Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies (30 page)

On February 6, 2011, the NFL’s Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers faced off in Super Bowl XLV, widely reported to be the most-watched sports event in U.S. television history, with more than 110 million viewers. To capitalize on the massive audience, broadcaster Fox aired a special episode of its hit musical comedy series
Glee
immediately following the game. And what plot device did the creators of
Glee
use to help keep people glued to their seats? Zombies. The rival glee club and football team joined forces and dressed like the undead, culminating in a halftime zombie dance performance that saved the club’s season and helped the football team win their game. Zombies saved the day!

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.
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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.

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.
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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.

F
rom 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.
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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.
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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.
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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 scholarly 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.