Where Did All These Zombies Come From?
Maybe I shouldn't be admitting this publicly, but I don't really consider myself a zombie fanatic. All right, I have a fascination with the undead but that's largely come from role playing and fantasy rather than horror. A friend of mine introduced me to Night of the Living Dead when I was college and I thought it was amazing. Then we watched Dawn of the Dead and I didn't like it very much.
Blasphemy!
My problem with Dawn of the Dead was the way in which I approached the movie. I wasn't interested in a fun movie where there were zombies and fights and bad bikers (I don't remember much because I only saw it the once). I couldn't understand why these characters were clinging to what seemed a very finite solution to a very endless problem.
I think this was a major influence on me when I started writing Zombies! Apocalyptic fiction deals with the end of the world. To some people I think that's appealing (throw off the shackles of society and all that). Apocalyptic zombie fiction, however, comes with a particular kind of despair. If you read it or watch it, you go in knowing that there is no happy ending. But from my perspective, the fact that there is no real attainable goal for the characters, invalidates their struggle. I would like to note here that the best of the zombie authors do circumvent this problem. The characters in the Walking Dead, for example, are always trying to find a safe place to build a new life.
Leading up to the spring and summer of 2010, I had been reading a lot of zombie fiction. Since I was enjoying it, I was getting inspired to write some. I had published Forty Leap and it had stagnated quickly so I thought that if I could do a monthly series, I might get a bit more exposure. As a result, I began to think of multiple characters and interweaving story lines that could be told in an episodic format. Electronic publishing made this possible whereas I would never have been able to sell it in print.
When I began outlining Zombies, I had every intention of leading up to an apocalypse. After all, everything I had read had been apocalyptic. I thought, "I can do the apocalypse." My biggest problem with apocalyptic zombie fiction is that it always begins after the main event. Even when the characterization is excellent, such as in the Walking Dead, you don't really get to know what the characters were like before the zombies. So I planned half a series of stories that took place before the apocalypse. That half a series turned into a whole series. By the time I'd gotten that far in my thinking, I'd all but given up on the apocalypse entirely.
The result has been my take on zombies. Fighting them is a whole lot different when you're fighting for more than just your life.
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I don't want to get too bogged down talking about The Walking Dead comic, but I think Kirkman does a really good job at keeping the reader on his toes. No one is safe in that book and, while Rick has managed to survive so far, there have been many times when I'm pretty sure he wishes he was dead.
True, there have been plenty of twists and turns, I just wish for the story to follow more than Rick, the new Adventure Game by TellTale based on TWD spins a new story within the same universe, and makes for a great change of scenery.Also - oddly enough I was reading another blog/editorial type thing from a Video game critic about the rise of zombies in popular culture, combined with the evolution of essentially the cliches. One point that links perfectly to your blog post is this
"We're so used to associating zombies with post-
apocalyptic settings that we forget to take into account the logistics of it all.
I mean, one would think it'd take a few decent last-stand battles and a good amount of time to let signs of neglect and lack of maintenance set in all over civilized society. Somehow I doubt it'd work like it did at the start of the Dawn of the Dead remake when the one lady comes out of her house after one night indoors and finds that her pleasant suburban neighborhood has turned into downtown Baghdad. The only explanation is that zombies can now also shoot lasers out of their eyes and their hatred of the living is matched only by their hatred of civil infrastructure."
One last point - have you seen Diary of the Dead? It puts me off of NOTLD because Diary is just so, well ridiculous.
I've read similar things regarding the decay of civilization. Very few apocalyptic books deal with problems surrounding uncontrolled fires and nuclear reactors that no longer have people to maintain them. There's a book called Earth Abides that really deals with the slow decay of what man leaves behind when a plague virtually wipes us out. It's an interesting book without being at all exciting. It's been a long time since I've read it and I still haven't decided whether I liked it or not.
That book looks really interesting, will have to get hold of that in the near future! Looks like what I wanted out of the UK TV series "Survivors", however when I watched the remake of that it was essentially The Walking Dead without zombies, too much focus on character drama AFTER the apocalypse, and not much from before that couldn't be written on a postit on the characters head....
I liked Survivors. Especially toward the end, I thought it was really beginning to come into its own. You're definitely right about the characterization, though. Again, that's typical of apocalyptic fiction. If you do read Earth Abides, you'll find that the lives of the characters before the apocalypse is almost entirely irrelevant.
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Although this probably stems from the fact that personally I'm not a big film fan, there are very few occasions when I will watch a film over a TV series. The best I can attribute it to is that while films are 2 hours of easily digestible content, a TV series contains overarching stories. Then to transfer this to say, Zombies! and The Walking Dead - The long term has to be considered or the story would be everyone wanders around until they get eaten.
Another medium for the apocalypse is video games. As far as I am aware (and I like to think of myself as very aware) there is nothing covering the struggle of society battling to hold itself together under a large scale threat. Its all either a contained outbreak where you need to escape (Dead Island, Dead Rising), Post Apocalyptic with a focus on short term lets try and run (Left 4 Dead, Killing floor) or just nonsense (Yakuza Dead Souls).
I've lost my train of thought now.
Basically I'm trying to say a long term struggle doesn't work well with movies, hence the success in a serialized set of books, and the ongoing comic nature of TWD.
(One problem with TWD is that due to the nature of a comic, it will always follow Rick, magically surviving when others don't, the same way that any super hero is -nearly- defeated only to survive, until the last issue.