Can The Last of Us Bring Zombies Back to Life?

After an extremely impressive 12-year run, the ending of The Walking Dead is the final bolt through the decaying brain that was the late ‘aughts zombie craze. The flagship show is over, and while The Walking Dead IP itself endures in spinoffs and such, the ghastly torch of the zombie genre has been passed to a new bearer: HBO’s The Last of Us (review).

The cable and streaming giant has high hopes for the series, but if you take away the smash hit game, soulful characters and big Hollywood names, it’s a boilerplate zombie apocalypse with a fresh coat of fungus. 

That might seem a bit passe now, which is why the marketing of the show kinda seems to be avoiding the Z-word at all costs. Fans of the game know that the real appeal is in the craft and details of Naughty Dog’s ruined world, the brutality of its stealth-action gameplay, and of course, the incredible characters whose very existence sets the internet ablaze. 

Those who may not have heard of The Last of Us may roll their eyes upon discovering that it is, at its core, yet another zombie story, but it wasn’t all that long ago that zombies were a bonafide cultural phenomenon. So let’s examine where the franchise fits in the genre, and try to figure out if The Last of Us can bring zombies back to life.

Zombie Mania

In 1968, Pittsburgh filmmaker George Romero drew on the apocalyptic imagery of The Last Man on Earth, a Vincent Price film that was itself an adaptation of author Richard Matheson’s iconic I Am Legend to conjure up an army of cannibal ghouls in Night of the Living Dead.

But outside of Romero’s initial trilogy and a few impressive imitators, zombie films never enjoyed the popularity and dominance of slasher flicks, and they seemed even more kitsch and toothless when slashers achieved post-modernity with Scream.

Zombies did, however, make for excellent cannon fodder.

The living dead have been staples of violent video games before they were even in color. 1976’s controversial Death Race, arguably the first truly violent game, awarded points for running down plausibly deniable undead “gremlins.” For the most part, the zombies in your average retro game weren’t all that scary… Then Resident Evil made them terrifying.

Known as Biohazard in Japan, Shinji Mikami’s survival-horror masterpiece hit the market in 1996, the same year as Scream. The game sparked a surge of interest in the classic zombie films to which it paid homage and inspired a new generation of filmmakers to update the living dead for a new millennium. First came inventive Asian films like Junk, Wild Zero, and Bio Zombie. Then the games started influencing Western filmmakers like Alec Garland. Resident Evil reminded him how much he loved zombies, inspiring the extremely dangerous sprinting infected in 2002’s 28 Days Later.

Fellow Brits Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright featured a fantasy sequence in the style of Resident Evil 2, and then the literal game itself in their sitcom Spaced, which provided the seed for their incredible satire Shaun of the Dead in 2004. The same year, America brought out the big guns with the undisputedly awesome Dawn of the Dead remake, proof that the visions of Zack Snyder and James Gunn can co-exist.

And beyond their box office success, zombies transcended the cinema in a way that slashers never could. In 2003, O.G. nepo baby Max Brooks published the Zombie Survival Guide, a staple of many a millennial’s bathroom library. The book was written entirely in kayfabe, a deadpan instruction manual for thriving in a real-world undead apocalypse oozing with axioms like “use your head, cut off theirs” and “blades don’t need reloading.”

The Guide perfectly targeted the doomsday prepper parts of our delicious brains, which were already working overtime in the paranoia of post-9/11 America. It sparked countless thought experiments and nerdy debates over which blunt object would best bash a zombie’s skull.

Not long after, Robert Kirkman added soap opera melodrama to the zombie formula in his creator-owned Image comic The Walking Dead, which in turn became a smash-hit TV show that only just ended, long after the zombie craze it embodied subsided.

For a while, all of pop culture seemed locked within the gnashing jaws of a living corpse. College students and convention-goers across the world shambled around cities in massive zombie walks. Light-hearted “zom-com” spinoffs created an accessible path for wider audiences to enjoy zombie fiction without all the gore and terror. In some circles they joined sparkly vampires and shirtless werewolves as objects of adolescent desire.

In cinemas, things came full circle with Romero returning to the genre he created, and a new adaptation of I Am Legend that took more from the zombie tropes inspired by the original novel than the book itself.

‘Please, Don’t Be a Zombie Game’

Back in the world of video games, the medium had become overrun by the undead swarm, which is a big reason why The Last of Us initially received some groans.

Sony and Naughty Dog first teased the PS3 exclusive in 2011, with mysterious imagery of a shattered society and mind-controlled ants. Speculation abounded, with one common refrain among all the rumors being: “Please, don’t be a zombie game.”

Even though The Last of Us was “just another zombie game,” it was also so much more.

After all, we had seen a whole lot of those by the time the game was released in 2013. Zombie adventure games, zombie mobile games, zombie shopping games, even zombie educational games. They quickly supplanted “World War II” as the go-to gaming genre, and it’s not hard to understand why. Much like the Nazis they replaced and, in some cases, became, the undead serve an extremely useful purpose as humanoid enemies that you don’t have to feel all weird about killing.

But even though The Last of Us was “just another zombie game,” it was also so much more – a gorgeous technical showcase, a tense stealthy thriller, and a gripping story that ends with a moral conundrum that has sparked one of the longest Internet flame wars of all time. It’s got naturalistic mo-cap performances from incredible actors and a visual and tonal aesthetic borrowed from heavy hitters like Children of Men and The Road.

It’s even got giraffes!

But it’s still a zombie story, and not even a particularly novel one. The cordyceps fungus that turns people into shrieking mushroom monsters is a unique twist, but one could swap it fairly seamlessly with the T-Virus, Solanum, Rage, space radiation, or a Sumatran rat-monkey.

Ditto the different mutated forms. While not as gleefully over the top as the bio-organic weapons of Resident Evil, the Bloaters and Lickers — I mean, Clickers — certainly owe a debt to the granddaddy of survival horror.

Creator Neil Druckmann had a very different vibe in mind when he first pitched The Last of Us as an intimate study of two characters, the bond they form, and the way it’s tested by the cruel world they live in. It took the tone, pacing, and production values of Prestige TV and applied it to video games, the same way Hideo Kojima incorporated the language of action movies into Metal Gear Solid.

But it’s still a zombie story. And there’s nothing wrong with that! Zombie stories are awesome, but there’s no denying that they seem like yesterday’s news, and it’s tough to get excited about the genre after so many years of saturation.

You certainly won’t see any “hell yeah, it’s zombies!” enthusiasm from the folks behind the adaptation.

In the latest episode of the perpetual online controversy that curses The Last of Us, we recently learned that, in the TV show, the cordyceps infection would no longer spread through dense clouds of spores, but rather through fungal tendrils. It’s not the biggest change, and it’s certainly an understandable one. I’m sure Pedro Pascal would rather not spend another show with his face stuffed behind a respirator. Plus, the tendrils and the way they connect the minds of infected will help set The Last of Us apart from its undead brethren.

Showrunner Craig Mazin has said he’s “not interested in the zombies,” while Druckmann himself has stated point-blank “we wanted to avoid making a zombie show.” And who can blame them? At its heart, The Last of Us isn’t really about guts and gore and sci-fi monsters; it’s about people who have lost everything and the connection that’s forged in terrible circumstances. To call it “a zombie show” does it a disservice. And besides, isn’t the zombie genre dead?

The Last of Us: Will the Zombie Genre Rise From the Grave?

I think of the 2013 World War Z movie as the high watermark of the zombie craze. The film cynically co-opts the title of Max Brooks’ clever follow-up to his Survival Guide, while dumping the plot, characters, and unique docudrama format.

Reception was mixed to say the least, but with a cool half-billion box office, it remains the highest-grossing zombie movie of all time and will probably stay that way. Further films in the genre saw diminishing returns as pop culture was swallowed by superheroes, and zombies soon joined the ranks of pirates, ninjas, and performative love of bacon in the upper echelon of epic cringe.

But they didn’t go anywhere.

The story and characters of The Last of Us do indeed transcend the genre, but zombie fiction is foundational to the narrative.

The Walking Dead kept on trucking. Its ratings only really started to decline in 2016, but it still shambled on, along with a bevy of lower-budget spinoffs and limited series. Zombies were replaced at the box office by classy A24 horror kino and the Blumhouse machine, but they’re still a fertile playground for inventive filmmakers to mess around in. And the Resident Evil games have moved on to hillbillies and giant vampire women, but some of the biggest video games in the world still involve scraping undead guts off your Moonlight Greatsword.

Zombies aren’t trendy, but what does that even mean in 2023? There’s not really one prevailing, overwhelming “thing” anymore. The monoculture has shattered into thousands of boutique subcultures. Shows and movies just sort of… come out, and even massive hits like Avatar and Top Gun: Maverick are infamous for their lack of memetic impact. 

We may never have an Avengers: Endgame moment again, but that doesn’t mean superheroes are going away. Even if the profits plateau and the budgets become slightly more modest, there’s always gonna be money in that particular banana stand. As media evolves, Marvel and DC might just become background noise, cool and profitable content to check out on streaming, but never again the phenomenon of Phases 1 through 3.

But that’s okay. Take Westerns, or musicals, or even raunchy college comedies: When something becomes big enough to dominate an entire industry, let alone a culture, its impact doesn’t vanish when its memes do. Genres don’t die; they just become shambling corpses gnawing on the periphery of pop culture waiting for a chance to rise again.

The story and characters of The Last of Us do indeed transcend the genre, but zombie fiction is foundational to the narrative. Ellie and Joel would not be Ellie and Joel if their world was ended by aliens, insects, or giant kaiju. They are who they are because of the path paved by their predecessors in zombie film, TV, literature, and gaming. 

The Last of Us already has to deal with the negative perceptions surrounding video game adaptations – they shouldn’t fight the zombie label. Because much as the original elevated the storytelling, production value, and craftwork of games, The Last of Us TV series has the real potential to bring some prestige, popularity, and power back to the zombie genre.

For more on the show, check out how to watch The Last of Us, read our non-gamers guide to The Last of Us cast and characters, or watch our interviews with the cast and creators.