Zombies are All Around

Piles of rubble. Slowly collapsing buildings. Dirty, desperate people. Monsters in human shape, either by choice or by disease. The symbols are common by now. The rising wave of post-apocalyptic stories is one of the dominant cultural stories of the past decade. There’s The Walking Dead, which went from comics to television, or The Hunger Games and World War Z, novels adapted to film. More importantly, it looks like the apocalypse is here to stay. Post-apocalyptic isn’t “in” just because a few films were popular and spawned more films, it’s popular because stories from different mediums are both reinforcing one another and building from the same foundation.

The beating heart of this cross-media obsession is, in my view, video games. Over the past decade, games have become an increasingly understood (if not always explicitly acknowledged) component of the media landscape, particularly as people who were raised with games begin to create their own art, or analyze it.¹1 In this video essay at Press Play, film scholar Matthias Stork documents the often symbiotic relationship between games and film. It’s not just action blockbusters that use video game aesthetics, either: Stork points out the “side-scroller” camera common to games like Super Mario Bros. being used by arthouse auteur Wes Anderson in his superb The Fantastic Mr. Fox.  And video games have been consistently interested in the apocalypse for years—which is appropriate, as they may be the best medium to deal with the subject.

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