Have zombies peaked as a cultural meme, in other words? And if they have, what’s the hot new horror meme? I do so like to keep up with this stuff.
…That’s pretty much it. I was going to do something zombie-ish, but then I stopped because I wasn’t sure if it was worth the trouble to do and whether anybody would want it anyway. Man, this trying to be hip and stylish and whatnot can be hard, sometimes.
I’m not sure about the culture at large, but personally I’ve been done with zombies for a couple of years now.
It’s a cyclical thing. They’ll come shambling back at some point, but I think they’re done for now (finally, ugh…).
The Walking Dead is still a thing. I think Twilight killed Vampires more completely than WWZ killed Zombies. And there’s a WWZ sequel with Brad Pitt coming out in 2017.
No. Next.
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Oh, elaborate? Fine. By the end of 2017 we’re going to see (so far) 8 more zombie films, and these are the ones with actual budgets, not small ones that sneak in like Prom of the Dead or Cooties, and another big 7 zombie games, minus the gazillion smaller zombie games that arrive constantly.
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Yeah, a few years ago, folks were going more gaga over zombies than they are now, but zombies are still very much a thing.
Just because Hollywood and the game industry are doing even more movies and games with zombies does not necessarily mean people are not tired of them. It could just mean they are still trying to milk a trend that is on it’s downhill path,
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Ot all comes down to story and characters. Zombies (or any post apocalypse) are a great background in which to tell a story. It is instant motivation, backdrop, and antagonist all in one. If the story and characters (and gameplay) are good, then the projects will be successful. If they are not, people will blame the fact that we have reached the saturation point as the reason, rather than the fact that they made a crappy story with boring characters.
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Pretty much the only one I have heard of that I am interested in is State of Decay 2. State of Decay was a really well done survival simulator in which the feel was one of actually trying to survive (rather than just an excuse for a character drama that had little to do with the zombie apocalypse.) They left the story minimal, so the player themselves could fill in the story as they went about their tasks. I hope they continue with the same formula with the sequel.
In an world mired in cultural relativism, Zombies are one of the few entities left, along with perhaps Nazis, who are still permissible to engage in wholesale slaughter against. They’ll never completely go away.
Yes, they peaked a while back a lot of people won’t even watch new zombie movies or be interested in zombie games. As for the next horror meme Vampire Apocalypse maybe you have the TV series “The Strain” and “Van Helsing”.
Nope.
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In a time when it seems everything is falling apart,post-apocalyptic fiction will remain popular.
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Also, it’s clear the media and much of our intelligentsia see the citizens of the country as zombies. We’re a mindlessly destructive force thoughtlessly tearing down the international structures they’ve created, dontchaknow.
I disagree, I know Romero saw them as an allegory for the mindless consumer culture of the west, but they always worked better as an allegory for the mindless masses of communist states out to destroy individualists. They originally came out of the biting skeleton movies (Templars, Conquistadores I forget the movie names) and crossed over into popular fiction. Now we’re getting zombie animals (“Zoombies” :”Zombie Apocalypse”) it’s pretty hard to top zombie tigers and zombie giraffes. The fact that a number of movies about zombie animals have come out pretty much shows the concept is reaching it’s end. Even “Z-Nation has had a zombie bear.
I tend to think of zombies as the mob, or the herd, rather than of the individual. For me, that makes the metaphor closer to “what if we lost the power grid, and essentially all civilization?”
If anyone cares, here are trailers to 6 upcoming zombie games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_-wUwomrMs Some of them are quite bloody, BTW.