by Mogk, Matt
Glee, Episode 2.11 (2011)
BRITTANY:
Zombie camp was funner than I expected. And the glee club together with the football team is like a double rainbow. A zombie double rainbow.
QUINN:
If we go to the cheerleading competition, then we miss the halftime show and we’re out of glee club. I’m torn.
SANTANA:
I’m not.
BRITTANY:
I’m Brittany.
The modern zombie has been a featured guest on a wide range of TV shows, from Comedy Central’s long-running animated series South Park to NBC’s prime-time sitcom Community. Even Superman battled a zombielike horde in Smallville in 2009. In a one-month period between April and May 2011, the undead appeared or were discussed on Fox’s animated comedy Bob’s Burgers, on ABC’s freshman sitcom Happy Endings, and on the CBS veteran prime-time hit The Big Bang Theory. So completely has the modern zombie infected our TVs that George Romero said he won’t be surprised if zombies shamble into Sesame Street to hang out with the Count.67
Zombies also sell products on TV, from cold medicine to cars. On April 14, 2011, a Ford commercial featured the finalists of American Idol season 10 playing zombies more interested in the new Mustang than in eating innocent victims. Not long after Ford’s pitch, Honda launched an ad campaign for the 2012 Civic that featured a zombie driving to work, playing golf, and hitting on women at a singles bar.
STAR OF THE SHOW
In 2008 the modern zombie got its first chance to step into a recurring role in the British miniseries Dead Set, a fictional account of what happens when the cast of the reality show Big Brother is left stranded inside their secure compound while the rest of the world collapses under the weight of a zombie plague. Dead Set premiered in the UK in October 2008 to strong ratings and critical acclaim, and was then rebroadcast in January and October 2009. IFC in the United States then picked up the series and aired it for American audiences in October 2010.
In that same month, the AMC original series The Walking Dead finally gave zombies a real shot on the small screen in the United States. The story follows small-town police officer Rick Grimes and a collection of fellow survivors in their quest to carve out a life after a global zombie pandemic causes complete societal collapse. In keeping with George Romero’s original vision, the action is centered around the personality conflicts within the human ranks, with the zombie threat only serving to increase tension and draw out character flaws. It was an instant hit.
The Walking Dead scored a higher rating in the coveted 18–49 demographic than any drama series in the history of basic cable. Hollywood news outlet The Wrap said it was a watershed day for the respected cable network:
Mad Men and Breaking Bad brought AMC awards, prestige, and the wealthy, well-educated audience that most networks would envy, but The Walking Dead has given the network the one thing it didn’t have: a flat-out hit.68
The Walking Dead began life as an established graphic novel. It was considered for television adaptation several years before it was finally produced, but it was not the first potential breakthrough zombie series for TV. The 2009 hit zombie movie Zombieland was originally developed as a TV series for CBS but was shelved when the studio decided that zombies weren’t fit for that medium. Times have changed.
In November 2010, less than one month after The Walking Dead premiered, I met with Sharon Levy, executive vice president of original programming for Spike TV. She confirmed that the show’s success had turned the entertainment community green with envy, saying that every major television network was in the process of trying to create their own hit zombie show. Though most will never make it out of development hell, here’s hoping that more quality zombie programming like The Walking Dead is coming to a TV near you soon.
32: ZOMBIE VIDEO GAMES
From the first modern zombie outbreak in a remote Pennsylvania cemetery in 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, it was just a matter of time before the walking dead reached our own homes. With the rise of zombie console video games in the 1990s, we didn’t have to leave the living room anymore to be entertained and terrified by the latest in zombie mayhem. What’s more, video games throw the audience into the undead action in a way that films can’t.
Kicking off the craze, video game maker Capcom released Resident Evil for the Sony PlayStation system in 1996, changing the face of horror gaming forever and becoming one of the biggest franchises of all time. With more than fifteen games, spinoff comics, novels, and action figures, Resident Evil was instrumental in the revitalization of zombies in film, too.
The Resident Evil story takes place in the fictional Raccoon City. We follow a team of SWAT officers as they investigate reports of mass cannibalism and the disappearance of some of their colleagues. With limited supplies and a complex mystery to unravel, players are taken through an undead maze of creaking doors and shambling corpses that lurch forward from all sides. Though Resident Evil wasn’t the first zombie video game—that title goes to the relatively forgettable Zombie Zombie (1984)—at the time of its release, it was unquestionably the most inventive and compelling zombie game ever made.
Senior editor of GamePro magazine Patrick Shaw says that Resident Evil brought zombie video games to prominence, and its influence on the industry as a whole is profound:
The series is essentially responsible for legitimizing the horror genre in games. The scarcity of ammunition and supplies like first-aid kits, which you’ll see in most horror-themed games today, is directly borrowed from Resident Evil.
George Romero says that Resident Evil and the zombie games that followed it have driven the popularity of zombies in recent years much more than films.69 Paco Plaza, director of the innovative Spanish living-zombie franchise REC, has explained that Resident Evil influenced his zombie filmmaking techniques. His unique approach of abruptly shifting the audience’s camera view came from playing zombie video games for hours on end.70
BEYOND RACCOON CITY
Electronic zombie games are such an economic and entertainment force that many game franchises that are not inherently zombie-related have shoehorned the undead into their projects, either as add-ons or as completely new spinoffs of their original concepts. Red Dead Redemption is a popular Wild West video game released by Rockstar Games in May 2010, as a follow-up to their successful 2004 offering Red Dead Revolver. Five months after it hit stores, Rockstar introduced a zombie plague sweeping across the Redemption frontier with its downloadable add-on called Undead Nightmare. The western-meets-zombie concept was such a hit that in November, Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare was offered as a stand-alone game.
That same month the first-person military shooter Call of Duty: Black Ops was released with its own zombie spin. Developed by Treyarch, it is the seventh installment of the wildly popular Call of Duty franchise. Within twenty-four hours of hitting store shelves, Black Ops sold more than 7 million copies worldwide, and it went on to top $1 billion in sales in less than two months, due in no small part to its zombie mode, which features John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Fidel Castro fighting the undead inside the Pentagon.
An additional downloadable map pack, Black Ops: Escalation, was released in May 2011 featuring expanded zombie game play titled Call of the Dead. Set in an isolated region of the old Soviet Union, Escalation’s zombie mode includes new characters, impressive cinematic action, and even George Romero as a zombie. The game’s director, Dave Anthony, adds:
This is Treyarch’s tribute to the legendary George Romero, who truly defined the zombie genre and whose incredible work has been such an inspiration to our team.71
Despite many exciting innovations, zombie video games continue to follow a common framework that shapes nearly all zombie stories, whether they’re on the big screen, on desktop screens, or on little handheld ones.
Bernard Perron is professor of cinema at the Université de Montréal and editor of Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play. When it comes to the scholar
ly review of zombie games, there isn’t anybody on the planet better qualified. He observes:
Why would zombie video games differ from the canonical post-Romero zombie plot? Bottom line, interactive or not, one has to survive the zombie apocalypse. But even though most games are just variations on the same theme, it doesn’t mean that the genre isn’t evolving in new and interesting ways.
It seems the evolution in electronic zombie gaming has actually mirrored the evolution of zombie films. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, which established the subgenre, was made with a tiny budget, so it had to take place in an isolated area—a farmhouse—where fewer than a couple of dozen attackers could represent a national zombie outbreak. Similarly, the groundbreaking Resident Evil set its action in confined spaces where just a few electronic zombies could do the same.
A decade later, Romero’s second film was made with a bigger budget and set in a shopping mall, using hundreds of zombie extras to create the mass hordes, rather than implying them with a limited cast. Similarly, Capcom’s popular zombie video game franchise Dead Rising (2006) innovates on Resident Evil ten years after its release by introducing massive zombie hordes on-screen, also in a shopping mall. And just as running zombies upped the ante in films and became the new zombie norm with the Dawn of the Dead remake of 2004, the Left 4 Dead franchise introduced fast ghouls to gaming in 2008. But the newest evolution of the zombie game isn’t found on the console or the computer but at the app store.
With the explosion of high-tech products in recent years, such as Apple’s iPhone and iPad, programmers across the planet have introduced hundreds of thousands of downloadable applications. From making electronic fart noises to checking the calorie count of a bacon cheeseburger, Apple’s trademarked slogan seems to hold true: “There’s an app for that.” And in the first few months of 2010, no pop-culture app sold better than Plants vs. Zombies.
This lighthearted tower defense game moved 300,000 copies worth more than $1 million in just nine days, ranking it number one in both units sold and gross revenue on Apple’s charts within twenty-four hours of its launch on February 15, 2010.
Much the way online video has allowed new filmmakers to gain exposure for their work, leading to innovations in that medium, mobile gaming is ushering in a new way of playing in the zombie world.
Read Dead Revolver—Undead Nightmare (2010)
JOHN:
Come out. It’s okay. Come out, I don’t bite. Bad joke. I mean, come out.
GIRL:
They got my family, mister.
JOHN:
And mine, I fear.
GIRL:
I saw my momma rip my daddy’s face off!
WORST GAMES EVER
There’s no shortage of bad zombie movies, and there’s no shortage of disappointing zombie games to go around. Many critics argue that the most disappointing zombie game title ever released is Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler’s Green, loosely based on George Romero’s 2005 film. Gamespot’s Alex Navarro suggests that it falls just short of approaching brilliance in its sheer awfulness:
The game shuffles along at a sluggish, depressing pace while pieces of it literally fall apart at the seams. This is either one of the most avant-garde pieces of gaming artistry to ever find its way to the retail market, or the absolute worst game ever.72
For my money, though, the worst zombie game on the planet is Attack of the Sunday School Zombies from Sunday Software. In this illogical mess, players take on the role of Super Kenz the Bible Kid, spouting passages from scripture and firing a crossbow loaded with chocolate doughnuts at zombies of all ages as they complain about being bored in church. If Kenz’s aim is true, she subdues the zombies with doughnuts long enough to teach them why their bad attitudes are “lame” and how to be better churchgoers.
WHAT’S NEXT?
Despite several noted innovations in zombie video games over the past fifteen years, they still closely follow a common framework borrowed from zombie movies. None of them have taken advantage of the immersive quality of gaming to construct a world that presents realistic zombie survival scenarios and challenges. That may soon change.
Formed in 2009, Undead Labs is a video game development company in Seattle, Washington, with the singular focus of creating the first-ever true zombie survival console game. Founder Jeff Strain says that the project is a logical next step in the evolution of zombie gaming:
When fans leave the theater after a great zombie movie they’re all talking about what they would have done in that situation. Zombie survival is a key element to the popularity of the living dead today, but video games haven’t kept up with this reality.
Undead Labs’ plan as of 2011 is to produce a highly polished console zombie game for Xbox, followed by a massively multi-player online world. Hopefully, they’ll succeed.
33: ZOMBIE LITERATURE
The doorbell rings. You glance outside and spot a group of carolers dressed as if they’d walked off the pages of a Charles Dickens novel. Christmas carolers? It’s the right time of year, the end of December, so when they start humming a traditional song, you open the door. Oops. Too late. The nice singers on the porch aren’t a local church group. They’re actually the walking dead. They’re all dressed like rotting zombies, and though the tune they sing harks back to the carols of a bygone era, the lyrics are rotten and twisted:
Fresh brains roasting on an open fire,
Zombies chewing off your nose.
In 2009, author Michael Spradlin released his book of zombie Christmas carols, It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Zombies. Now carolers around the country can join the celluloid undead and the electronic undead in your home.
If movies are the old guard in zombie culture and video games are the established player, then zombie literature is the new kid on the block and making quite an impact. As of the end of January 2010, there were no fewer than five zombiethemed books on the New York Times bestseller list. At the end of January 2011, there were nine books on the list, with many others rising and falling off over that twelve-month period. Zombie lit has hit the big time, and it seems that from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Studs Terkel’s oral history of World War II, nothing is safe from loose or direct adaptation for the ravenous zombie market.
Like video games, books are giving back to the medium that created the modern zombie, with dozens of novels being optioned for Hollywood adaptation in recent years. This multi-platform success has helped push zombies from a fringe subculture to the mainstream, and the evidence of their arrival is clear in the names of the players. Brad Pitt’s production company optioned Max Brooks’s zombie novel World War Z, slating it for a large-budget studio production. When the undead are mentioned in the same breath as A-list celebrities, you know they’ve hit the big time.
But why did it take more than three decades for the un-dead to make a real impact in publishing? Kim Paffenroth is professor of religious studies at Iona College and an author of several fiction and nonfiction zombie books. He argues that the appeal of zombies has traditionally been a visual phenomenon:
Zombies are cool to look at, either when they’re having pieces of themselves blown off with gunfire, or when they’re tearing a screaming person limb from limb. That makes them seem much better suited to film, video games, and comic books.
The challenge for writers has been to find a way to make an inherently visual creature engaging on the page. Often, this means roping in familiar characters, such as Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy, or focusing on the character development of the survivors. From accounts of the strained relationships of the living to detailing zombie combat, strategy, and tactics, authors have attacked the subgenre from all angles in the past decade.
THE BROOKS FACTOR
In nonfiction, Max Brooks launched the zombie instructional manual craze with his groundbreaking Zombie Survival Guide, published in 2003. At the time, the book was cutting-edge and such a hit that it convinced publishers to snap up guides that claimed to teach everyt
hing from proper zombie etiquette to the official military policy for dealing with an undead outbreak.
Brooks followed up that effort with his 2006 novel World War Z, making him the biggest name in the world of zombie publishing and putting zombie fiction squarely on the mainstream map. The book was originally called The Zombie Wars, but his publishers didn’t want the word zombie in the title because they thought it wouldn’t appeal to a broad audience. So he shortened Zombie to Z for the more global-sounding World War Z. Now, less than five years later, anything with the word zombie in the title is hot in the publishing world, as we’ll see below.
Both of Brooks’s books are regulars on the New York Times bestseller lists in their categories, but when he shopped The Zombie Survival Guide in the late 1990s, no publishing house would touch it. It took upward of five years from the time Brooks wrote the book for it to reach store shelves, and even then, only a few thousand copies were produced in the first printing. This wasn’t initially a moneymaking scheme, as it has become for some writers since. Brooks did it because he loved zombies, and he’s looking forward to getting his hands on the next great zombie book to come along:
I hope that someone out there right now is writing an amazing zombie book, looking at the monster from a completely new angle. I love reading great zombie stories and can’t wait to be knocked out of my chair.