What if we decided the world is self-evidently worth defending?

When I was a kid, I rented a copy of George Romero’s 1978 version of Dawn of the Dead. I was absolutely too young to be watching that movie, and it engendered what’s proven to be a lifelong fascination with zombie media. Whether it’s classic shamblers, the indestructible mutants from John Russo’s Return spinoffs, the 28 Days Later sprinters, or the strange mutants of a Left 4 Dead, anything with zombies in it will always get my attention.

What’s come to fascinate me about Romero’s Dawn (not to be confused with Zack Snyder’s in-name-only 2004 remake) is its overall impact on American media, both in indie horror and pop culture as a whole. It might be the first major example of what you might call a “cozy apocalypse,” where the fall of civilization sets the handful of survivors up to live like kings.

In Romero’s Dawn, the rise of the living dead is tearing the United States apart at the seams. In Philadelphia, as it becomes obvious that everything’s about to collapse, two SWAT cops and two TV reporters escape the city in a stolen helicopter. They proceed to take shelter in a recently abandoned shopping mall and settle in to ride out the end of the world.

In the second act, the 4 survivors get a few weeks of hedonistic excess by living off all the stockpiled goods in the mall. In the third, a biker gang stumbles across their sanctuary and breaks in to loot the place, dismantling the survivors’ defenses in the process. That triggers a 3-way brawl between the survivors, the bikers, and the zombies, which no one really wins.

The second and third acts of Dawn are the start of a cultural conversation that’s been going on for almost 50 years now. Romero uses the dead mall to make a few deliberate, pointed observations about American consumerism, but by complete accident, also set it up as the first example of the post-apocalypse as a sort of adult playground. That led to work like Zombieland, Dead Rising, and Netflix’s Daybreak—

—yes, I am one of the three people who watched Daybreak, I told you I was hardcore—

—where the zombies may still be a threat, but they’re primarily there as a feature of the setting. They’re there as blood-filled practice dummies, so a character can show off their moves, or as a way to deliver sudden shock deaths to the slow, stupid, or humorless.

The third act of Romero’s Dawn, conversely, is an instant thesis statement for a thousand later stories: humans are the actual monsters. Zombies can be handled like they’re weather, as they’re almost always stupid if not actually mindless; a good wall or a decent distraction can hold them at bay indefinitely. However, in the final analysis, humans are their own worst enemy.

The Walking Dead is the modern standard-bearer for that kind of zombie story, where hope is an illusion and things can only ever get worse, but it’s only the most painfully obvious example. The zombie apocalypse as a sort of clean-burning disaster has been a major focus of horror media for decades now, where the undead or their functional equivalent only exist to clear out humanity so the protagonists can battle over whatever remains. Sometimes that’s to tell a story about desperation or inhumanity (cf. 28 Days Later, Days Gone, Dead Winter); other times it’s a libertarian fantasy about rebuilding civilization as the creator’s ideological utopia (cf. maybe six thousand indie novels on Kindle Unlimited).

That isn’t to say that these are the only two kinds of zombie story, of course, but they’re predominant in the genre. Zombies show up; the world ends; what happens next? It’s considerably faster to list zombie media that doesn’t follow that blueprint.

Speaking of which:

—

Resident Evil never ended its world, and that’s quietly become one of the most revolutionary things about it.

This doesn’t apply to either the Anderson film series or the Netflix show, of course. Ignore them. I do.

In the games’ setting, global society remains more or less intact. Granted, various zombie viruses and other bioweapons have taken a terrible toll on Resident Evil’s Earth, with particularly significant disasters in North America, mainland China, and the Mediterranean Sea. However, by the time of RE Village’s Shadows of Rose DLC, which takes place roughly around 2037, life on Earth seems to go on as you’d expect it might.

That’s remarkable by itself. Resident Evil is one of the biggest franchises in the zombie genre, as well as one of the few that’s resisted the seemingly magnetic pull of the apocalypse. In fact, it wrapped up much of its original storyline in 2009 with Resident Evil 5, which put a surprisingly conclusive end to the story of the series’ first zombie virus.

That hasn’t kept the series from telling zombie stories, such as in the animated movies (particularly 2023’s Death Island), but the original virus has been effectively neutralized in-universe. It can cause problems, but realistically cannot end the world.

In recent games, Resident Evil is more about its setting than a single core storyline. While there’s some connective tissue between major arcs, such as the established ties between the defunct Umbrella Corporation and Resident Evil Village’s antagonist Miranda, there is no core plot. It’s simply about the various threats posed to the world by mad science, whether it’s due to related zombie viruses, related technologies, or some new innovation like Resident Evil 7’s mold monsters, and the people who risk their lives to stop them.

This lack of focus can be frustrating for long-time fans of the series, as RE has an established tendency to set up plot arcs or characters, then ignore them for actual decades at a time. Next year’s Resident Evil Requiem, for example, seems at time of writing to be the payoff for a 20-year-old teaser from 2004’s Outbreak. Find any RE superfan and they’ve likely got a long wishlist of dormant plot threads that they wish Capcom would pay off on somehow. I’m no exception.

On the other hand, I’ve grown to appreciate Resident Evil’s optimism, particularly by comparison to most of the rest of the zombie subgenre of media. The protagonists of Resident Evil suffer, bleed, and often fail, but their world continues to spin. For all the crashed vehicles, dead partners, and wrecked cities, life on RE’s Earth continues apace.

Despite the genuinely global stakes of what you could call RE’s “widescreen” era, RE4 through RE6, it didn’t take those opportunities to burn down the setting so it could set the next few games in the ashes. Instead, the protagonists successfully averted greater disasters. They dared to hope for something better than base survival, and that hope was not punished.

That’s rare in horror games, many of which seem to revel in pyrrhic victories or unreliable narration, and virtually unheard-of in zombie media as a whole. I have played so goddamn many indie horror games where your initial goal was a mistake, a delusion, or impossible from the start.

In Resident Evil, almost uniquely, victories are possible. They’re always difficult and often costly, but the characters can win. The world can be saved, and is in fact worth saving in the first place.

There’s a moment in 2019’s remake of RE2 that’s consistently stuck out to me as a sort of inadvertent thesis statement. If you play as Claire, you end up as the caretaker of a 12-year-old girl named Sherry, who’s one of the only other survivors you’ve found in Raccoon City. At one point, after you’ve gone through quite a bit to reach and rescue Sherry, she asks Claire why she’s doing it. Claire’s response is simple:

That’s all she says, and the narrative treats that as self-evidently enough. There is no attempt to justify it, as many other series would attempt to do; Claire has saved this girl’s life simply because she can. The end.

It’s a useful scene to highlight the peculiar sense of humanity at the heart of Resident Evil’s formula. It’s got an odd sense of optimism underneath all the gore, where for all the malevolence in the world, there are also genuine people who will do what it takes to fight it.

The real problems in Resident Evil  always seem to come down to those who think they’ve somehow earned the right to decide whether other people’s lives matter. Whether it’s a reclusive billionaire, a mad genius, or a cult leader with delusions of grandeur, RE has been surprisingly consistent—especially for a series that’s easy to define by its creative inconsistency—about who its actual villains are. It’s not the people around you; it’s the people who think that, due to accidents of birth or finance, that they should have the right to decide how your life should go.

Like many of the most interesting things about Resident Evil’s writing, I’m not sure how deliberate this is, but it’s always been remarkably careful to put the blame in the correct places. Humans can be a problem, but humanity almost never is.

In 2025, that particular, qualified optimism is arguably the one thing about Resident Evil that I’d argue is an underrated part of its recent success. In a genre that’s struggling under the weight of The Walking Dead’s unstoppable cynicism, Resident Evil deserves more credit for being its antithesis. In this series, almost uniquely, hope is not a mistake.