Lament for the Zombie

Zombies are overused and just plain aren’t scary.

I’m sorry, but that’s my opinion.

Zombies rose to particular prominence as the ‘undead horde’ thanks to George Romero’s watershed horror film Night of the Living Dead which was released back in 1968.  The film was creepy, intense and gave the overall sensation of a world going mad, along with the loom, lingering forms of the undead as they attacked the humans, whose foibles caused them to fray, falter and so forth.

 The success of the zombie film was also due to the fact that zombie films, in general, are cheap. Undead people tend to look like, well people, and extras are easy to come by. Romero used to find it funny, supposedly, that extras always wanted to be the ones who got shot or blown up or chowed down on people, meaning he had plenty of gruesome opportunities to let his special effects guys go crazy.

Now, I’m agoraphobic, so crowds bother me. I can understand why someone would worry about a horde of malicious insensate, unreasonable kinda-people coming for you. So I appreciate why zombies were scary and successful.

The problem is that they aren’t scary in RPGs, or video games for that matter, and the common idea of the zombie film, is well, tired and was kinda stupid to begin with.

It’s been said that Romero always thought we should be rooting for the zombies. This is probably out of some hideworn 60s era dross about them being the silent unwashed proletariat waiting to rise up and take what was theirs. The whole ‘eat the rich’ nonsense. So most zombie films portray, well, morons and jerks, who end up as zombie chow in short order.

It’s also been theorized that the reason the ‘true zombie fan’ doesn’t like fast zombies is because, well, nobody has a chance against them. Similar to the ‘eat the rich’ bullshit, there’s also the idea that only cagey, resourceful people ‘like me’ could survive the zombie outbreak. Strangely, zombie films tend to portray the religious, the well off, the well armed and such as the people least likely to survive the onslaught of slow, shambling brainless killing machines. Which again, is probably due to the dime store socialism that seems to have infected the indie-side of Hollywood in the sixties that Night of the Living Dead was born out of.  Basically, the ‘true zombie fan’ wants to envision that only he and his friends could really survive and that people made into chow are done so just because they were too dumb, too foolish or too (insert trait he doesn’t like) to survive against slow moving oceanic seas of corpses. Fast zombies wreck that because well, anybody can be run down if the zombie is the cheetah and you are the antelope.

And in that, is why zombies in RPGs are always kind of well, dumb. See, RPGs inherently give the player character capability and agency and zombie films, more so then normal horror films, don’t function if the heroes aren’t hamstrung.

Player characters don’t forget to call the cops. Don’t buy that shambling undead hordes can overwhelm military bases with astounding ease (given that they tend to have at least a passing understanding of how modern firearms or military tactics work), refuse to accept that they have to throw fifteen different breakers on dozens of floors of an apartment building to turn the lights back on, and know that Home Depot carries generators, gasoline and other fun stuff. So DMs are usually left with alternatives of putting their heroes in bizarre locales, which raise further problems for the zombies (why don’t they free solid at the arctic base, why aren’t they being liquidifed by pressure on the ocean floor, etc) Fantasy zombies are little better then creepy robots, and most classes are literally given specific anti-zombie artillery, which has led some to just straight up making something like ‘unturnable zombies’ to keep the cleric from flash eradicating them.

There are some specific ‘zombie RPGs’ out there, but most operate on the intrinsic conceits of taking away the player’s capability to do anything at the onset. The problem here is that the ‘weak pc’ vs the zombies really turns the game into either a shaggy dog story, or else turns the game into a puzzle. That of course discounts that some people do go in for a ‘storyteller’ like experience.

Zombies end up as the baseline, the lowest threat. After all, they don’t think. And the only threat they present is when there’s a lot of them. Some DMs try to get around this by making other weirder zombies (zombie sharks!) but that’s tricky since zombie doesn’t necessary mean ‘all undead’ and sometimes people want fancier, or weirder undead: Ghost sharks, vampire sharks, etc.

Ironically, the older version of the zombie, that with the voodoo priests and the like, can be arguably more compelling. The idea of loss of control, or the despoilment of family members can strike more firmly then just a wall of necrotic flesh. The idea that the voodoo zombie may or may not even be dead might also make dealing with them weirder. Undead who talk, but talk like the dead, are far scarier than just fleshy robots groaning out ‘brains!’