There was a sustained moment throughout the aughts where you couldn’t move for zombies. Perhaps it started with 2002’s 28 Days Later – little Cillian Murphy wandering dazed around a desolate Westminster! – but there were other takes on the shambling undead every couple of years: 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, 2008’s Dead Set, the novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in 2009, Left 4 Dead 2. Zombies quietened down a bit with the advent of 2010’s The Walking Dead – a franchise that, ironically, refuses to die and keeps shuffling forward while making a low rustling sound – and we got into other things instead: Westworld’s robots with souls, The Last of Us’s mushroom monsters, every goth thing Game of Thrones could throw at us. The point is: sometimes zombies are popular, sometimes zombies go away.
Zombies are popular, again. There have been rumbles for a while – Danny Boyle’s 2025 sequel, 28 Years Later, looms; indie sleaze is back; and there are a load of new Walking Dead spin-offs creaking onwards for people who collect Funko Pops to watch – but the real proof that zombies are back is that Channel 4 are making an interesting and writer-led take on the beasts. The take is Generation Z (Sunday 27 October, 9pm), the writer is Ben Wheatley, and I am delighted to say that Sue Johnston is one of the primary zombies. That rustling sound is me rubbing my hands together with glee.
The set-up is: an army van carrying some sort of toxin has crashed outside Dambury care home, and the baby boomers inside transform into biters with a sudden taste for young flesh. Four teenagers – who all keep looking at their damn phones! – have to stop them. The army are also there but they are not much use. There are some parents but they all have their own thing going on – there are some subplots that feel as if they’ve got lost on their way to This Is England and decided to stick around – and the teachers aren’t much use, either. The main thing is: the zombies are old, and the people they are trying to suck the blood and marrow from are young, and there’s a message there, isn’t there? If you do a lot of the thinking yourself and really squint, there’s sort of a message there.
There are a lot of things Generation Z gets right, so … I’m just going to list some of them. The initial toxic leak is done really quickly and, well, it just gets to the point. The show’s gore is enjoyably ghoulish – somewhere between cartoon splatter and absolute horror – and the decision to make the zombies half-conscious while they do it was a smart one (Sue Johnston’s extreme pang of guilt for eating the arteries of care workers is very good). They put Robert Lindsay in it, which is always a good idea, and the whole thing manages to avoid some of my least favourite zombie tropes: guy who gets infected but hides it, a hand shooting through a blocked door, the whole world turning into chaos the second the first bite hits (there’s a very funny sequence where, as zombies roam the countryside, Johnny Vegas still grumpily commutes to work). It’s often good, never boring, and feels like a fresh take on a monster I have seen many, many times before.
But most of all, Generation Z manages to make actual characters out of its teenagers, which I don’t think I’ve seen done yet. The concept of gen Z is still very new – the eldest person in the generation is 27, and I’m not sure their totemic writer and cultural interpreter has stepped forward yet, and the youngest are 12 – and previous attempts to characterise them have been really bad, like in Douglas Is Cancelled.
Wheatley’s gen Zs – Buket Komur’s Kelly, Viola Prettejohn’s Finn, Lewis Gribben’s Steff and Jay Lycurgo’s Charlie; and I’m only writing the names down here because at least two of them will go on to be very famous – are all superb, but have well-observed storylines beyond the outbreak (Gribben’s Steff, for instance, gets radicalised by red-pill TikToks in a way that doesn’t feel corny at all) that makes me, you know, care if they live or die.
I’m not sure how much the show really says – there’s an intergenerational war going on here, of course, though I think that gets a little lost in the blood – but I’m also not sure how much I actually care. Zombies are back! Yeah!
