Looking back on history we often say that the culture of medieval Europe revolves around the church. Pretty much all the art and literature was in praise of God and his works. Now how might people in the future look at our culture. They’d probably say that western culture in 21st century begins and ends with zombies. No I’m not kidding, a quick look at games, movies, books, and other art being produced definitely shows a pervasive zombie culture that continues to grow.
Starting with games, cause I like games the most, its pretty easy to come up with some pretty popular games that are based on killing zombies. Most notably Resident Evil, Dead Rising, Left 4 Dead, and DeadSpace to name a few, but Wikipedia has a more complete list. As you can see from that list there are very few zombie games in the 80s, and handful in the 90s, than in the 2000s, developers really start to crank out zombie games, especially 2008-2011 which has about half the zombie games on the list.
Even games that aren’t primarily about zombies like Call of Duty with its zombie mode, or Red Dead Redemption with its Undead Nightmare DLC, include zombies in some way. I assume in a few years we can expect game reviewers to criticize any game that doesn’t have a zombie mode. It will simply be a standard feature everyone expects from a game, like multiplayer is expected today.
Since a rising trend of zombies in video games is hardly an argument for a pervasive zombie culture, lets take a look at another popular medium, movies. Again Wikipedia is a useful place, it has a very good list of zombie movies. Unfortunately its alphabetical, chronological would make it easier to demonstrate my point, but if you take a good look at the years, it should become apparent. It lists White Zombie in 1932 as the first zombie movie, so from then to 2000 is almost 70 years.
Now if you look closely at the list its pretty obvious that the number of zombie movies made up to 2000, is approximately equal to those made since. 10 years, and the volume of zombie movies is equivalent to the previous 70 years. Now look at one year in particular, 2011. There are over a dozen zombie movie made just this year, though some have yet to be released. Now I enjoy a zombie movie from time to time, but it seems the volume of zombie movies being made is just excessive.
One more thing, lets look at books. Now this is a list of Novels, so short stories will be left out but it should provide a good measure of how much zombies show up in written works. You’ll see a couple from the 70s and 80s, a few from the 90s, then suddenly in the new millennium zombie novels skyrockets, especially 2007-2011, which is most of the novels on that list. Its clear we can look forward to more and more zombie books in the future. If somehow you’ve gone this far in your life without noticing the zombie culture, you probably will in the next few years.
Now, the question is, is zombie culture bad? I don’t really think its all that bad, if it wasn’t zombies it would probably be something else. As long as there are still some works being made that don’t relate to zombies to give me some variety, I’m okay with it. I think the real question is, how do you feel about zombie culture? Share your thoughts.
Also related is vampire culture. Until recently vampires were more popular than zombies. Although they have their differences, both vampires and zombies are basically undead monsters. I can’t help but think that the popularity of both are related, but I just don’t get why they are so popular. I enjoy vampire and zombie stories from time to time, but they never seemed particularly more enjoyable than any other genre.
Go ahead and leave some comment on zombie culture.
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