In Twilight, Bella figures out that her boyfriend, Edward, is a vampire. “Say it. Out loud,” he says. “Vampire,” she replies. And that’s that. No need to pretend Forks, Washington has some artisanal form of our favorite bloodsuckers with a new euphemistic name.
That’s something I respect about vampire fiction: people have usually heard of vampires. They may have even heard of a specific one, like Dracula. But they’ve definitely heard of vampires, and they use the word “vampire” to talk about vampires. They might not believe they’re real, but they have a word for pale-skinned creatures that can’t go out in the sunlight, live forever, and drink blood. In that same scene from Twilight, Bella lists off some of the most famous vampire attributes, too, noting that Edward meets many of the criteria. “You’re impossibly fast and strong. Your skin is pale white and ice cold. Your eyes change color, and sometimes you speak like you’re from a different time. You never eat or drink anything. You don’t go out in the sunlight.” She figures all of this out by going on the internet like a normal person.
Bella’s experience isn’t uncommon. In many vampire stories, people are familiar with these bloodsucking monsters. Werewolves tend to get a similar treatment. But, whenever you watch zombie fiction, you have to pretend that the story is being told in a world where no one has ever heard of zombies, and play along as they trot out some silly name like “undead” or “walkers.” You know 28 Days Later? The zombies in that totally aren’t zombies, they’re the Infected (the word also used for victims of the Cordyceps virus in The Last of Us). It’s a bizarre trope of the genre that, honestly, seems to result from people being embarrassed that they’re telling stories about zombies. No way, dude, this fungal infection that takes over people’s minds completely and makes them hungry for human flesh is totally different than zombies.
There’s a difference between attempting to carve out an interesting niche within a genre you respect, and being afraid to embrace the inherent silliness of the one you’re working in. Given that zombie comedies, like Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, Warm Bodies, and The Dead Don’t Die all own the term, I can’t help but feel that self-seriousness is responsible for the two-step many zombie movies do around the name.
So, while playingBaldur’s Gate 3, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see that the game (and, I assume,Dungeons & Dragonsbefore it) just calls zombies “zombies.” During Act 3, you’re able to find a large building, Philgrave Manor, where a mummy named Mystic Carrion is performing experiments on dead bodies. He asks you to track down a runaway zombie called Thrumbo.
I haven’t finished the quest yet, so I don’t know what I’ll end up doing when I find Thrumbo. But the quest is off to a nice start because it began with a mummy (who was called a “mummy”) asking me to track down a zombie (who was called a “zombie”) after I slaughtered all of his ghouls (another form of undead). This game isn’t pretending to be anything that it’s not, and I appreciate that about it. It says it. Out loud. Zombies.
NEXT:A Tale Of Two Developers: Larian And Bethesda’s Differing Approaches To Feedback
