Zombie apocalypse meets generational conflict in horror-comedy "Generation Z"

Over six grotesque episodes, the horror-comedy follows three generational cohorts: the Baby Boom generation, Generation X (who Wheatley by his own admission overlooks), and Generation Z.

The audience follows both the elder zombies and their young victims. Unlike other zombie portrayals, Wheatley’s monsters retain their memories and cognitive capacities. They can and do deliberate the ethics of eating the young. Deep, deep down, the older zombies know that eating people is wrong but, by and large, they simply can’t resist.

Generation Z is a state-of-the-nation satire that releases a zombie plague into the UK’s generational divisions

The rise of generational rhetoric in newspapers and memes explains social, economic, and political problems in largely pejorative generational terms. This way of thinking is termed ‘generationalism’ and it is a discourse of division that strengthens and shapes distinct generational identities.

Newspapers, a significant contributor to generational discourses, have invented a cultural scapegoat in the character of the “greedy Baby Boomer”. Over the past decade, a rise in generational rhetoric has apportioned blame for environmental pollution, consumerism, the cost of living, unaffordable housing, pensions, unemployment, and rising university fees at the feet of the ‘Boomer’.

The show revels in the flat monstrosity of the ‘Boomer’ zombie

Wheatley’s contagion affects people differently depending on their age and has a restorative effect for those with plenty of aged cells. Patient zero, Cecily (Sue Johnston) is a resident of Sunny Rise Retirement Home, and she feels great. So great that episode three sees her cartwheel across the Golden Uplands Retirement Home as she mobilises generational rhetoric to recruit others to join her zombie horde. “They see us as monsters, and they lock us away out of sight. But maybe it’s time for us to be monsters” argues Cecily.

Her defence of zombiehood is a response to the demonising of the ‘Baby Boom’ generation as greedy and future stealing and the attempt to keep the elderly “imprisoned” and “weak”. They might as well, she reasons, live up to the headlines.

Then there is Janine (Anita Dobson), also infected, who takes the monstrosity trophy. Janine soon usurps Cecily as zombie leader and launches a campaign to eat your kin. “When I bit my son” she says, “it was electric”.

Rachel Cooke of the New Stateman calls the metaphors ‘crudely drawn’ and ‘mortifying’.

By contrast, young people with less aging under their belts are killed quicker and seem reluctant to eat others. While the young try to figure out what on earth is happening, they also face exams and think about their future in the midst of the destruction of society. In an ironic commentary on the Covid-19 pandemic, these sixth formers are forced to turn up to do their A-level exams, until the zombies turn up too.

Stealing the future

The programme literalises the claim that Baby Boomers are ‘stealing’ young people’s future through the flesh-eating zombie.

From its origins as a metaphor of enslavement and colonialism to ideas of contagion and capitalism, writers and filmmakers have adapted the zombie over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to represent pressing social ideas.

Now, in a period marked by an “aging population” it is unsurprising that the zombie metaphor has come to represent elements of aging including the portrayal of Alzheimer’s disease as a living death. Aged zombies emphasise later life as a period of frailty and deterioration. As ‘undead’ creatures, the implication being that later life is no life at all, merely a liminal zone between life and death.

The zombie creates a sense of repulsion too. The zombie body is a messy one with impure borders between life and death, health and disease. Wheatley’s zombies are smeared with blood. They have wide sores, hair loss, pale skin, and deep cracks canvassing their skin. Such messy borders mobilise the fear of disability and disease that runs through Western culture.

When the zombie stands in for our aged selves, there is something sinister in the zombie’s abject decay which emphasises their defiance of the grave

Unlike their glamourous undead cousin, the vampire, an object of power, sexuality, and desire, the consensus is that the zombie really ought to die. When the zombies in question are ‘Baby Boomers’, the desire to destroy the zombie hoard feeds into broader rhetoric that eliminates futures for older peoples.

This aspect of Generation Z dramatizes the apocalyptic slant of much contemporary generational discourse that portrays the aging of Western societies as a disaster (for instance, as a ‘silver tsunami’) that threatens the prospects of younger demographics.

Perhaps it is too easy for Wheatley to transform the Baby Boomer into a zombie monster, even if it’s a joke. Popular culture has already written half the script. Take the scene in episode one where Janine sets out to eat her granddaughter, Kelly (Buket Kömür), whilst screaming, “Why shouldn’t I eat?! I’ve been treated very unfairly … Why shouldn’t I have what I want?” There’s little to do but grimace at the heavy-handed metaphor and Janine’s co-opting of victimhood.

Janine’s monstrosity is not why this might sit uncomfortably. Do we need to be more explicitly critical of intergenerational discourses that pit older people against younger?

Generationalism is a rhetorical sleight of hand. It stirs up animosity and distracts from the real causes of social, economic, and political problems. It is hostile, perpetuating a view of older people as undeserving of futures and desires. Those who desire, like Janine, are society-destroying monsters as Wheatley’s drama so graphically shows.

But why are the desires of older adults delegitimised in our culture?

Children are much more frequently a symbol of the future, which appears to make a kind of temporal sense. However, this association has, on the other side, led to a binary view of older people as symbols of the past.

How might we think differently about the future if we saw it as belonging to all of us? And if we thought through the idea that we want our children to be able to grow old in a safe world too.

In Waste/Land/Futures, a project I’m working on funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, we are exploring places across Europe where demographic change and post-industrial decline has caused the ageing and shrinking of populations. While such places are often framed in terms of the past, decline and loss, we focus instead on the potential for utopian visions about the future of Europe, its people and places. Instead of leaning into generational conflict, or focusing on these sites as spaces of apocalyptic aging, we’re identifying how different generations of people, including older people, imagine the future and think beyond ideas about progress and decline across the generations.

Perhaps Generation Z is best viewed as a cautionary tale. When we buy into generational conflict, we may well make ourselves monstrous. We are all aging into our shared future, and I know I don’t want to be seen as the ‘walking dead’.