" "We've already seen great results for Dead Rising which has been fueled by the national coverage it has received from its various marketing campaigns," said Bob McKenzie, Senior Vice President of Merchandising, GameStop Corp. "With the additional exposure from Capcom's expanded TV campaign, we look forward to continuing the momentum into the crucial holiday season."
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"The zombie story is less about zombies than the human survivors; a tool for social, psychological and economic commentary." - Joshuah Bearman, writing for LA Weekly
Once the dead have risen, all bets are off. Society, necessarily, breaks down, and the Maslow pyramid contracts to a single tier. Facing off against the undead horde, therefore, we find our petty insecurities erased; clothes, cars, who'll win American Idol - all become meaningless. What's left is what will get us through the night, and the day, and the next night ... until the zombies are vanquished. And it's this deconstruction of the pillars of our culture, this sifting through the waste to find what's really important - a gun perhaps, or a propane tank - that makes for such cathartically good storytelling. By fighting zombies, in other words, we're actually fighting ourselves.
Which is why Capcom's take on the zombiepocalypse is so telling. Dead Rising stars an American photojournalist named Frank West who breaks past military and police roadblocks to infiltrate a once peaceful Colorado town and discover the truth behind the rumors of a mysterious disturbance at the local mall. The answer, and there is one (at least - depending on how you play the game), is that we did it. Not humanity in general, the other we: Americans.
Dead Rising's plot suggests that scientists tinkering with the genetics of plants unleashed a killer swarm of insects which, instead of killing humans, zombified them. Plot-wise, this isn't breaking any new ground in zombie horror circles. Most zombie tales feature some form of "man tampering with nature" scenario, but the agricultural take is a new twist, playing on the perception of Americans as over-fed gluttons swarming over the globe like English speaking locusts, and adding a new dimension to the "man vs. himself" archetype. (Man taxes man's agricultural infrastructure, man accidentally zombifies man in response, man must then begin bashing man's brains all over the place using every imaginable household implement as a weapon, and for this, man earns Xbox Live Achievements.)
As a mirror, then, Dead Rising exposes a fear of ruining the Earth and destroying nature's balance with science. But is this an American or Japanese fear? Dead Rising holds a unique place in the horror fiction genre as a Japanese constructed nightmare designed for American consumption, and as such it's apparent that many of the scares therein seem designed less to inspire fear in the hearts of its audience than to illuminate the fears of its authors.
As Bearman says, in zombie films origins are irrelevant, so we'll instead look at the game's survivors, or to be more specific, those survivors against which Frank must battle as he goes about his business subjugating zombies and uncovering The Truth. Dead Rising, in addition to about a thousand and one ways to kill a zombie, features that uniquely Japanese staple of game design so inured in Capcom titles, the Big Boss Battle, and these Big Bosses are no mere monsters. In fact, a list of them reads like a menagerie of American stereotypes: the deranged clown, the gun store owner, the lesbian law enforcement officer, a diabolical cult leader, gun-toting hunters and the black ex-cons riding a gigantic SUV. In these characters we see ourselves, reflected in the mirror of a different culture, and we slowly begin to imagine how we're viewed from the outside.
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