Defining the Zombie Apocalypse (Post 1): Not a Fantasy, Not a Sci-fi, Not a Horror

Yesterday I finished reading Compendium 1 of Robert Kirkman's comic, The Walking Dead (issues #1-#48).

First off, I really enjoyed it! I have some minor resevervations that I'll explore in a later post. But, in general, if you haven't read the comic book and love the show (this was how I came to it), I highly recommend it to you. It's so interesting.

But, before I get into discussing specifically The Walking Dead (this will come in a later post), I want to explore some thoughts about the "zombie apocalypse" genre.

It was a strange realization, but when I started seriously considering "the zombie apocalypse" sub-genre, I realized I don't know how to describe it.

Is the "zombie apocalypse" a fantasy?

Well, the dead rising is a common theme in modern fantasy. The icon of the sword wielding hero fighting an animated human skeleton is a common trope in modern fantasy (sword and sorcery specifically). And yet, in many zombie apocalypse texts there is a tendency to attempt to describe the phenomenon of the dead rising in terms of scientific theory. E.g. it's a disease; it's a new micro-organism; it's the result of the earth passing through a comet, etc..

This seems to disqualify it as a fantasy for me, which seems to turn, specifically, on how fantastic phenomena are treated. In fantasy, the appeal is always to magic, the inexplicable. A key element of fantasy is, to my mind, the thesis that all is not explainable through recourse to the observable world.

And so, is the "zombie apocalypse" a science fiction?

Hmm. The appeal to science to explain the phenomenon of zombies seems to make it conform to the conventions of hard science fiction. It is a kind of "extrapolative" genre. It's kind of a thought experiment based upon the initiating question: "what if all the dead rose up?" And yet--it feels wrong to call the "zombie apocalypse" a science fiction as it doesn't manifest any of the familiar tropes of the genre.

The key source of drama in a zombie apocalypse is always the struggles of the survivors. The story seems to emerge from a conflict with Nature (i.e. "Nature" designated as a world filled with zombie). And so, the zombie apocalypse seems to have more in common with the naturalistic survival stories of, say, Jack London, than the speculative stories of H.G. Wells.

Is the "zombie apocalypse" a horror?

Hmm. This feels the most intuitively correct. I'm sure lots of folk would be happy just filing the sub-genre away after glimpsing the gore, the undead, etc.. I'm not willing to do that. There's something about the "zombie apocalypse" that disqualifies it as a horror to me. Before you call BS on me, let me try to make a case for it.

In a "pure" horror tale, the key aesthetic effect is the experience of horror. Thus, the monster (or the ghost, or the demon, or the alien) emerges as a kind of negativity, something that cannot be fully represented or described: you see a flash of a tail, a pair of eyes, some teeth, etc.. The "experience of horror," according to many theorists of the genre, is that moment when our language breaks down, when we can't describe what - that - thing - is. In the "zombie apocalypse," you always know precisely what the horror is: zombies. And in these zombie apocalypse tales, very often the characters become somewhat desensitized to the sight of zombies and move among them, somewhat un-fazed (although their guard is always up).

So, we're back to where we began: how do describe the "zombie apocalypse" genre. I have a working answer. I don't have time to write it up just now. Tomorrow I'll pick up where I left off.