Of Course "The Last of Us" is a Zombie Show

What this debate says about the zombie genre

Photo by Denny Müller on Unsplash

HBO’s The Last of Us is a lot of things. It is the first successful adaptation of a video game into a prestige television show.¹ It is, for all its quality, a show that is breathtakingly ignorant of Massachusetts geography. It is yet another data point for Pedro Pascal being everyone’s “Internet Daddy.”

Is it a zombie show, however? That seems to be the running debate out in The Discourse, and the show’s fans and crew are definitely on one side of that debate. In an interview with The Credits, The Last of Us cinematographer Eben Bolter kept making it clear that as far as he was concerned it was not a zombie show:

“There’s a lot of things The Last of Us is not,” says Bolter…. “It’s not a cliché zombie movie, it’s not Hollywood backlit where everyone’s close-up is perfect. It’s a world of organic cinematic naturalism, and that’s something I could just feel.”….

“We weren’t allowed to say the Z word on set. It was like a banned word. They were the Infected. We weren’t a zombie show. Of course, there’s tension building and jump scares but the show’s really about our characters; The Infected are an obstacle they have to deal with….

“What’s been great about this series is that now, I don’t have to pitch people anymore: ‘Trust me, it’s not just zombies.’ My parents, for example, I can just tell them: ‘Watch the show.’

Weirdly, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro waded into this debate and infuriated the show’s fans on this question. After watching the third episode “Long Long Time,” which tells a beautiful story about how two men (Bill and Frank) forged a romance after the apocalypse, Shapiro vented on Facebook about “Brokeback Zombie Farm,” complaining, “It’s a zombie show. There are no zombies in this entire episode [NOTE: This is not true—DWD]. There are no zombies in a zombie show. This is worth pointing out.”

This upset the fans,² because they don’t think it’s a zombie show either. According to IndieWire, the online responses included comments like, “Ben Shapiro fails to understand TLOU is not a ‘zombie show,’ it is about human relations in a post apocalyptic setting” and “If you think ‘The Last of Us’ is about zombies then you’re as brain-dead as one. It’s always been a story about love under circumstances that push people to the brink, about the extremes of light and dark humanity is capable of.”

So the showrunners and its fans seem bound and determined to not call it a zombie show! And I get why, sort of. Technically, the infected are not dead, so it does not meet the standard definition of a George Romero-like zombie. But this is weak beer. 28 Days Later also meets this criteria — “The Infected” was a term used in that film as well — but it is not widely viewed as part of the zombie canon. There are also past entries into the zombie canon based on fungal infections: see, for example, The Girl With All the Gifts.

The AV Club’s Cindy White is spot on in noting that The Last of Us far more similar than different to The Walking Dead:

Let’s not forget that the “z word” never appeared in [The Walking Dead] either, and that’s not the only thing they have in common. Both are set in a post-apocalyptic world where hordes of hostile monsters who used to be people could show up and attack at any moment. The few remnants of civilization that still exist have become tribalized and insular, some even predatory. The zombies (or whatever you want to call them) are just a device to tell stories about the nature of humanity. That’s a pretty common zombie trope, whether you’re dealing with the shambling George Romero variety or the rage-infected creatures in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (he didn’t consider them zombies either, but everyone collectively decided to ignore that)….

The Last Of Us sets itself apart from the zombie genre in many ways, but the nature of its central threat—be they living, dead, or undead—isn’t one of them. It’s like saying the Batman films don’t technically count as a superhero movies because Bruce Wayne has no super powers.

As for The Last of Us being a show about human relations and not the living dead, well, these kind of comments are coming from folks who have never watched a zombie flick. With a few exceptions, the entire zombie genre is not about the undead but about how the living react to emergency. That is true of Romero’s films, it’s true of The Walking Dead, it’s even true of rom-zom-coms like Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland. Indeed, in this way The Last of Us is more about the zombies than most: the game and show devote a fair amount of time to the different kinds of infected, like the bloaters.

So why are the show’s fans and crew resisting the zombie label? My hypothesis is because their perception of the zombie genre is that it’s low-rent and two-dimensional, and they think The Last of Us is better than that.

Spoiler alert: they’re not wrong. As someone who has had to watch a lot of this genre for research purposes, I can stipulate that zombie television shows in particular range from the schlocky to the unrelentingly grim. None of them have fallen into the “prestige tv” category commonly associated with HBO.

And this is where fans of The Last of Us have a valid point: the show, at least, is taking detours and exploring themes that The Walking Dead was never able to tackle with much competency. In having Joel and Ellie travel across the country, the show enables them to encounter a more varied set of communities that respond to the apocalypse. The show’s overriding theme is whether it is possible to forge human bonds in a world in which humans are no longer the dominant species. That is not original to this show — see 28 Days Later again — but Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey, and the rest of the cast bring a lot more to their performances than the typical zombie production. Heck, I’d watch a spinoff of the Native American couple that Joel and Ellie encountered in Episode Six.

So let’s be clear: The Last of Us is definitely a zombie show. But it’s fans want it to be more than that. And fair enough — the show has as much in common with Station Eleven as it does The Walking Dead. But there is no shame in being a quality zombie show. Own the label.

1. Fun fact: during my moment of peak cool parenting, I took my son to the San Diego Comic-Con because I was talking about my zombie book. This was a few months before the video game was being rolled out. My son and I attended that panel, and we were both blown away by the care that the game’s creators were devoting to it. Even as a complete non-gamer I was not surprised that it was wildly successful.

2. More amusing is that Michelle Goldberg thinks the show espouses conservative tropes. I don’t think it picks a side to be honest.