On “Les Revenants”/”The Returned”

So back in 2012, a TV-series was produced and broadcast in France, called “Les Revenants”, or as it’s called in English “The Returned” (which I think is a bit odd, considering that the word “revenant” does exist in English). The premise of the show is that for whatever reason, the dead return to life and try to reintegrate into the world of the living (now we know what inspired Steven Moffat into the two-parter “Dark Water” and “Death In Heaven”). It was an okay show. It had some nice drama, the characters were likable, and some nice mysteries. However, a lot of questions remained unanswered (though they promised to answer those in the second season) and… well, it’s a French show, so their style of story-telling tends to be a little… off, for want of better words. But it’s still something I’d recommend.

But there is something about this show that bothers me. Okay, not the show itself, but how people, especially the ones praising it, talk about it. Everyone I know who watched this, would describe it as “a show about zombies that aren’t like the zombies from the movies”. Why does everyone insist on calling it a zombie series? The characters aren’t zombies, they’re revenants. The name of the show pretty much spells out they’re not zombies. Granted, its English name is “The Returned”, so I can see why especially the English-speaking crowd wouldn’t make that link. But even so… it just hit me that not everyone knows what a revenant is. So maybe I should explain that first.

The word “revenant” literally means “someone who has returned”, or in this specific context “someone who has returned from the dead”. You may think to yourself that that’s exactly how you define “zombie”, but you’d be wrong. A zombie is a re-animated corpse. But that’s all it is, just a body that moves on its own, but its mind (or spirit, or whatever you want to call it) has left long ago, so the corpse cannot be the person it was when it was alive. That’s what differs it from a revenant, where the individual did return. So we’re talking about a walking corpse that still has the memories and more or less the same personality from when he/she was alive. And if you’re one of those people who’d say “they still sound like zombies to me”, then by all means, we should start calling vampires zombies (as they too are walking corpses). If by some twist of logic you think one should still differentiate between vampires and zombies, then by that same logic you should differentiate between zombies and revenants.

But maybe I shouldn’t be too surprised about people insisting on calling the series’ titular Revenants zombies. In recent years, the zombie genre has become quite popular. Too popular, I should say. What with George Romero’s return to the genre with “Land/Diary/Survival Of The Dead”, “Flight Of The Living Dead”, “The Walking Dead” and the thereupon based comic book series, and the movie adaptation of “World War Z”, just to name a few. And that’s not to mention these zombie-walks that are often organized, the number of people who have cosplayed as zombies at conventions, and even an entire episode of “Mythbusters” was about zombies. As you can see, “they” are going completely overboard with all of this. Then comes a show that is about living dead people that tells an entirely different story. One that isn’t about the dead coming back and being monsters, the living dead people are human, and capable of interacting with the living. It’s different from what we have seen in recent years, and people would love to think that original ideas still exist (even if the premise of “Les Revenants” is remarkably similar to “The 4400”, and if revenants in fiction are already over-abundant, like Eric Draven (“The Crow”), Jason Voorhees (“Friday The 13th”) and Jesus Christ (do I even have to say who that is?), and even before I knew what a revenant was I thought “zombie” was a misnomer for these characters). I guess it’s like a certain Critic once said: if you don’t show your audience anything new, they won’t know what’s different (or something along those lines). And I’m guessing most people have seen one too many zombie movies already, so they won’t know that there is more than one type of reanimated corpse. So I guess I shouldn’t tear people down for this.