by Jay Wilburn
There was a time when zombies were an original concept and a seldom used monster. You hand a few proto-zombie stories in the early history of horror. There were a few voodoo zombie movies in the early days of film. Some key authors applied this concept to stories before the Romero films, but zombies were not used like vampires, werewolves, ghosts, or other tropes in horror. When Romero introduced walking dead zombies with no master to guide them and a hunger for human flesh, this was something new and original. If he had handled his copyright correctly, there might have been no real zombie sub-genre in horror and fiction to the extent there has been over past few decades. Hiding in a mall from zombies was a new idea when Dawn of the Dead, the original, introduced it. The military vs zombies was a new idea in Day of the Dead. It was all new once. That was then and this is, of course, not then anymore.
There is a push and undertone among zombie writers and zombie readers to do something new with zombies. “How are your zombies different?” is asked by many people. There is this implication that if you just come up with a new type of virus or a brand new mutation to the shambling, hungry monsters, then that solves the problem of originality. It doesn’t always hurt, but it is never a substitute for characters and story. I’ve read a lot of zombie stories that are essentially another monster in substitute for zombies and then the story plays out as a poorly written zombie story. But my zombies were new and different, the author cries from the page!
A lot of zombie stories fall into some version of the pattern of Wake Up, Discover Zombie Apocalypse, Run, Hide, Run, Repeat, Die, Repeat, Maybe Survive, and Start Writing the Sequel. Nothing wrong with that unless there is not much more than that. Any story can get old and unoriginal even if zombies are nowhere near the page. Zombie writers have to realize that they do write in a genre where a lot of ideas used to be original and now a lot more ideas have been done a lot. So, how do you write your favorite, old monster in fresh new ways?
There is no end to ideas. Great, creative writers find new stories and new ways to tell them no matter what their subject or genre. In many ways, it is the writer and the writer’s voice which will always be what is “new” on the page.
For zombie writers in particular, they can go with new types of zombies or new types of outbreaks. They can tell stories from different timeframes set before, during, after, or way after the outbreak. They can follow individuals, groups, new societies, the rebuilding of civilization, or new dystopias. They come up with characters or character combinations which have been seldom seen. They can choose settings which have not been used often or can be utilized in different ways. Characters can travel in the story or be set in one location over the span of the novel. Characters and missions can succeed or fail or fall somewhere in between. Stories can barrel through the action nonstop or the action can rise and fall. There can be mysteries or new twists. Things can be discovered or lost. There are a lot of ways to go even when many original ideas have been used until they are no longer new.
And then there is a more dangerous option. It is always possible to run into the face of the “original and new.” If an author is bold and daring enough, they can take an idea that is done to death and try to breathe something new into it. Maybe that is ultimately what every zombie author is really doing each time we sit down to dare to write and publish yet another zombie story. We always run the risk of writing an old and unoriginal story with old ideas, but what if it turns out to be an original, new take, after all this time? Imagine that a zombie author sits down to bring a cast of characters together to hide in the mall again. Can it even be done a new way? Is there any possible way for the audience to see it as something new instead of more of the same? Who would even dare? Quite a risk running into the face of certain failure, isn’t it? Most probably it would fail, but isn’t that true of every story idea?
What makes success in life something special is because so many people don’t achieve it in so many areas. What makes the greatest stories exceptional is the fact that there are so many more which aren’t anything special. Zombie writers still work at it though. They still dare to try to make something original out of the trope for readers and fans willing to give them a chance at greatness.
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