When Dawn of the Dead’s four protagonists, Roger, Peter, Stephen, and Fran, first break into the uppermost floor of Monroeville Mall, they find a large reserve of CD V-777-1s—cardboard boxes filled with basic medical supplies, bottled water, dried and canned food, and the rudiments for building a shelter, issued by the United States Civil Defense department throughout the 1950s and 60s. During their first night and day in the mall, the heroes subsist on the V-777-1’s spartan contents, passing around square tins of heat-treated beef and using some of the unopened boxes for makeshift chairs. They look like they are surviving. They look like how people are supposed to look at the end of the world.
We have already seen the civil unrest that is boiling outside of the mall. The first time we meet Peter and Roger, they are part of a SWAT team storming a tower block in a Puerto Rican neighborhood, because the residents insist on keeping their undead relatives in the basement rather than turning them over to the government to be destroyed. “Why do these people keep them here?” Roger asks, as he helps eliminate the zombies that have been bound, gagged, and secreted in the boiler room. “Because they still believe there’s respect in dying,” Peter replies. In this exchange, the gun battle between the police and the people living in the tower is recontextualised into a clash between the state and the rules of the state, and the creeds and cultural practices of an ethnic minority. The immortal, immutable conflicts of race and class seemingly still exist, despite the zombie apocalypse.
This is the world from which Dawn of the Dead’s four main characters are trying to escape. Between the Cold War, the Red Scare, Jim Crow, college riots, the Hippie movement, and the Great Migration, the ‘50s and ‘60s in America represent periods of enormous social transformation and volatility. Romero’s film itself arrives in 1978, but in the earliest scenes in the mall, Peter, Roger, Fran, and Stephen resemble denizens of the immediate post-McCarthy era, retreating from the chaos outside into their metaphorical fallout shelter. Alongside the Civil Defense supply boxes, Roger and Peter’s guns are icons of modern America’s most transfigurative epoch, the same M-16 rifles issued to general infantry in Vietnam.
Fleeing from the symbolic ‘50s and ‘60s, the four gradually secure greater sections of the inside of Monroeville Mall, gathering more possessions in the process. Initially, they only want for the essentials of survival: tools, a radio, more food, a map of the mall. But as they clear more space, block all the doors with trucks and ultimately rid the mall of zombies entirely, they start ‘shopping’ for luxury goods. They get a television, a refrigerator, and a stove. They drink wine and eat expensive cheese, and have a trio of cut-glass decanters for gin, scotch, and bourbon. Peter and Roger discard their police-issue jumpsuits and start dressing in silk shirts and leather brogues. The bare storage room that the group first breaks into is converted into an approximation of a high-rent condo, complete with a Bang and Olufsen hi-fi system, potted plants, and a spice rack.
In combination with the various montages of zombies shambling around in the mall, you can see why Dawn of the Dead is often analysed as a criticism or satire of consumerism and commerce. ‘The desire for status symbols, for things, for stuff is a mindless one and will make a monster out of you,’ the film seems to suggest. The zombies’ animal-instinct appetite for flesh is a simple metaphor for greed. But Dawn of the Dead is perhaps shrewder and more sinister than it initially appears, and rather than the horrors of blind consumption, is more ‘about’ the existential horror that we experience once we achieve a certain degree of material comfort.
If the 1950s and 60s were marked by civil turmoil and a fear of annihilation from nuclear war, the late '70s and the '80s are conversely defined by prosperity and power, and America strengthening its economic, political, and military positions. The Soviet-Afghan war and the eventual collapse of the USSR helped instantiate the US as the dominant international superpower. Financial markets were deregulated, income and capital gains tax were progressively reduced, and advances in technology alongside free trade with Japan meant an influx of new electronic and labour-saving appliances. “We are the people who have thrown the windows of our souls wide open to the sun,” said Ronald Reagan in 1981, paraphrasing the abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier. The big threats to national security were all gone—and you could buy everything you wanted.
In this context, Dawn of the Dead feels more like a film about boredom, aimlessness, and a spiral into apathy; the alienation and directionlessness that might follow once you have too much stuff and not enough strife. A selection of defining images:
Fran and Stephen in bed together
Fran walking through the ‘apartment’ that the group has arranged on the top floor of the mall
Stephen and Fran strolling through the mall itself
Fran applying makeup in the mirror
The slapsticky ‘Gonk’ remains the iconic track of Dawn of the Dead’s score, but ‘Sun High’ feels more fitting for its themes of estrangement and lassitude.
By the 1980s, America had won the Cold War and succeeded in building its (seemingly) invincible economy. There were no foreign enemies left to defeat and the social despair that seemed to define the ‘50s and ‘60s was now at such a remove that it could be ignored entirely, the white middle-class having pulled (or rather, having been pushed) so materially far in front of the blue-collars, the immigrants, the minorities, and the unemployed that they essentially lived in a different country. For most of the 20th century, even for the most insulated suburbanites, the course of American society might have felt tumultuous and unreliable. But in the final decades before the millennium, with no Commies, the perception of a bright new financial world, and simple solutions apparently available for every problem (“Just say no”), for a lot of the country there was nothing left to do.
This is the position that Peter, Fran, and Stephen find themselves in once the zombies in the mall have been killed or locked out, and they’re free to plunder the stores. When they arrive in the mall, their survival is uncertain. After a few weeks, the only danger that remains is a paradoxical absence of danger. The home that they make isn’t destroyed by the zombies, but by a gang of bandits—as is often the case in zombie fiction, the real threat is not the undead but other people. In Dawn of the Dead, this becomes symbolic of the idea that in a comfortable, middle-class, and materially rich world the only enemy that remains is the proverbial self—when no external threats exist, we inevitably turn inwards. More than two billion Valium tablets were reportedly prescribed and consumed in 1978. Fran, Stephen, and Peter become ironic heroes of this age, paragons of a society where people now have the luxury to drown in the abyss of the soul.+
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The same on-screen message marks the beginning of every new Project Zomboid savegame: “These are the end times. There was no hope of survival. This is how you died.” But although death, zombie-related or otherwise++, is probable in Zomboid, it is not inevitable, and the reason that you typically finish with a savegame is because you get bored.
A lot of survival games (The Forest, DayZ, The Long Dark, Rust, Green Hell, Don’t Starve) are set in expressly hostile wilderness environments where basic resources like drinkable water are scarce. Zomboid by contrast takes place in the semi-fictional ‘Knox Country’, an approximation of the real-world city of Louisville and its outskirts, designed using actual maps and topographical data.
It’s 1993 and the zombie apocalypse has only just begun. While the owners have become undead, their shops and houses are still filled with fresh and canned food, clothes, guns, tools, CDs, VHS tapes, and essentially everything else you would find in abundance in contemporary America. Even the furniture can be broken down into planks of wood, strips of metal, and constitutional electronic parts for reuse in the extensive crafting menu. The entire Zomboid map is essentially one gigantic mall.
It will take semi experienced players perhaps three or four in-game days to gather everything they need to stay alive indefinitely, and secure for themselves a reasonable fortress against the zombies. Despite its initial survival game overtones, your and your character’s struggle in Project Zomboid quickly becomes the same as Fran’s, Stephen’s, Peter’s, and Roger’s in Dawn of the Dead: what to do after you have everything? The typical Zomboid character is the embodiment of that same material-made ennui that affects Romero’s heroes, in possession of so much stuff that all worldly endeavouring becomes moot, and the only thing left to contend with is the self. Especially in comparison to genre contemporaries, where the search for and gathering and stockpiling of life-preserving resources forms the ‘gameplay loop,’ the quantity and availability of items in Project Zomboid means the focus of your efforts turns inward even within the opening hours. Grinding and building your character’s carpentry, metalwork, foraging, pottery, and other skills becomes a crude simile for a more encompassing ‘personal development.’ You overpower your enemies. You can get every and any material thing that you like. The main thing that you are left to fight with, build upon and metaphorically colonise is your in-game self.
Like Dawn of the Dead, Project Zomboid begins to feel like a grotesque of over-comfortable suburbanism, a world where the principles of commerce, property, materialism, and self actualisation are so entrenched and ingrained that they continue to exist even after the dead rise from their graves and kill and eat the living. It is a game about finding stuff and getting stuff, but with the sick joke that getting the stuff is so trivially easy, in this country, at this time, that the undertaking becomes hollow. Project Zomboid’s creator The Indie Stone acknowledges the original Sims as one of its biggest visual influences. But Zomboid’s resemblance to Maxis’ 2000 masterpiece+++ is more than aesthetic. In The Sims, the ostensible richness of modern life is represented via reductive and dispassionate metres and bars, which empty and refill depending on what they eat, what they do, and how nice their home looks. Your character’s needs, drives, and aspirations are thus expressed as quantifiable data, creating the impression that so long as you do X, own Y, and achieve Z, you will be able to ‘maximise’ your Sim’s life, as one might maximise the value of a stock or property portfolio. This is often stifled however by the game’s capriciousness and darkly comic cruelty—as soon as you buy the ‘Back Slack’ recliner that generates +6 Comfort and +3 Energy, it will be destroyed because your microwave catches fire, or stolen by a burglar, or you will have to sell it, at a loss, because you get fired from your job. Alternatively, you’ll get lucky, and then you can start saving for the ‘Von Braun’ recliner, which has +9 Comfort. Either way, The Sims implies that the gratification of material need in and of itself is inadequate, that life and happiness are subject to forces that can’t be allayed by owning stuff. On first apprehension, there seems to be a straightforward solution to your Sims’ problems, where more things means more effective replenishment of their bars. But the experience is actually subordinate to invisible, immaterial gameplay functions. Both Zomboid and The Sims initially suggest that the whole point of the game is to get things, but their subsequent layers retroactively emphasise the vapidity of getting things.
It was patched out in subsequent versions, but build 41 of Project Zomboid had an exploit where television sets were invincible. You could place a TV in your doorway or at the foot of your staircase, and no matter how many undead flailed and bashed against it, they couldn’t ever get through, so that the strongest and longest lasting bases in that particular build were the ones encapsulated by a perimeter of television sets. This feels like the ideal metaphor for another flavour of middle-class tedium, where you anaesthetise yourself with boxsets, subscription services, consumer electronics, videogames, and toys; where you ‘beat’ or defend yourself from reality by escaping from it. If Zomboid is partly a game about the wilting power of consumerism, and partly about the melancholy and insularity that the same consumerism produces, the image of the protagonist both protected and imprisoned by a ring of TVs becomes singularly characteristic. This theme of isolation is perhaps even stronger considering that when you play Zomboid solo there are no other survivors anywhere on the map.
The zombie is a stupid, weak, and slow creature, to the point that, in order for a zombie apocalypse to be plausible to us as fiction, the infection has to be able to spread by some in-world means other than bites. We just don't buy the idea that zombies could catch up to, overpower, and successfully sink their teeth into enough people to terrorise the survival of the whole race. Concrete explanations aren’t provided, but in Dawn of the Dead, there are hints that the ghoul plague is the result of either an alien bacteria falling to Earth aboard a comet or the radiation spill on Three Mile Island. In Zomboid, it might be a tainted batch of burger sauce brewed by a fast food chain called Spiffo’s.
The Zomboid protagonist is able to kill hundreds, thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of zombies using weapons and objects that are available in a normal town. Dawn of the Dead’s survivors clear out an entire shopping mall, making themselves totally safe from the zombies in the space of a few weeks. Perhaps what the zombie confronts us with is the unnerving extent of our own dominion, the frightening totality of our power. We have so much stuff that even existential threats don’t threaten our existence anymore. The zombie is just one more thing for us to subjugate, and after they’re gone we’ll think about ourselves or whatever.
+++
+ In the climax of Dawn of the Dead, the mall is pillaged by a motorcycle gang, which vandalises the stores, butchers the zombies, and shoots Stephen. If our trio of survivors have become bored and miserable because they have nothing left to fight, kill, or overcome, the bandits feel like an expression of their suppressed desires, and the film’s ending a symbolic conflict between a well-behaved but castrated superego and the id.
++ Zomboid’s subReddit is a collage of unfair, tragicomedy death. You will find players who have lost a game of some two or more in-world years because they accidentally used the ‘go to sleep’ command while in the same room as their gasoline-powered generator and thereby suffocated on the fumes.
+++ I keep starting and then getting frustrated with and abandoning an extremely long article about why The Sims 1 is the greatest videogame of all time.
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Ed Smith is one of the co-founders of Bullet Points Monthly. His Bluesky handle is @edwardsmithwriter.