Zombies! The genre that won't die

It’s unlikely that when, in 2001, Cillian Murphy was wandering around empty early-morning London streets sporting surgical scrubs, avoiding the dead, he was thinking about reviving an industry. To some degree, the main thing that was being given fresh life was Danny Boyle’s tottering career as a director. It is hard to imagine post-Slumdog Millionaire, and post-Olympics, but at that time, and until he made 28 Days Later, his graph was heading downwards. His reputation was far from dead, but it needed a little resuscitation after a weak adaptation of Alex Garland’s The Beach.

So he and Garland made a zombie movie that never mentioned zombies. It claimed not to be a zombie movie, giving its infected victims sprinting abilities to match their bloodlust. Yet it became the most important zombie movie since George A Romero’s Night of the Living Dead created the genre, in 1968.

That film didn’t mention zombies, either; “those things” is the most used euphemism. That’s the first rule of zombies. You do not talk about zombies.

This week, The Walking Dead returns to TV, a stand-out among the films, games, graphic novels, T-shirts, survival guides and literary novels that have exploded in volume since 28 Days Later. The Walking Dead at least contains real, shambling zombies, but it doesn’t call them that, obviously.

Instead, the undead are “walkers” – although a running theme of the show is that the undead/zombies/walkers are also wives, daughters, brothers, friends. Some of them, anyhow. Most are dead meat, willing receptacles of an axe to the head, an arrow through the eye or a bullet in the brain.

The Walking Dead has mined very dark themes, but it also understands the dark comedy of zombie slaying. The entertainment value of gore is the key to the success of the zombie genre. It allows the viewer to indulge in a guilt-free bloodlust of a video game, alongside the comedy inherent in finding ever new and creative ways to dispatch a shambling, reanimated corpse.

Some films, such as Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland, played entirely on the genre’s inherent silliness. The Walking Dead has overcome this pitfall by, first, playing up to it when necessary, but also realising that the greatest terror in a zombie apocalypse comes not in what the dead to the living but in what the living do to each other. It is interesting that the only time the scriptwriters have flinched this season is for a rape scene. A zombie child being speared through the mouth? That got a close-up.

The appeal of the zombie has been written about endlessly. They are a manifestation of Us versus Them, with “Them” being whoever you want it to be, from consumerism to government to inner rage to al-Qaeda. They are about loss of identity and control, dispensing with any of the ambiguity of vampires or werewolves. In an increasingly secular age, they represent a monster that even God cannot kill, so that waving a crucifix or holding an exorcism is not part of the survivors’ armoury.

In The Walking Dead, the occasional promise of a miracle has been followed by an acceleration of the journey towards hell. But what has allowed it, in particular, to move forward so relentlessly has been the intelligence and depth of US television. Yes, it’s been written about over and over, but it’s still worth observing that 10 years ago it would have been inconceivable that a television show would bring itself to a point where an episode would climax with a boy taking it upon himself to shoot his postpartum mother in the head – and that act could be simultaneously portrayed as one of love, self-preservation and selflessness.

The Walking Dead has also become perhaps the purest example yet of the lengthy story arc in television drama. Based on successful comic books, but with enough digression to keep readers and nonreaders guessing, The Walking Dead’s promise is that there is no resolution. The zombies are not going away. The world is not one scientist’s eureka moment away from normality. There are stories, and stories within stories, and births and deaths, but it is currently open-ended. It owes a lot to Lost, as much television sci-fi does, yet it is the antithesis of Lost’s complex and ultimately ragged mystery.

It succeeds because of this interminable quality, and despite this. Just as the whole genre does. A TV spin-off of Zombieland is on the way. World War Z, starring Brad Pitt, will be a summer blockbuster. The French film Les Revenants is now a TV series. The “zomromcom” Warm Bodies was released yesterday.

There’ll be a fun zombie run near you again this year. On it comes, wave after wave, single-mindedly invading popular culture like a horde of . . . You get the picture.

@shanehegarty