After nearly 12 years of successive seasons, the series has ended The Walking Dead who has been the zombie torchbearer for the past decade. Although there are many spinoffs stemming from the original series, the torch of the zombie genre has been passed to a new bearer: the series. The Last of Us from network HBO.
The giant broadcast and cable network has high hopes for the series, but if we exclude the famous successful game, lively characters and big Hollywood names, we will have a series that carries elements of the apocalypse and zombies with a new layer of fungi.
This might sound a little old-fashioned now, which is why the marketing team for the series seems to have tried to avoid promoting zombies as much as possible. But fans of the game know that the real appeal lies in the craftsmanship and detail of its world Naughty Dog The destroyer, the brutality of its action-stealth gameplay, and of course: the incredible characters whose very existence has ignited online excitement.
People who haven’t heard of the game might fidget The Last of Us before upon learning that it (in essence) tells another zombie story, but it wasn’t that long ago the zombie genre was a dominant phenomenon across media. So let’s analyze in this article where this series falls in this genre, and try to find out if it is a series The Last of Us He can revive zombies.
zombie fever
He appeared in the 1968 film directed by George Romero, titled Night of the Living Dead It evokes an army of cannibal monsters and draws inspiration from the image of a destroyed world in film The Last Man on Earth Which starred Vincent Price and was itself based on a novel I Am Legend Authored by Richard Matheson.
But with the exception of Romero’s initial trilogy and a few other impressive blockbusters that imitated it, zombie films weren’t as popular and dominant as gore, and even looked bad and weak when gore hit the modern age with Scream.
But the zombies themselves were excellent fuel to move the plot forward. The zombies were a staple of violent video games before they were even colored. It can be said that a game Death Race The controversy, released in 1976, was the first truly violent game, which awarded the player points for running over the zombies.gremlinsZombies weren’t usually so scary in the old games…that’s until I converted them Resident Evil to terrifying creatures.
The survival horror masterpiece was known as Biohazard In Japan, it was released in 1996, the same year the movie was released Scream. The game sparked a growing interest in the classic zombie films that honored it, and inspired a new generation of directors to recreate the zombies for a new millennium. First came innovative Asian films such as junk And Wild Zero And Bio Zombie. Then the games began to influence Western directors such as Alec Garland. where I reminded him Resident Evil How much he loves zombies, which inspired him to make the movie 28 Days later 2002 full of seriously injured and very fast.
Then British directors Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright presented a fantasy scene in style Resident Evil2 And then the game itself, literally, in their sitcom Spacedwhich served as the seed for their amazing satirical film Shaun of the Dead 2004. In the same year, America unleashed itself with the undisputedly fantastic remake Dawn of the Deadwhich proves that Zack Snyder and James Gunn’s vision can coexist.
In addition to being successful at the box office, zombies have overtaken cinema in a way that bloody films (slashers) who did it one day. In 2003 Max Brooks published a book The Zombie Survival Guide, which has become a staple for many millennials. It’s a tough how-to guide that teaches thriving in a real world ravaged by zombies and teems with axioms like “use your head, chop them off” and “swords don’t need to be reloaded”.
The guide skillfully targets the deep parts of our brains that want to prepare for the end of the world, and which were already preoccupied with these thoughts after the events of September 11 in America. It has sparked countless thought experiments and goofy debates over which blunt tool would best smash a zombie’s skull.
Soon after, Robert Kirkman added an element of melodrama to the zombie formula in his comics The Walking Deadwhich in turn became a successful series that released its last episode a short while ago, after a long period of the zombie fever that it embodied subsided.
For a while, it seemed that popular culture was caught in the jaws of the undead, as college students and conference-goers around the world marched through cities in massive zombie parades. Hilarious zombie comedies also opened the door for a wider audience to enjoy the fantasy world of zombies without the gore and horror. They are sometimes joined by bright vampires and graceful werewolves.
Romero then returned to cinema with the genre he pioneered in a new film adaptation of I Am Legend, which uses zombie metaphors that draw more from the original novel than from the book itself.
The video game world is overrun with zombies
Back in the world of video games overflowing with hordes of zombies, this was a huge reason to receive a game The Last of Us Some resentment at first.
longing Sony And Naughty Dog Initially exclusive PS3 Set in 2011 with murky images of a fractured society and ants with controlled minds. Speculation abounded, and a common phrase among all the rumors was: “Please don’t be a zombie.”
although The Last of Us It was “just another zombie game”, but it was also much more than that.
After all, we saw a lot of them by the time the game came out in 2013. Adventure zombie games, zombie mobile games, zombie shopping games, and even educational zombie games. The genre quickly replaced World War II as the game genre of choice, and it’s not hard to see why. Zombies, like the Nazis they replaced, and in some cases became, serve a very useful purpose as human enemies that we don’t feel weird about killing.
But even though The Last of Us It was “just another zombie game”, but it was also much more than that. Brilliant technical presentation, heart-pounding stealth action, and a captivating story that ends with a moral dilemma that sparks one of the longest-running cyber wars of all time. She gave us natural motion capture performances from amazing actors and a visual aesthetic that was inspired by blockbuster hits like Children of Men And The Road.
It even contained giraffes!
But it’s still a story about zombies, and even that’s not original. Although the fungus that turns humans into boisterous monsters is a unique idea, it could be seamlessly replaced with the T-Virus or Solanum or Rage space radiation, etc.
Same for the various mutated forms, which though aren’t as exaggerated as the bio’s organic weapons Resident EvilHowever, the Bloaters And Lickers… I mean Clickerscertainly owed to the famous survival horror series.
Series creator Neil Druckmann had a completely different idea when he proposed one The Last of Us For the first time as an intimate study of two characters, the bond they form, and the way they are tested by the harsh world in which they live. The game took the style, pace, and production value of high-end series and applied it to a video game, in the same way that Hideo Kojima incorporated the language of action movies into a game. Metal Gear Solid.
But it remains a zombie story. Nothing wrong with that! While zombie stories are great, there’s no denying they may seem old-fashioned now, and it’s hard to get excited about the genre after so many years of saturation.
We certainly won’t now see the zombie apocalypse from the people behind the sequel.
We recently learned that the series The Last of Us The spread of the infection will not be seen through thick clouds of spores, but through climbing fungal plants. This may not be a huge change, but it is certainly understandable. I am sure that Pedro Pascal would prefer not to spend another series with his face hidden behind a mask. The climbing plants and the way the brains of the infected are attached will also help distinguish The Last of Us About other zombie series.
“I’m not interested in zombies,” said general supervisor Craig Mazin, while Druckmann himself bluntly stated, “We wanted to avoid making a zombie series.” And who can blame them? Not related to serial The Last of Us At its heart is gore and sci-fi monsters, it is about people who have lost everything and connections that have grown up in horrific circumstances. It would be unfair to call it a “zombie series”. In addition, isn’t the zombie type dead?
The Last of Us: Will the zombie genre rise from the grave?
I think the 2013 World War Z movie is the height of the zombie fever. The film shares its title with Max Brooks’ clever sequel to his first Survival Guide book, but ditches the plot, characters, and unique docudrama formula of the book.
The film received mixed reviews, but with more than half a billion box office returns, it remains the highest-grossing zombie movie of all time and probably will remain so. Other films in this genre saw their returns decline as superhero films dominated popular culture, and zombies quickly joined the ranks of pirates and ninjas, but it was not going anywhere.
Skip story and characters The Last of Us The genre for sure, but the zombie genre is central to the story.
Continue series The Walking Dead His seasons didn’t really start to dwindle until 2016, but he continued to flounder along with a handful of spin-offs and limited series. Zombies have been replaced at the box office by high-end horror films from studios A24 and studio films Blumhouse plentiful, but still a fertile playground for creative directors to play with. Games are moved Resident Evil To rustic people and giant vampires, some of the biggest video games in the world still add zombies to kill with the sword of Moonlight Greatsword.
The zombie genre is out of vogue, but what does this mean in 2023? There really isn’t a “thing” that is overwhelming anymore. Monolithic domination has been shattered into thousands of subcultures, and only series and movies are being released, and even blockbusters like Avatar And Top Gun: Maverick It is criticized for its lack of “meme” influence.
We may not get a movie-like moment Avengers: Endgame Again, but that doesn’t mean the superhero genre is going anywhere. And even if huge profits and huge budgets become more modest, there will always be money in this kind. With the development of media, it may become Marvel And DC Just background noise, offering great, lucrative content to enjoy on broadcast networks, but will never again be the massive phenomenon it was during Phases 1-3.
But that’s okay. Take westerns or musicals, even college comedies: when something becomes big enough to dominate an entire sector, let alone culture, its influence doesn’t fade when its meme fades. Species do not die. Rather, they become mere rickety corpses that eat away at the ocean of popular culture, waiting for a chance to rise again.
Skip story and characters The Last of Us The genre for sure, but the zombie genre is central to the story. Ellie and Joel wouldn’t be the same if their world was ended by aliens, insects, or a giant kaiju monster. They are like this because of the path paved by previous works in zombie movies, series, games and literature.
enough to serial The Last of Us He has to deal with negative perceptions surrounding works based on video games, and he doesn’t have to fight his zombie status either. Because just as the original game elevated the narrative, production value, and game development, so has the series The Last of Us Real potential to bring some prestige, popularity and power back to the zombie genre.