Just short of scandal, a key member of the Last of Us production recently exposed a curious bit of censorship. “We weren’t allowed to say the Z word on set,” cinematographer Eben Bolter told The Credits this month. That word? Certainly not “zigzag,” friends. “They were the Infected,” he insists — not zombies. In the post-apocalypse of HBO’s horror drama hit, the Infected are humans mutated by the cordyceps fungus , which tears through the brain and blossoms into pretty patterns. Whether Runners, Clickers, or Bloaters, they sure seem to walk and talk like zombies, so why the updated label? Why can’t anybody ever say “zombie” in movies and TV shows?
It could have something to do with a rule baked into the subgenre at its modern conception, when George A. Romero christened the monsters of 1968’s Night of the Living Dead as “ghouls.” He tells The Irish Times that back then, “There were a few Universal films about ghouls, and that was what was in our minds,” before explaining that “The idea was they are your neighbors in a different state. ” Indeed, with the original dead series being illegal, it was higher-minded than the voodoo silliness of 1932’s White Zombie or 1943’s I Walked with a Zombieanticipating Bolter’s comment that the prestigious The Last of Us is “not a cliché zombie movie.”
The Origins of the Zombie Genre
Moving away from the premodern roots is probably a good idea. It’s believed that the term “zombie” is of African origin, brought west by the Atlantic slave trade. As Amy Wilentz writes in The New York Times, “The only escape from the sugar plantations [under French rule in Haiti] was death, which was seen as a return to Africa.” To keep slaves from dying by suicide, the slave drivers invoked voodoo beliefs, that death would bring not peace but zombification, trapping the soul within eternal slavery. It would seem that, after Early attempts to play with this historical reality, the zombie genre grew to avoid the fate of its cousin, cosmic horror, which is now so bound up in its own racist origins.
The zombie’s reinvention took the shape of a genealogical tree, beginning with Romero’s dead films, and spinning out into at least four different series: the director’s sequels (Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Deadet cetera); the farcical Return of the Living Deada continuation both textual and metatextual; Zombiethe unofficial Italian sequel, with sequels of its own; and the various remakes, like 1990’s Nightand Dawn ’04, followed by a day remake in 2008 (with a sequel, Bloodline) and 2021’s Army of the Dead. Talk about beating an undead horse. Regardless, with few exceptions, these movies purposely exclude the word “zombie,” prompting the running joke in Shaun of the Dead to not use “the zed word” because, as Simon Pegg’s character declares, “it’s ridiculous.”
‘The Last of Us’ Is Not Uniquely Self-Conscious
That’s the real problem, isn’t it? Genre insecurity. Remember that, in 2015, author Kazuo Ishiguro ranked readers — including Ursula K. Le Guin — by declaring that his novel The Buried Giant wasn’t an example of the fantasy genre. When video game director Ken Levine was developing his objectivist parable Bioshockhe reportedly shouted, “I don’t want to hear anything about any fucking cyborg ninjas!” He wasn’t making mere video games anymore. By that token, his own industry colleague Neil Druckmannalongside Chernobyl creator Craig Mazinset out to make the First Great Video Game Adaptation, and will not hear anything about any fucking mushroom zombies, recalling both Robert Kirkman and Danny Boyle’s conscious distance from the word. (Not Alex Garlandthough).
It is, however, difficult to entirely distance The Last of Us from the zombie genre. The Infected may not bite their victims (anymore; they did in the video game), but to the fleeing survivors, the difference is academic. And it ought to be. If there’s any subgenre that benefits from cliché, it’s the one where Night of the Living Dead spawned dozens of revisions, each one tinkering with the formula to see what worked and what didn’t. Return of the Living Dead introduced the venerable trope that zombies eat brains, and Land of the Dead took the allegory way too far — we’re setting parameters. The creative team behind The Last of Us has learned enough from past movies and TV shows, as well as the real-world pandemic, to know how and when to apply these tropes. In the second episode, a character is infected and makes the choice to self-sacrifice, proving it’s only cliche on paper.
For ‘The Last of Us,’ It’s Execution Over Originality
This may be the difference that Eben Bolter is alluding to, but it’s also how The Last of Us positions itself within the genre. Whether a lowly remake or exhausting sequel, each new zombie movie has an opportunity to contribute something novel and build on what’s come before. The Last of Us offers a grounded, scientific rationale for the outbreak beyond viruses or voodoo, and while this isn’t new in itself (realism nor mushroom zombies, which can date back to 1963’s Matango), it is symptomatic of that grander sense of mission. The character’s choice to self-sacrifice is made affecting by the performances and the writing. Themselves animated by an elevated sense of purpose, Bolter and company turn what could’ve been another disastrous – or disastrously middling – video game adaptation into event television.
At the close of Bolter’s interview, he notes how gratifying it is that The Last of Us is reaching a wider audience, having evangelized for it in video game form. He’s now able to say “Trust me, it’s not just zombies,” and that’s certainly true. The blood and gore of the genre is a turn-off for some, but there’s the potential for compartmentalization with The Last of Uswhich has more to offer. Importantly, though, that “more” is purely quantitative.
The zombies are not a Trojan Horse, not an obstacle in this story where, actually, man is the real monster. They’re just as essential to the power of The Last of Us as the formal elements, being scary enough to sell the characters’ sometimes radical decisions as perfectly logical. In this way, the zombie is expanded beyond the realm of allegory, imbued with more dramatic than solely thematic utility. A scene where the Bloater tears a A man’s head off can comfortably sit alongside a tender, 20-year love story, and that sort of reconciliation between what’s “serious” and what’s genre is a welcome definition of elevation. The Last of Us turns out to be, then, hardly self-conscious, as after all, not saying “zombie” is perhaps the oldest zombie tradition.
Find out more about how to watch new episodes of The Last of Us on HBO and HBO Max.