The good thing about the zombie genre is that if you like it, you have plenty of material to quench your thirst for blood (and flesh). The typologies of the living dead are enormously varied, and in recent years they have given us such notorious series as ‘The Walking Dead’ and its multiple spin-offs, ‘Z-Nation’, ‘Black Summer’, ‘Sweet Home’, ‘ Kingdom’ or ‘We are dead’. And in a completely different vein, but one that fans will appreciate, this series that is already a few years old but is worth recovering: ‘The Returned‘, which you can see on Prime Video.
This is a different and alternative vision of the zombie plagues that we know. In this French production of only 16 episodes (two seasons of eight episodes each) we travel to a small French mountain village, where the level of the local lake is decreasing at a worrying rate. Unexplained mass animal suicide follows the return of the dead to normal life from one day to the nextresuming their usual activities as if they had never left. They are received in very different ways by those who lost them some time ago, which generates new conflicts.
Winning an International Emmy for Best Drama Series in 2013, this ‘The Returned’ (or ‘Les Revenants’ in its original language) is diametrically opposed to zombie series where the revived dead are a more or less easy enemy to defeat. Here reflections are raised on the authentic dimension of death and the genuine meaning of mourning. A suggestive proposal that has earned the series a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Without a doubt, the chilling thing about these “returnees” is that decide to return to routine without fully realizing that they are dead. A resource that has been expressed before (in the French film that inspires the series, without going any further) and later (the recent and extraordinary ‘Rest in Peace’). That is, replacing unearthly hunger with existential emptiness: another way of exposing a horror icon, in an essential series for all fans of the genre.
In WorldOfSoftware | Few people have heard of this Netflix zombie movie, but it’s one of the best of the genre in years
