Editorials
5 Unforgettable Twists On Zombies in Video Games!
Zombies. There’s no escaping them, and while that rule has remained true since 1968, when George A. Romero’s first gifted us with a little indie film called Night of the Living Dead. The rule applies whether you’re a character in a zombie movie or in the theater watching it. Since they first shambled onto the silver screen, the undead hordes have gone on to permeate literally every facet of entertainment — especially video games, where gamers have made thinning their reanimated ranks a national pastime.
One of the (many) reasons why they’ve become such a popular moving target in video games is because they’re so much fun to kill.
Dropping a ghoul is substantially less naughty than killing a human, and there are few scenarios that can match the intensity of being trapped in a room or building that’s been surrounded by scores of them. As much as I enjoy vanquishing them, sometimes, the classic Romero archetype can get tiresome. Thankfully, video games have come up with the antidote to that.
Much like the virus that probably created them, zombies have never stopped evolving. Today, the term can be used to describe a wide array of creatures we’ve been trained to kill in video games. It’s no longer limited to the moaning, flesh-hungry walking corpse that many of us grew up with.
Resident Evil is a prime example of this, as the series has continued to welcome new twists on the idea of the “zombie” (admittedly to mixed results). This is why I’ve decided to come up with a list of games that weren’t afraid to innovate with their undead.
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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