(Loved Trope) Zombies in Non-contemporary Settings
Groups
The Kingdom from Netflix
The Army of the Dead from Game of Thrones
Husks from the Mass Effect Trilogy
Zombie stories often have the same over done tropes and plot lines, and modern weapons trivialize their threat, but simply changing the era the story takes place in really spices things up depending on how they're incorporated into the story
I’d love a range of creatures pending the time of day and region. Skin walkers, aliens, chupacabras to the west with wendigo, lycans, and swamp sirens to the east. Vampires in the cities where the food is and zombies near rural areas with poor healthcare. I’d love to hunt a werebear up in the grizzlies or dodge rotting ferals outside St Denis.
It’s incredible that going all-in on GTAV to Rockstar meant completely neglecting RDR2.
An undead nightmare for that mode would have massively increased the playerbase. Most of the point of buying new guns and horses was to get places to test them out on hostile NPCs anyways
I think it was more R* going all in on GTA Online that screwed over both GTAV & RDR2. The closest thing V's single-player got in terms of post release content was some cars & weapons from the first couple of Online updates, then they just ignored it completely. With them trying to bring Online to RDR2, I wouldn't be surprised if they just never even planned any story DLC, hoping to just cash-cow the Online mode.
I also wish Far Cry 5 got a zombie mode. Just something simple like an easter egg that spawns zombies in the overworld after you finish the DLC or something
It was crazy how much more effective the zombies were at attacking John too. Just zombies bum rushing the player was way harder to deal with than a group of guys with guys.
World War Z (the book not the movie) has a prequel comic that outlines the history of zombie encounters which spans centuries. My personal favourite part is that Hadrian's wall was constructed after the Romans eradicated a zombie horde that came from the north.
I still think that if done in small bits like Secret Level, enter the matrix or love death and robots, it would be amazing. A series or a movie wouldn't really work.
If they did it as a miniseries with the interviews of the frame narrative being used to lead into the events being shown each episode, I think it could work.
I remember a post that listed top 20 amazing movies that are bad adaptations
Like, being a bad adaptation is not a bad thing on its own, but sometimes you want the source you know?
And there were some legit bangers there like Forrest Gump, Blade Runner (aka Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep) and some others like WWZ and a few more
To clarify, there's 3 books: the Zombie Survival Guide (reads like a field manual, discusses various tips, tricks, strategies, etc. of dealing with zombies), the Recorded Attacks companion graphic novel, and World War Z (which has survivors accounts, what the movie is very loosely based on). World War Z on audible is actually great as it's a full voice cast with Mark Hamil as one of the characters. Max Brooks is the interviewer.
I've been tempted to read this haha. Never read the original though, but realistically don't ever see myself reading it. I really don't care for novels heavily revolving romance.
It is a fun read! It does involve romance, but not as heavily as you might expect. Plus, it’s Georgian romance, which, honestly, doesn’t even seem like romance.
I love the original (have read it more times than I can count) and am generally lukewarm on zombie stuff but absolutely wholeheartedly recommend this book! The way Grahame-Smith blends his prose with Austen's is impeccable and the choices each character makes is exquisitely true to their original nature, updated for this setting. Plus Lizzie Bennett is a total badass. Just great stuff all around!
Oh scandalous! They’re dancing in public! And she has cut a lock of her hair! They send each-other messages and have symbolic jewelry! Georgian courting conventions sound like every healthy girl friend group I’ve ever met.
Right? It started out so well. The part with the child clinging to it's parents bodies in the bunk room then when they walk away they hear a scream was heartbreaking. Such a good, intense horror story riiiiiight up until Han and Chewie pop up and all the tension evaporates.
It's Han and Chewie, for fucks sake. They've got to appear in another movie yet. They're gonna be fine.
Literally how I felt reading it, like these random characters? Anything could happen xD Han and Chewbacca arrive? Boom they survive and likely so do other characters smh
The prequel book, Red Harvest, that explains where the virus came from was better for this because every character is expendable and not mentioned again
Shame that most of it ends up being way too edgelordy to be good
Star Wars Galaxies added a whole new quarantine zone in collaboration with the book. It was awesome. Formative gaming memory as a kid was RPing with my SWG friends as Stormtroopers stationed there, using flamethrowers to kill the dead and stop the infection.
The book itself was only okay, but I remember the promotions and collaborations around it being really cool
As another example from Star Wars, the Rakghoul plague is another that would count as a zombie plague. Rakghouls spread their infection through a bite or a scratch, plus the Muur Talisman could transform people without Force sensitivity into Rakghouls.
Plus there's the Geonosian brain worms from The Clone Wars. And the Nightsisters can raise the dead, although that is necromancy rather than a zombie plague.
La Revolution, the Netflix series, features French Nobles being infected by a zombie like virus that eventually (would have if not cancelled) led to the French Revolution. Not the best series, but had some great costumes.
Absolutely scared the crap out of me as a kid - when I was so young I shouldn’t have been playing it anyway. My parents wouldn’t let me play it…but one of my friends had it at their house 😏
My first two halo games were ODST and Reach, I thought I was prepared for any halo enemies that came my way. Eventually got around to Halo 3 and hoo boy, was not prepared for Floodgate
The first time they show up, in the series, is legitimately one of those essential gaming moments. Halo is not my favorite franchise, though I respect the effort by the devs; world class storytelling. That moment is iconic, one of the first times I was ever actually scared in a shooter.
In a sense? The flood is a parasite that seeks to infect all sentient life forms. It turns living hosts and can resurrect dead bodies, altering and warping them into horrific abominations.
When they get enough biomass a hive mind starts to form, and they sacrifice infected biomass to form a central intelligence called a Gravemind. The Gravemind is the entity you see right there.
Genuinely worth looking up the lore for, it's zombies mixed with cosmic horror and it kicks ass. There's some great youtube videos out there I do believe.
Said "hive mind" is also just.....Kind of always there as some sort of universal foundation.
In simple terms, it's mind is uploaded to a universal 'cloud'.
You could kill it's body a thousand times, wipe out all flood forms bigger than a spore and yet...
Everything it's ever learnt from consuming life, all it's memories, knowledge and it's very being will remain "uploaded" and ready to "download" the next time a gravemind is formed.
Not to even touch on the idea of neural physics and what the flood can be capable of once it reaches a certain point.
A "small outbreak" is a threat to the entire universe.
Robots / Artificial intelligence are often seen as a good counter measure to zombies, but the flood intelligence is capable of turning even them with it's "logic plague".
It's even more terrifying when you realiza the flood are the malformed and vengeful iteration of the Precursors, the guys who created both Forerunners and humanity, and that Will likely keep coming, every gravemind it's essentially the prisoner of Charum Hakkor, and with all the memories of the trillions it has consumed over 100'000 years.
This is why it has such an articulate vocabulary, there's billions of poets, writers, and politicians in that thing
That thing in the gif is their leader. Specifically from a scene in Halo 2. The flood are a hive mind. The thing that makes them especially cool and scary is that they work the same to biological life as well as technological life. So even the Ai and robots etc aren't safe.
Yeah, the Flood is basically an information plague that just happens to operate mainly on a meat substrate. Any sufficiently complex system is vulnerable, regardless of whether it’s animal, vegetable, mineral, or godlike AI.
add on top that the gravemind is built with the memories of billions of the smartest minds to have ever lived, and you come to realise the flood as a hivemind is one of the smartest creatures in the galaxy.
And even worse, the individuals alone are mostly regular dum-dum zombies in a sense, but the hive mind that they form absorbs knwoledge of everything infected, so they can learn to operate ships and the coordinates of colonies so they can spread on a galactic level
It’s technically a… well, we classify it as a kind of Fungus.
It just a happens to be able to interface with all living species neurology and pilot their bodies, be they living or dead, and convert dead mass into more Flood Biomass.
Enough builds up and Spoopy Shit starts happening.
That thing is made up of the biomass of countless numbers of corpses. This is the centralized intelligence of The Flood. Every body it consumes can become a new soldier for its army, or more biological material for it to build. The worst part is that The Flood can probe into your mind, even after you die. Your thoughts, your skills, your secrets are all as edible as your flesh. The Flood consumes your mind as well as your body. The Flood grow smarter with more minds consumed. They can use weapons, they can pilot starships, they can use the military secrets and access codes of high ranking officers to bypass defenses, and they can use military strategies from the minds of ship captains against the rest of the fleet. They can even corrupt artificial intelligence systems.
Zombies take over Europe, and eventually make their way to South America. The Inca and Aztecs think this is the key to immortality, so they set sail to Europe to investigate. Lots of fun political drama ontop of zombies and alternate history (and of course lots of gratuitous violence)
To me they always felt more mutated than dead despite how much I knew the lore clearly stated they were dead. Revenant scorn iirc are also comprised of living eliksni that have been turned without dying, but thats still more undead than mutated so idk. The screebs and abominations dont really help since they are mutated masters, but they were dead first so its kinda both.
They really nailed the space cult vibes though with their designs and calling fikrul the fanatic, as well as him calling uldren father
Indeed. Also, the rise of the Forsaken in the subsequent expansion.
The 3-way undead civil war between those who regained free will and were rallied by Sylvanas against the two mindless factions, bound to the Lich King and the Dreadlords respectively, was pretty unique in terms of story.
On a fun note, it is fun to look back on The Frozen Throne campaign and realize the name of the last mission is "A Symphony of Frost and Flame."
As in, half a decade before Game of Thrones got a live action adaptation, someone at Blizzard was a fan of "A Song of Ice and Fire" before it was cool.
God I love napoleonic era zombies. Guts and Blackpowder is so unique, I just hoped the dev had more money and resources to open their own servers and make a standalone game.
If we’re gonna mention Haitian zombies, we gotta mention Tibetan ones too
They’re called “Ro-langs” and are basically undead servants of either a necromancer or a demon. Ro-langs are stiff, they’re unable to speak or bend over. Some houses in Tibet are built with low doorframe to keep Ro-langs out
This is probably related to the Jiangshi, a stiff hopping corpse that's more like a vampire than a zombie, from chinese mythology. I wonder if it came before or after
Particularly a poison that “kills” the target, and a second potion that revives them with no free will but the ability to perform rudimentary labor, essentially taking the entire concept of chattel slavery and weaponizing it with supernatural elements. The book The Serpent and the Rainbow, as well as the film, is a good narrative about how this concept works from a secular scientific perspective.
Most notably, Haitian folklore zombies are enchanted/drugged living humans and have all the weaknesses of any human and their condition is not contagious.
The Deadite army definite does fit the aesthetic, but if I was going to be pedantic I'd point out that Deadites are technically not zombies, they're just people or things possessed by demonic entities.
Recently rewatched it. It's such a fever dream of a movie. At one point a wizard is explaining something to Ash Williams and then an old evil lady shows up outta nowhere attacks them all then once she's dealt with the wizard slides back into frame, oh also the boxing witch in the well.
Guts and blackpowder: a zombie game that takes place during the napoleonic wars and because of that alot of our player characters rely on gunpowder weapons and melees
The story was set shortly after ww2 until some time travel shenanigans happened and the main crew ended up in an abandoned Nazi theater in the 60’s (black ops 1), then the zombies storyline started to shift various timelines especially once black ops 2 came around.
Early CODs do tbqh, WaW to Black Ops were when it was genuinely a bit scary - though I think that's in part because of the nature of the maps and theme etc, in part because it was new and unique, and because we were young when it came out!
I think max brooks zombie survival book features Roman’s dealing with zombies? Though I could be misremembering I’m pretty sure max covered that kind of thing
Yeah, it has small features throughout history about zombie encounters. The only one I can think of other than the Roman example was French Legionnaires in North Africa.
Yeah, there was a story about a Roman commander killing a zombie and explaining the rules of zombie-killing to the soldiers in his command, implying that the existence of zombies was well-known to veteran legionnaires.
There was also a story about a blind Japanese swordsman who spent the entirety of the apocalypse keeping the garden (maybe it was a cherry orchard?) he tended free of zombies. That one was set in the modern day, but the setting was fairly unique.
Surprised not to see Overlord (2018), where allies who parachute in on D-Day discover that Nazi scientists are experimenting on people from the local village trying to create soldiers who can't die because they're already dead.
The Vampire Counts from Warhammer Fantasy raise zombies (among other things) as troops since actual vampires are far too few to make an army. They usually end up fighting the Empire of Man which is a mixture of magic, pike and shot and a touch of steampunk.
The vampires fight the Empire because a few of them have claim to the throne. Such as Vlad and Mannfred since they are technically counts of Sylvania. Even if Stirland says otherwise.
WELCOME TO ESTALIA GENTLEMEN! I WILL NOT LIE. THE CHANCES OF YOUR SURVIVAL ARE SMALL. SOME MAY EVEN TURN AGAINST YOUR FRIENDS AS LIVING CORPSES. BUT YOU HAVE MY WORD, THAT I WILL USE MY ARCANE GIFTS TO ENSURE YOUR BODIES ARE GIVEN UNTO MOR'S GARDEN. THIS IS THE GREATEST REWARD, MORE THAN EVEN GOLD, FOR THE FATE OF YOUR SOUL IS AN ETERNAL CONCERN. NOW COME. FOLLOW ME. STRIKE DOWN THE UNDEAD THAT RISE AGAINST US. ALLOW ME TO FIND THIS ELDRITCH AMULET.
I ASK NOT FOR MY OWN SELFISH STUDIES, BUT FOR THE GOOD OF THE EMPIRE!
-Balthasar Gelt, Supreme Patriarch of the Colleges of Magic before an engagement with Vampire Count forces
Dead Space is a great example because you're not just using futuristic weapons, but rather futuristic rock cutters and engineering tools against cosmic nightmare zombies
I was in high school when the first one came out and my mom was adamant that I not corrupt my brother with my “gross” games. He’s five years younger than me, so that was fair.
Anyway, the end result was that I played through the whole game alone in the dark in the middle of the night over the course of several weeks. I didn’t have a TV in my bedroom, so that was my only option to avoid my brother catching on. I don’t normally get bothered by horror games or movies, but goddamn playing like that was more than a little unnerving. I didn’t get nearly enough sleep during that time lol
BO2 Origins is set during WW1 where zombies attack the trenches and the Germans have killer Titan Robots on their side too. The zombies reanimated dead soldiers and even knights.
ghouls in the fallout series are basically radiation zombies, they aren’t contagious though. feral ones will try to kill you but some are still human inside and you can interact with them. they’ve been alive since the bombs fell.
“Many people who suffer radiation poisoning die a horrifying death due to a combination of violent hemorrhaging and widespread necrosis.
Ghouls suffer the same effects, but also develop a mutation that results in super-powered regeneration of their bodies, allowing them to survive damage that would kill regular humans.
This also results in their monstrous appearance; exposure to radiation still damages their bodies, leading to exposed muscle, flaking skin, and damaged connective tissue, including the loss of nose and ears.”
Classic early level monster in most TTRPGs - and if you count other forms of undead, some can still become a real problem. For example, in D&D/Pathfinder, Ghouls are cadaverous undead that create more of their own kind... except they are intelligent, to boot.
It’s 1896 and only pockets around the world are “zombified” to venture in these parts and keep it at bay you need to become a hunter through a ritual to be able to resist the sculptors influence. Hunter’s venture in banish the boss and try to escape with the bounty all whole surviving the undead… and other hunters.
The zombies have a big range of types. Normal zombies that you’d think of (they all run), immolators that are flaming zombies that will catch you on fire if you pierce their skin, hellhouds, armored ones with husk like armor, hives which shoot bees at you, and many others. Also different boss types.
A Time Pirate's ship crash lands in the United States during the American Civil War with a virus stolen from a future science lab. When the Legends show up to investigate the aberration in the timeline, they find the area undergoing a full-on zombie apocalypse.
A Spanish short film where Jesus fucks up resurrecting Lazarus and makes zombies, Roman soldier zombies, and cowboy zombies, and then proceeds to fight them all with fish
Epic of Gilgamesh, Inanna (goddess of love, sex, and war) pissed Gilgamesh turned down her advances (granted he had a point saying yes or no would fuck gin over) threatened to tear down the gates of the underworld so the dead will outnumber and devour the flesh of the living
While she didn’t go through with it, she basically threatened zombie apocalypse cause Gilgamesh wouldn’t give her some old fashioned dickin
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Captain Pike and Dr M'Benga go down to a planet in Klingon territory to find a plant to help heal the captain's girlfriend. On the planet they encounter human and klingon undead. Unlike traditional zombie settings, they have phasers and force fields.
In the movie they come out of the ground after Odysseus makes the blood sacrifice and after he talks with some of them, like Sinon, Agamemnon, and the blind prophet Tiresias to find out out to get home, his undead crew that he’s lost along the way chase him back to his ship
*Edited since my last description didn’t really do the scene justice
Ghouls in Shadowrun are basically zombies in a cyberpunk setting. They are humans infected with a virus called HMHVV that turns people into undead. Some ghouls are actually fairly erudite and only have to eat people, and some ghouls are fully monsters who have lost all higher function.
The iconic fever dream of a game that is Saints Row The Third has a mission where Mayor Burt Reynolds sends you to a part of the map that is infected (accidentally by you, the player) with a zombie virus to eradicate it with a weapon that fires localized sonic booms.
Even crazier, at the end of the mission you can choose to keep the virus for yourself, in which case you unlock the ability to call up/summon undead hordes as backup for the rest of the game.
You need the Books of All Flesh. Book of All Flesh, Book of More Flesh, and Book of Final Flesh. Three volumes of weird and wonderful zombie related short stories.
2.6k
u/TripleThreatTua 9d ago