American Zombie Gothic by Kyle William Bishop

In its multiple iterations, the zombie has always signified a state of thralldom, variously operating as a metaphor for slavery, colonialism, industrial capitalism, consumerism, and social conformity. In the late sixties and seventies, the films of George Romero helped reinvent the zombie as a ravenous cannibal, a characterization that continues to the present day (though increasingly we see in the “zom com” subgenre a trend to humanize the zombie). The zombie first entered the American consciousness in the 1920s, via Haitian folklore, when it was popularly depicted as a reanimated corpse under the spell of a voodoo master.

Historically, the zombie has proven to be a flexible metaphor. In his influential essay “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” Jeffrey Jerome Cohen reminds us that monsters signify, that they exist “only to be read” (4). Why has this particular monster so pervaded our popular imagination in the 21st century? Consider The Walking Dead, Land of the Dead, World War Z, Zombieland, iZombie, Resident Evil, The Last of Us-from film and television, to novels and comic books, to video games and public spectacles like zombie walks, what do all of these zombie stories tell us about the stories we tell and why we tell them? With this essay, I join the moaning hordes who have tried to explain the resurgent popularity of the zombie in American culture. “Sometimes you forget all about them in spite of yourself, but all too often the very first thing you realize when you wake up is that they are there again, settling in like bad weather, hovering like plague-bearing insects, swarming precisely as if they were indeed blue demons dispatched on their mission of harassment by none other than the Chief Red Devil of all devils himself.” Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.Stomping the undead: a blues theory of zombie cultureĪdam Golub (California State University, Fullerton) Closely examining such influential works as Victor Halperin's White Zombie, Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie, Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2, Dan O'Bannon's The Return of the Living Dead, Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, and, of course, Romero's entire 'Dead' series, it establishes the place of zombies in the Gothic tradition. This book provides a cultural and critical analysis of the cinematic zombie tradition, starting with its origins in Haitian folklore and tracking the development of the subgenre into the twenty-first century. The voodoo-based zombie films of the 1930s and '40s reveal deep-seated racist attitudes and imperialist paranoia, but the contagious, cannibalistic zombie horde invasion narrative established by George A. Zombie stories are peculiarly American, as the creature was born in the New World and functions as a reminder of the atrocities of colonialism and slavery.

American Zombie Gothic by Kyle William Bishop