"Any Zombies Out There?" Undead Film Studies

Image from I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943)

The zombies in these films are a kind of revolutionary force of predators without a revolutionary program. Their only concern is to satisfy an instinctual drive for predation; a drive which, as is pointed out in Day of the Dead, serves no actual biological purpose. They appear and attack without explanation or reason, violating taken for granted principles of sufficient cause and rationality. Because of this, they are especially threatening to the surviving human beings. Enemies such as Nazis or Communists are comprehensible in terms of their historical backgrounds, economic interests, religious, political or philosophic beliefs. But these zombies are a new breed of enemy in that they do not operate according to the same underlying motivations human beings share in common. They are a nihilistic enemy which, as lifeless, spiritless automatons, exemplify the epitome of passive nihilism. They wander the landscape exhibiting only the bare minimum of power that is required for locomotion and the consumption of living flesh. They must steal life from the strong because they possess such a depressed store of innate energy. They are, literally, the walking dead. [John Marmysz, 'From "Night" to "Day": Nihilism and the Living Dead', First published in Film and Philosophy, vol. 3, 1996] 

In [George Romero's films], antagonism and horror are not pushed out of society (to the monster) but are rather located within society (qua the monster). The issue isn’t the zombies; the real problem lies with the “heroes”—the police, the army, good old boys with their guns and male bonding fantasies. If they win, racism has a future, capitalism has a future, sexism has a future, militarism has a future. Romero also implements this critique structurally. As Steven Shaviro observes, the cultural discomfort is not only located in the films’ graphic cannibalism and zombie genocide: the low-budget aesthetics makes us see “the violent fragmentation of the cinematic process itself." The zombie in such a representation may be uncanny and repulsive, but the imperfect uncleanness of the zombie’s face—the bad make-up, the failure to hide the actor behind the monster’s mask—is what breaks the screen of the spectacle. [Lars Bang Larsen, 'Zombies of Immaterial Labor: the Modern Monster and the Death of Death', E-Flux, No. 15, April 2010] 

The fear of one's own body, of how one controls it and relates to it, and the fear of not being able to control other bodies, those bodies whose exploitation is too fundamental to capitalist economy, are both at the heart of whiteness. Never has this horror been more deliriously evoked than in these films of the Dead [Richard Dyer,  White: Essays in Race and Culture (London: Routledge, 1997)].

Film Studies For Free is quaking in its digital boots as a whole host of freely accessible zombie studies gathers menacingly on the online horizon and shuffles ever nearer.... No, no, no, nooooo...

Yes.

Resistance is futile on this the Night of the Living Links.

(The only comforting thought is that film zombies also grow old and win the undying loyalty of their fans...)

• Lars Bang Larsen, 'Zombies of Immaterial Labor: the Modern Monster and the Death of Death', E-Flux, No. 15, April 2010
• Sean Brayton, 'The Post-White Imaginary in Alex Proyas’s I, Robot', Science Fiction Studies, #104, Volume 35, Part 1, February 2008
• Diane Carr, 'Textual Analysis, Digital Games, Zombies', Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory, Proceedings of DiGRA, 2009
• John Cussans, 'Tracking the Zombie Diaspora: From Subhuman Haiti to Posthuman Tucson', First published in Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil edited by Paul Yoder and Peter Mario Kreuter, May 2004
• John Cussans, 'Voodoo Terror: (Mis)Representations of Vodu and Western Cultural Anxieties', paper presented for Feels Like Voodoo Spirit – Haitian Art, Culture, Religion, The October Gallery, London October 14, 2000
• Scott Darwick, 'Who’s Laughing Now?', Williams Prize, 2005
• Jennifer Whitney Dotson, Considering Blackness in George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead: An Historical Exploration, MA Thesis, Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, 2006
• Robert J. Edmondstone, 'Beyond “Brutality”: Understanding the Italian Filone's Violent Excesses', PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2008
• Darren Elliott, ‘"Death is the New Pornography!" – Gay Zombies in Queer Horror and Bruce LaBruce’s Otto; or, Up With Dead People (CA/GE 2008)', Monsters and the Monstrous, Mansfield College, Oxford University, September 2009
• Phoebe Fletcher, 'Apocalyptic Machines: Terror and Anti-Production in the Post-9/11 Splatter Film', in The Many Forms of Fear, Horror and Terror edited by Leanne Franklin and Ravenel Richardson, InterDisciplinary.net, August 2009 (scroll to p. 81 in pdf)
• Michael Grant, 'Clint Eastwood: Avatar of the Undead', Michael Grant, February 8, 2010
• Joshua Gunn & Shaun Treat, 'Zombie Trouble: A Propaedeutic on Ideological Subjectification and the Unconscious', first published in Quarterly Journal of Speech Vol. 91, No. 2, May 2005, pp. 144/174
• Stephen Harper, 'Zombies, Malls, and the Consumerism Debate: George Romero's Dawn of the Dead', Americana, 1.2, Fall 2002
• Stephen Harper, '"I could kiss you, you bitch": race, gender, and sexuality in Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2: Apocalypse', from Jump Cut, No. 49, spring 2007
• Stephen Harper,  “Night of the Living Dead: Reappraising an Undead Classic”, Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 50, November 2005
• Eric Hamako (University of Massachusetts) presents: '“The Yellow Peril rises from the grave…to get your White women!" Orientalist themes in zombie stories', In Media Res, Monday, September 28, 2009
• Philip Horne, 'I shopped with a zombie', Critical Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 4, Winter 1992, 97-110
• Peter Hutchings, 'Uncanny Landscapes in British Film and Television', Visual Culture in Britain Vol. 5, Issue 2, 2004
• Phevos Kallitsis , 'Urban Fears and spatial transformations: the horror movie point of view', CityFutures '09, Madrid 2009
• Benjamin A. Lathrop, Cult Films and Film Cults: From The Evil Dead to Titanic, MA Thesis,Ohio University, June 2004
• Elizabeth MacLean Kent, Zombie as Parody: The Misuses of Science and the Non-Human Condition in Postmodern Society', MA Thesis, Auburn University, May 2009
• Mzilikazi Koné, 'Zombies, Haiti, and (Sex) Workers: On Relating to Modernity/Coloniality and Subalterity', Thinking Gender Papers, UCLA Center for the Study of Women, UC Los Angeles, 2010
• Samantha Lay, ''Audiences Across the Divide: Game to Film Adaptation and the Case of Resident Evil', Particip@tions Volume 4, Issue 2 (November 2007)
• John Marmysz, 'From "Night" to "Day": Nihilism and the Living Dead', First published in Film and Philosophy, vol. 3, 1996
• Elizabeth McAlister (Wesleyan Univ.), '“Obama, Zombies, and Black Male Secular Messiahs"', In Media Res, Thursday, October 1, 2009
• Melanie McDougald, Where I am, There (Sh)it will be: Queer Presence in Post Modern Horror Films, MA Thesis, Georgia State University, August 2009
• Bert Olivier, 'Architecture as consumer space', SAJAH, volume 23, number 1, 2008: 93–106
• Kim Paffenroth, 'Religious Themes of George Romero’s Zombie Movies', Golem: Journal of Religion and Monsters, Spring 2006
• Kim Paffenroth (Iona College), 'Dawn of the Dead (1978): Zombies and Human Nature', In Media Res, Wednesday, September 30, 2009 
• Mark Richardson, 'Where Can The Others Meet? Gender, Race and Film Comedy', Senses of Cinema, Issue 33, 2004 
• Janet G. Sayers, 'Emotional contagion and the infectious service smile: A response using parody', Notework [Museletter of the Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism], May 2007, pp. 20-26
• Steven Shaviro, 'Survival of the Dead', The Pinocchio Theory, September 25, 2010
• Steven Shaviro, 'Diary of the Dead', The Pinocchio Theory, April 26, 2008
• Steven Shaviro, 'Specters of Marx', The Pinocchio Theory, Feburary 8, 2006
• Steven Shaviro, 'Daniel Plainview', The Pinocchio Theory, Feburary 20, 2008
• Cathy Schlund-Vials (Univ. of Connecticut), 'Racism, Postcolonialism, and Neocolonial Zombies: Resident Evil 5', In Media Res, Tuesday, September 29, 2009
• De Villo Sloan, 'Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman as Post-literature', The International Fiction Review, 14, No. 1 (1987)
• Jasie Stokes, Ghouls, Hell and Transcendence: the Zombie in Popular Culture from Night of the Living Dead to Shaun of the Dead, MA Thesis, Brigham Young University, April 2010
• Jesse Stommel, '"Pity Poor Flesh": Terrible Bodies in the Films of Carpenter, Cronenberg, and Romero', Bright Lights Film Journal, No. 56, May 2007
• Margaret Twohy, 'From Voodoo to Viruses: The Evolution of the Zombie in Twentieth Century Popular Culture', MPhil Thesis, Trinity College Dublin, October 2008
• Darrin Verhagen, 'Audiovision, psy-ops and the perfect crime: Zombie Agents and sound design', Scan: Journal of Media Arts Cultures, Vol. 6, Number 2 September 2009
• Mike Wayne, 'Theses on realism and film', International Socialism, Issue 116, October 2007
• Cameron M. Weed, 'The Zombie Manifesto: The Marxist Revolutions in George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead', MA Thesis, Baylor University, May 2009
• Tony Williams, 'White Zombie: Haitian horror', from Jump Cut, no. 28, April 1983, pp. 18-20

Romero's Zombies

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