The Trouble with Alien Zombies

| May xviii, 2021 |

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Army of the Dead zombie — *Photograph: Netflix*

Soon nosotros're going to be watching Zack Snyder go out behind the quest for a "grown-up" superhero pic and render to his old playground, the zombie picture. Army of the Expressionless looks similar a huge amount of fun and leaves us wondering why nobody has made a zombie heist pic before (except for Train to Busan sequel, Peninsula ), but one of the plot details that has leaked nigh the motion-picture show is that Area 51 plays a meaning role.

This suggests that the zombie plague may be extraterrestrial in origin. Like about subversions of the zombie apocalypse genre (although Army of the Dead promises a much smaller and more than independent "apocalypse" so that all that cash they steal is all the same worth something) this is really a plot twist you can trace back to the earliest roots of the genre.

In Night of the Living Dead, the zombie apocalypse (although again, by the terminate of the film the "ghouls" seem to have been mostly mopped upwardly) is the result of foreign radiation emerging from a probe that has returned from Venus. The trope goes back even further than that.

One of the few films that tin brand a claim to an earlier take on the zombie apocalypse than Nighttime of the Living Dead is the timeless classic Plan 9 from Outer Space . In that film, which we will not be making whatever jokes about, aliens reanimate the recently expressionless and bulldoze them to assail the capital cities of the Globe.

In fact, if you want to find pre-George Romero examples of zombie apocalypse stories, the original series of Star Trek has done 2. In the episode "Miri" the Enterprise encounters an verbal duplicate of Earth, except that humanity has been wiped out by a deadly pandemic that turns every adult human being into a tearing, raging monster. Information technology's a premise explored in more item past Charlie Higson's YA zombie series The Enemy , and the Netflix series Daybreak .

Star Trek besides gives united states of america the brilliantly titled "Operation — Annihilate!", where a swarm of spacefaring parasites sweep through the galaxy, infecting humanoids and driving them to a violent rage.

Yep, zombie purists might claim both of these are close to 28 Days After 'south "Rage infected humans" than true zombies, but in truth, the genre is big plenty to include multitudes, and anything that A: uses human bodies, to B: create more entities like itself, while C: Not appearing to be intelligent, will usually create a story that looks a lot like a zombie story.

Indeed, Star Trek would come back to space zombies once more, once more in the Star Expedition: Enterprise episode, "Impulse" and again in the pilot episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks .

Is At that place Expiry on Mars?

Star Trek is not lone in drinking from this particular well. Early in its run Dark Matter had a space zombie episode. Doctor Who has washed two space zombie episodes in the new serial alone, "The Waters of Mars", and "Oxygen" (which used zombie movie tropes for their intended purpose- bringing down commercialism), and that'due south just including the ones actually prepare in space. Hell, even the primitive bandage-and-infirmary-gown-wearing Cybermen from "The Medico Falls" have a very George Romero vibe to them.

The appeal of putting a zombie in a spaceship for a TV show is easy to see. Zombies are a cool and instantly recognisable monster. Spaceships are a absurd and instantly recognisable setting. What'south more than, while your production values may vary, zombies on a spaceship is a pretty damn cheap concept to realise on screen. Zombies are just withal many extras you can afford with some gory make-upwards. All yous need for a spaceship is some suitably gear up-dressed corridors and maybe a couple of exterior model shots if y'all're feeling classy.

And as with the zombie apocalypse genre as a whole, the audience instantly and instinctively understands "the rules" of a zombie story, allowing you to focus on your characters and the solutions they come with.

The movies are no stranger to the space zombie either. The nearly straightforward instance being The Terminal Days on Mars , which is pretty much a note-for-note remake of Doctor Who 's "The Waters of Mars" but without David Tennant. Mars is a popular venue, in fact as we see also Martian zombie apocalypses in Doom (2005) and Doom Annihilation (neither of which I watched to research this article, considering there are limits). Even the "Ghosts" in Ghosts of Mars (which I did picket) may resemble more of a cross between Mad Max baddies and Evil Expressionless 's Deadites than zombies, merely even so, have a certain zombieness about them.

Most recently, in this last twelvemonth Bruce Willis has starred in not ane, but two movies with sub-Doctor Who production values where he fights space zombie-similar adversaries (I have watched Alienation/Anti-Life and Catholic Sin , so don't know why I thought I could get away with being snobby about the Doom movies earlier).

Just Doom also raises some other point about infinite zombies – a really pop venue for the extra-terrestrial undead is videogames.

This is for surprisingly very like reasons to why space zombies are popular on telly and in film. Videogames will go far more artistic in designing the appearance of their space zombies – with the Dead Space trilogy setting the bar with their gloriously gory Necromorphs – but the AI for a zombie, environmental navigation aside, seldom needs to exist much more complicated than that of a Pac-Man ghost. Space has been a popular videogame setting for every bit long as videogames have been a affair, thanks to the handy black background it offers, and one time over again, corridors.

We've seen them in Dead Space , in all the Doom games, but also the Halo games in the grade of the fungal, cancerous looking, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis-inspired Flood. Mass Effect gives usa colonists zombified by the sentient Thorian plant, likewise every bit the more technological "Husks". And of course, there's that 1 Phone call of Duty map.

Fifty-fifty now the makers of the original Dead Space games are looking to get back in on the action with the upcoming game, The Callisto Protocol.

And yet, while the appeal of space zombies is undeniable, by the same token they just don't experience quite like "proper" zombie stories.

In Space, Nobody Can Hear You Shout "Brains!"

The problem is this: Your archetypical zombie story is ultimately a siege narrative. Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead, even twists on the formula like 28 Days Later , Train to Busan, and Pontypool all operate on a like premise. You and some humans you probably don't get on with are trapped in a structure (in Railroad train it's a moving construction, only yet counts). Outside of that structure, there are somewhere between hundreds and thousands of zombified humans who want to become in and kill you. The humans keep arguing until the zombies get in and kill everyone.

For this to work you need a structure with a lot of room effectually it, and a big population of people to be turned into zombies.

Unfortunately the living atmospheric condition in infinite, even in our wildest infinite hereafter fantasies, tend to be A: Quite claustrophobic, and B: Don't have many people in.

Even in Dead Infinite , arguably the all-time example of a infinite zombie story, you very ofttimes discover yourself thinking that if zombies hadn't killed off this mining ship/space station/mining colony, overpopulation would accept.

At the same time, spaceships, space stations and colonies tend to have really good, robust metal doors separating any two parts of the habitat, quickly reducing any zombie plotline to this XKCD cartoon.

But at that place are workarounds, and ways to employ these restrictions to your advantage. Zombies are, by nature, pretty rubbish, deadening-moving, stupid, easy to impale in small numbers. Nearly zombie stories get effectually this result by throwing loads of them at you. Space zombie movies tin can brand apply of those corridors we mentioned before, showing how much scarier a single zombie can be in enforced close quarters.

Zombies likewise take one major advantage over their living victims – they don't need to breathe. This is a major plus point in space, offer y'all the adventure to take hordes of zombies crawling forth the outer hull of the ship – something nosotros've seen in Dead Space and Medico Who 's "Oxygen".

At the same time, the space setting also emphasises some other key aspect of the zombie story – resource management. In space there is no huge affluence of well-stocked shopping malls or bunkers full of firearms. One of the ways The Terminal Days on Mars manages to make its very small-scale number of zombies threatening is that their small hab modules take very little that y'all could utilize as a weapon.

And still, space zombies notwithstanding lack a certain something of their terrestrial counterparts.

It's Undeath, Jim, simply Not every bit We Know It

The thing is, aside from annihilation else, zombies are a transformation of the familiar. They await like more than beaten-up versions of your neighbours and co-workers. The zombie apocalypse is a scene you can easily imagine on your street, at your pub, your local shopping heart.

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Army of the Dead gets this – no matter where you are in the world, the iconography of the Las Vegas strip is familiar and nosotros enjoy seeing it overrun by the undead.

And spaceships just aren't. You lot might conceivably stop up on holiday in Vegas. You're statistically unlikely to be an astronaut.

But it's more than than that. Zombies are far more than cheap monsters that require fiddling in the way of brand-up or AI programming. The symbolism they deport is incredibly weighty. Earthly zombies have been used to stand for capitalism, conformity, Vietnam soldiers, burrow potato civilisation, mob mentality, our instinct towards violence, poverty, our obsession with mobile phones, and our ability to dehumanise one another.

Divorced from our earth, from u.s.a. every bit we recognise ourselves, that symbolism becomes a lot harder to smash. The zombies in The Final Days on Mars are simply zombies. Dead Space 'due south Necromorphs are maybe a legally-safe satire on Scientology? Pandorum gives us extremely pale evolved human descendants that are extremely zombie-ish, and they certainly exhibit some of the worst $.25 of humanity, but they also live in a darkened, claustrophobic Hell, and then it'due south hard to hold it against them.

Zombies rarely represent anything in the way Earth-leap zombies do.

At to the lowest degree, nothing human.

Adrian Tchaikovsky'southward Children of Ruin features a sentient alien slime mould-like animal that, in its curiosity and need to explore, infiltrates and takes over the nervous system of the humans it encounters. To an exterior observer, they look extremely like zombies, merely the lifeform itself isn't aggressive, merely very, very alien. Andrew Skinner'south Steel Frame gives united states not just space zombies, just space zombie mechs, and again the "Flood" (not the Halo 1) that infects them is implied to be a kind of hivemind.

Nigh of the space zombies we've seen hither aren't what purists would call "true zombies" merely are some style of hivemind. This is true of Halo 's Flood, Mass Upshot's Thorians and Husks, and if we throw the doors to zombie-dom wide open up, while they're very different in the TV series, the Borg of Star Trek: First Contact see as alien cyber-zombies.

I book to feature relatively harmless conflicting-created zombies is Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic . In that volume the aliens aren't robots or fiddling dark-green men, we just encounter their leftovers and garbage, which are artefacts strange and incomprehensible to humans. That these artefacts somehow heighten the dead as mindless automata is a small-scale side event – the book is nearly how alien intelligence might exist something so different from ourselves we don't even recognise information technology as intelligence.

If in that location is a space for alien zombies and zombie astronauts in the zombie pantheon, mayhap information technology's there. Space zombies are scary because they wait like united states of america but recall and so differently that we can't embrace them, while World zombies are scary because we have oh and so much in common with them.

Chris Farnell is the author of Fermi'due south Progress , a series of novellas almost a epitome FTL send that blows up every planet information technology encounters. The latest instalment, Descartesmageddon, features an alien planet undergoing a very different kind of zombie apocalypse. Information technology is bachelor at Scarlet Ferret and Amazon .