The Last of Us cast and crew aren’t allowed to say the word “zombie”

The Last of Us is a hot new show on HBO based on Naughty Dog’s 2013 video game. It’s about a man named Joel (Pedro Pascal) who must escort a teenaged girl named Ellie (Bella Ramsey) across a ruined United States, 20 years after a fungal outbreak turned a good chunk of the population into violent monsters.

Another way of saying it is “zombie apocalypse.” But like The Walking Dead before it, The Last of Us refrains from referring to any of its shambling people-munchers as “zombies.” Instead, it uses the word “infected.”

According to cinematographer Eben Bolter, they weren’t even allowed say the word “zombie” during production. “We weren’t allowed to say the Z word on set,” he told The Credits. “It was like a banned word. They were the Infected. We weren’t a zombie show.”

"Of course, there’s tension building and jump scares but the show’s really about our characters; The Infected are an obstacle they have to deal with. For example in Episode Three, Ellie hears an Infected trapped under some rubble. Initially, she’s scared, but then you see her grow in confidence, cutting open the Infected and looking at the fibers. Through that interest, you see what the Infected means in Ellie’s own life. She was born into this world that’s completely gone to hell because of this thing and now, maybe she has inside her a solution to this thing. We see Bella’s performance as she goes from wonder to hate and you start to think, wow what is this girl capable of? There’s darkness and anger in there. So [even in scenes featuring the Infected], it’s character first and then just tell the story."

Again, The Walking Dead pulled this exact same trick, referring to its hordes of shuffling undead as “walkers,” “biters,” “empties” and more; anything but “zombie.” And there as here, I find that to be, on the whole, pretty silly.

Both The Walking Dead and The Last of Us use the zombie apocalypse genre to explore conflicts between characters. In neither case is the show fully “about” zombies…but that’s still what they are. Call them whatever you like, they’re dead people lurching around biting people and turning them into the same kind of creature. The great majority of viewers are going to look at that and say “zombie,” so what do you gain by avoiding the word? It’s not like your show will start sucking if you identify these things as what they obviously are.

Then again, there’s little harm done. But if I were on set, I have a feeling my contrarian streak would come out and I’d start calling them “zombies” whenever possible. I will be bound not by your silly rules!

The Last of Us doesn’t want “to look like Michael Bay”

Working on The Last of Us was a dream job for Bolter, who played and loved the game back when it came out. “I remember telling everybody I saw ‘You have to try this game’ but there were many people I knew who were never going to pick up a controller,” he said. “It’s almost like ‘There’s this amazing book I read but you can’t read the language it’s written in so you’re never gonna know.’ What’s been great about this series is that now, I don’t have to pitch people anymore: ‘Trust me, it’s not just zombies.’ My parents, for example, I can just tell them: ‘Watch the show.’ And now they see what I saw when I first played the game, which is a beautiful thing.”

Bolter shot Episodes 3, 4, 5 and 6. If you’ve been watching the show, you know he’s done great work. Having to shoot a show set in a world that’s largely without electricity poses a thrilling challenge. “I love constraints,” he said. “Here, you’ve got daylight, you’ve got moonlight, you’ve got fire — three natural resources — and then a finite resource with electricity in certain areas that have generators or the lights are 20 years old so they’re going to be flickering. And you’ve got torches and flashlights. I wanted to lean into these imperfections and make the light feel dirty and mixed and messy and feral.”

That was also Bolter’s thinking when it came to the many handheld shots in the show. “[Cinematographer] Ksenia [Sereda] set that up in Episode One, which I think was 100 percent handheld. It was a good decision because handheld gives things a documentary-style grounding. When you suddenly put a camera on a stick, it feels like a bit more artifice so we generally defaulted to handheld unless there was a good reason to do something differently.”

"We didn’t want it to look like Michael Bay. Nothing against Michael Bay but with The Last of Us, you always want to dirty it up."

Catch more of Bolter’s work when The Last of Us Episode 5 streams on HBO Max this Friday night!

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