ZOMBIE-APOCOLYPSE

History





George A. Romero was an early contributor to the genre with his 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead.
The founding work of the genre was Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend (1954), which featured a lone survivor named Robert Neville waging a war against a human population transformed into vampires.[1] The novel has been adapted into several screenplays, including The Last Man on Earth (1964), starring Vincent Price, and The Omega Man (1971), starring Charlton Heston. A 2007 movie version also titled I Am Legend starred Will Smith in a more contemporary setting.[2] George A. Romero borrowed the idea for his apocalyptic feature Night of the Living Dead (1968) from Matheson, but substituted vampires with shuffling ghouls, identified after its release as zombies.[3]

[edit] Thematic subtext

The literary subtext of a zombie apocalypse is usually that civilization is inherently fragile in the face of truly unprecedented threats and that most individuals cannot be relied upon to support the greater good if the personal cost becomes too high.[4] The narrative of a zombie apocalypse carries strong connections to the turbulent social landscape of the United States in the 1960s when the originator of this genre, the film Night of the Living Dead, was first created.[5][6] Many also feel that zombies allow people to deal with their own anxiety about the end of the world.[7] Kim Paffenroth notes that "more than any other monster, zombies are fully and literally apocalyptic ... they signal the end of the world as we have known it."[8]

[edit] Story elements

There are several common themes and tropes that create a zombie apocalypse:
1.Initial contacts with zombies are extremely traumatic, causing shock, panic, disbelief and possibly denial, hampering survivors' ability to deal with hostile encounters.[9]
2.The response of authorities to the threat is slower than its rate of growth, giving the zombie plague time to expand beyond containment. This results in the collapse of the given society. Zombies take full control while small groups of the living must fight for their survival.[9]





Night of the Living Dead established most of the tropes associated with the genre, including the unintelligent but relentless behavior of zombies.[10]
The stories usually follow a single group of survivors, caught up in the sudden rush of the crisis. The narrative generally progresses from the onset of the zombie plague, then initial attempts to seek the aid of authorities, the failure of those authorities, through to the sudden catastrophic collapse of all large-scale organization and the characters' subsequent attempts to survive on their own. Such stories are often squarely focused on the way their characters react to such an extreme catastrophe, and how their personalities are changed by the stress, often acting on more primal motivations (fear, self-preservation) than they would display in normal life.[9][11]

Generally the zombies in these situations are the slow, lumbering and unintelligent kind first made popular in the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead.[10] Motion pictures created within the 2000s, however, have featured zombies that are more agile, vicious, intelligent, and stronger than the traditional zombie.[12] In many cases of "fast" zombies, creators use living humans infected with a pathogen (as in Zombieland and Left 4 Dead)—instead of re-animated corpses—to avoid the "slow death walk" of Romero's variety of zombies. These first came about with the 1985 film "Return of the Living Dead".

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