The Walking Dead is finally over. After 11 seasons and twelve years of consistent and visible decline in quality, the show has reached its conclusion. Of course, no one thinks that this is the end of the franchise, even though it should have been.
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In 2003, Robert Kirkman’s monthly comic book series The Walking Dead hit store shelves. In the zombie genre, that series’ premiere shared space with precisely one moderately popular zombie film, Uwe Boll’s terrible House of the Dead movie. The following year saw Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead and Edgar Wright’s masterful deconstruction Shawn of the Dead. The early 2010s were a veritable apocalypse of Zombie Apocalypse films. Zombie films have been around since Night of the Living Dead, but most examples were minor examples that would be unknown today. The 2010s featured non-stop big zombie films and TV shows. The arguable climax of the trend was 2013, which held both the massive blockbuster World War Z, the highest-grossing zombie film of all time, and Warm Bodies, the ill-fated zombie rom-com. It was all downhill from there, but, even as the corpse of the craze wasted away, The Walking Dead kept on going.
Why was there a zombie craze to begin with? Why did society at large decide that from 2009 to 2014, the ideal horror story was a modern riff on Romero’s classics? Horror tends to move in big broad phases. There are always exceptions, but horror media at large tends to have one central concept that lasts a few years. In the 80s, slasher movies ruled the day. In the 90s, snarky teen murder mysteries were in charge. The villain shifted from an iconic masked killer to a member of the central cast as paranoia shifted from the woods to the suburbs. Possession movies were all the rage back in the 2000s, followed swiftly by a broader wave of ghost movies after Paranormal Activity. In almost every case, the movement was kicked into high gear by a single hit in the genre. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Scream, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Paranormal Activity, and so on. The zombie craze had an inciting incident too, it was called The Walking Dead.
The series premiere of The Walking Dead and the subsequent first season was an absolute cultural phenomenon. There wasn’t much like it in terms of investment and the resulting response. The first season was made with an eye toward film production, rather than traditional TV success. After AMC fired the director that made the first season such a massive success, the following seasons got into the rhythm of identical boring stories. The precipitous drop in quality seemed to go unnoticed by a lot of the show’s audience. The zombie craze was kicked off by the outstanding first season, and the sheer excitement of the audience carried the show along well beyond its early success. The show is an institution, and it’s hard to believe that the world will be without The Walking Dead or a spin-off for long. Unfortunately, while the show has never recaptured the glory of its first season, it’s also suffering the long death of its larger cultural importance.
Perhaps more than any other cultural phenomenon, the worldwide response to zombies shifted from eager acceptance to widespread distaste. People talk a lot about superhero fatigue, but if the world needs an example of how sick fans can get of a concept, look to the world of zombies. Zombie shows and movies still come out, but every single one has to come with a disclaimer assuring the world that there’s something more to the project. Train to Busan came out in 2016, and it’s one of the best films in the genre, but many ignored it because it’s a zombie film. The Walking Dead kickstarted the craze, stuck around long enough for people to get sick of it, and is still here now, as people gradually become neutral towards zombies once again.
The Walking Dead should’ve wrapped years ago. The cultural negativity towards the pitch of the show combined with its enormous decline in quality resulted in the slow death of its impact. Ironically, like the zombie outbreak, The Walking Dead used to be a massive event that changed everything, but now it’s just an omnipresent background detail that we never have to think about. The zombie craze was a weird time, but nothing lives forever.
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