A popular setting for horror fiction, movies, horror-themed games and the like is the ever-useful Zombie Apocalypse. In a zombie apocalypse, the world is unexpectedly overrun by swarms of the living dead, moaning, shambling zombies who go around eating the living.
Zombie Apocalypse fiction usually features a number of plucky survivors attempting to survive in a world full of hideous, cannibalistic ghouls. Many movies, usually named “(Noun) Of the Dead” have been made on this theme, and virtually every horror writer worth mentioning has written at least one story about a world filled with hungry zombies. There’s even a book out now that serves as a how-to guide for dealing with hordes of flesh-eating corpses, featuring detailed instructions on constructing zombie-proof shelters, engaging in zombie elimination missions, and the like; if there is anything about dealing with homovorous undead, this guy thought of it. It’s a weird book.
Variations on the theme have also been employed, such as the film “28 Days Later,” where instead of the walking dead, people were infected with a virus that turned them into mindless killing machines, but the jist of it was the same.
I’m wondering where all this came from. Did someone just come up with the idea and then everyone else ran with it?
Predating that was I Am Legend, a 1954 horror novel by Richard Matheson, in which a plague causes vampire-like symptoms, and the protagonist is the last man on earth, holding off a vampire horde.
Total guess here, but I would think the inspiration for it comes from the End Times, Book of Revelation, especially chapter 8-12, which mention zombie hordes.
From there it was left to George Romero to set the modern stage with the basic “rules” which all zombie movies seem to follow. Romero, it should be noted was a TV director from Pittsburgh and used to direct “occasional segments from Mr. Rogers Neighborhood.” :eek:
A discussion of the leftist politics of most zombie movies is part of the deal.
Plus, from another point of view, zombies are rather an ideal opponent—they’re human-ish, but not frighteningly strong or cunning, and you can’t get in trouble (legally or ethically) for killing them because they’re already dead.
By the same token, Nazi Zombies are an even better opponent. No one in the world in their right mind can fault you for killing them.
There was a movie back in the 1960s or 1970s about people who wash up on an island which turns out to be inhabited by Nazi Zombie SEALs; leftovers from a WW2 plot to create the ultimate submarine soldiers, they could stay underwater forever then rise out of the deep to wreak havoc on land.
It was very cool when I saw it on late-night TV at the age of about 14.
I’m sure that someone here has the name of the flick handy
It comes from the zombie apocalypse of 2112. Scientist wizards of the future beam meson tachyon warnings back to us in our dreams. WE ARE HAVING TRANSMISSION DIFFICULTY. THIS IS NOT A DREAM. These signals occasionally peak at key nexus. One such nexus was an island where a man named John was imprisoned. Another was in Pittsburgh. Next year, an aspiring reality show contestant will fail an audition when she opens her mouth and begins giving dispatches from the frontlines.
We have until 2112 to stop history from happening. Is the future already set, or is our fate mutable? Is there hope, or is each day just another step closer to the day of the dead?
Either that or it was George Romero and Night Of The Living Dead.
Treehouse of Horror VIII has a take on it - Homer is in a bomb shelter when the French drop a neutron bomb on Springfield. Some of the Springfieldians survive as zombies, and chase Homer in a wierd car that sort of looks like the Beverly Hillbillies’ truck on acid. Did the Simpson animators just make that up, or are they copying (excuse me, paying homage to) some well-known zombie movie?
It wouldn’t shock me if John Wyndham’s 1951 novel Day of the Triffids had some influence on the early expressions of the genre, or at least drew on the same impulses. The threat is carnivorous, semi-sentient plants, but the setting’s the same: most of the population’s wiped out, and the few survivors have to face an overwhelming tide of shambling hordes keen on eating their flesh.
An early, admittedly imprecise literary precursor is H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, with its vision of a distant future in which humanity has [de-]volved into infantilized Eloi and the subterranean, clever, cannibalistic Morlocks who provide for them in order to feed on them.
The Morlocks aren’t zombies: they’re very much alive, and the engineers of their survival, but OTOH they’re crude humanoids who emerge *en masse * from beneath the ground to feed on the living… and presumably their hygiene and appearances aren’t much better than that of the average zack.
I’ve been thinking about this as well. This last month has been filled with Zombie-fun for me. I’ve ended up partaking in:
World War Z
Kirkman’s ‘The Walking Dead’ trade paperbacks
Shaun of the Dead
28 Days Later
For no particular reason, honestly. They’ve all just popped up on my radar at once.
And of course that gets me thinking of why the zombie zeitgeist is so uniform in its style and symbolism. I get that it all roots to Romero but you’d think there’d be more variation in the genre by now.
