Abstract for 2006 Reel Fear Film Studies Symposium
"Automated or Empty: Zombies in Video Games and Computers"
Zombies have entered mainstream popular cultural awareness primarily through films. Early zombie films focused on zombies as products of voodoo and later films—largely operating within Romero's conceptualization—created zombies as politicized ghouls who embodied capitalistic failures or environmental disasters. While film zombies have recently accelerated, both in terms of the number of zombie films released and in the actual speed of zombie movement, computers and video games have developed the figure of the zombie on a separate, yet connected trajectory.
In video game zombies have followed their cinematic counterparts as generic ghoul-like creatures, and have emulated cinematic presentations with many video game zombies drawing on the conventions created in Romero's Dead trilogy. Resident Evil is the most influential series in popularizing the zombie figure for video games. In the early Resident Evil games, the zombies developed when an evil capitalist corporation, Umbrella, created a virus that mutated humans into zombies. While the basic plot of the Resident Evil games thus blended the traditional cinematic zombie tropes of environmental hazard and capitalism, Resident Evil also allowed the zombies to infect the world around them and the zombies themselves to mutate, as they do in Romero's later Land of the Dead—and in its subsequent video game. For instance, the virus that creates Resident Evil's zombies also creates various mutant flowers, fish, and further mutated certain zombies into more powerful and faster zombie-like creatures. In the latest installment of Resident Evil, Resident Evil 4, the zombies are now thinking yet incredibly volatile humans who follow a cult leader. The game presents these creatures as angry, strong, and fast-moving mobs who are under the sway of an infection that draws on their political, social, and religious convictions. In doing so, this game evolves zombies both in terms of their physical abilities as monsters and in terms of their function for social and cultural critique.
In addition to exploring zombies in video games, I also examine the function of the zombie figure in computing. As zombies have come to stand for the troped figure of malevolent, massed automatons, computers that are infected with viruses that cause them to act in mass conjunction with other machines to launch attacks on other computers are referred to as zombie machines. In doing so, I connect the evolution of the zombie figure in video games to the evolution of zombies in film and to the evolution of zombies in actual computing attacks.