Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
Steven Poole considers the evolution of zombies, all the way to the bleakest of ends
How fast should a zombie go? The oldschool pop-culture conception of zombies as slow-moving was in its way quite scientific. A zombie’s muscles and sinews are in a state of decay, because it is dead. Stands to reason, then, that if a zombie tried to run fast its body would simply fall apart. The shambling gait familiar to us from deathless films such as Dawn Of The Dead is a rational means of self-preservation, to the extent that a zombie has a rational self to preserve. As the zombie godfather himself, George A Romero, once put it: “I don’t think zombies can run. Their ankles would snap.”
Your classical zombie, then, is terrifying precisely because of its slowness: it is also relentless, and a horde of them will overwhelm much more agile prey. In this way, although the first zombie videogame is usually said to be Sandy White’s Zombie Zombie (Spectrum, 1984), a good argument could be made for Robotron 2084 (1982) as the first to really capture the claustrophobic dynamics of fighting zombies, even though the enemies are nominally robots rather than corpses. And so Housemarque’s sublime twin-stick co-op shooter Dead Nation (2010), which is essentially Robotron with zombies, satisfyingly completes the circle.
The old zombie-velocity consensus, however, eroded over time like rotting flesh, until the new thing became fast zombies like those in the films 28 Days Later (2002) and World War Z (2013, even though in the original book the zombies were classic shamblers). Modern zombie games, too, inevitably include fast zombies along with your basic cannon-fodder slow zombies, to ramp up the adrenaline and difficulty, even at the cost of the game becoming essentially just another Call Of Duty faceshooter, but with zombies, and even though COD literally has zombies too, since World At War (2008).
Thus, based on an ever-expanding menagerie of undead species, the zombie game arrives at Capcom’s Resident Evil Village, featuring lycans (werewolves), gruesomely engineered Soldats, various zombie-esque villagers and giants, a very hungry baby, and of course a giant female vampire. None of these seems to be officially a zombie at all, which is one way around the issue. Instead, the game raids the horror myth-kitty with aplomb in a beautifully unwelcoming snowcovered rural setting.
By contrast, the undead in Zack Snyder’s Army Of The Dead are definitely zombies, but divided again into classical shamblers and fast, athletic ‘Alphas’. The ruling Alpha zombie of this movie understandably gets quite annoyed when someone gruesomely beheads his “Zombie Queen”, who has hitherto been writhing around in an unnecessarily revealing outfit. By contrast, Resident Evil Village’s representation of extremely tall vampire woman Lady Dimitrescu (the subject of much erotic speculation from a peculiar subset of fans before the game’s release) is remarkably restrained, harking back to golden-age Hollywood with her floor-length gown and cigarette holder.
A purist might worry that the lines between vampires, zombies, and other undead forms are these days becoming uncomfortably blurred. But the clear distinction is itself a relatively recent invention. Romero’s first film, Night Of The Living Dead (1968), was partly inspired by a vampire novel, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), as memorably filmed with Will Smith (and a happy ending) in 2007. But Matheson’s vampires, in his novel, were the result of an apocalyptic plague, a novel kind of bacterial infection, and subsequent popular fictions about pandemics producing monsters have more often made the victims zombies than vampires. The pseudo-zombies in 28 Days Later, indeed, are known as “the Infected” after the lab leak of a mutated Rage Virus.
And so, of course, the zombie genre speaks all the more powerfully to modern concerns in a time when people are speculating about a possible lab leak of a pandemic virus. Its most despairing message has always been that, deep down, we are already the zombies, milling around in shopping malls like in Day Of The Dead; Army Of The Dead takes this even further by showing how the zombies, who display honour and loyalty, are morally superior to the humans, engaged as always in their frenzied orgy of betrayal and backstabbing. The zombie fiction is now the only genre of entertainment that is allowed to have a totally bleak ending, and in that way it is the last outpost of true literary realism.
As the zombie godfather himself once put it: “I don’t think zombies can run. Their ankles would snap”
Steven Poole’s Trigger Happy 2.o is now available from Amazon. Visit him online at www.stevenpoole.net