It's been a long time since movies, games and TV shows have been ashamed to say 'zombie' because it's 'stupid'. It conjures up images of a brain corpse, a hand reaching out from a freshly dug grave, and an undead man with his arm pointing to the head, nibbling on some of that sweet, sweet almond. But not Dead Rising. Paying homage to the classic Dawn of the Dead with a supermarket, the zombies with their chest Frank West, hairy.
It was revived in 2006, just a few years after 28 Days Later started calling them 'Infected', and shortly before I Am Legend named their undead 'Darkseekers'. But it's even more refreshing 18 years later with the Deluxe Remaster after an unprecedented zombie outbreak that… didn't use the word zombie.
The Walking Dead spawned a number of phrases, from Walkers to Biters to Shamblers, while World War Z went for the abbreviated Zeds. Days Gone horribly called them Freakers, Dying Light, The Last of Us, and Left 4 Dead also adopted the 'Infected', although the first two stuck to simple zombies, in terms of Naughty Dog divided them into categories such as 'Clickers' and 'Bloaters' due to their very different designs.
The Walking Dead is an example of a story where zombie media doesn't exist.
A lot of fiction doesn't mention the Z word, even though hundreds of them are slowly making their way across America to feast on the living. So when Frank West entered the mall to find the survivors who had set up a makeshift barricade at the exit, they treated me as a 'zombie' like him. No cute words here, none of the Shuffler, Lurker, Groaner, Rotter, Stiffs nonsense, just zombies.
It's not because Dead Rising has traditional zombies that it's happy to say the word. They are controlled and infected by mutated parasitic wasps, and you can even see the larvae coming out of them when you kill them with the queen. It's a unique approach, but usually, zombies aren't called zombies because they're technically something else. But George Romero's vision of zombies – the basis of much modern literature – is hardly traditional either.
The word comes from the Haitian folklore 'zombi' or zonbi', witch corpse, or Vodou priest known as bokor. Many of the early zombie films before Romero were very strange in terms of viewing the modern idea of the undead because of this huge difference. They are not mindless people who eat brains, but people who rise from the dead often under the control of other people.
White Zombie is often considered the first feature-length zombie film. Set in Haiti, it sees a Vodou master named Murder Legendre running a sugar mill run solely by the undead, lending credence to the theory that zombies are rooted in the fear of slavery.
Romero took the word and created the idea of modern zombies that are often the result of the plague, biting others to spread the disease. But they are still called zombies, even though they are unique in concept.
Dead Rising continues this trend, creating a new version of the legend – although most of the graphics and behavior are similar to Romero's – while still using the name. That's why it's a faithful tribute, not the shopping center or the confused survivors of the security office: the unabashed love of the genre. SY legend, using his name without hesitation.
