There’s long been a trend for movies, games, and TV shows to be ashamed of saying “zombie” because it’s “silly.” It conjures up images of brain-eating corpses, hands reaching out from freshly dug graves, and the undead with arms outstretched, nibbling on some of that sweet, sweet amygdala. But not Dead Rising. Paying homage to the classic Dawn of the Dead with its mall backdrop, it proudly says “zombie” with its big, hairy Frank West chest.
It was refreshing in 2006, just a few years after 28 Days Later started calling them “Infected,” and just before I Am Legend labeled its undead “Darkseekers.” But it's even more refreshing 18 years later with the Deluxe Remaster after the unparalleled zombie boom that… didn't use the word zombie.
The Walking Dead has coined a slew of terms, from Walkers to Biters to Shamblers, while World War Z went with the abbreviation Zeds. Days Gone horribly called them Freakers, and Dying Light, The Last of Us, and Left 4 Dead even adopted “Infected,” though the first two sometimes stuck to straight zombies, while Naughty Dog split them into subcategories like “Clickers” and “Bloaters” due to their radically different designs.
The Walking Dead is an example of a story where zombie media simply doesn’t exist.
There’s a staggering amount of fiction that doesn’t say the Z-word, even as hundreds of them slowly creep across America to devour the living. So when Frank West walked into the mall and found survivors erecting makeshift defenses at the exit, I was taken aback that they said “zombie” as much as he did. No sappy 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 mutant wasps, and you can even see larvae coming out of them when you kill them with a Queen. It’s a unique approach, but more often than not zombies aren’t called zombies because they’re technically something else. But George Romero’s take on zombies, the foundation of much of their modern literature, isn’t traditional at all.
The term comes from Haitian folklore 'zombi' or zonbi', corpses reanimated by witchcraft, or a Vodou priest known as a bokor. Many of the early pre-Romero zombie films are incredibly strange to watch in retrospect with the modern idea of the undead because of this stark difference. They are not mindless hordes eating brains, but resurrected individuals often under someone else's control.
White Zombie is often considered the first feature-length zombie film. Set in Haiti, it features a Vodou master named Murder Legendre running a sugarcane factory staffed exclusively by the undead, lending credence to the theory that zombies are rooted in the fear of slavery.
Romero adopted the term and created the idea of modern zombies, which are often the result of a plague, biting others to spread the disease. But they are still called zombies, even though they are a unique version of the idea.
Dead Rising continues this trend, creating a new version of the myth, even if much of the iconography and behavior parallels Romero's, while adopting his name. That's what makes it such a faithful homage, not just the mall or the ramshackle survivors arguing in a security office: the unabashed love for the genre. AND legend, using their name without hesitation.
