One of my personal favorite games is Left 4 Dead 2. In it, you play as one character in a group of four survivors -- Nick the gambling con, Rochelle the TV newscaster, Coach the high school football coach, and Ellis the excitable mechanic -- and fight your way to the various safe houses scattered throughout the game. Ultimately, your goal is to escape the zombie apocalypse and try to find some sort of haven away from it all. Gameplay generally revolves around shooting everything in sight, though there are some melee weapons and things that go boom.
I will be real with you guys: I absolutely suck at shooters. Suck, suck, suck. When I get startled by something, I tend to just spray bullets in every direction, or absolutely murder my teammate on accident. I sometimes wonder how I got through Resident Evil 4 with all the bullets I wasted, but perhaps the game was far too generous with poor me and my twitchy trigger finger.
Yet L4D2 isn't just a shooter, and the zombies aren't just zombies. While the fast, swarming hordes on their own can cause enough trouble (god forbid you set off a car alarm), there are a set of mutated, specialized zombies that evolved specifically in the best ways possible to kill you dead.
Holy shit, right? These aren't your Average Joe Zombies, and the four survivors will actually call out the names of these horrific beasts to let you know when there's trouble afoot. From the disgustingly boil-faced Smoker to the spitting...Spitter, each one of these foes has their own special method of murder.
But can they still be called zombies?
We've talked a lot about the idea of affect, and how in most of our zombie media, zombies are lacking this crucial human trait: they don't feel anything anymore and all they want to do is devour and consume human (or hot dog) flesh. If you look at the image above, you'll see a rather small zombie next to the giant, hulking mound of pink flesh called the Tank. With her lanky hair, pale skin, suspiciously non-rotting flesh, and skinny limbs, she looks less than threatening. This particular zombie is known as the Witch, and she is quite possibly the most dangerous member of the specialized zombies.
While the Tank will rip you to shreds with its bare hands and also throw a bus at you for good measure, the Witch has a much more subtle approach. You know when a Witch is nearby when you hear the crying: yes, she is indeed a zombie who cries. Endless, horrible, echoing sobbing that is, quite frankly, terrifying. Witches tend to hide away in areas where hapless survivors are most likely to run right into them while trying to avoid them at all costs. And once you've startled the Witch, the fun starts. Either you stay and fight and scream a lot, or you run like hell, but whatever you do, you'll probably die, as each of her hands are tipped with claws about as long as your forearm.
Freddy Krueger's mother, perhaps?
Once you've gotten a Witch's attention, the game even tells you that you've startled her. You, the normal human, have startled the crying zombie. The crying zombie who was hiding away instead of searching for flesh to devour. What kind of zombie is she, really? She doesn't even attack you in order to eat you, she attacks you because you frightened her. The Witch, then, seems to have affect.
The bulbous Boomer up there is made only to explode. Boomer bile attracts zombie hordes, and if any survivor gets too closer to a Boomer when it erupts, they become the unlucky target of the horde. Spitters spew acid puddles, Smokers lash out their freakishly long tongues to wrap up a survivor and drag them away from the group, Hunters pin survivors to the ground...you get the picture. And Tanks are essentially the Hulk in zombie form.
I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about L4D2 with an emphasis on the specialized zombies; she told me that they didn't sound like zombies anymore, just monsters. Would you agree with this? In what way are they zombies, but in what way are they not? In the same vein as our 28 Days Later conversation, should zombies always be the same sort of uniform, shambling horde that consumes people like locusts? What are your opinions on zombies evolving like any living creature?
Most importantly, would you play L4D2 with me?
As we discussed in class, people can fill zombies with whatever fear they want. Since fear is so multifaceted the zombie genre is constantly changing to express different fears. Zombies started out as soulless re-animated corpse slaves from Haitian voodoo lore and now look at where we are today: bulbous acid spraying zombies and crying witch zombies. I like that the image of a zombie is not confined to a single stereotype or definition....some are smart, dumb, fast, slow....some show emotion...some don't. I don't want to classify a zombie, because then they start to lose their wild card factor.
I am pro-zombie evolution. Zombies can have emotions too.
The idea of zombie's evolving is definitely an interesting one, and one that the special infected in L4D2 certainly bring up. Without much background knowledge in the ways of evolution, it seems fair to say that each of the special infected has in some sense evolved, that each has developed some special trait or strategy or behavioral pattern that enables them to catch prey more efficiently. As you point out with the witch, her gimmick is that she has the ability to invoke affect in unlearned or otherwise oblivious survivors by playing with our assumptions about what zombies can and can't do (like crying, for example). And indeed, this makes her scary as shit. In the case of the boomer, we see the development of a last resort defense mechanism to presumably compensate for his girth and slow pace. All of this got me thinking about Warm Bodies and the question of the 'bonies.' It seems to me that we see a similar evolution of the zombie (much to our own detriment) in the hordes of CGI skeletons that populate the film. Whereas the zombies in Warm Bodies have the ability the slowly cure themselves, the bonies are those who are "too far gone." They think of nothing, we are told, but flesh, and will attack anything with a heartbeat without a moment's thought. If the zombies in the film can in fact regain some of their more humanizing attributes -- chief among them speech and thought, those two properties which almost all zombies (sort of) live without -- the bonies do not. Given that these traits are so closely tethered to what we understand to be 'human,' might we say that the bonies are in some sense an evolved form of the zombie? A kind of 'superzombie,' as you and I discussed today in class? Through their total submission to the need to eat, the bonies have closed themselves off to the possibility of ever coming back to the world of the living or of the living dead. They have shed or lost those only qualities that *might* potentially slow them down in their quest for food: a conscience, as well as the potential to develop the only means of rejoining the world fo the living: speech. Food for thought, with a lot of opportunity for counterarguments, but still -- zombie (d)evolution(?). Interesting.
The idea of zombie's evolving is definitely an interesting one, and one that the special infected in L4D2 certainly bring up. Without much background knowledge in the ways of evolution, it seems fair to say that each of the special infected has in some sense evolved, that each has developed some special trait or strategy or behavioral pattern that enables them to catch prey more efficiently. As you point out with the witch, her gimmick is that she has the ability to invoke affect in unlearned or otherwise oblivious survivors by playing with our assumptions about what zombies can and can't do (like crying, for example). And indeed, this makes her scary as shit. In the case of the boomer, we see the development of a last resort defense mechanism to presumably compensate for his girth and slow pace. All of this got me thinking about Warm Bodies and the question of the 'bonies.' It seems to me that we see a similar evolution of the zombie (much to our own detriment) in the hordes of CGI skeletons that populate the film. Whereas the zombies in Warm Bodies have the ability the slowly cure themselves, the bonies are those who are "too far gone." They think of nothing, we are told, but flesh, and will attack anything with a heartbeat without a moment's thought. If the zombies in the film can in fact regain some of their more humanizing attributes -- chief among them speech and thought, those two properties which almost all zombies (sort of) live without -- the bonies do not. Given that these traits are so closely tethered to what we understand to be 'human,' might we say that the bonies are in some sense an evolved form of the zombie? A kind of 'superzombie,' as you and I discussed today in class? Through their total submission to the need to eat, the bonies have closed themselves off to the possibility of ever coming back to the world of the living or of the living dead. They have shed or lost those only qualities that *might* potentially slow them down in their quest for food: a conscience, as well as the potential to develop the only means of rejoining the world fo the living: speech. Food for thought, with a lot of opportunity for counterarguments, but still -- zombie (d)evolution(?). Interesting.
Great post with plenty of good questions. These zombies certainly are peculiar in the sense that none of them are the same and that they all have their own versions of affect. Rather than being a stumbling undead idiot looking for brains, these zombies in L4D2 seem gruesome and have far more agency than the walkers in The Walking Dead. Hell, they're far more scary than the Nazi zombies in COD. I find your explanation of the witch to be very intriguing. Rather than her trying to find you, she hides and only comes out when she is frightened. She doesn't seem to have much agency, but has claws that would allow her to eat just about anything she wants. It is rather peculiar. What your friend said definitely has some validity, but at the same time, zombies are whatever our minds construct them to be. There is no definition for what a zombie should look like or how it attacks its prey. I suppose thats beauty of zombie culture!
This brought back so many awesome memories of playing L4D2 with my suitemates sophomore year. One of the most interesting things about that game is the ability to play as a zombie (on of the special zombies; it would be a pretty boring game if all you could do was bite and walk). When you consider that, it almost seems like the game developers meant for the special zombies to have as much agency as human beings. L4D uses the term "infected" instead of "zombie" so that they can get away with this, but when they combine hordes of mindless hungry infected with a few intelligent monsters, it seems like they're trying to walk a tightrope between zombies and traditional horror movie creatures. To have their brains and eat them too, you might say.
Also, Nick? Seriously? Why would you play as Nick when Ellis is there?