

Obviously, humans can still turn on each other, as Days Gone, The Last Of Us, and The Walking Dead all show, but they still have zombies as a common enemy.īecause zombies so perfectly embody "the enemy" and are also shown as consciousless, aggressive husks without a shred of humanity left, video games can use them as guilt-free enemies to kill. Much like hostile aliens in sci-fi, zombies give humanity a common goal to rally against, one that forces people to set aside differences and team up. This is used to make zombies serve as an enemy everyone can rally against. This combination of factors makes them deliberately impossible to sympathise with, which in turn makes it easy to place any cultural fear onto them. They're also completely deindividualised, vast hordes that can't be reasoned with. The reason zombies are so good at being the vessel for fear is because they've been constructed to be a universally loathed villain - they're gross, rotting flesh sacks that want to eat you. RELATED: Fan Recreates Call Of Duty's Kino Der Toten With Functioning Pack-A-Punch In Minecraft Romero's Night of the Living Dead is all about the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam war, it was revolutionary at the time. Seriously, watch zombie films from specific decades and you can learn what American society was afraid of at the time. Popularised in American cinema and rooted in American perceptions of Haitian culture at the end of America's occupation, they've been used to symbolise racial tensions, Cold War fears, capitalism, and AIDS.

They have a fascinating and troubling origin in popular culture - they've frequently been used to convey cultural fears. To start, I think it's worth looking into the history of zombies. So, what exactly makes them such good villains? Zombies are bad and Nazis are bad - and together they're even worse. I think it's because Nazi zombies are like a bad guy 2-for-1 sale. I'm a big fan of zombie games and movies in general, but there's just something better about a Nazi zombie. I was playing Zombie Army 4: Dead War last night, and as the killcam showed the bullet from my sniper rifle pierce the testicles of a rotting and resurrected Nazi, I let out a little chuckle. Killing Nazi zombies is really, really fun.
