Resident Evil
Zombie
The door-opening animation finally ends, and you find yourself in a corridor you haven’t been in before. Like most parts of the Spencer Mansion, it’s dimly lit. The fixed camera prevents you from seeing further down the shadowy hallway, so you can’t tell if something is waiting for you, just slightly out of view. You pause, your finger hovering above the control stick, and listen carefully. Outside, thunder rumbles. But then you hear it: a low, guttural moan, the trademark noise of Resident Evil’s most iconic enemy. You still can’t see it, but there’s a zombie somewhere up ahead and it’s shuffling closer…
In the real world, the zombie myth originated on the Caribbean island of Haiti, though they were a far cry from the rotting corpses we know today. Instead, they were the product of voodoo or necromancy, carefully spawned by ritual and mysticism, one at a time, to serve a master. But since then, there has been a big cultural shift. Today, that original zombie – the occult-born drone, a living-dead puppet resurrected and possessed by dark magic – is in itself as good as dead in popular culture. We now identify zombies almost exclusively as rotting corpses, often shambling relentlessly along in mass hordes, driven not by a need to serve, but by the insatiable instinct to feed on living flesh.
The first modern zombie film is generally considered to be George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, released in 1968. Though the monsters are never once referred to as ‘zombies’ in the film, they nonetheless became the archetype that most other zombies in media would mimic in both appearance and origin – dead bodies that have been reanimated and become flesh-eating ghouls. Night of the Living Dead also popularised the idea of a ‘zombie pandemic’, whereby large numbers of the walking dead are spawned by events such as viral outbreaks or chemical catastrophes. All of a sudden, zombies could also create other zombies through bites and scratches.
By the mid-90s, zombies were already popular in films and at Halloween parties, but Resident Evil offered people what was quite possibly their first opportunity to actually interact with them. Players could run past their outstretched arms, shoot and kill them, or, if they weren’t careful, be bitten by them.
The Resident Evil games use many established tropes when it comes to their zombies, but whereas most zombie media begins in the middle of the crisis and shows how humans deal with this new threat, Resident Evil looks at how the zombie outbreak occurred and focuses on the actual ‘science’ of the walking dead, through biological weaponry and genetic manipulation.
So, what exactly is a Resident Evil zombie? Simply put, a zombie is the result of a human who has been exposed to the t-Virus, either through direct infection or secondary exposure. They are so named due to their grotesque appearance and uncanny resemblance to the living dead. However, in the Resident Evil universe, zombies are not actually reanimated corpses. The virus takes control of them and causes external changes like rotting flesh and cannibalistic urges, making them alive but non-sentient.
When a person is infected with the t-Virus, the first physical symptom is decay of the surface flesh. This is followed by degeneration of muscle tissue and blood congealing all over the skin. The neocortex portion of the cerebrum, which controls higher-order functions, begins to necrotise. As brain cells are destroyed, sensory perception, cognition, intelligence, memory, and language all severely deteriorate, and the person loses their rationality and humanity.
In time, the person becomes disorientated and eventually loses consciousness, entering something of a brain-dead state. All functions outside the autonomic nervous system completely shut down, resulting in an inability to feel pain. Their behaviour becomes limited to simple survival activities, leading them to act in accordance with their basal instincts. With their humanity gone, the person can now be referred to as a zombie. A zombie’s metabolism increases dramatically, and it is driven by an intense, insatiable hunger that never subsides, which causes it to aggressively seek out and devour living flesh. This allows the zombie to spread the virus more efficiently.
Umbrella researchers have noted that zombies may retain some of the habits they had before infection, and possibly even some selective memories, as they are often found roaming the buildings they frequented in their former lives. They can also perform simple actions, such as opening doors. However, due to rigor mortis, zombies usually cannot move very quickly and only walk in a slow, shuffling gait as they wander aimlessly in search of food. Since they feel no pain, they don’t react when injured. They completely lack any sense of self-preservation and will continue to attack until either incapacitated or destroyed. Even if a zombie loses the use of its legs, it will keep advancing by crawling along the ground, using its hands to drag itself towards its prey.
Once close enough, zombies attack by biting and scratching. One bite from a zombie is enough to pass on the t-Virus, dooming the unfortunate victim to eventual zombification1. To dissolve consumed human flesh more quickly, a zombie’s stomach produces highly acidic gastric juices, which they also sometimes vomit up onto their victims as another form of attack. Interestingly, they seem to prefer attacking humans. Whether that’s an effect of the t-Virus or an inherent, hidden dark side of humanity in general, zombies exhibit a deep obsession for raw human flesh.
After being bitten by a zombie, the time it takes for the t-Virus infection to take hold varies depending on a person’s immune system and the strain of the virus itself – the process can be gradual, in some cases taking over a week to complete; or, it may take as little as a day. However, it should be noted that being bitten or scratched by a zombie is not the only way for a person to become infected. In pretty much every outbreak in the series, there are cases of humans becoming secondarily infected by consuming contaminated food or water, or by coming into contact with virus-carrying rodents.
If a zombie does not have a regular supply of nourishment, its muscle tissue may degenerate to the point where even basic motor functions become restricted. Some zombies drag themselves across the floor because their leg muscles have deteriorated so much that they can no longer support their own weight. There are even accounts of some zombies being so weak that they simply sit or lie still, so starved of energy that they are on the verge of true death. However, if they sense anyone getting too close, they will still try to bite. If there is no longer a supply of living flesh, zombies have been known to resort to cannibalism and will begin eating the flesh off each other.
The most effective means of killing zombies is to destroy the brain, though it is possible to put them down with enough bodily trauma. However, if a zombie is ‘killed’ without destroying the brain or incinerating the body, its vital signs may not cease completely, and it may undergo a secondary mutation. The Epsilon strain of the virus, for example, causes an incapacitated zombie to begin a process known as ‘V-ACT’, which causes them to later reawaken as ‘Crimson Heads’ – faster, deadlier versions of standard zombies (but that’s a story for another time).
The origin of the zombie dates back to the Progenitor Virus – the first virus the Umbrella Corporation experimented with, in the 1960s. If a human subject was lucky enough to survive the initial infection, they would almost always degenerate from lack of intelligence and suffer severe malnutrition, leaving them in a ‘zombie-like’ state. However, they remained susceptible to pain and showed no increase in strength. The prototype t-Virus, developed by James Marcus in the 1970s, eliminated those weaknesses. During his trials with the t-Virus, Marcus began to consider the impact that human testing would have on his research, and he eventually forced people – possibly even students at his own training school – to serve as guinea pigs in his secret bioweapons projects. The results of these trials were the first beings that we would recognise as classic Resident Evil zombies.
However, it was soon realised that zombies would not make good weapons. Yes, humans who lose all sense of fear and become insensitive to pain due to the t-Virus are ideal, and they actively seek out other targets to infect and spread the virus – but the biggest problem is that they cannot be controlled, particularly in large groups. Zombies lack the intelligence to follow commands and cannot distinguish between enemies and allies, so their value as a bioweapon is practically nought.
- An exception to this is the player character. Jill and Chris can be bitten multiple times without becoming zombies. This is presumably just a game mechanic, since having the player face a death sentence after a single bite would make things far too difficult and frustrating. ↩︎