It isn’t an understatement to say that the zombie genre is pretty much dead. Following years of declining ratings, The Walking Dead has killed any good will it has with general audiences. The battalion of zombie clones have trickled their way to the bargain bin section of your DVD store. Even Resident Evil, a video game franchise partially responsible for the zombie genre’s revival in the 90s and early 2000s, has traded the walking dead for werewolves and nine-foot-tall vampire MILFs who makes everyone question their sexual preferences.

Sure, not every zombie film to come out in the last few years have been completely drained of vitality. Blood Quantum offered some fresh blood to the genre, and Zack Snyder’s newest zombie film, at the very least, hearkens back to his roots with the Dawn of the Dead reboot. However, the majority of zombie films now incorporate tired zombie tropes or feel indistinct from one another.

It’s telling that one of the biggest shots in the arm for the zombie genre came in 2020 from Charles Band when he managed to make everyone angry with him over his film Corona Zombies. According to Wikipedia’s list of every major zombie film to come out, seven films came out in 2020, sixteen in 2019, and twelve in 2018. This might sound big. After all, there are more zombie films made than superhero films. But compare these numbers to ten years ago, when in 2010 when nineteen zombie films came out and in 2011 when twenty-four zombie films came out.

Oh, and among the list of zombie films from 2019? They count Pet Semetary as one of them.

The Zombies Have Grown Stale

So why would a genre grow stale and die? A few reasons, but one of the biggest is that the formula simply doesn’t connect to audiences anymore. They’ve seen it one too many times. It’s stale. Dull. More than that, there’s such a vast lack of innovation on a genre that the story has fallen apart.

Every monster genre has tropes, of course, but only the zombie genre seems to have fallen into a rut of non-innovation for this long. Vampires, werewolves, and even Lovecraftian horror has re-invented itself every couple of decades. There’s a lack of innovation with the zombie genre that is truly avoidable. It’s telling that 28 Days Later is the most noteworthy innovation on the zombie genre in the last twenty years by making the zombies fast and victims of a viral pandemic.

That is also not to say that zombie films haven’t tried innovating in the last twenty years. Films like Shaun of the Dead and Warm Bodies tweaked with the genre expectations by mixing romantic comedies with zombies. The Girl With All the Gifts really played with expectations in a very different way—especially the film, which essentially indicates that a young Black girl will herald in the new world of society. Then there’s Blood Quantum, which uses the zombie genre as a means to discuss internal and external bigotry among Native populations.

The Weakness of Power Fantasy Narrative

But if I were to diagnose the zombie genre with a singular problem – and I will – it’s this: too many straight men keep writing straight male power fantasies with zombies. The only horror elements are recycled from superior horror films, but are repurposed in order to showcase a power fantasy.

I hesitate to say “white, straight men” due to the fact that the majority of quality zombie stories today are being written and created outside of America. Again, the Japanese series Resident Evil sparked renewed interest in zombies, while the genre is mainly kept alive by Asian horror. 2020 saw the release of both #Alive and Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula, along with the Filipino zombie film Block Z. However, all of these still play to the same core power fantasy.

So what is this power fantasy? It’s the fantasy of going out and stopping hordes of non-complicated monsters without any social order. There is no need to think about killing a zombie. Zombies are just fodder for spectacular kills. Because of this, the zombies become...unimportant.

That’s not to say there’s no place for power fantasies or that they’re inherently bad. Superhero films are in essence power fantasies. However, the best superhero films have learned how to balance the power fantasy elements with narrative meaning and theme.

Modern Zombie Films Take the Wrong Lessons From Romero

The issue with modern zombie narratives is that the majority of them use the same themes that George Romero already utilized in his own narrative work.

George Romero is undeniably a masterful filmmaker. His original Dead trilogy—Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead—are undeniably some of the greatest horror films ever made. However, there are three mistakes people make when discussing them. One, all three films have different core themes and conflicts. Two, the zombies are not consistent but ever-changing in the role of the narrative. Three, Romero’s vision of the zombie future is not universal among zombie narratives from the pre-zombie boom.

The core themes of Romero’s original trilogy are all different from one another. Night showcases the crumbling of society under stress, where survival is ultimately ruined by a combination of futile power struggles, arrogance, and, most damning of all, casual human cruelty and stupidity. Humanity’s failure to work together results in the ultimate death of the central human characters.

Dawn and Day are a little different. Dawn is centered mostly on humanity’s vapid consumer culture, made the more obvious due to it being centered in a mall. Day focuses on the divide between those with power and those with knowledge, as the conflict between the military forces and the scientists in that bunker completely overshadows the threat the zombies pose.

However, the lesson many zombie films take away from Romero is that humanity is just bad and are “the real monsters.” The problem ultimately is that most rip-offs take this concept in that vague, indistinct kind of way. Rather than military power structures losing control in a world without focus or consumers looking for resources in a crumbling ecosystem, as is the case in Romero’s world, humanity is bad in that vague Mad Max 2 way.

For certain, none of these rip-offs ever make humanity awful in a way that’s relevant to real life. There has never been a moment as true-to-life as the end of Night of the Living Dead.

Zombies are Too Consistent

The other problem is that zombies as a genre are too consistent and cookie-cutter. Romero’s zombies change in every film. We see zombies in Night use weapons—a feature recycled in Day when we learn zombies retain some degree of memory of their old self.

Modern innovations on zombies are interested in two things: how can the zombies kill and how are the zombies infected? 28 Days Later and Resident Evil feature bio-weapons and viruses gone wild, while The Last of Us suggested that fungal growths might create a zombie apocalypse.

However, none of this really changes the zombie’s role in the narrative the same way Bub changed zombies in Day of the Dead. Nor do we ever see something as introspective as in Return of the Living Dead, when a strapped down zombie tries to explain their need to eat brains in a profoundly haunting, tragic way.

Return of the Living Dead in many ways shows why modern zombie films consistently fall apart. The original film reinvents the zombie in such a unique way that changes their entire role in the narrative. However, most modern story tellers are too afraid to stray from the Romero formula with how zombies behave and act. This results in a weak narrative because we’ve seen these zombies all before.

Because the zombies are all the same, they ultimately just become undeveloped targets for attack, either ripping a human to shreds or being ripped to shreds themselves. Again, they feed into the power fantasy without offering nuance.

We Don’t Need to Recycle Romero’s Films

This leads to the final, most important point. Romero’s films are great. We...don’t need to tell the same story fifteen times. Look at Lucio Fulci’s Zombie – which served as a fake sequel to Dawn of the Dead. That rip-off film is more original than the majority of “original” zombie films. The zombies are the central source of fear. There is never any explanation given to them. They might very well be supernatural entities.

Zombie might be one of the most haunting zombie films ever made in that the zombies just feel otherworldly and evil. Because Fulci frames zombies as a force of raw danger, we never see the zombies get killed in spectacular ways, but rather see the zombies rip everything in their paths apart in increasingly violent ways.

This makes zombies scary. It makes them a threat. We never understand why the dead are rising. For that matter, though, none of Fulci’s zombie films attempt a “humans are the real enemy” narrative. Zombies—and the supernatural forces that create them—are the real enemy.

Lucio Fulci’s Zombie — Lucio Fulci’s *Zombie*

We need to stop pretending that we can survive a zombie apocalypse. We need to stop figuring out ways that heroes can just confront the legions of the dead and plow through them. What we instead need to focus on is how to tell different narratives within the zombie apocalypse.

A lot of diverse voices have used zombie stories to tell different themes. Several webcomics have used the zombie apocalypse formula in order to tell LGBTQIA+ narratives in that framework, without a society there to judge them any longer. Here are several webcomics that combine zombies with, of all things, the slice-of-life genre and high school puppy love romance genre, to great effect.

The “power fantasy” here is to smooch a cute person who society wouldn’t let you smooch otherwise. This is similar to the recent manga ZOM 100: Bucket List of the Dead, where the zombie genre is used to showcase how the zombie apocalypse allows one overworked Japanese man to pursue his lifelong dreams that society would have prevented him from accomplishing.

Zombie narratives can be used for so much more than just bland zombie massacres. Either make zombies scary again or try to figure out a different theme for your narratives. You can’t just bring back a patchwork of all of Romero’s Dead films without innovating anything other than “How did the zombies come back THIS time?”