Beware of zombies

Zombies have groaned and shuffled their way across our pages and cinema screens for more than half a century.

As with most monsters, their popularity is cyclical, but over the past 12 months or so, the zombie horde has returned with a vengeance.

Over the last year, we’ve seen The Last of Us return to our TV screens, new spinoff seasons of The Walking Dead, and we’re beginning 2026 with the release of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, the next instalment of Alex Garland and Danny Boyle’s series set in the infection ravaged UK.

While many of these works draw on well-established story worlds, the question begs: why now? What is it about the contemporary era that has drawn us back to the living dead?

Zombies and the polycrisis

Monster stories are a subgenre of horror, which – along with the genres of fantasy and science-fiction – might be broadly encapsulated within the realm of ‘speculative fiction’.

These genres can all be defined as “What if?” fiction, where a story world evolves from the author tweaking an element of the real world to make it fantastical.

In the case of monster stories, they can be seen as a social critique of when they were produced.

The slow, shuffling zombies of George A. Romero’s films are often discussed as a critique of capitalist consumerism.

Vampires emerge from the shadows when questions around human desire and sexuality are prevalent. Frankenstein’s monster was resurrected from a time when scientific revolution was clashing with religious doctrine.

These stories might serve as metaphors for the troubles of the past and present, but when we think about the future, it’s not one, single issue that looms over us.

Climate change, societal inequality, and global conflict are examples of the ‘polycrisis’, a term that has come to describe the increasingly complex and interrelated challenges of the modern era.

The zombies in “The Last of Us” are humans infected by a mutated cordyceps fungus. 

Addressing and writing about even one of these issues has proven a major challenge for creatives (consider how hard it is to capture the scope of climate change in a single story), so how might we go about telling stories that capture the complexity of the polycrisis?

Enter zombies.

Zombies as a metaphor for society’s ills

Unlike literary terrors like Dracula and Frankenstein’s Monster, the zombie emerged from Haitian folklore, without a single text or author determining what it was, or how it operated.

This lack of intellectual property rights meant that it was embraced by writers and filmmakers alike, who were allowed to reproduce and revise the monster to fit their stories.

Zombies might emerge from the overflowing gates of hell as a form of supernatural or divine retribution. Just as likely, they may be the result of human folly – often bioweapons – or as a vehicle for the natural world to strike back at humanity’s hubris. Think of the cordyceps in The Last of Us.

These manifestations critique society’s ills, whether it’s consumerism, ecocide or the barbarism of human behaviour in itself.

This point is important, because in many zombie stories – notable examples include The Last of Us, The Walking Dead, and 28 Years Later – we see the zombies themselves become an environmental hazard, with the narrative focus placed on the human protagonists, their ethics, survival, communities and the conflicts that arise between them.

In many instances, it is the humans who prove the greatest danger.

George Romero’s Trilogy of the Dead offers a nihilistic vision of humanity and consumerism. 

This understanding of human behaviour within the altered story world is a defining feature of the zombie genre and allows us to consider the narratives in relation to the polycrisis, and the systemic challenges that define it.

That system, many suggest, is capitalism, something that was critiqued heavily by Romero in Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead.

Through the lens of ‘polycrisis’, capitalism is the ‘host system’ for all of those complex, interrelated challenges.

How zombies can teach us to adapt

But zombie stories don’t just offer a critique of the polycrisis, they may, in fact, offer us a possible solution.

If the system is failing us, how might we imagine an alternative?

This is another way the zombie genre sets itself apart from other monster stories. From the moment of the first scratch, or bite – ‘Day Zero’ – the world as we know it is gone.

There’s no going back from the apocalypse, just as there’s no going back from some of the effects of climate change.

But with this uncertainty, it opens up an opportunity to consider alternatives, to explore how those characters and communities that feature in our stories might adapt and evolve in the face of uncertainty.

This is something that the American philosopher Jonathan Lear has spoken about in his discussions of ‘radical hope’, a concept he and Australian author James Bradley have suggested is a kind of resistance that imagines solutions, even in the face of incredible odds.

Because while we imagine a world that has been changed forever, it’s also possible to imagine one that resists and repels despair, rather than one that succumbs to it.

This article was published by Pursuit.