There’s long been a trend of movies, games, and TV shows being ashamed to say ‘zombie’ because it’s ‘silly’. It conjures up images of brain-munching corpses, hands stretching out from freshly dug graves, and undead with their arms pointing forward, gnawing for some of that sweet, sweet amygdala. But notDead Rising. Paying tribute to the classic Dawn of the Dead with its mall backdrop, it proudly says zombies with its big, hairyFrank Westchest.
It was refreshing in 2006, just a few years after 28 Days Later started calling them ‘Infected’, and shortly before I Am Legend labeled its undead as ‘Darkseekers’. But it’s even more refreshing 18 years later with the Deluxe Remaster after the unprecedented zombie boom that… didn’t use the word zombie.
The Walking Deadcoined a bunch of terms, from Walkers to Biters to Shamblers, whileWorld War Zwent for the abbreviated Zeds.Days Goneawfully called them Freakers,Dying Light,The Last of Us, andLeft 4 Deadalso adopted ‘Infected’, although the first two sometimes stuck with plain ‘ol zombies, while Naughty Dog split them into subcategories like ‘Clickers’ and ‘Bloaters’ on account of their radically different designs.
The Walking Dead is an example of a story in which zombie media simply doesn’t exist.
There’s an astounding amount of fiction that doesn’t say the Z-word, even if hundreds of them are slowly making their way across America to chow down on the living. So, when Frank West walked into the mall to find survivors putting up makeshift defenses at the exit, I was as taken off guard by them saying ‘zombies’ as he was. No cutesy terms here, none of that Shuffler, Lurker, Groaner, Rotter, Stiffs nonsense, just zombies.
It’s not because Dead Rising has traditional zombies that it’s happy to say the term. They’re controlled and infected by parasitic mutated wasps, and you can even see larvae spill out of them when you kill them with a Queen. It’s a unique approach, but a lot of the time, zombies aren’t called zombies because they’re technically something else. But George Romero’s take on zombies — the foundation of so much of their modern literature — is hardly traditional, either.
The term comes from the Haitian folklore ‘zombi’ or zonbi’, corpses re-animated by witchcraft, or a Vodou priest known as a bokor. A lot of early zombie films pre-Romero are incredibly strange to watch in retrospect with the modern idea of the undead because of this stark difference. They’re not mindless, brain-eating hordes, but resurrected individuals often under the control of someone else.
White Zombie is often regarded as the first full feature length zombie film. Set in Haiti, it sees a Vodou master called Murder Legendre running a sugar cane mill operated solely by the undead, lending credence to the theory that zombies have roots in a fear of slavery.
Romero adopted the term and created the idea of modern zombies. While still undead, they’re an infectious plague, biting others to spread the disease. They aren’t completely mindless, able to claw back some of their sentience and learn, but Romero’s version is far more monstrous and dystopian. Yet despite these radical changes, they’re still called zombies.
Dead Rising continues that trend, creating a new version of the mythos — even if much of the iconography and behaviour parallels Romero’s — while still adopting the name. That’s what makes it such a faithful homage, not just the mall or ramshackle survivors bickering in a security office: the unashamed love of the genreandlegend, using their name without hesitation.
Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster
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Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster builds on the 2016 remaster of the 2006 original, following photojournalist Frank West as he looks to uncover the shocking source of a zombie outbreak - and make it out alive.
