28 Years Later, The Last of Us: Zombies are everywhere and they reflect our worst-case scenario fears

They’re slow, but they’re persistent – and so is the zombie genre itself, perhaps not so slow, but definitely determined.

George Romero re-engineered the zombie figure in the popular imagination with the 1969 horror classic Night of the Living Dead, which situated the hordes of lumbering, unthinking, insatiable monsters in a suburban landscape.

It lay dormant for many years after that but in 2002, Danny Boyle revived the form with 28 Days Later, a post-apocalyptic horror in which Cillian Murphy’s bike courier character tries to survive a deserted London as people are morphed into monsters by the “rage virus”.

Not quite 28 years later, but a quarter of a century on, the zombie genre never let up. It’s the millennium of the zombie story, spanning different genre tropes from anxiety-inducing horrors to goofy rom-coms.

In the decade following 28 Days Later, it spawned a sequel, the Resident Evil movies (adapted from a 1996 video game), Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, a Dawn of the Dead remake, Quarantine and more.

The Walking Dead comic launched in 2003, followed by its TV adaptation in 2010, which lasted 11 seasons and launched seven spin-offs, two of which are still going. Train to Busan became one of the best-known films out of South Korea.

In the recent past, it’s become an even bigger deal thanks to high-profile projects including The Last of Us TV series (adapted from the acclaimed 2013 video game), TV show Kingdom, which blends court intrigue with a zombie horror, Army of the Dead, the zombie-like ghouls in Fallout, and dozens of B-movies.

And, of course, Boyle is back with two instalments of 28 Years Later, the second of which, The Bone Temple, directed by Nia DaCosta, is in cinemas now.

Every era has its apocalyptic fears, including in 1968 when Romero made Night of the Living Dead, coming at the tail end of a huge, tectonic decade in which social changes and political turmoil were erupting all over the western world.

That’s the thing about zombies compared to other fictional monsters including vampires, werewolves or Frankensteinian creations. Zombies reflect our worst-case scenario fears because almost every zombie story takes place during or after a world-ending event, and sometimes because of the folly of man - the 28 Days Later virus was made in a lab.

The 28 Days/Months/Years franchise is particularly instructive because it’s a rage virus, one that turns people into feral, angry monsters that can’t be reasoned with as they prey on victims like a mindless hive, which is a description you could apply to the netizens of the nastier corners of the internet.

The worlds is these zombie stories have completely collapsed. The institutions we know and depend on – government, democracy, commerce and the social contract of not killing each other – are gone and all that’s left is anarchy, where your own survival justifies every act.

When people half-joke about the end-times thanks to the myriad challenges including but certainly not limited to climate catastrophe, AI dominance, tech giants in general, social disharmony, the potential end of NATO, the upending of the global rules of engagement and economic inequity, it’s hard to not link the surge of zombie narratives with all that’s going on.

Not to mention the actual worldwide pandemic we lived through only a handful of years ago.

The zombie figure is a potent representation too. It’s not just predator, capable of ripping you from limb-to-limb, trying to eat your brain, but it’s a victim we also fear becoming. No zombie chose to be one, to have no control of their mind (and here there’s a dementia analogy), and to be subordinate to some primal, base drive.

To be disconnected from our humanity.

But do these stories have any redemptive value or do they make us feel even worse? They might reflect our collective terrors, as art should do, but is an exaggerated version of our potential future helping us sleep better at night? Is there a catharsis here?

The better ones do offer something – faith in human decency. Even in the bleakest of these stories, there are characters who will still do the right thing, such as Joel does for Ellie in The Last of Us or Glenn in The Walking Dead.

It’s a reminder of the “just because everyone is doing it, doesn’t make them right” philosophy, of not only being in it for yourself just because you can get away with it.

In 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, there’s even a glimmer of hope, the idea (mild spoiler warning) that even those infected by rage can reconnect to their humanity and to reason.

We don’t have to lose those essential parts of ourselves to the horde.