Hello, I’m Jenna!
I have a Master’s Degree in Media and Culture, and for the last 5 years I’ve been studying
horror media and video game cultures.
What does that mean?
It means I’m one of a handful of people in America who is qualified to talk to you
about ZOMBIES.
No wait, come back!
I know, listen, I know.
You’re thinking that zombies have been played out in the 85-ish-years of zombie media we’ve
seen.
But that’s only because you’re not looking through the eyes of a media theorist!
We’re actually in the midst of an entirely new cycle of zombie media, and it's really interesting!
Let me explain.
A cornerstone truth about horror is that it reflects the crises of the culture it’s
made in.
Generally speaking, the more cultural anxiety there is, the more horror media is produced
and consumed.
But horror movies rarely deal with crises head-on; cinema relies on structuring absences,
a concept pioneered by sociologist and film theorist Annette Kuhn.
Movies often skirt around the very historical events that give them meaning.
So a movie that’s reacting to say fears about Cold War communist infiltration won’t
mention the Cold War at all.
Instead it will be about alien pod-people with sinister intentions.
The fear is projected onto a metaphor.
This is why a zombie story told in 1932
Zombies!
will differ from a zombie story told in 1968 or 2018.
[gunshot] [gunshot] [gunshot]
The set dressing stays roughly the same - ragged gape-mawed flesh-eaters lurching along - but
the differences are a reflection of society at that time, like a snapshot of somebody’s
nightmare.
So even though zombies have existed in American media for over 80 years now, each cycle of
zombies is vastly different.
White Zombie (1932), the earliest appearance of zombies in a full-length movie, was about
the supposed superiority of western imperialism–similar to what you’d see in
H.P. Lovecraft’s writing during the same time period.
Night of the Living Dead (1968) was a little about the Vietnam War and a little about the
American Civil Rights movement.
Dawn of the Dead (1978) was about rampant, mindless consumerism.
The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) was about racist and imperialist American propaganda placing
blame on Haiti for the AIDS epidemic.
And post-9/11 zombie movies were a reaction to Americans remembering that war isn’t
just something that happens Elsewhere in the world.
Across cinematic genres, America became obsessed with imagery of half-destroyed buildings and
rubble and dust-laden cities, and people running in the streets.
We had a whole subculture of survivalists arise from
these fears.
Now all of those examples are cinematic; the conversation gets a little stickier when talking
about video games, because zombies are so often a mechanic and less of a metaphor.
Zombies are the perfect video game enemy: they are endless, easily customizable in design
and strength, and there’s no real moral quandary to slaughtering them en masse.
But step back and look at the trend in video game plots and you’ll see an interesting
change: in both video games and cinema, over the last 8 years or so, we’ve moved away
from the post-9/11 total-apocalypse society-is-over stories.
Modern zombie media is struggling with the fact that Americans thought the world was
going to end and then it…. didn’t.
Everybody picked back up and continued living; they built lives and started families and
wanted to tell stories about that instead.
Part of this change in video games goes hand-in-hand with the so-called daddifcation of the medium,
in which many developers and the perceived audience of the games have grown up and are
reaching a child-rearing age.
So the stories they want to tell involve growing up and starting to have children.
Bioshock went from ‘Daughters and Daddies are terrifying’ to ‘I have a daughter,
she has changed me.’
Kratos went from conquering Olympus in 2005 to having a kid in 2018.
And more importantly, you have stories about father-daughter-style relationships in zombie
apocalypses, like The Last of Us and Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead.
These aren’t stories about survivors just trying to make it to the next checkpoint;
they’re about finding a community to keep each other safe.
The State of Decay franchise is a great example of this - just the title clues you into the
fact that this isn’t like other zombie games.
There’s a state - a location-based organized community.
These games are a natural evolution of the zombie story.
Both SoD 1 and 2 allow you to play not as one character, but as anyone in the community.
You are not a survivor - you are a community of survivors, and your goal is to strengthen
that community.
To quote Polygon’s own Colin Campbell, “I am me, but also, I am them.”
A part of the overarching plot of State of Decay 2 involves finding a cure for zombie
bites— a mechanic that shifts the idea of infection from “the inevitable end-point
of all survivors” to “a bad situation that is not a hindrance to our longevity as
a species.”
It’s also why it’s interesting that one of the teasers for The Last of Us 2 includes
a leader using short-hand slang to meter out internal justice
"Clip her wings."
–a sure sign of a community, however warped.
Incidentally I believe the next big trend in horror will be stories about cults - but
that’s for another video.
It’s also probably part of the reason building has become such a popular mechanic
in video games, even in genres that don’t normally feature them.
But that’s also part of this broader cultural shift; you build things and have children
because you have hope about the future.
And that’s all good news.
It means that we — or at least our media — or at least the people who make our media
— are feeling hopeful about the future, too.
A lot of apocalyptic media was starting to feel more like a wish than a fear, and wanting
the world to be destroyed so you can play out large-scale power fantasies is dark, that
is some dark shit, and that is what we’ve been living with.
We want to start telling stories about moving on and rebuilding and getting on with our lives, and
you know what? We deserve it!
And if you’re anything like me that’s a big relief.
So take a break, shoot some zombies, build a house. You’ve earned it.
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