Do you think good zombie fiction requires the lack of zombie fiction in that universe?
Do you think good zombie fiction requires the lack of zombie fiction in that universe?
I feel like a lot of zombie fiction where characters know what zombies are and the dangerous of getting bitten end up being semi-satirical comedies. Movies and shows where the idea of zombies didn't previously exist seem to be a bit more serious from what I've experienced. I don't know if it's the aura of suspense and mystery or because it leads to more pandemonium.
The issue these days is that everyone and their grandma knows the basic rules of zombies, so if the characters within the story are completely clueless, the audience is going to impulsively think the characters are idiots.
I think the trick to creating good zombie fiction these days relies on subverting the existing tropes and knowledge. If the zombies you're writing are sufficiently different from other examples in the genre, it won't matter if the characters have knowledge of tropes or not. If you have a scene where a zombie gets up after having their head chopped off, then it doesn't matter if characters in the story "know" that chopping off the head kills the zombie. You're no longer playing by those rules, and tension/suspense is returned to the story.
I don’t know if it matters that the characters inherently understand how to kill zombies. Shaun of the Dead does this well, where they hear it on the news in five seconds and they’re like “oh that makes sense.”
The original Dawn of the Dead I think they say it on the radio or TV too, I believe. There isn’t really a spot where they don’t know and it matters. The thing that forces drama in zombie movies to me isn’t aiming for the head, it’s being overrun.
But I also mostly just like the old Romero ones so I may be wrong!
Nah, good zombie fiction, at least for my taste, requires that the zombies aren’t the main focus of the story. Sure, they’re there, and they’re the most omnipresent threat, the whole reason the world is the way it is; but they should be background stuff, for the most part. What you really want is to focus more on something like, I dunno, man’s inhumanity to man or something like that.
In this case, having a zombie-savvy cast can actually massively improve some of the more hard-hitting moments. For example: instead of choosing to shoot the bad guy or leave him stranded in the desert, the choice is shoot him in the head to give him a quick and painless or do the practical thing and not waste the ammo when the zombies everywhere will do the job just fine. Slower and more painfully, but it’ll get done just the same.
So yeah, those are my thoughts.
When the original Walking Dead comic books came out around 2003 I was just getting back into comics and I remember reading Robert Kirkman’s ideas about what he wanted it to be.
This is exactly what he said. That the original classic zombie movies that he liked — mostly the Romero Living Dead ones — were stories about the people trying to survive. The zombies are secondary and, sometimes, even kind of ridiculous (see Dawn of the Dead, one of my favorite movies).
I thought the Walking Dead TV show and the comics after a certain point went into more gore porn, so I tuned out.
But you’re 100% right for me. George Romero made zombie movies to look at people. Not the zombies.
yeah night of the living dead didn't need zombies, just some external threat to drive the drama between the characters.
aliens, plague, robots, wild animals, dinosaurs , goblins, fairies , and apparently seagulls can all do similar thing
Not at all.
Feed, by Mira Grant, is one of my all time favorite works of zombie fiction. In it, the zombie uprising happened, but George Romero movies existed, so humanity was prepared to fight back, and as a result the events of the book take place in a world much later, where zombies are still a problem, even a huge one, but the book is actually about some reporters covering the events of a presidential election. Also, George Romero has been canonized as a national hero for giving us all the means to fight back against the zombies.
The book is absolutely brilliant. The sequels... I have complicated feelings about the sequels. But the first stands entirely on its own two feet and is fantastic.
Imagine what would happen in a universe where people thought they knew how to fight zombies because there were tons of stories about them and it all turned out to be completely and utterly wrong?
And look at real life. There are tons of things that we know how to combat but are scary anyway either because what needs to be done is scary, the margain of error is small and/or there are enough people that think its all a conspiracy theory and/or actively work against solving the problem. So anyone that does know how to deal with problems like that looks on in horror as a huge chunk of society just decides to throw the whole thing in the bin.
Minor spoilers for the manga I Am Hero.
I recently started reading it and there's a point where people gather up on a mountain because it's colder and they don't think the virus can spread because of it. It leads to a pretty sizeable crowd and you can guess what happens.
It's kind of what prompted this question and sounds kind of similar to what you are saying. I wonder what media there is out there about a situation like that where people unintentionally sabotage the effort by making false assumptions about combating zombies.
I guess in a lot of shows there's usually the debate about whether or not a cure is possible and that kind of throws a wrench into things
Not necessarily, i mean WWZ - while not explicitly stated - clearly exists in a world with zombie media
Book, not film, obvs.
WWZ is based on a book? Damn. TIL.
...in the same way christianity is based on the teachings of Jesus.
There's not much in common.
In that the movie has the same name.
The book is far better.
I think half the fun of a zombie movie is the confusion and disarray of society having no idea what's going on, why Mom is trying to bite me, why is my sister already laying in a pool of blood!? So yes, I think it works best for the characters to not have zombie fiction in their world, so they learn what's happening and why getting bit is such a bad thing.
Zombie is just a tool. Best Monster media is always about something else, that's more important than the zombies. About trust on strangers (dawn of the dead), the breakdown of society (28 days) about moral decisions (the last of us) or about the distribution of rights and the power of corporations (resident evil). The rest is an excuse for action and gore.
I would like to see the genre grapple with flies as both a vector and an expiration date.
Zombies have been done to death.
I agree with that sentiment, though it may just have been a good pun!
The problem is I feel either with people knowing or not knowing, it seems it's all been rehashed and overdone.
Maybe years ago, I would have answered characters must not understand what zombies are and learn the rules along the way.
I used to enjoy zombie movies a lot, but midway through "The Walking Dead" I couldn't take it anymore and I've ignored anything zombie ever since.I suppose I have the same rejection for vampire movies.
Oh hey, this was essentially my experience too, but with the Walking Dead comic! The TV series used plot points from the comic book and I think you can kinda tell where the TV series’ success started affecting the comic and the whole thing turned into an ouroboros of trying to maintain the success of a flashy zombie TV show.
I think maybe it was inevitable. Robert Kirkman’s original idea of a never-ending human drama surrounded by the pressures of zombies doesn’t seem profitable long-term without insane character deaths and (more) deliberate gore porn.
There's a very great FOSS zombie game called Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead and one can read a Zombie Survival Guide just for fun, learning and aquiring nothing but better mood for some hours (crafting works faster with better mood). CDDA could be more serious, sure, but the monster/zeds are gruesome as hell sometimes.
Example:
Wretched Hatchery
Description:
Lethargically resting on its back, this hideous mass of sagging flesh and writhing organs, which used to be a child, twitches feebly as its midsection churns. Almost bursting from its skin, the child’s ribcage has arched outward, forming a hive-like construct covered by severely stretched epidermis. Through the wretched organism’s taut abdominal flesh, you witness small forms swarming within its ribcage—its guts roiling as new beings are sculpted from pilfered flesh and bone. The creature’s limbs rest haphazardly on the ground, contorted in ways that suggest the absence of bones or any interior construct.
Nah, it's all about how you treat it.
Zombies are an idea, and they're an idea that has had many expressions even before the zombie as we know it came to be, or the word itself was applied to them.
The word is based in vaudun/voodoo and related practices. But the idea of an undead entity with a hunger is timeless and beyond the word. Hell, the word doesn't even start as something truly undead by the usual concept of undead. It's more of a soulless slave for lack of a better description.
Zombies as they have shown up in film and fiction since Romero turned them into a genre take from all kinds of myths and legends.
All it takes is the creator of the fiction deciding what, if any, similarities there are to our fictional zombies. That's it. It can be as much as these direct references to established fiction, or as little as no mention at all.
The walking dead did the "blind" zombie appearance best, imo. That world didn't have any known culture references to zombies. And, if there had been, someone would have used the word, in universe.
While she catches a lot of heat for good reasons, Laurell K Hamilton is a great example of the middle ground. She makes plenty of references to movie zombies as a point of comparison to the way zombies work in her Anita Blake world. She does it with other movies and different supernatural creatures too. It works very well as a way to let the reader know that the fictional world is similar to ours, but with differences.
But you're right, the harder you lean into existing zombie fiction, the more likely you are to end up in satire, farce, or other comedy. There's just such a big history of zombie fiction that if you assume the characters have knowledge of that fiction, you retread that history. It's hard to do that and stay serious/horror. It could work, but you'd have to go the extra mile of making the transition from fiction history into your fiction smooth. You'd need more exposition at the very least, someone explaining how and why there's similarities between old fiction and the new fiction that explanation exists in
It's the same with vampires for sure, and werewolves/therianthropes to a lesser extent. And any fiction writer is going to place their own stamp on any of it, if only by picking which myths and fictional versions they are going to use as a basis for their own work.
I've taken a different route in my fiction. Zombies in particular have multiple versions in-universe. Some of those versions are the basis for the in-universe fiction that is simply our real world fiction in that universe, with no changes. Others reflect myths, and there's vers ions that are all mine. Did the same with vampires too. But the real world fiction is only referenced obliquely because I know that anyone reading my fiction (or playing in my ttrpg world) are aware of those things, and we don't need to do anything other than stating "on screen" that it's the variety of undead in my world that led to the fiction in the first place.
That's a good point. Due to the amount of possible variations it might not even mean much in the grand scheme of things whether they have some general outline of what zombies are.
Without zombies people may just think they're I Am Legend style (the book) vampires or something
No