What’s so strange to think about now is how accurate the title Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968) really is. The film takes place over the course of one day, and the hordes of zombies we see menacing the film’s ensemble are easily defeated by collaboration between the National Guard and civilian volunteers once they have time to muster. All the main characters we meet are dead by the end of the film, but the country as a whole seems relatively unchanged. Watching the movie for the first time over lockdown, I was shocked. Modern zombie fiction has a completely different conception of the impact a zombie outbreak would have on our way of life. Walkers, Boneys, Runners, Lurkers, Zeds, have consumed my mind (but thankfully not my brain) these last few days. Here’s how they’ve changed over the years, and how stories about them have evolved.
The zombie virus in this film is theorised as coming from mysterious radiation found on a space probe. This pre-moon landing speculation about space dates the film in a very endearing way. Causes for the virus in more recent fiction are varied, and sometimes ignored completely. Ignoring what the author has posted to Twitter, a cause for the virus in The Walking Dead (Robert Kirkman, 2003-2019) was never stated, though it was cured off-panel during a time skip in the last issue. In Scooby Doo on Zombie Island (Hiroshi Aoyoma, Kazumi Fukushima and Jim Stenstrum, 1998) the same group of zombies arise every year to warn others of the real threat, the werecats that killed them. Stephen King’s novel Cell (2006) presents a world in which using your phone is enough to turn you into one of the mindless hoard, following Romero in that he was exploring anxiety over technology relevant to his time. In the videogame The Last of Us (Bruce Straley and Neil Druckman, 2013), zombies are caused by a fungus that takes root in the brain. The zombification process is also developed past a dichotomy of living/undead. The fungus continues to inhabit a zombie until it becomes blind and develops a form of echo location to identify the living. This also creates more danger in that areas can be made dangerous by the presence of the fungi spores. This innovation is encouraged by the medium, as players are aware of the text they are engaging with in a way that characters aren’t, and make choices based on things that characters wouldn’t. Further developing what a zombie can be in this way keeps the genre from getting stale.
While there are still modern texts such as Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer, 2009) that focus on a small group of survivors, nowadays zombie stories are more likely to focus on building a new community after the old one has fallen away. Casts usually have people from different generations who aren’t related to each other forced to get along, which while true for the original film, the range in age has increased, as has their objectives. In The Walking Dead, Rick and his gang develop communities in a near-deserted prison as well as joining one in a town that then has to manage trading and defending themselves against other settlements. In Blood Quantum (Jeff Barnaby, 2019), Indigenous Canadians in the Mi’gmaq reserve discover that they are immune to the zombie virus, which adds to the tension caused by outsiders wishing to join their community.
Just changing the time-span of the Outbreak can lead to entirely different stories to Romero’s. But zombies are difficult to contain the more there are, and even other genres have been infected. Warm Bodies (Jonathan Levine, 2013), a zombie/human rom-com, presents zombie-ism as a state that can, for the most part, be reversed by interpersonal connection. An end to the plague can also be seen in the film, The Cured (David Freyne, 2017), and TV show, In the Flesh (Hilary Martin, 2013-14), where cured zombies have to deal with what they did while they were infected, and in the latter deal with societal prejudice based on that time. Dread Nation (Justina Ireland, 2018) is a historical fiction novel in which zombies appear during the American Civil War, and black girls are sent to schools to learn how to fight them. iZombie (Rob Thomas, 2015-2019) is a procedural crime drama where the lead uses her newfound taste for brains to solve murders. While horror elements can be seen to different degrees in these stories, zombies are being used in interesting and thought-provoking ways to tell stories far outside their original context.
What a zombie is, and what a zombie can be post-Romero is only becoming broader, and that’s for the better. While I don’t think every zombie story needs to do all it can to leave its roots behind, I always get excited when I see somebody doing something new with the concept. The popularity of different monsters ebbs and flows, and we’re about to hit an absolute valley for zombies as close-knit hordes are the last thing people will be shooting while Covid-19 is still a threat. Or maybe this reality will create further innovation in the kind of zombie stories we see on screen? I can only hope so. I’m still hungry.
