My Zombie Has Two Genres

During Superb Owl Sunday I was talking to someone about the Walking Dead, because I'm not going to waste my time dealing with sports. He was criticizing it for a number of reasons. Some of it was arguable on a purely on a stylistic level, he claimed that he thought a zombie series that never solved the problem of zombies was too bleak and unrelenting. While I think that's off the mark I can understand where that feeling comes from. Content wise I think the show is on the inspiring side but the tone is bleak.

His other complaint is what threw me, though. He said that for him it failed as a horror show. Here's the rundown:

• It has zombies and therefore is a horror show
• He is not afraid of zombies and therefore doesn't find the show frightening
• It is a horror show that is not scary and therefore fails as entertainment

The impasse that we became stuck on was that he was seeing it only through the lens of the horror genre. While I suppose it wouldn't be unfair to call it a horror show I never thought of it that way. The tropes in it don't follow the horror genre. Generally the point of horror is to elicit emotional negative reactions from the audience. When done in a more refined manner we tend to think of things as classic thrillers (these bring out the reaction of tension, stress, anxiety), and as they become more graphic they are thought of more as horror (shock, disgust, cringing at empathetic pain). American Horror Story, while obsessed with delivering disturbingly saccharine endings, does aim to elicit disgust during the early part of their seasons. But The Walking Dead doesn't really go for the horror side of things. Sure, the thriller emotions are there, but the use of zombies and gore is actually in service to world building and not emotional manipulation. Like all good zombie movies it leaves that to the humans to do.

Am I arguing that Walking Dead isn't horror at all? I would. The show (and the comic, for that matter) doesn't try to evoke the negative emotional reactions that horror as a genre aims to. Instead it employs massive world building and a wide cast of characters to analyze human complexity and create parallels between this abstracted alternate reality and our own. Social issues are parsed through the lens of this world in order to avoid preaching while still dissecting human values. And all of these tropes actually indicate that The Walking Dead functions more like...

Science fiction!

Yup, if you want to know whether the show has zombies then it does. If that is all you want to know then there you go. But if you want to know what features of genre storytelling it uses then the horror label will do nothing to inform you. It's more like science fiction.

The mistake is understandable. A number of other shows have done the "technically one genre but fulfilling another". Battlestar Galactica is the first one that springs to mind. It's a fantasy show but people always forget that and then get mad when mystical aspects have a real effect on the world. People forget because it fulfills the genre functions of science fiction. Lost was on its way to be a technically science fiction show on the road to fulfilling the world-building explorations for the sake of exploration, as well as rising to the call, of the fantasy genre until it broke down in the writer's room. M*A*S*H* subverted the sit-com into a character study. This one is clear to such a degree that the laugh-track is actually optional on the DVD audio menu (and I wait for the day this is done for Sports Night as well).

End result? That maybe there certain genre stories need a genre label and a subtext label. In this case the horror label actually stopped someone from getting into The Walking Dead. To be fair, he's not much of a science fiction fan so a subtext label wouldn't have won over another Walking Dead-head, but the reason behind the avoidance is still problematic. He didn't keep on with the show because it failed as a horror show. That's kind of OK since it isn't trying to be a good horror show. The only reason it's a problem to fail at something it's not trying to be is because of that genre label. And I do think genre labels are important. I won't say that I like the majority of science fiction out there it is still safe to say that I'm a science fiction fan. There's something about the fulfillment of the genre that clicks with me, and that's also why subtextual science fiction shows also work for me.

Maybe we need to add meta-genres the same way we do sub genres. Instead of Steampunk or Urban Fantasy we should have "by way of" after a title. Horror by way of science fiction. Labels are important. Labels are words and cutting out words from storytelling will get you nothing but interpretative dance. But maybe as our genre stories are getting more complex we also should think about putting more nuance in their labels.