Then the games started influencing Western filmmakers like Alec Garland. First came inventive Asian films like Junk, Wild Zero, and Bio Zombie. The game sparked a surge of interest in the classic zombie films to which it paid homage and inspired a new generation of filmmakers to update the living dead for a new millennium. Known as Biohazard in Japan, Shinji Mikami’s survival-horror masterpiece hit the market in 1996, the same year as Scream. 1976’s controversial Death Race, arguably the first truly violent game, awarded points for running down plausibly deniable undead “gremlins.” For the most part, the zombies in your average retro game weren’t all that scary… Then Resident Evil made them terrifying. The living dead have been staples of violent video games before they were even in color. Zombies did, however, make for excellent cannon fodder. In 1968, Pittsburgh filmmaker George Romero drew on the apocalyptic imagery of The Last Man on Earth, a Vincent Price film that was itself an adaptation of author Richard Matheson’s iconic I Am Legend to conjure up an army of cannibal ghouls in Night of the Living Dead.īut outside of Romero’s initial trilogy and a few impressive imitators, zombie films never enjoyed the popularity and dominance of slasher flicks, and they seemed even more kitsch and toothless when slashers achieved post-modernity with Scream.
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