101 ways to deal with zombies – Filmweb

Because even though the world is rushing forward, the zombies are steadfast, and they still care about our brains, our guts, and our meat pellets. However, genre convention has tried from the beginning metaphor, making zombies the carrier of some deep ideas or using them to talk about the state of the soul of a postmodern society.

Whether it’s the works of the late George A. Romero or The Walking Dead, which the series itself has long since begun to resemble, we’ve been reminded at every step that it’s not about zombies per se, the real villain being the other guy. Today it is almost a cliché, but it is deeply rooted and forms the basis of entire species, and then we expect a reflection on the fate of man and the sauce pouring out of the skull of a broken rotten corpse.

But films with films, series, series, and games rarely treat zombies only as frightening tools, often adding to the entire narrative at least frightening reflections on the world and life. Take, for example, “Days Gone,” where the hordes of the zombies were the result of human error resulting from carelessness and arrogance, and the collapse of civilization can be blamed as much as pride and social disorder, resulting in everyone playing for themselves.

And perhaps “The Last of Us” went even further, because, exploring the world created on the ruins of concrete, metal and school, we will have to consider the fact that after removing the undesirable element – man – the harmony of plants and animals came to him. And although, of course, everyone and everything wants to kill us, people are the worst, because they act consciously and do evil not only out of necessity, but also by choice. After all, creatures affected by the parasite are immoral, they are guided only by instinct. Resident Evil deals a little differently with the theme of the pulp much more, however, there is the destruction of zombies in the fore, but also the whole catastrophe is the result of capitalist intrigues and absolute contempt for the human race.

Hence the team responsible for “Dead Island 2” announced that the game will come out of this scheme and focus on zombies, and that the dead will be the core of this production, and that they will become not only the background and element of the scene, but the most important aspect of the gameplay and plot.The way is refreshing. In other words, we will deal with intermarriage with zombies, who are not walking metaphors but merely decomposing, moving corpses eager to eat us. And all that’s required of us is to survive – chopping, shooting and slicing, and not without a good deal of gruesome humour.

It is no coincidence, when it comes to inspiration, that the title of the beloved movie “Evil Dead”, where director Sam Raimi measured proportions in pharmacy, horror mixed with black humor. Another trope is certainly the “Return of the Living Dead” series, which, without any awkwardness or embarrassment, focused almost exclusively on B-grade gameplay with the genre, with subsequent jokes punctuated by gushing springs of blood.

Of course, this is not the first attempt of its kind, let’s take the classic slot machine “The House of the Dead”, which grew on the American pulp and was not about anything else, but about precisely shooting any tormented creatures from the side effects of a lab experiment. Or the already forgotten Gothic “Nightmare Creatures”, as well as undemanding in terms of plot and content, the “Left 4 Dead” co-op.

Cinema also experimented with zombies in different ways, although, apart from these attempts at pulp, patents, for example, classic Italian, rarely penetrated the mainstream, and then in games, which usually still capture official solutions from the big screen. However, the corpses of Lucio Fulci’s lesser known and more unusual “zombie meat eaters” or “graveyards” were extremely brutal, as if they were consciously sadistic, able to use tools and were sane of minds.

Sometimes the games also feature superhero combos, usually huge and clubbed, let’s say, but so far we haven’t dared to “humanize” an ordinary zombie walking person crawling over our brain, reeling on his feet. But, well, Romero also made three films for the education of the dead.

But first and foremost, it really pays to take the burden off their shoulders, the burden of metaphors and social and political context, and leave pure pleasure. Since zombies, although they can teach, play and have fun, it’s time for them to have fun.