How ‘The Last of Us’ gave zombie horror its heart back

Think of zombies in popular culture and you’ll probably picture baying hordes of swivel-eyed maniacs with grey, decaying flesh lurching stupidly towards their human prey.

Typically, zombie movies and their TV counterparts are all about the grand guignol set pieces, often scoring low on subtlety and high on shock and gore. But The Last of Us, created by Chernobyl director Craig Mazin and video game mastermind Neil Druckmann, which came to an end this week, has turned all that on its head. Yes, there are zombies, infected with a cordyceps fungus that turns their hosts into mindless, flesh-eating barbarians, and yes, there is gore as these creatures and assorted other baddies are violently dispatched. But the series has set aside the most persistent clichés of zombie horror to provide an intimate portrait of two people thrown together and forging a bond in extreme circumstances.

Admittedly, the first two episodes made it seem we were in for a common-or-garden splatter-fest, opening in Boston with dad Joel (Pedro Pascal) and daughter Sarah (Nico Parker) finding their elderly neighbour, Mrs Adler, chowing down on her live-in carer. Familiar scenes of chaos ensued as Joel and family tried to leave town. Cut to 20 years later and Sarah is dead, civilisation has collapsed and Joel is a different man: hardened, monosyllabic, traumatised by all he has lost. But then he meets Bella Ramsey’s Ellie, a 14-year-old who has been bitten by one of the infected and survived, and who needs to be shepherded to a facility where doctors are working on a vaccine.

It is significant that The Last of Us is based on a popular video game that itself went out of its way to upend horror tropes. Druckmann, co-creator of the game franchise, told Variety that he “wanted to do the opposite of Resident Evil . . . which is all about enemy variety. What if it’s about intimate relationships — an exploration of the unconditional love a parent feels for a child and the beautiful and really horrible things that could come out of that?”

Clearly this vision has been carried through into the TV version, during which whole episodes pass without a glimpse of a zombie and we see Joel slowly defrost in the face of Ellie’s infectious chirpiness.

Compare that to the wall-to-wall carnage of AMC’s zombie juggernaut The Walking Dead, an initially clever and leanly-plotted series that outstayed its welcome, lumbering on, dead-eyed, for 11 seasons. Or Netflix’s Black Summer, set in the days immediately following the apocalypse to allow for maximum combat scenes with the staggering masses. Over the years, we have seen zombies played for laughs (Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, Warm Bodies), pitted against high school students (All of Us Are Dead), decked in period costume (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) and used as metaphors for everything from the Vietnam war (Night of the Living Dead) and rampant consumerism (Dawn of the Dead) to our fear of immigrants (practically every zombie film and TV series ever made. Curse those undead, coming over here and feasting on our flesh).

Given the sheer volume of zombie dramas, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the genre has been wrung dry.

All credit, then, to The Last of Us for finding fresh ways to tell a hoary old story. Such has been its focus on the human impact of the apocalypse that one episode was given over to a standalone story featuring Bill (Nick Offerman), a lonely prepper with a well-stocked larder and vast armoury who catches Frank (Murray Bartlett) in a trap on his property. After Bill grudgingly offers him a shower and some food, Frank’s passing visit turns into a gorgeously moving 20-year romance.

In its finale, The Last of Us took a turn for the brutal as our protagonists arrived at their destination and, on discovering that doctors were all set to scoop chunks out of Ellie’s brain, Joel embarked on a tense and bloody rescue mission. But, once again, there was not a zombie in sight. Perhaps the series’ closest TV forebear is 2012’s Les Revenants, a necrotic horror series set in a French mountain town where the dead come back to life. That show was less about the spectacle of the undead than human bonds and the shattering grief facing those still living. Both are that rare thing: a zombie horror with a big, beating heart.

‘The Last of Us’ is on Sky Atlantic and Now in the UK and HBO Max in the US