One of my best friends recently admitted he could not get into The Walking Dead, or zombie literature or films in general, because they are too hopeless, their characters’ actions too futile. Nothing matters in the world of zombies, and the constant work of killing and fleeing is never-ending and pointless. One can behave bravely or stoically, but to what purpose? Anyone temporarily “saved” from a dire fate is usually only killed in some equally horrible way later on. This is a fairly common—and straightforward and understandable—criticism of the zombie subgenre. However, it is one that applies least to The Walking Dead.

To show how different this new series is from its predecessors and contemporaries, let’s first examine George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), because it is the seminal zombie film that every new artist knows and references—whether directly or indirectly—and thus stands as the paradigmatic zombie narrative: people are trapped somewhere with a growing zombie horde outside, and we watch the cohesion of their group unravel to the point at which the zombies can get the upper hand. The bare bones of the plot of Night of the Living Dead show how close it is to the setup of The Walking Dead: although the human survivors are more mobile in the latter, the focus on interpersonal dynamics and conflicts remains the central point of the series. But in tone and resolution, the first of the modern zombie films and the recent television series differ. Night of the Living  …