Ask John: Why Isn’t There Any Survival Horror Anime?

Question:
The “zombie survival/horror” genre of entertainment has had a huge revival in the past few years. In cinema we’ve had 28 Days Later and its sequel, the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake, Shaun of the Dead, Land of the Dead, House of the Dead and House of the Dead 2; in video games, Dead Rising and the popular Resident Evil series; and even in prose with Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z (which is being made into an upcoming movie).

Although countless anime feature demons, vampires, and other spirit beings, zombies don’t seem to be especially popular, with only a couple of anime titles having zombies as a major feature and none of them very popular. Why is the zombie survival/horror genre so overlooked in anime?

Answer:
Although I doubt that my preamble is necessary, I’ll state anyway that I’m not Japanese, don’t intimately know the Japanese mindset, and haven’t ever encountered any theories or discussions of this topic. So what I provide is my own interpretive theory, which I hope is valid and accurate, but might not be.

Ostensibly the zombie is terrifying because it’s a vicious monster that preys upon humans. But vampires and werewolves are also monsters that prey upon humans, yet vampires and werewolves are frequently romanticized or revered as much as they’re reviled. The zombie, however, is only ever feared or satirized – never respected. The ultimate reason for this discrepancy lies in the fact that, as Peter in the classic film Dawn of the Dead says, “They are us.” The zombie represents the gnawing, inescapable fundamental horror of humanity – especially Western and American society. Unlike a vampire, which is a being more powerful than a normal human, a zombie is a shambling, mindless, rotting shell of former humanity. The existence of the walking dead opposes the agnostic belief that death is a finality, and opposes the fundamental Western belief in an eternal heaven or hell. The rotting, soulless zombie that destroys and consumes not to survive, but merely out of blind instinct, is the ultimate de-evolution of civilized humanity, and being faced with that realization is horrifying. Furthermore, the zombie is a Western monster. Asian cultures have their own concepts of zombies and ghosts, but the literal reanimated corpse is not a monster native to Japanese mythology. This definition of the zombie and its meaning may be pivotal to the explanation for why the zombie is a more popular monster in Western popular culture than Japanese pop culture.

Zombies appear in anime including Hellsing and Tokyo Majin Gakuen, and the Biohazard (Resident Evil) game franchise originated in Japan. I think that it’s definitely possible for Japan’s anime industry to create a zombie survival horror anime, so the fact that there isn’t such an anime may be a matter of conscious choice. The zombie may be a monster that’s more terrifying and relevant to Westerners than Japanese viewers. America is the world’s largest consumer economy. Japan may be a material society, but not even Japan rivals America’s obsession with consuming everything from food to natural resources to manufactured goods. The zombie may be especially terrifying for Americans because the zombie is a direct reflection of American greed – the mindless obsession with constantly consuming. Furthermore, Japanese culture does not fear its dead the way that Westerners do. Every culture respects its loved ones and every culture fears death, but I think that Western societies have a greater fear of, literally, the dead than Japanese society does. Japanese society has suspicions about spirits and monsters, but Japanese culture reveres its deceased, and maintains a strong belief in natural, karmic rebirth.

The traditional shambling and mindless zombie popularized by George Romero and Lucio Fulci is a frightening concept for Westerners because that zombie is both an abomination of what we believe to be natural order, and a painfully striking consummation of our own concentrated nature. But since Japanese viewers don’t perceive death and the dead in exactly the same way that Westerners do, the concept of slow moving, brainless zombies may not be quite as frightening for them. Japanese pop culture seems to replace zombies with pale, long haired female ghosts (“yurei”) and various traditional Japanese monsters (“yokai”). For Japanese viewers, the concept of the zombie seems to be appealing entirely for schlock entertainment while, for Americans, the zombie is both pulp entertainment and social critique. Japan may be home to the Biohazard franchise of zombie horror, but note that the Japanese Silent Hill survival horror franchise relies more on monsters than literal zombies. And Japan is also the home to zombie themed video games like Dead Rising, House of the Dead, and The Oneechanbara, in which zombies aren’t a frightening threat, but rather an impediment to be eliminated or toyed with. To put it simply, zombies just don’t seem to be as frightening, or fascinating, for Asian viewers as they are for Western viewers.