Monster Stories/Storied Monsters

2019 ◽  
pp. 195-214
Author(s):  
Adam Charles Hart
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
High Profile ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
The Face ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Walking Dead

This final chapter continues the discussion of monsters by engaging with the writings of Robin Wood, who theorized monsters as fundamentally ambivalent figures who allow us to envision alternatives to the restrictive social order. It then realigns Wood’s terms to show how the recent horror genre has been structured around questions not simply of monstrosity, but of asserting or maintaining humanity—and recognizing the humanity of others—in the face of monstrosity and other inconceivable horrors. This is the explicit theme of The Walking Dead TV series, as is emphasized in its first video game adaptation, The Walking Dead: The Game (2012), but is there at the beginnings of the modern genre in the 1960s with a film like Night of the Living Dead (1968). The chapter concludes with a discussion of how understandings of “monstrosity” and “humanity” are redefined around questions of morality with two high-profile, integrated horror films, Get Out (2017) and The Shape of Water (2017).

scholarly journals Choices and Consequences: The Role of Players in The Walking Dead: A Telltale Game Series

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 350-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Genovesi
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Comic Books ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Interactive Approach ◽  
Transmedia Storytelling ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
Walking Dead

Abstract One of the most important features in a transmedia structure, as Max Giovagnoli argues in his book Transmedia: Storytelling e Comunicazione [Transmedia: Storytelling and Communication], is the development of the user’s decision-making power, defined by the author as “choice excitement.” In this, every choice of the user should have a consequence in the fictional universe of a specific franchise. Consequently, a narrative universe that wants to emphasize choice excitement and the active role of people can focus on video games, where the interactive approach is prominent. This essay will discuss a specific video game, based on the famous franchise of The Walking Dead. This brand, which appears in comic books, novels, TV series, Web episodes and video games, is analysable not only as an exemplary case of transmedia storytelling, where every ramification of the franchise published in different media is both autonomous and synergistic with the others, but also by focusing on the choice excitement of users in the first season of the video game The Walking Dead: A Telltale Game Series.

Comic Books, Video Games, and Transmedia Storytelling

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 34-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlie Ecenbarger
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Comic Books ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Additional Information ◽  
Transmedia Storytelling ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
Book World ◽  
Walking Dead

This article illuminates the transmedia storytelling techniques in The Walking Dead comic book and video game. Telltale Games' The Walking Dead localizes itself within the comic book world of The Walking Dead by acting as a transmedia storytelling device and using intertextuality comics to assist game players with meaning-making. By participating in the game, Telltale rewards players with additional information about The Walking Dead universe, as well as creating a contingent but separate narrative that expands upon the existing Walking Dead world. This exploration of The Walking Dead offers insights into the specific methods that are being employed by creators to further engage the audience in the transmedia storyworld.

scholarly journals Black (anti)fandom's intersectional politicization of "The Walking Dead" as a transmedia franchise

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Rendell
Keyword(s):  
Black Men ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Black Male ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
Academic Discourses ◽  
Walking Dead

Despite axiomatic industry and academic discourses of The Walking Dead's (2010–) status as quality TV—linked to its graphic visuals and compelling story lines—strong counterclaims question the text's (mis)representations of race and its propensity for systematically killing off Black male characters. An analysis of African Americans' responses to marginalized Black male characters politicizes the racial milieu of the series against the backdrop of wider racial relationships in the United States. Moreover, The Walking Dead is a successful transmedia franchise, and thus racial discourse shifts and changes, depending on which transmedia texts are being consumed. Thus, Black antifan rhetoric aimed at the spin-off series Fear the Walking Dead (2015–) centers on the zombification of Black men, a metaphor of the mistreatment and othering of young Black men by US police. Comparatively, The Walking Dead video game (TellTale Games, 2012) offers character development for its Black male lead character that fans praise against wider cultural representations in relation to both the franchise's hyperdiegesis and to video games in general. Therefore, Black audiences may read The Walking Dead as both racially reductive and radical. In doing so, aspects of self-identity, such as race, can inform (anti)fan positions through intersectional politics.

scholarly journals “No one gives you a rulebook to raise a kid”: Adoptive Motherhood in The Walking Dead Video Game Series

Loading ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (20) ◽  
pp. 51-70
Author(s):  
Sarah Marie Stang
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Father Figure ◽  
Extant Literature ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
Mother Figure ◽  
The Way ◽  
Walking Dead

This article closely examines the representation of adoptive motherhood in Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead video game series. It builds off previous research which has examined The Walking Dead: Season One as an example of a ‘dadified’ game to explore the ways adoptive motherhood is represented throughout the series. More specifically, this article focuses on the series’ protagonist, Clementine, as she develops from a daughter-figure to a mother-figure. Overall, this article argues that although TWD has been discussed primarily as a dadified game and much of the extant literature on the series has focused on Lee as a father-figure, TWD series can also be read as a ‘momified’ narrative. While there are several problematic aspects in the way Clementine is portrayed, the series is notable in that it explores adoptive maternity, centralizes the experiences of non-white characters, and reinforces the message that family is not limited to blood relations. Because of its centralization of Clementine – a young, potentially queer, adoptive mother of colour – TWD series should be considered as a maternal narrative, rather than only categorized as another dadified series.

Why Horror Seduces

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathias Clasen
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Computer Games ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Theoretical Account ◽  
Horror Literature ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
Central Claim

This book explains the appeals and functions of horror entertainment by drawing on cutting-edge findings in the evolutionary social sciences, showing how the horror genre is a product of human nature. It is the first book to integrate the study of horror with the sciences of human nature and to offer a sustained analysis of the ways in which our evolutionary heritage constrains and directs horror in literature, film, and computer games. The central claim of the book is that horror entertainment works by targeting ancient and deeply conserved neurobiological mechanisms. We are attracted to horrifying entertainment because we have an adaptive tendency to find pleasure in make-believe that allows us to experience negative emotions at high levels of intensity within a safe context. This book offers a detailed theoretical account of the biological underpinnings of the paradoxically and perennially popular genre of horror. The theoretical account is bolstered with original analyses of a range of well-known and popular modern American works of horror literature and horror film to illustrate how these works target evolved cognitive and emotional mechanisms to fulfill their function of absorbing, engaging, and horrifying audiences: I Am Legend (1954), Rosemary’s Baby (1967), Night of the Living Dead (1968), Jaws (1975), The Shining (1977), Halloween (1978), and The Blair Witch Project (1999). The book’s final chapter expands the discussion to include interactive, highly immersive horror experiences offered through horror video games and commercial haunted attractions.

scholarly journals Writing for Emotional Impact in Film and Video Games: Lessons in Character Development, Realism, and Interactivity from the Alien Media Franchise

Arts ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
Christian Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Creative Writing ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Character Development ◽  
Emotional Impact ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
Meaningful Relationships ◽  
Film And Video ◽  
Walking Dead

This article compares Ridley Scott’s film Alien (1979) with Creative Assembly’s video game Alien: Isolation (2014), which is based on Scott’s film. Guidance for academics who teach creative writing—as well as for working screenwriters and video game narrative designers—emerges in the comparison, particularly with regard to the importance of developing strong yet vulnerable main characters who put themselves in danger in order to protect other characters with whom they have meaningful relationships. Examples from other media, including Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967), James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead (2012), and Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us (2013), are also discussed as they relate to larger principles involved in crafting sympathetic characters, realistic settings, and compelling gameplay for media within the horror and sci-fi genres.

The walking dead and killing state: Zombification and the normalization of police violence

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 506-527 ◽  
Author(s):  
Travis Linnemann ◽  
Tyler Wall ◽  
Edward Green
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Police Violence ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Media ◽  
Violent Acts ◽  
Black Man ◽  
Walking Dead

In May 2012, police shot Rudy Eugene, a black man of Haitian decent, dead as he ‘ate the face’ of a homeless man on a deserted Miami causeway. Because of the strange gruesomeness of the attack and other similar violent acts, some in the media declared that a terrifying pandemic—the ‘zombie apocalypse’—had arrived. While this particular case may be yet another instance of mediated panic, we suggest cries of ‘zombies’ and ‘cannibals’ should not be dismissed as simply sensationalistic, irresponsible journalism. Rather, we see this case as a powerful example of the cultural production of a spectral sort of monstrosity that obscures and justifies police violence and state killing. As such, we argue that all of the contemporary ‘zombie talk’, usefully reveals how the logics of security, state violence and punitive disposability are imagined and reproduced as livable parts of late-capitalism.

Producing zombie television: AMC, The Walking Dead, and the institutional dynamics of green-lighting hard-edged horror on cable

2021 ◽  
pp. 174960202098137
Author(s):  
Todd K Platts
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Green Light ◽  
Diagnostic Model ◽  
Institutional Dynamics ◽  
Breaking Bad ◽  
Mad Men ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
Reputation Model ◽  
Walking Dead

This study documents the industrial conditions that permitted the green-lighting and production of The Walking Dead (2010–present) on AMC, a network that built its reputation through high-brow series like Mad Men (2007–2015) and Breaking Bad (2008–2013) . The findings challenge two major arguments forwarded to make sense of the show’s airing: 1) the diagnostic model which suggests that zombies dovetailed into a zeitgeist-coloured paranoia of Others and the aftereffects of a neoliberalised social order and 2) the reputation model, which maintains that the industry track records of the personnel behind projects significantly enhances the chances of receiving a green-light.

Past Lives

2018 ◽  
pp. 49-80
Author(s):  
Michele Fazio
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
American Dream ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
Work History ◽  
Minor Characters ◽  
Graphic Narrative ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
Walking Dead

In Robert Kirkman’s graphic narrative The Walking Dead, the zombie apocalypse acts an equalizing force, bringing together disparate groups of survivors from all walks of life, who join forces to combat the living dead. Yet Kirkman’s emphasis on each character’s work history sheds light on the divisive class and economic power that continues to haunt protagonist Rick Grimes and a host of minor characters who display a profound sense of disillusionment and worker alienation in attempting to achieve the American Dream. Kirkman’s anti-capitalist slant as demonstrated by many of the characters’ relief in having escaped the endless cycle of commerce, consumerism, and capitalism that consumed their lives before the zombie invasion occurred becomes a useful tool to discuss how labor impacts lived experience.

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