For all the moments of quiet cinematic grandeur Telltale achieved in the first season of the game -the starving boy arcing toward the window in episode 4, the lightning-drenched finale of episode 2 -they still had to play by The Walking Dead rulebook, which is to say: bickering like drunk in-laws.
The comic treats zombies and their accordant gore as a frame around the carefully painted human characters, a model that AMC’s show and Telltale’s games have studiously followed.Īll of which would be fine if the humans in The Walking Dead weren’t such insufferable fucks. With its weighty games of interpersonal politics and its pious evocations of racism and misogyny, it plants its flag firmly in the high-brow camp.
The Walking Dead, in its many media incarnations, has fought against the meme-ification of zombies. (No one wins, we all lose.) These are equally important. The high-brow camp brought us 28 Days Later, which is shot-for-shot the most cogent, accomplished zombie film ever made, but the low-brow camp brought us Zombi 2, in which a zombie fights a shark. It’s easy to bemoan this, but either school of thought can produce wonderful art. (It is the only type of film that categorically includes headkills, for example.) There has been a further uptick, in recent years, of the zombie movie not as an allegory but as simply a movie containing zombies. Snyder was giving voice to an undercurrent that had always existed in the genre, one that yearned to give into its, shall we say, pulpier thrills. Twenty-five years later, Zack Snyder remade that film as a hyper-lush, headkill-filled music video, and in so doing made the most direct counterpoint imaginable: No, he said, It Won’t. When George Romero sent zombies doddering through a shopping mall in 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, he set a mandate that the zombie movie, unlike much other pop horror fare, would be Important.
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