Talk:Nazi zombie/GA1

GA review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Nominator: Thebiguglyalien (talk · contribs) 23:14, 26 December 2025 (UTC)

Reviewer: Premeditated Chaos (talk · contribs) 17:46, 28 December 2025 (UTC)

Dibs. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 17:46, 28 December 2025 (UTC)

• Heads up I was hoping to get to this today or tomorrow but I've been laid out by a post-holiday plague so it'll be a bit before I'm smart enough to read things again. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 05:28, 5 January 2026 (UTC)

Prose

• "Nazi zombie fiction combines the Nazi exploitation genre with the horror genre." feels a little stilted but I can't figure out how to loosen it up. I think it's that we go directly from this to a history of the use in fiction, so there's no follow-up. I would suggest moving this sentence into paragraph 2 maybe? It feels like it flows into that content better.
  • Done.
• "declined until returning in the 2000s" I think you could lose "returning" here, as "declined until" contextually suggests that the decline stopped
  • Done.
• "Nazi zombie video games" this phrasing seems to suggest that "Nazi zombie" is a genre of video game; I might tweak to something like "Video games began to feature Nazi zombies around this time"
  • Done.
• Suggest mentioning comics/literature in the lead as they are mentioned in the body
  • Mentioned comics, besides that all I found was one example of a pulp fiction story.
• Having now read the whole article, I might suggest including a brief background section discussing zombie and Nazi tropes in general. Because Nazi zombies as a concept rely so much on pre-existing ideas from zombie fiction and Nazi history and related fiction, it might be nice to have a grounding in those things first rather than encountering them for the first time deeper in the themes section
  • I'm not sure what the best approach to this might be. For the time being, I've moved part of the introduction in the "Themes" section up to "Genre" so the basic explanation is there. It's a bit more difficult to cover the basic tropes of zombie fiction because it changed over time.
    • It occurs to me that maybe "Genre" should precede "History" altogether. You'd expect "description of the thing" to be before "history of the thing", right? You could probably get a few sentences in there about pre-existing tropes. I do think you need an explicit mention of zombies originally being something that isn't the living dead, because otherwise the later phrase "making this one of the first zombie stories to depict zombies as the living dead" will be confusing to the modern reader, who may not know they were ever depicted otherwise. You probably also want a mention of zombies as cannibals/flesh-eaters, because a couple times later you call attention to depicting zombies not as cannibals without ever establishing that they are normally such.
• Nazi horror is redlinked farther down, but not in its first appearance in the History section - deliberate?
  • Fixed.
• "Revenge of the Zombies follows the same general plot as King of the Zombies" since you just used the name of both films in the previous sentence, suggest trimming at least one here or possibly combining the two sentences
  • Removed per next point.
• "instead of having the female character play a sacrificial role for the American protagonists" this is a surprising sentence because there's no indication that anyone played any kind of sacrificial role for anyone in King of the Zombies - can you expand on that?
  • It's not really relevant to the Nazi zombie element, so I've cut this part.
• " who had been taken by his father" taken like killed? kidnapped? stole their corpses from a graveyard?
  • Reworded so the emphasis is on the Nazi experiments.
• "but these were influenced by the science fiction stories" drop the "the" here since you're not referring to any specific stories. Also, the "but" implies this is in contrast to something, but it's not clear what
  • Fixed both.
• I think it might be helpful to describe (briefly) what zombies were depicted as prior to Romero, since the difference is not clear from the prose (yes there's the brief mention of brainwashing but otherwise it does mainly seem to be raising undead)
  • I'm not sure how to approach this. The "modern image" of the zombie is kind of abstract and the main contrast is that the early ones weren't clearly defined as a unified concept of a "zombie".
    • Still think having a background section would go some way toward resolving this, because if you're saying a guy invented the modern version of a thing, you need to clearly establish what it was he did differently than before.
• Suggest combining "Shock Waves (1977) was the first film..." with the following sentence and trimming a bit; currently it reads a bit stilted. Maybe something like "Nazi zombies in film were popularized by Shock Waves (1977), the first film to depict them as Romero's shambling corpses."? Gives a bit of variety and flow. (You could sfnm the refs if that'll bug you.)
  • Reworded a bit and then combined the sentences after this one.
• Would suggest moving the new style of zombies mention up to the first mention of 28 Days. Something like - "The zombie film genre was revived by films like Resident Evil (2002) and 28 Days Later (2002), which popularized a new style of swiftly-moving zombies." Then you can add the bit about films of this era to the sentence that lists them.
  • Reworked the paragraph.
• The source also calls Horrors of War a war movie, I might emphasize that (side note - that we don't have an actual article about WW2 movies is crazy to me)
  • Done.
• Awkward but I think the comic books at the end of that last para in History need their own paragraph, even if it's gonna be a single line, since it is a new topic
  • Done.
• No sourcing on Nazi zombies in modern literature, eh?
  • Couldn't find anything.
• "Critics of Nazi zombie fiction describe it as mere parody or as a misrepresentation of Nazism's threat." - Any way to expand on these analyses? "mere parody" of what? Misrepresentation in what sense?
  • The source doesn't go into a lot of detail, but I added "as something that can be contained or defeated".
• "where also depict a scientific explanation" - "which"?
  • Fixed.
• Suggest expanding the caption for the image to provide some context that it's costume/special effects from a film
  • Done, though I'm not sure about the wording
• "but they are not separated from their living identities the way that many zombies in fiction and still retain their Nazi affiliation." something missing here
  • Fixed.
• "Media about Nazi zombies rarely mentions the Holocaust directly, as the presence of zombies provides a new moral justification for killing them while the Holocaust is only remembered implicitly." The way this is worded seems to imply that this is purposeful on the part of filmmakers/authors and I'm not entirely sure we can say that in wikivoice. Are there any more details we can expand on?
  • Watered this down a bit, open to further wording changes.
• " the Nazi characteristic of individuals giving up their individuality to the Volksgemeinschaft" - "Volksgemeinschaft" needs a brief gloss in text here I think to be of much use to the casual reader
  • Done.
• "Discourse around Nazism..." as written, this sentence and the one that follows feel more like background about Nazis in fiction than directly related to themes of Nazi zombies
  • I agree. Removed.
• "Video games involving violent gameplay require moral disengagement on behalf of players" this feels like an uncomfortably subjective assessment to make in wikivoice
  • Rewrote so its stated as the intention of the game designers instead of an objective fact.
• "zombies have no moral considerations" - probably better phrased as "violence against zombies has no moral considerations"
  • Fixed.
• It feels odd that the movies section is so comprehensive but Zombie Army Trilogy isn't mentioned in the video games section, only in themes
  • Added a mention.
• "zombification of the Imperial Japanese Army, which presents the risk of Orientalism" in what way?
  • Switched to "Orientalist caricatures and stereotyping" to make it clearer, open to better wording.
• "This takes on additional meaning when it is compared to ideology like Nazism, where it becomes stronger as its numbers grow." - current wording is a bit awkward. Suggest something like "This can be seen as analogous to the "mob mentality" that occurs when large numbers of people begin to adhere to an ideology like Nazism", which I think feels (more) in line with the source.
  • Reworded per the spot check below.

Spot checks

Will return for spot checks. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 08:06, 11 January 2026 (UTC)

Arbitrarily checking a subset of refs as selected by a random number generator, plus a couple that I mentioned above:

• 1a Miller - "Zombie films first appeared as a genre in the 1930s." - While I don't doubt it, the pages from Miller cited don't seem to support the assertion. Checked p 139 in case it was earlier and I don't see it there either. Closest thing on p 141 is "Taken together, these three films [from later] extend familiar themes of mad science (...) and the undead", but nothing specifically about zombie films first appearing as a genre in the 1930s.
  • Those were the first generation of zombie films, but you're right that the source doesn't explicitly say first and I must've filled that blank myself. Removed.
    • Removal feels less optimal compared to finding a citation, since the date gives useful context, but I won't fight about it at GA.
• 1b Miller - Good
• 8 Faragher - "King of the Zombies ends with the American protagonist snapping his friend out of a zombified state by appealing to their friendship" - As a nitpick, McCarthy is still pretty clearly a zombie when he turns on Sangre. Faragher herself only says that he "turns on his master", not that he recovers.
  • Fair point, reworded.
• 11 a&b Kee - Both good
• 15 Miller - "The films They Saved Hitler's Brain (1963) and The Frozen Dead (1966) were about evil Nazi scientists who tried to raise Nazis from the dead." - Sole mention of these films is in this passage, "The association of evil (or at least, horribly misguided) science, Nazi Germany, and zombies that these films began continues, initially in not-quite zombie films like They Saved Hitler’s Brain (1963) and The Frozen Dead (1966)" which doesn't actually mention them featuring evil Nazi scientists who tried to raise Nazis from the dead
  • I looked at the edit history and it seems I butchered this while copyediting. I've reworded it.
    • Looks good
• 26a Hoglund - Good
• 26b Hoglund - Does not mention the second-wave films employing modern fast zombies, in fact, it specifically says that the zombies in Horrors of War are "stumbling and ineffective"
  • I've put this under the subsequent Miller citation, which does support everything here. I also checked a clip from the film to be sure, and I saw a running zombie, although it does seem to be the case that the film is lacking zombies and they're ineffective.
    • Mmm...it covers fast zombies being in Horrors of War, Outpost, and Dead Snow, but doesn't mention Blood Creek and Frankenstein's Army at all, and while it discusses Stone's Army/War of the Dead, it doesn't discuss the speediness of its zombies.
• 33 Bishop - Bishop is a little ambiguous here. To me it sounds like he's contrasting Horrors to Lake and Oasis by its setting, rather than its genre. Lake and Oasis are both straight horror films set after the war, whereas Horrors is set during the war, making it both a period piece and a war film in addition to being a horror film. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm not entirely sure we can confidently say it doesn't function as a "traditional horror film" based on Bishop alone
  • Just to be safe, I've changed it to "features characteristics of" the other genres, though I'm open to other wording.
    • Yeah, reasonable
• 34 Ward 2012 - Good
• 48 Bridges - Good
• 73 Chapman - See my last bullet point in the prose section - not wrong per se, but could be phrased better
  • Reworded, "mob mentality" is the phrase I was looking for.
    • Works for me

I was able to access all of these sources. Honestly I'm both surprised and concerned here. Of the 12 citations I checked, only 6 are unreservedly solid. The refs to Faragher, Bishop, and Chapman aren't badly wrong per se, but perhaps strain the source/could be phrased better. Miller 1a, Miller 15, and Hoglund 26b all make statements that I have not found in their respective sources. I'm not going to quickfail, but I do think this means I will have to do another set once you've addressed these. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 22:58, 12 January 2026 (UTC)

I've made the fixes for the spot checks as listed above. And since I had them in front of me, I also double-checked all of the Höglund, Miller, and Whittall citations, making a few minor wording changes and dropping a few redundant ones. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 01:33, 14 January 2026 (UTC)

No problem, I've replied - mostly good but the Miller sub for zombie speed has some issues. I've generated another set of checks, which follows, ref numbers are from the current revision:

• 4 Luckhurst - minor typo, should be p68 not p60 I think, but otherwise yup
• 16 abc Jüngerkes & Wienand - all 3 good
• 17 Bridges - both good
• 28 Ward - yup
• 33 Ordona - yup
• 45 Bridges - yup
• 52 Webley - reasonable
• 55 Hoglund - yup
• 57 Miller - yup
• 63 Hoglund - yup
• 65 Jüngerkes & Wienand - yup
• 69 Chapman - yup

Okay, much better on second go, no concerns here. Minor formatting nitpick that isn't a GA thing at all so obviously I won't die on the hill of it, but I noticed that Ordona gets a biblio entry and a sfn, but Walker of Rock Paper Shotgun gets a cite web; should be consistent one way or another. Other than that and the Miller thing noted above, I'm satisfied with the source checks. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 02:09, 17 January 2026 (UTC)

Premeditated Chaos, I've replied to everything above. Quick fixes are done and I'm interested in your opinions on some of the more structural changes. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 21:39, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

Sorry for being such a delinquent on this, I've replied above. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 18:32, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

I think I'm gonna pass this here, the spot checks are now solid and the prose is fine. The background suggestion is more of a FAC-level comprehensiveness situation; I don't want to hold this up longer seeking perfection when good is good enough for GA. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 18:52, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.