How the zombie became King of the Monsters

Demise of the vampire

Over the past few decades — when zombies became cinema’s preferred monster of choice — vampires were radically humanized. Anne Rice and Joss Whedon’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” gradually chipped away the dread of what Bram Stoker accomplished with Dracula. HBO’s “True Blood,” the Twilight series and “The Vampire Diaries” dealt a killing blow.

Well before American literature died when Barnes & Noble put up its first “Teen Paranormal Romance” sign in 2010, women could snap up vampire-themed adult novels in the romance section.

Vampires, I suspect, have a psychological appeal to straight women because they represent a bad boy. They’re the new Mr. Darcy. They’re emblematic of every boy whoever pulled their pigtails on the playground, every player who used pick-up lines to score points at the bar. They’re a festering hope that an unhealthy relationship will one day swing positive. For if you love a newfangled sparkly vampire hard enough, he may even love you back.

In Buffy, Sarah Michelle Geller and the “Scooby gang” mostly battled metaphors — personifications of coming-of-age woes. Since then, weaker storytellers have capitalized on that success and forgotten the true fury of the monster they write about.

Vampires of folklore are brutal, vicious demons that took on the appearance of the recently dead. Everything that was good in that person had vanished – and the forces of evil were using that late loved one’s visage as a lure to kill and claim souls for Hell. They were irredeemable. “Sensitive,” “troubled” and “caring” couldn’t ever describe them.

But people want villains. People need monsters to scare them. When one of storytelling’s Big Bad Wolves losses his fangs and falls in love, horror fans turn elsewhere. They turned to zombies. Rotting dead people can’t be glamorous. They will always be gruesome, terrifying and sickening to contemplate. Zombies can’t ever be cuddly.

Resident Evil, too

During the 1990s, movie fans didn’t see a lot of quality zombie flicks. The decade featured a glut of remakes, sequels and D-movie gore fests. The one shining exception was Sam Raimi’s “Army of Darkness” — itself both a sequel and a comedy. People looking for legitimate scares had few ghoul-related options.

But in 1995, on a little island called Honshu in the Pacific, a group of programmers working for a company called Capcom were finishing up a new game for PlayStation. Set in a spooky abandoned mansion, “Resident Evil” pits two police officers against waves of zombies brought to life through a weaponized virus.

In the game it’s the pharmaceutical company — and secret arms manufacturer — Umbrella Corporation who created the plague. Resident Evil, the game, proved to be extremely popular and eventually spawned more than a dozen sequels, remakes and spin-offs. In their own way, the games sparked a zombie renaissance. “The Walking Dead” and “28 Days Later” both take that virus-based plague riff and run with it.

If you’re thinking about zombies right now, it’s likely you have Resident Evil to thank.

Mike Townshend is a writer and journalist living at a zombie-fortified compound somewhere in the Hudson Valley. If you can’t reach him on the phone, he’s probably busy playing “Resident Evil 6” or reading a guidebook about surviving the paranormal.