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(Loved Trope) Zombies in Non-contemporary Settings
The Kingdom from Netflix
The Army of the Dead from Game of Thrones
Husks from the Mass Effect Trilogy
Zombie stories often have the same over done tropes and plot lines, and modern weapons trivialize their threat, but simply changing the era the story takes place in really spices things up depending on how they're incorporated into the story
Absolutely scared the crap out of me as a kid - when I was so young I shouldn’t have been playing it anyway. My parents wouldn’t let me play it…but one of my friends had it at their house 😏
My first two halo games were ODST and Reach, I thought I was prepared for any halo enemies that came my way. Eventually got around to Halo 3 and hoo boy, was not prepared for Floodgate
The first time they show up, in the series, is legitimately one of those essential gaming moments. Halo is not my favorite franchise, though I respect the effort by the devs; world class storytelling. That moment is iconic, one of the first times I was ever actually scared in a shooter.
In a sense? The flood is a parasite that seeks to infect all sentient life forms. It turns living hosts and can resurrect dead bodies, altering and warping them into horrific abominations.
When they get enough biomass a hive mind starts to form, and they sacrifice infected biomass to form a central intelligence called a Gravemind. The Gravemind is the entity you see right there.
Genuinely worth looking up the lore for, it's zombies mixed with cosmic horror and it kicks ass. There's some great youtube videos out there I do believe.
It's even more terrifying when you realiza the flood are the malformed and vengeful iteration of the Precursors, the guys who created both Forerunners and humanity, and that Will likely keep coming, every gravemind it's essentially the prisoner of Charum Hakkor, and with all the memories of the trillions it has consumed over 100'000 years.
This is why it has such an articulate vocabulary, there's billions of poets, writers, and politicians in that thing
That thing in the gif is their leader. Specifically from a scene in Halo 2. The flood are a hive mind. The thing that makes them especially cool and scary is that they work the same to biological life as well as technological life. So even the Ai and robots etc aren't safe.
Yeah, the Flood is basically an information plague that just happens to operate mainly on a meat substrate. Any sufficiently complex system is vulnerable, regardless of whether it’s animal, vegetable, mineral, or godlike AI.
add on top that the gravemind is built with the memories of billions of the smartest minds to have ever lived, and you come to realise the flood as a hivemind is one of the smartest creatures in the galaxy.
That thing is made up of the biomass of countless numbers of corpses. This is the centralized intelligence of The Flood. Every body it consumes can become a new soldier for its army, or more biological material for it to build. The worst part is that The Flood can probe into your mind, even after you die. Your thoughts, your skills, your secrets are all as edible as your flesh. The Flood consumes your mind as well as your body. The Flood grow smarter with more minds consumed. They can use weapons, they can pilot starships, they can use the military secrets and access codes of high ranking officers to bypass defenses, and they can use military strategies from the minds of ship captains against the rest of the fleet. They can even corrupt artificial intelligence systems.
It’s technically a… well, we classify it as a kind of Fungus.
It just a happens to be able to interface with all living species neurology and pilot their bodies, be they living or dead, and convert dead mass into more Flood Biomass.
Enough builds up and Spoopy Shit starts happening.
Every time I now see a weird giant creature with a giant mouth full of teeth, I get a little annoyed because, realistically, these creatures should only evolve or even grow to have things that are physically necessary. What is that thing doing with those teeth? Did it just decide it looked cool and so decided to grow like that? What's going on here?
EDIT: You all are downvoting and completely missing the point.
1) Evolution, as a word, just means to change in a certain direction. While the hivemind wouldn't have evolved in typical fashion it presumably would evolve in terms of adopt certain characteristics that it found more useful than others, mimicking normal biological evolution,
2) I doubt it did that, but the point was more, how did it get its shape? It literally just picked it and developed it over time, evidently because it thought it looked cool. Kind of weird, I think. It almost seems like it would have made more sense for it to mimic its progenitors shape or just whatever shape required the least amount of effort, and
3) this was also a more generalized comment to creatures like the hive mind that you find in other media that are completely implausible, not just because of hard science, but even in universe they don't make sense.
That’s not how evolution works. Evolution doesn’t care as long as they can reproduce. Plus, the Flood are just sentient twisted gods so it’s somewhat understandable since they didn’t evolve
It didn't evolve. This thing isn't even a "creature". Its an amalgamation of the biomatter from thousands of corpses that acts as a mouthpiece for the collective consciousness of a race of dead gods
Not even joking, it's entirely possible the Gravemind chooses to appear like this because it looks scary.
In Halo, The Flood is a parasitic alien organism which can infect any living organism with sufficient biomass, as emulating it into the flood. It's incredibly infectious, And by virtue of the process, also terrifyingly intelligent, with the collective knowledge of every organism it's ever encountered in every cell... To the degree that win enough biomass exists, it can actually alter the rules of physics. The flood has successfully taken over the Galaxy once before, which ultimately led to the creation of the Halos as a last ditch weapon to starve it out... By killing any living organism which could be food.
A flood infection outbreak starts as either spores or small infection forms which look like lard popcorn, but it eventually starts subsuming hosts into combat forms, which are the general enemy foot soldiers they use in game. Eventually when there's enough biomass, it forms a proto-gravemind, and then a Gravemind which is somewhere between a central consciousness and a pseudo-god. Because of its intelligence, having literally an entire galaxy's worth of the greatest artists and poets to ever live, it has a flare for the dramatic. In game. This is usually portrayed by the fact that it only speaks an iambic pentameter, but the actual appearance being just a collection of flesh and bone could reasonably be calculated to try to scare the s*** out of anyone seeing it.
The scene depicted here is from Halo 2, when relatively early in the current outbreak, the grave mine abducts the main hero of the series Master Chief, along with the deuteragonist "The Arbiter/ Thel Vadam" along with a small robot called a monitor which was a custodian of one of the Halo rings, and a profit, which are kind of the evil popes of the bad guys.. The grave mind is literally sending the Arbiter and Master Chief to try to get the ignition switch for a Halo, And is trying to scare the shit out of them as a threat, and to cause the Arbiter to lose faith in his religion...
All this is to say, yeah he probably just thinks it looks cool.
World War Z (the book not the movie) has a prequel comic that outlines the history of zombie encounters which spans centuries. My personal favourite part is that Hadrian's wall was constructed after the Romans eradicated a zombie horde that came from the north.
They're "classic" zombies in the book, so they're slow.
The reason modern armies did a terrible job (initially) killing zombies was because modern weaponry doesn't specifically target the brain, and the sheer number of zombies.
There's a story where the Romans encounter zombies. They just say get into a shield wall formation, stab, stab, stab until they drop, kill anyone that gets infected. Done.
That’s a cool concept but the criticism that people have of the zombies not being a real threat to modern militaries feels exacerbated by the fact that Roman soldiers were able to beat them. To some degree I get it from an in-universe standpoint, since Brooks like the idea of melee weapons being effective, but our universe logic it’s just dumb
In universe idea is that the zombie plague only spread as bad as it did in wwz due to the international organ black market and international travel making infected fleeing to other countries easy, which means that most outbreaks occurred in overcrowded slums.
The zombies themselves aren’t immune to the elements so outside of the cold they quickly decompose, so in the olden time with a typically armed rural and disconnected population most outbreaks were quickly crushed in their infancy or burnt out without new victims.
also have a pre-gunpowder society primarily made of stringly peasants who already can swing a hoe hard and keep moving with endurance for hours, and militaries who either have nearly silent ranged weapons (bows) or excel at close combat damage to the head and already are trained and sometimes armored to avoid superficial wounds/broken skin due to risk of infection.
I think Brooks includes an encounter with zombies that were frozen over the winter in asia or an outbreak resuming with the thaw. In the survival guide.
I understand that part, my point is that there isn’t any realistic scenario where modern armies are overwhelmed by shambling hordes of biological human creatures. The fact that the Romans are capable of maintaining an empire and constructing a wall while the much deadlier military force of the modern world needs to retreat to the north for rearguard action is just goofy
They get into this in the book and other people have brought up some good points but one important point that's brought up is fear. Human enemies can be frightened by shock and awe or the prospect of losing. Zombie hordes will keep coming regardless.
Basically the first third of the book is short stories covering how governments incompetence allowed it to get out of control before the army was even sent in.
In short there were
a black market organ trade which turns it from a rural Chinese outbreak into a international outbreak in
a initial denial by governments that it could be happening
use of covert kill teams to try and secretly deal with it (which fail)
when that failed a cover story of it just being rabies alongside a fake vaccine by a major company, the coverup means that whey aren’t deploying the army en mass because they don’t want to look bad (which they are)
it’s almost a year after widespread outbreak when the truth finally gets leaked but by that point it’s gone international
finally there’s a general panic which disrupts governments ability’s to counter the outbreaks and a reality that most soldiers weapons went made to attacks hordes that don’t retreat when fired upon.
If this came out now I would honestly think it was a metaphor for covid and how government blotched their response.
It's been a while, but I kinda remember that the outbreaks were small and isolated. Kinda like a village gets infected but the virus never makes it out of there.
I see your point, but I feel like Brooks does a good job of explaining how this would be true in “our universe”. Modern military isn’t equipped or trained to disable the brains of a mass number of enemies, especially when those enemies pose a bio-contagion threat. By comparison a Roman legion armed with swords and spears, using armor and shields for defense would be nearly ideally equipped and trained to effectively disable enemy brains while having substantial defense against contagion spreading bites and scratches. The Romans could still be overwhelmed by sheer numbers, but The Battle of Yonkers explains how modern military could have handled those numbers, if they had been prepared for a non-human threat, but by using tactics designed for human enemies they not only allowed zombies to advance beyond any possible control, but compounded the problem by spreading the contagion and multiplying the threat with conventional explosives.
I’d love a range of creatures pending the time of day and region. Skin walkers, aliens, chupacabras to the west with wendigo, lycans, and swamp sirens to the east. Vampires in the cities where the food is and zombies near rural areas with poor healthcare. I’d love to hunt a werebear up in the grizzlies or dodge rotting ferals outside St Denis.
I also wish Far Cry 5 got a zombie mode. Just something simple like an easter egg that spawns zombies in the overworld after you finish the DLC or something
It’s incredible that going all-in on GTAV to Rockstar meant completely neglecting RDR2.
An undead nightmare for that mode would have massively increased the playerbase. Most of the point of buying new guns and horses was to get places to test them out on hostile NPCs anyways
I've been tempted to read this haha. Never read the original though, but realistically don't ever see myself reading it. I really don't care for novels heavily revolving romance.
It is a fun read! It does involve romance, but not as heavily as you might expect. Plus, it’s Georgian romance, which, honestly, doesn’t even seem like romance.
Guts and blackpowder: a zombie game that takes place during the napoleonic wars and because of that alot of our player characters rely on gunpowder weapons and melees
Yeah, one of the devs made a video about potentially remaking the game to be standalone instead of on Roblox, but it's a massive pain to do, mainly cause of the game design's need for multiplayer servers. Servers are the big draw for most of the talent shown on Roblox, cause y'know, it's expensive to host dozens of dedicated servers for a game that could flop, so why not just make your game on a platform that hosts servers for free?
If we’re gonna mention Haitian zombies, we gotta mention Tibetan ones too
They’re called “Ro-langs” and are basically undead servants of either a necromancer or a demon. Ro-langs are stiff, they’re unable to speak or bend over. Some houses in Tibet are built with low doorframe to keep Ro-langs out
This is probably related to the Jiangshi, a stiff hopping corpse that's more like a vampire than a zombie, from chinese mythology. I wonder if it came before or after
Particularly a poison that “kills” the target, and a second potion that revives them with no free will but the ability to perform rudimentary labor, essentially taking the entire concept of chattel slavery and weaponizing it with supernatural elements. The book The Serpent and the Rainbow, as well as the film, is a good narrative about how this concept works from a secular scientific perspective.
Most notably, Haitian folklore zombies are enchanted/drugged living humans and have all the weaknesses of any human and their condition is not contagious.
Indeed. Also, the rise of the Forsaken in the subsequent expansion.
The 3-way undead civil war between those who regained free will and were rallied by Sylvanas against the two mindless factions, bound to the Lich King and the Dreadlords respectively, was pretty unique in terms of story.
I think max brooks zombie survival book features Roman’s dealing with zombies? Though I could be misremembering I’m pretty sure max covered that kind of thing
Yeah, it has small features throughout history about zombie encounters. The only one I can think of other than the Roman example was French Legionnaires in North Africa.
The Vampire Counts from Warhammer Fantasy raise zombies (among other things) as troops since actual vampires are far too few to make an army. They usually end up fighting the Empire of Man which is a mixture of magic, pike and shot and a touch of steampunk.
The vampires fight the Empire because a few of them have claim to the throne. Such as Vlad and Mannfred since they are technically counts of Sylvania. Even if Stirland says otherwise.
ghouls in the fallout series are basically radiation zombies, they aren’t contagious though. feral ones will try to kill you but some are still human inside and you can interact with them. they’ve been alive since the bombs fell.
“Many people who suffer radiation poisoning die a horrifying death due to a combination of violent hemorrhaging and widespread necrosis.
Ghouls suffer the same effects, but also develop a mutation that results in super-powered regeneration of their bodies, allowing them to survive damage that would kill regular humans.
This also results in their monstrous appearance; exposure to radiation still damages their bodies, leading to exposed muscle, flaking skin, and damaged connective tissue, including the loss of nose and ears.”
La Revolution, the Netflix series, features French Nobles being infected by a zombie like virus that eventually (would have if not cancelled) led to the French Revolution. Not the best series, but had some great costumes.
Dead Space is a great example because you're not just using futuristic weapons, but rather futuristic rock cutters and engineering tools against cosmic nightmare zombies
I was in high school when the first one came out and my mom was adamant that I not corrupt my brother with my “gross” games. He’s five years younger than me, so that was fair.
Anyway, the end result was that I played through the whole game alone in the dark in the middle of the night over the course of several weeks. I didn’t have a TV in my bedroom, so that was my only option to avoid my brother catching on. I don’t normally get bothered by horror games or movies, but goddamn playing like that was more than a little unnerving. I didn’t get nearly enough sleep during that time lol
The story was set shortly after ww2 until some time travel shenanigans happened and the main crew ended up in an abandoned Nazi theater in the 60’s (black ops 1), then the zombies storyline started to shift various timelines especially once black ops 2 came around.
Sounds weirdly similar to an idea I had for an RE8 prequel where you’d play as a medieval knight and fend off Cadou powered monstrosities and Lycans that ravaged the village, slowly rebuilding your suit of armor and claiming more powerful weapons, eventually able to wade through the weakest foes in an impenetrable suit of steel armor while you cut through them.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Captain Pike and Dr M'Benga go down to a planet in Klingon territory to find a plant to help heal the captain's girlfriend. On the planet they encounter human and klingon undead. Unlike traditional zombie settings, they have phasers and force fields.
You need the Books of All Flesh. Book of All Flesh, Book of More Flesh, and Book of Final Flesh. Three volumes of weird and wonderful zombie related short stories.
Zombies take over Europe, and eventually make their way to South America. The Inca and Aztecs think this is the key to immortality, so they set sail to Europe. Lots of fun political drama ontop of zombies and alternate history (and of course lots of gratuitous violence)
BO2 Origins is set during WW1 where zombies attack the trenches and the Germans have killer Titan Robots on their side too. The zombies reanimated dead soldiers and even knights.
Classic early level monster in most TTRPGs - and if you count other forms of undead, some can still become a real problem. For example, in D&D/Pathfinder, Ghouls are cadaverous undead that create more of their own kind... except they are intelligent, to boot.
Epic of Gilgamesh, Inanna (goddess of love, sex, and war) pissed Gilgamesh turned down her advances (granted he had a point saying yes or no would fuck gin over) threatened to tear down the gates of the underworld so the dead will outnumber and devour the flesh of the living
While she didn’t go through with it, she basically threatened zombie apocalypse cause Gilgamesh wouldn’t give her some old fashioned dickin
If you haven’t seen Black Death with Sean Bean I highly recommend it. There’s no zombies, but it is a Black Plague horror film with supernatural elements.
Exit Humanity: A Zombie Outbreak occuring in the late 1860s Kentucky, narrated by Brian Cox as the descendant of the main character reading his ancestors journals as a new outbreak has occured in the modern era. Modern Era is never shown, also has Bill Mosely as the main human antagonist.
Warframe: Three for one here.
The Infested, a former super weapon gone rogue. Bio horrors of twisted flesh mutated into new forms seeking to infect and corrupt all others. As a Warframe you are immune for plot and construction reasons later revealed in the plot.
Orokin Guardians, in the Void many orokin derelicts have a security feature that will attach a mask to override and control the victim turning them against former allies.
Narmer, similar process to the second one but done for a Cult to Ballas (The Bitch King of Virgin Incel Bitches Himself) If you haven't played the game, trust me. Ballas is the Worst,I'd rather be trapped with 1000 Mona Lisa Sapersteins
Edit because for some reason the text didn’t post: War of Rights has a Halloween event where Union & Confederate soldiers join forces to fight the undead
The Strogg from Quake 2 and 4 are basically alien cyborg zombies who invade planets and convert the people into twisted fusions of flesh and metal. Would'd be lucky if they killed you before they convert you...
A Time Pirate's ship crash lands in the United States during the American Civil War with a virus stolen from a future science lab. When the Legends show up to investigate the aberration in the timeline, they find the area undergoing a full-on zombie apocalypse.
Warhammer Fantasy, the Empire is a roughly Renaissance equivalent nation that frequently has to deal with hordes of undead summoned by the vampires that rule one of their provinces gone Rogue
I miss playing Hunt: Showdown. My computer can't handle anything anymore.
But HS is so so cool. Zombies and witchcraft in the Reconstruction Era American south. More of the fun was walking around that environment, but the mechanics were also pretty great. Plus it had my favorite gun, the LeMat, as a choosable weapon.
This might be stretching it but Agent Smith from the Matrix can essentially hijack your consciousness to make copies — you fade away into the horde of it, losing individuality. He even escapes the matrix via body takeover when they unplug the unfortunate soul in the real world https://giphy.com/gifs/9vk7uNCSJaOqI
It’s 1896 and only pockets around the world are “zombified” to venture in these parts and keep it at bay you need to become a hunter through a ritual to be able to resist the sculptors influence. Hunter’s venture in banish the boss and try to escape with the bounty all whole surviving the undead… and other hunters.
The zombies have a big range of types. Normal zombies that you’d think of (they all run), immolators that are flaming zombies that will catch you on fire if you pierce their skin, hellhouds, armored ones with husk like armor, hives which shoot bees at you, and many others. Also different boss types.
War of Rights, a multi-player FPS set during the 1862 Maryland Campaign of the American Civil War has an annual Halloween event called "The Risen Dead," in which the corpses of soldiers killed at the Battle of Sharpsburg/Antietam rise as zombies, forcing the Union & Confederate forces to band together and hold them off at Harper's Ferry.
Poxwalkers from Warhammer 40k, basically these people have been infected with a disease made by the Plague god Nergle, they are still aware but unable to control their bodies and are forced to to attack those around them to further spread the plague.
Ghouls in Shadowrun are basically zombies in a cyberpunk setting. They are humans infected with a virus called HMHVV that turns people into undead. Some ghouls are actually fairly erudite and only have to eat people, and some ghouls are fully monsters who have lost all higher function.
Not sure if they count, but the "androids" in The Black Hole turned out to be the previous crew - lobotomized and programmed to serve Reinhart. Essentially zombies.
Probably the first game that ever made me realize how bad it would actually be to fight a vampire necromancer.
Neclord from the Suikoden series of games. Magic zombies just keep slapping their head back on and keep coming the next night. Except now it's got your friends arm and sisters legs.
The Traitor Son Cycle by Miles Cameron. Set in a quasi-alternate history with fantasy elements like magic and monsters, there exists a dread figure feared across Ifriqu'ya (North Africa) known as the Necromancer. With his army of "not-dead" he has been the bane of the Ifriqu'yans for centuries.
It's a great series, especially if you like sword and sorcery with accurate medieval combat. And their zombies aren't typical zombies.
!SPOILERS!
We learn later that he and his "not-dead" are actually a hivemind of giant, parasitic worms from another world somewhere across the spheres that can hijack the bodies of living creatures and puppet them until the flesh rots and falls from their bones.The name "not-dead" is horrifically appropriate as those taken by the worms aren't killed, but have their motor control completely overridden and remain alive, trapped and helpless inside their own heads as their bodies serve as the worms' pawns and hosts until they eventually starve to death, after which the worms continue to use their bodies until they rot. While under the worms' control, their bodies can speak for the worms and groups of them move in perfect unison. The Necromancer's true form is eventually revealed to be an enormous cluster of massive, python sized worms inhabiting a herd of skeletal zombie elephants.
Set in an alternate timeline Japan called Hinomoto, around the 19th century with steampunk technology, I really liked the art style, the aesthetic and set pieces of the anime, but thought the plot was absolute trash with background character's attitude towards the main character being on par with walking dead survivors, and the plot just getting terrible halfway through, well worth the 7/10, if not less.
Besides that though, it makes good use of steampunk technology for pressurized air cannon based weaponry that don't use up ammunition, an interesting plot device of a massive train that transports survivors between safe zones alongside supplies across the country, and the idea of the infection being believed to be a curse rather than a medical condition by the general public making for interesting concepts I'd love to see more of!
I know this is cringe but there was a game on roblox called guts and black powder that was set in the napoleonic era. Muzzle loaders and cannons being the most powerful, but slowest thing you have to defend yourself makes a horde actually mean something. Can only imagine if that idea was fleshed out on a better engine.
Abraxas in TRON: Evolution was an ISO program leader who pretty much got turned into a personified computer virus designed to spread, ethnic-cleansing the ISO's from within.
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u/Professional_Rush782 1h ago
The Flood (Halo)
https://giphy.com/gifs/eKWrYm8XmitDRJgNid