“A dying trend” is a bit of an understatement. Truth is, the zombie trend died on the operating table years ago only to be mercilessly brought back to life over and over again. Zombies as a subject matter have been around for quite a while. From television series to exercise apps, zombies have pervaded just about every form of media available to us for the last decade. It seems we just can’t get enough of those lovable, mindless, man-eating corpses. Looking through the zombie tag on Steam will generate 198 results. Ignoring the 11 rereleases, the oldest game is “Left 4 Dead” from 2008. That’s an average of 23 zombie games a year. In a Wikipedia list of zombie-themed movies, 19 were released in 2011 and 17 in 2012.
So just where and when did this trend start? In 2004 we had a horde of zombie movies, 23 released in one year. 2003 only had 12, and 2002 had a meager 4. However, of those four, one standout was the film “28 Days Later.” Often cited as reviving the zombie genre, “28 Days Later” mixes up the zombie film formula, putting a greater emphasis on the human element. Before, most zombie films were B-movie horror. Watching “28 Days Later,” one realizes that it’s not so much a movie about zombies but a movie about people. How we react when cornered and surrounded, forced to survive by any means necessary. Zombies then become a kind of setting rather than a subject, a backdrop in place to draw out how humans really behave.
Why did the trend last so long? In our vast hypermedia world it feels like trends are born, live and die before the week’s over. The popularity of certain video games like “Dead Rising” (2006) and “Left 4 Dead” (2008) kept the trend alive. Improved processing power in the seventh-generation gaming consoles allowed games to render hordes of zombies without detriment to gameplay. At this point games could be created with the intention of recreating the environments seen in zombie movies. While exciting, these games carry the feeling of B-movie horror. It wasn’t until 2009 that the overall feel of contemporary zombie movies was recreated in an “Arma 2” mod called “DayZ.” Placing players in an unfamiliar city, starving and alone, the game brilliantly recreated the opening of “28 Days Later” in its own way. While the yearly release of zombie films started its decline, zombie video games began their ascent. Indie developers flooded Steam Greenlight in hopes of getting the attention of the zombie-hungry crowd.
With all its popularity these previous years, the zombie craze seems to have died down significantly this year. Compared to the 13 zombie movies released in 2014, only three have been released this year so far. The flood of zombie games has reached the point of absurdity, generating titles such as “Yet Another Zombie Defense Game” and “GoatZ.” Many of the games are appearing simply as clones of their predecessors with very little variation in the market. It seems we’re at the end of this apocalypse. So why was it so damn popular in the first place?
Zombie movies excite us and incite fear in us. We’re terrified of zombies, yet we cannot get enough of them. What’s there to love in these heartless monsters? Considering the takeoff in 2004, many have come to the conclusion that the zombie apocalypse is a cultural response to the war on terror. It reflects the change in warfare from individual battles with men to mass genocide through biological warfare. It’s not the result of an attack but the consequence of the preemptive strike, which results in one’s own self-destruction.
The growing public awareness of global warming and mass extinctions may also have created a drastic change in world-view. We are, after all, just another animal relative to the global ecosystem. As a natural response to the toll humans take on the environment, what better way to reverse the scales than by displaying the human as a victim of nature; people become the endangered species.
Perhaps it’s a reaction to the development of the Internet and celebrity fame. A kind of Übermensch mentality that the few who are able to overcome, rise above the mindless, abhorrent and apathetic masses. Only those who resist and persist are able to survive. Perhaps zombies became popular because they appeared as a dark parody to the trend of reality TV shows.
It’s hard to say just what it is that make zombies so appealing to us. However, it’s plain to see the zombie is on a downward spiral into obscurity, joining trends like the spaghetti western and man vs. machine. What does this mean? It means we are in the midst of a changing cultural environment. Our ideas of war, government, society and technology are not what they were five years ago, and are nothing like what they were 10 years ago. When will we see a new trend emerge? We will not know until it’s already happened.