There’s a very great FOSS zombie game called Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead and one can read a Zombie Survival Guide just for fun, learning and aquiring nothing but better mood for some hours (crafting works faster with better mood). CDDA could be more serious, sure, but the monster/zeds are gruesome as hell sometimes.

Example:

I would like to see the genre grapple with flies as both a vector and an expiration date.

Nah, it’s all about how you treat it.

Zombies are an idea, and they’re an idea that has had many expressions even before the zombie as we know it came to be, or the word itself was applied to them.

The word is based in vaudun/voodoo and related practices. But the idea of an undead entity with a hunger is timeless and beyond the word. Hell, the word doesn’t even start as something truly undead by the usual concept of undead. It’s more of a soulless slave for lack of a better description.

Zombies as they have shown up in film and fiction since Romero turned them into a genre take from all kinds of myths and legends.

All it takes is the creator of the fiction deciding what, if any, similarities there are to our fictional zombies. That’s it. It can be as much as these direct references to established fiction, or as little as no mention at all.

The walking dead did the “blind” zombie appearance best, imo. That world didn’t have any known culture references to zombies. And, if there had been, someone would have used the word, in universe.

While she catches a lot of heat for good reasons, Laurell K Hamilton is a great example of the middle ground. She makes plenty of references to movie zombies as a point of comparison to the way zombies work in her Anita Blake world. She does it with other movies and different supernatural creatures too. It works very well as a way to let the reader know that the fictional world is similar to ours, but with differences.

But you’re right, the harder you lean into existing zombie fiction, the more likely you are to end up in satire, farce, or other comedy. There’s just such a big history of zombie fiction that if you assume the characters have knowledge of that fiction, you retread that history. It’s hard to do that and stay serious/horror. It could work, but you’d have to go the extra mile of making the transition from fiction history into your fiction smooth. You’d need more exposition at the very least, someone explaining how and why there’s similarities between old fiction and the new fiction that explanation exists in

It’s the same with vampires for sure, and werewolves/therianthropes to a lesser extent. And any fiction writer is going to place their own stamp on any of it, if only by picking which myths and fictional versions they are going to use as a basis for their own work.

I’ve taken a different route in my fiction. Zombies in particular have multiple versions in-universe. Some of those versions are the basis for the in-universe fiction that is simply our real world fiction in that universe, with no changes. Others reflect myths, and there’s vers ions that are all mine. Did the same with vampires too. But the real world fiction is only referenced obliquely because I know that anyone reading my fiction (or playing in my ttrpg world) are aware of those things, and we don’t need to do anything other than stating “on screen” that it’s the variety of undead in my world that led to the fiction in the first place.

Not at all.

Feed, by Mira Grant, is one of my all time favorite works of zombie fiction. In it, the zombie uprising happened, but George Romero movies existed, so humanity was prepared to fight back, and as a result the events of the book take place in a world much later, where zombies are still a problem, even a huge one, but the book is actually about some reporters covering the events of a presidential election. Also, George Romero has been canonized as a national hero for giving us all the means to fight back against the zombies.

The book is absolutely brilliant. The sequels… I have complicated feelings about the sequels. But the first stands entirely on its own two feet and is fantastic.

Not necessarily, i mean WWZ - while not explicitly stated - clearly exists in a world with zombie media

Book, not film, obvs.

The issue these days is that everyone and their grandma knows the basic rules of zombies, so if the characters within the story are completely clueless, the audience is going to impulsively think the characters are idiots.

I think the trick to creating good zombie fiction these days relies on subverting the existing tropes and knowledge. If the zombies you’re writing are sufficiently different from other examples in the genre, it won’t matter if the characters have knowledge of tropes or not. If you have a scene where a zombie gets up after having their head chopped off, then it doesn’t matter if characters in the story “know” that chopping off the head kills the zombie. You’re no longer playing by those rules, and tension/suspense is returned to the story.

Imagine what would happen in a universe where people thought they knew how to fight zombies because there were tons of stories about them and it all turned out to be completely and utterly wrong?

And look at real life. There are tons of things that we know how to combat but are scary anyway either because what needs to be done is scary, the margain of error is small and/or there are enough people that think its all a conspiracy theory and/or actively work against solving the problem. So anyone that does know how to deal with problems like that looks on in horror as a huge chunk of society just decides to throw the whole thing in the bin.

Zombies have been done to death.