World War Z is a 2006 parody of the oral history genre of historical non-fiction which purports to relate the story of mankind’s ultimate showdown with the zombie apocalypse in the words of various survivors. The concept of mixing satire within the horror genre is perhaps genetically encoded within the book’s author, Max Brooks. His father is noted film director Mel Brooks who is perhaps best known for his 1970’s black and white Universal monster movie parody, Young Frankenstein.
The zombies featured in this tale are examples of the third-generation of the creatures. The original zombie was a living person over whom a practitioner of the dark arts of voodoo magic had taken control. This concept of a person with no will of their own was melded with the ancient myth of the ghoul, a corpse which had risen from the dead. The 21st century introduced a new breed of zombie in which the loss of control results from a biomedical disaster of some sort. In World War Z the disaster takes the form of a virus known as Solanum which can be transmitted through the bite from an infected victim. A framing device indicates that the interviews were conducted about two decades after onset of the war which takes ten years for humans to reassert their dominancy.
Three years before the publication of World War Z, Books had released The Zombie Survival Guide, a parody of end-of-the-world survival instruction manuals for conspiracy theorists and other paranoid survivalists. The manual is occasionally referred to in a mostly negative manner by some actual survivors in World War Z. The previous publication was much more comically bent toward satire and parody whereas the satire of World War Z is more corrosively aimed at the political and social structuring of the response to the zombie threat by both nations and individuals. The actual zombie apocalypse is presented in much more serious and straightforward manner, much in the same way that Young Frankenstein treats the premise of reanimating dead corpses with the same respect as the original films it is parodying.
In 2013, a film adaptation starring Brad Pitt became the biggest-grossing zombie movie to date despite diverging quite sharply from the source material. In 2017, it was announced Pitt would be returning for a sequel to collaborate once again with director David Fincher.
