We’ve discussed the trope of the Final Girl a few times in class – basically, she’s the last survivor of the horror film (typically, but not always, a slasher film). Conveniently, she’s usually a virgin (unlike the sexually active women, whose deaths many scholars interpret as punishments for sexual transgressions) and brunette (again, possibly interpreted as displaying more innocence/less sexuality). Although she doesn’t fit the paradigm exactly (she’s not a virgin), when Kelly was trapped in the diary room after the rest of the characters had died, I immediately thought “Final Girl!” While Kelly isn’t a virgin, she’s certainly less sexual than the other female characters, who are built like models and appear to rely on their looks and sex appeal as reality TV stars. Kelly is the most rational, down to earth (read: masculine) woman on the show, so it’s fitting for her to assume the role of the Final Girl.
After I finished the last episode, I went to tvtropes.org to read up on the Final Girl (that’s where I learned the bit about her usually being a brunette, which I had never heard before). If you’re a regular consumer of media/pop culture, tvtropes.org is a very easy rabbit hole down which to fall. As I usually do when on the website, I found myself with about a dozen tabs open, reading up on different tropes and seeing how they fit Dead Set.
I’ll come out and say it: I don’t think Dead Set was a particularly original zombie show. The reality TV element was interesting, and it was certainly enjoyable and well-written, but especially after seeing how many major horror tropes it fits, it strikes me as pretty standard zombie fare. Here are some horror/zombie tropes I found while browsing tvtropes.org, and how they fit Dead Set. (Tropes are all linked to their pages on the website both for citation purposes and in case you’re interested in doing any further reading).
The Zombie Apocalypse trope page reflects many elements seen in Dead Set: the collapse takes place quickly, people lose their humanity in the fight for survival, and there isn’t a happy ending.
The tropes entitled Black Dude Dies First and Bury Your Gays are pretty self explanatory: Angel, a black woman, is the first of the housemates to die and become reanimated, and Grayson follows not soon after.
Not Using the “Z” Word is another standard zombie trope displayed in Dead Set. The characters never say the word “zombie” and act as if they exist in a world without them (like we mentioned in class). This trope is an awfully common one called Genre Blindness.
Room Full of Zombies occurs, unsurprisingly, when a character enters a room flooded with zombies, like Kelly does when exiting the diary room. The trope of Our Zombies Are Different, in which zombies depart from the usual shambling, reanimated corpses, covers the zombies’ speed. The zombies also fit the tropes of Flesh-Eating Zombie and Plague Zombie.
I could keep going, but this post is already long enough. What I’m trying to illustrate is that in terms of plot and characterization, Dead Set doesn’t strike me as very original. While I didn’t find the show predictable, it was certainly familiar, and didn’t depart much from the mainstays of the zombie genre.
(If you’re looking for a somewhat weird, extremely creative and original zombie movie, I recommend Pontypool. It’s on Netflix, it’s pretty short, and it’s like no zombie movie you’ve seen before.)