Overview

By the 1930s, zombie films illuminated theaters across the United States, captivating and horrifying audiences with a new monster that they seem to need and one they have run with (or from) ever since. Hollywood launched its first feature-length zombie film in 1932, White Zombie. It was based largely on William Seabrook’s 1929 book The Magic Island. Horror movies had recently become quite the rage, hence a new monster could be highly profitable, which the zombie has proven to be ever since. People have written about and feared ghouls, ghosts, and flesh-eating humanish creatures for thousands of years. For just as long, they have also feared the end of the world, the apocalypse, which is covered extensively in the first section of this book. In this chapter we will revisit some protozombic mythology and literature and summarize the most popular forms of zombie literature in the twentieth century. Then we will consider zombie cinema and how, when, and why the ideas of the apocalypse and the zombie collided in the 1960s in Pennsylvania. The world has never been the same since.

Zombie Purists

Disclaimer: I am one of these, someone who rejects arguments that zombies are actually quite ancient and can be found in a long history of literary traditions stretching back to the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Bible. I agree with Sarah Juliet Lauro that the zombie is actually a modern monster and that earlier literary manifestations of the living dead or resurrected dead—however dreadful and dangerous they might be—are really no more than “protozombie myths.” This is because they do not have “the crucial element of the resurrected’s enslavement by a master.”¹ In White Zombie, such a crucial element is featured, as the victims, the living dead—who, incidentally, are all white—toil mindlessly in a sugar mill in Haiti under the domination of their master. As we will see momentarily, the zombie would soon move away from such forms of mindless, sauntering enslavement and actually speed up and become contagious and cannibalistic.

In this chapter, we carefully consider earlier literary efforts that some claim to be zombic, but my position is that the zombie comes from Haiti, and that the apocalypse was first wed to the zombie in Pennsylvania in 1968—much more on that fateful and profitable marriage in another section. In addition to Lauro, other zombie purists feel the same way, including two of France’s most influential twentieth-century philosophers, Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze. As they put it, “The only modern myth is the myth of the zombies – mortified schizos, good for work, brought back to reason.” Furthermore, “the myth of the zombie is a work myth, not a war myth.”² Earlier, although he didn’t have any knowledge of zombies, Karl Marx, perhaps the most influential philosopher in world history, employed the vampire as a metaphor for the capitalistic exploitation of mindless laborers, as Steven Shaviro explains:

Marx himself describes capital as “dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and the more it lives, the more labor it sucks”. . . . More and more, living labor is transformed into dead labor, through the extraction and realization of surplus value, and the zombification of the work force. Productivity increases, and prices are driven down, because the same amount of living labor is progressively able to produce more commodities, by setting more dead labor into motion.³

But before dismissing outright claims that some zombies preceded those that emerged in Haiti, let us briefly consider relevant historical texts, some of them quite ancient, that have been thought to be zombic. Our procedure will be chronological, before making our way to the twentieth century with more focus and detail. First, the Epic of Gilgamesh was written in what is today Iraq, then Mesopotamia, sometime between 2100 and 1400 B.C.E. It is perhaps “humanity’s oldest work of literature,”⁴ and it discusses a great deal of suffering, gloom, ghouls, and doom. Gilgamesh, the title character, is an ambitious king. Upon his close friend’s death, the king becomes distraught and wanders aimlessly, disheveled and filthy, in search of eternal life. Without going into too much detail, per Jim Kline, this epic recounts the king’s “wildly entertaining episodic adventures, and its main themes have universal appeal: the striving for lasting fame and glory, the fear of death, and the longing for immortality.”⁵

But are there really zombies in Gilgamesh? There is a scene in which the king rejects the advances of the goddess of love and war, Ishtar. Enraged, she threatens to “knock down the gates of the netherworld: I will smash the door posts and leave the doors flat down, and will let the dead go up and eat the living.”⁶ Now, while that might sound like divine wrath unleashing the zombie apocalypse, this passage is actually a citation of an earlier poem. And later in Gilgamesh these risen dead are hardly enslaved or menacing, but are “cold, lonely souls imagined as dust-eating birds.”⁷ Nonetheless, that didn’t stop The History Channel from alluding to Gilgamesh as the first historical instance of the zombie.⁸ They were more ghostly than revived beings in the flesh, however, and they had nothing to do with the apocalypse and had no masters.

There are multiple passages in the Bible that some interpreters claim as evidence of very ancient zombies. To quote one such passage (Ezekiel 4:12): “And this shall be the plague with which the Lord will strike all the peoples that wage war against Jerusalem: their flesh will rot while they are still standing on their feet, their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths.”⁹ There are also many biblical passages about the resurrection of the dead. Indeed, all the dead are prophesied to be resurrected at the end of time, as we saw in the earliest chapters of this book. But they are not zombies, not unearthed, enslaved former cadavers that a sorcerer either uses for work or sells or rents out.

Beyond the Bible, one of the earliest classic texts of Jewish literature, with roots in the thirteenth century B.C.E., portrays something of a monster in the form of The Golem. Golem means “unformed mass” in Hebrew. There are certainly things about the golem that evoke zombies, as this monstrous being “performs persons’ labor,”¹⁰ but it is made of clay. I agree with Lauro that the golem is not a zombie per se “because it is not reanimated but merely animated from clay.”¹¹ It was a major influence, though, on Mary Shelley’s classic 1818 novel, Frankenstein. Shelley’s monster was not really a zombie either, being made up of multiple parts from multiple dead people, whereas each zombie is a total and unique human being.

Concerning more modern literature, there are some interpreters who find William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to be zombic, as the deceased Juliet is revived by Friar Laurence, who, in Act V, Scene II, utters a memorable line, “Come from that nest/Of death, contagion and unnatural sleep.” There was a play on Broadway recently called Romeo and Juliet and Zombies, followed by a movie called Warm Bodies that Lauren Davis describes as “a funny and soft-hearted film that plays far more on zombie- and date-movie tropes than it does on the Bard, and puts an optimistic spin on the undead apocalypse.”¹² Meanwhile, one Haitian Vodou priest, Patrick Sylvain, reflects on Juliet’s deathlike state in the Bard’s original masterpiece as follows:

The so-called primitive people, whether the Mayans, Egyptians, or Scots, or the Irish, they’ve had a knowledge of the earth for a long time. And, we could also think of Romeo and Juliet, right? The alchemist, the priest, who put Juliet in a state like death. And we celebrate that, right? Because that was beautiful literature that Shakespeare gave us. She was, in a sense, a zombie.¹³

Some 225 years after Shakespeare bequeathed Romeo and Juliet to humanity, another English writer swept a zombie-like being into one of his books. Lots of them, actually. Far more famous for having penned Robinson Crusoe, one of the most widely translated books in history, Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) published a historical novel in 1722 about an epidemic of bubonic plague in England. This plague actually occurred in 1665 and killed nearly 100,000 people. Based in part on his uncle’s recollections of the plague, A Journal of the Plague Year is set in a dystopian world of nearly dead, infectious victims of the plague. “Many people had the plague in their very blood and were themselves but walking putrefied carcasses whose breath was infectious and their sweat poison.”¹⁴ It was all quite apocalyptic, a large city in which wandering semi-corpses could infect you with their sweat, unwitting agents “evidently from the secret hand of Him who had first sent this disease as a judgment upon us.” Even doctors, per Defoe, believed “that it was all supernatural, that it was extraordinary.”¹⁵ The afflicted undead are enraged and revolting and seek to infect others throughout the diseased city. But they are not the risen dead, thus not really zombies.

Andrew Stott compellingly reflects on how such scenes presage some of the most influential zombie apocalypse films of the current age:

For something so grounded in fact, A Journal of the Plague Year conforms to the expectations of zombie narratives in almost every way. People look to the skies for the origin of the pestilence, as in George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead; its city of spacious abandonment and grassed-over streets anticipates the empty metropolis of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later; and as the King takes flight and the law implodes, the living are faced with the decision to team-up or go it alone in the style of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, where zombie-battling is merely a skull-cleaving interlude between the real battles for resources.¹⁶

However, Stott adds, “What A Journal of the Plague Year doesn’t have is zombies—at least not explicitly. Still, the numberless, suppurating victims are apt to behave like the undead at every turn…. Thus, babies kill their mothers, and men tackle women in the street hoping to infect them with a deadly kiss.”¹⁷ There were no such things as vaccinations or antibiotics or germ science (or Clorox!) to save us then, but by the grace of God the plague subsided. However, the following year was just as dreadful and apocalyptic, as London burned in 1666. The Great Fire began in a bakery.¹⁸ “The scale of the damage was immense.”¹⁹ As one observer of the aftermath remarked, “The people who now walked about the ruines, appeard like men in some dismal desart, or rather in some Great Citty, lay’d waste by an impetuous and cruel Enemy.”²⁰ Some 100,000 people, a quarter of the city’s population, were left homeless.²¹ A doomsday scenario, indeed, and quite a precursor to the zombie apocalypse film, as noted by Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lens: “In cinema, the contemporary zombie and the rhetoric of plague are never far removed from each other.”²²

Appearing a couple of hundred years after Defoe’s remarkable Journal, two works of literary fiction that would better qualify as novels, and are sometimes touted as the first zombie novels, are H.P. Lovecraft’s 1922 six-part series of stories Herbert West – Reanimator and Richard Matheson’s 1957 I Am Legend. Kevin Alexander Boon calls the former “the first work of literary fiction to qualify as zombie literature” and “one of the most important works of early zombie fiction,” though admitting that Lovecraft’s classic “does not feature either a Haitian zombie or a variant of the zombie drone.”²³ Because of that conflictive caveat, I disagree with Boon and instead embrace Angela Tenga and Kyle William Bishop’s observation that in Lovecraft we merely “glimpse the approach of the more popular figure of the zombie.”²⁴ It would take several decades before any novel in English got closer to featuring a zombie, although the creature had already for decades enjoyed marked success in cinema, “primarily because the monsters are primarily visual in nature” as Bishop has argued.²⁵

I Am Legend features most of the right ingredients for modern and postmodern zombie fiction and film, like plague, pandemic, and contagious, formerly human creatures. There are really no zombies; they are more like vampiric monsters. But Matheson’s classic can be credited with fertilizing popular fascination with the zombie apocalypse. Published in 1954, I Am Legend was a bestselling book of horror fiction that has been adapted as a movie three times, all of them highly successful. The last, starring Will Smith, was released in 2007. I Am Legend is apocalyptic and features monstrous beings, who are the only human survivors of a pandemic, with one exception (Robert Neville). The drama centers on Neville’s efforts to survive and to kill these beings. The novel had a profound influence on George Romero’s epochal 1968 zombie apocalypse film Night of the Living Dead, but the creatures in Matheson’s classic are not really zombies. Romero is quoted as saying, “It seemed to me that it was about revolution, underneath…. The dead are coming back to life, that’s the revolution.”²⁶

But whether there are zombies in either Herbert West – Reanimator or I Am Legend depends, of course, on how one defines zombie. The Zombie Research Society, which is quite trustworthy in the realm of American cultural studies, offers the following definition of the zombie: “a relentlessly aggressive human or reanimated human corpse driven by a biological infection.” Though in Haiti, zombies are often biologically infected and reanimated corpses, they are not “relentlessly aggressive.”²⁷ So I take issue with this definition. The Zombie Research Society includes excellent scholars and professionals in the literary and cinematic worlds (including, up until his death, Romero himself), but although “hundreds of thousands of active members, experts, and volunteers around the world” comprise the organization, evidently few of them have extensive experience in Haiti or in West or Central Africa.²⁸

The 1697 erotic thriller by Pierre-Corneille Blessebois, Le zombi du Grand Perrou, was the first mention of a zombie in print, in a short novel no less. No other zombie fiction would appear for centuries. It is thus a moot debate about what the first zombie novel is. It is Blessebois, plain and simple, case closed. Subsequent writings mentioning zombies were, in the interim, few and far between. And they were usually either in travelogues or in anthropological accounts, like the pioneering texts by Seabrook, Hurston, and Wirkus, which were not novels per se. Per Kyle Bishop, “No short fiction, novels, or films depicting herds of flesh-eating zombies predate 1968,”²⁹ the year that Romero released Night of the Living Dead. (It seems that neither Bishop nor Romero ever read Blessebois.) But in the 1950s, as this genre of literature became increasingly popular, zombies found their way into comic books. Per Tim Lazendörfer:

Zombies and their close relatives also took to the pages of the rising tide of comic books, most notably in the Tales from the Crypt series from EC Comics. Many rising dead bodies populated this and other series, bent on revenge, seeking to return to their homes without realizing they are dead.³⁰

Appearing from time to time as a powerful and compelling chief subject in Haiti’s long and rich literary history, the zombie is the central being, motif, symbol, platform, villain, and foil in one of the most celebrated Haitian novels, Frankétienne’s 1975 classic Dézafi, “(t)he definitive literary revision of the Haitian zombie.”³¹ At times abstract and poetic, structured in a rather unorthodox “spiralist” way, it is the story of a cruel Vodou priest named Sintil who “has stolen souls,”³² and has the power to enslave people by zombifying them, which he does en masse in the village of Bouanèf. This all goes well for Sintil until his daughter and one-time accomplice, Siltana, falls in love with Klodonis, a zombie on her father’s plantation, and liberates him from his deathlike state by feeding him salt. Her plan for romance backfires, however, when the awakened zombie “hits Siltana with a bone-breaking bone-crushing body-felling backhanded slap.”³³ Feeding the other zombies on the plantation a salted broth, Klodonis wakes them to rise up and revolt, and they soon torch the plantation and kill Sintil, tearing his body into “tiny bits and pieces.”³⁴ It was a daring and dangerous book for Frankétienne to write during the Duvailer dictatorship, as many have interpreted Dézafi to be a critique of the brutal dynastic regime,³⁵ with the zombies representing the oppressed Haitian masses and the Vodou priest the regime. As such, the book can be read as both a call for rebellion against oppression and a stoic reminder that zombies are both human and curable. A book of hope, alas.

There was a marked uptick in interest in zombies among Americans in the 1990s, thanks in part to the popularity of George Romero’s films and their remakes (Night of the Living Dead [1968], Dawn of the Dead [1978], and Day of the Dead [1985]).³⁶ But there was also “a resurgence of zombie fiction in the USA and Europe in the 2000s,”³⁷ including youth novels (some in South Africa, too). Then the real zombie book uprising happened around 2005 and ramped up steeply after the global economic recession of 2008. When the world seems like it is about to end, zombies captivate us, as was the case during the COVID-19 pandemic. And, of course, a number of scholars “credit the resurgence to the events of September 11, 2001.”³⁸

John Vervaeke, Chistopher Matropietro, and Filip Miscevic estimate that more than “600 zombie films have been made.” What is striking in their calculations, published in 2017, is that “over half of them have been in the last ten years”:

Two great waves have lapped onto the shore of American cinema: one around 2001, and then again in 2008. Twenty-Eight Days Later comes out in 2002, George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead is remade in 2004, and Zombieland becomes the highest-grossing zombie film to date in 2009. This is quickly overtaken in 2013, first by Warm Bodies, and then by the Brad Pitt epic World War Z. By 2015, there are three TV series based on zombies: Z Nation on Netflix, iZombie on CW, and AMC’s breakthrough hit, The Walking Dead.³⁹

Zombie comic books and graphic novels have recently also proliferated, literary and artistic genres that thrive mightily in the twenty-first century. And, like a sprawling horde, the zombie has entered virtually all other forms of literature.⁴⁰ This especially took flight in the United States in late 2001, for “the anxiety about contagious otherness is a dominant discursive strain in the post-9/11 world.”⁴¹ Within a few years after the disaster of the World Trade Center, one could “find a hefty selection of zombie literature in the fantasy or young adult section of the book store, and among the graphic novels and comic books,” as Lauro notes. Fast forward a bit, and “now one finds an increasing diversity of zombies even in the humor section . . . and in the children’s section . . . and they are featured in highly lauded works of contemporary fiction.”⁴²

Zombie literature has multiplied and prospered ever since then. It seems that Amazon has tired of counting the number of zombie books it sells, because when you search for zombie literature it simply abandons precision in its counts and indicates “over 50,000!”⁴³ eBay is a little less prolific, but as of today it lists 28,374 items in a search for books about zombies.⁴⁴ Seemingly the most popular have to do with Minecraft, the bestselling video game in history. This is all part of a “major rise in zombie fiction,” per Lazendörfer: “The origins of this perhaps surprising development lie in a series of films, comics, and books that appeared in 2002 and 2003.”⁴⁵

Then a few years later, in 2010, the most popular television series in history was launched, Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, which ran over a hundred episodes until 2022. It’s worth noting that the word “zombies” is not used in this graphicly violent drama—the monsters are usually referred to as “walkers”—but these are unmistakably zombies, and the apocalypse is afoot. If you watch it with Spanish subtitles, you often see the word zombi used as a translation for these hording, ferocious, slumbering, flesh-eating, horrific, undead creatures. The entire series is based on Kirkman’s successful series of zombie apocalypse comic books.⁴⁶

The sprawling hordes of zombie books make it impossible to provide but a surface sketch of some of the most popular and influential. But, to speak of another sprawling zombic literary horde, such is also the case with the number of scholarly publications on zombies, which, according to Daniel Drezner, has multiplied by “five times” in recent years. “Since the start of the 2008 financial crisis, the zombie has supplanted interest in all other paranormal phenomena.”⁴⁷ Up until then, the zombie trailed hobbits, wizards, and vampires, but that had changed dramatically by 2008, with the zombie surging and, within a year, surpassing all other monsters in popularity. The peak of this was around 2013, but with the coronavirus pandemic, zombie searches on Google multiplied by an equally impressive rate. I have no idea what this regional breakdown might mean, if anything, but the leading place in the United States for zombie searches was West Virginia, while New York and Washington, DC ranked at the bottom of the list.⁴⁸ In the millions of books that Google has scanned over the years, meanwhile, a simple Ngram search demonstrates that in the late 1960s an uptick in zombies appearing in print began, with a dramatic increase as of 1999.⁴⁹ Perhaps that had something to do with Y2K and an expanded popular belief that when the end of the world comes, zombies will be part of the drama. It should be added here that the zombie film boom of the early decades of the twenty-first century has been fueled in part by the work of “amateur enthusiasts, with little training, financing, or technical support,” according to Peter Dendle, with “the vast majority” of recent zombie films being “backyard affairs accessible only to hardcore fans who don’t mind non-budget filmmaking.”⁵⁰

Arguably, Kirkman’s comic book series The Walking Dead is the most influential recent zombie publication, in large part because of the unsurpassed success of the spinoff TV series by the same name. But what are the bestselling zombie books in recent years, say, of 2001 in particular? In the teen and young adult books category, Amazon sells more copies of these titles than anything else, in descending order of popularity: Attack on Titan 1, by Hajime Isayama; Hell on Earth, by Tony Urban; The Silver Eyes, by Scott Cawthon; Hollow Men, by Amanda Hocking; Dread Nation, by Justina Ireland; Road to Riches, by Wesley R. Norris; Dead America, by Derek Slaton; Zombie Road VIII, by David A. Simpson; Dead America – Low Country, by Derek Slaton; and Rot and Ruin, by Jonathan Maberry. In the more general category of bestselling recent zombie novels, here are the top five from the now-closed Penn Book Center in Philadelphia:

• The First 30 Days, by Lora Powell (2019)

• The Complete Undead Apocalypse Series, by Derek Shupert (2021)

• The Living Dead, by George A. Romero and Daniel Kraus (2020)

• The Zombie Survival Guide, by Max Brooks (2003)

• World War Z, by Max Brooks (2006)⁵¹

To quickly consider these books in that order: I could not find any scholarly reviews of The First 30 Days, but on one website people raved about the book, like Mandy Andersen:

Fantastic zombie read that had everything I want in a zomb apoc book. I could have done with a smidge more romance since there was practically none. But it still packed a mighty punch and I loved it. Even though it wrapped up pretty well, I would love more. 5 Stars!

“A smidge more romance” is something many people would like, I guess, especially zombies, who are people, after all … sort of.⁵² At least they once were.

Shupert’s Series consists of four novels, Genesis, Deadfall, Riptide, and Dead Reckoning and is self-described as “an action-packed story of surviving the end at all cost.”⁵³ Romero died in 2017, thus his novel, The Living Dead, is posthumous, coauthored with Daniel Kraus, a novelist and longtime zombie aficionado.⁵⁴ One reviewer calls it “in the end a story about something unexpected: the quality of mercy…. zombies are … essentially victims caught up in a cosmic mystery that no one will ever solve.”⁵⁵ Max Brooks has two novels on this list, The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z, work that brought him this praise from one reviewer: “a luminary on the subject of zombie pandemic preparedness.” Guide “is firmly rooted in parody,” D. Ben Woods offers, more a handbook than a novel, which “presents an entertaining view of how to prepare for and deal with the unexpected – whether pandemic, natural disaster, failed state, or the rise of the undead.”⁵⁶ And, of course, World War Z would be adapted into the most expensive Hollywood movie ever made.

That is but a quick glimpse of a few zombie novels that, over the last twenty years, have sold tens of millions of copies. Thousands of others were published during this period, as well as e-zines, comic books, and zombie poetry. In fact, by 2011, there was enough zombie poetry swarming the literary world that performance poet Rob “Ratpack Slim” Sturma saw fit to collect work from some fifty poets who specialize in this emergent subgenre in a volume titled Aim for the Head.⁵⁷ It even includes zombie haikus and, for New York Times critic William Grimes, is the first attempt to have zombie poetry taken seriously. Sadly, though, “the genre has struggled to rise above the gross out, mass-murder sensibility of the comic book and video games.”⁵⁸ Some slam poets have tried, and at times succeeded valiantly, beautifully, and powerfully, though, like Melissa Lozada Oliva (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-Y9zgOSUnk).

Not to be outdone, playwrights have also been incorporating zombies into their work, like Richard Henry (Shakespeare and the Zombie Plague of 1590), Wade Bradford (Downtown Zombie), and Don Zoldis (Ten Ways to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse). Some even write zombie plays for kids; for instance, Sarah Mayo Tighe published in 2018 a play for older children and young teens titled Zombies in the Staffroom.⁵⁹ And three years later, a senior-year theater enthusiast at Hutchinson High School named Samantha Hagberg wrote a play called Love Bites, “a teen rom-com set in the 1980s, [that] is a mash-up of ‘The Breakfast Club’ and ‘Scooby Doo’ featuring wild hair, zombies and familiar tropes from an iconic era of American cinema.” Love Bites was staged that year, 2021, by the Minnesota student’s school.⁶⁰

Novels, short stories, poetry, plays, comics, e-zines … any literary genre imaginable has been part and parcel of the vast sprawl of zombie writings, which by now seem countless, thousands upon thousands of items, and that is only English-language texts. One book reviewer at the New York Times, Terrence Rafferty, felt as early as 2011 that the market had become saturated and “wearying”:

All these literary products are, in varying degrees, worth reading, or at least dipping into on one of those days when you’re not feeling unambiguously alive yourself. But taken as a whole the recent onslaught of zombie fiction is wearying. There’s a certain monotony built into the genre: in too many of these tales, the flesh-­chompers advance, are repelled, advance again and are repelled again, more or less ad infinitum.⁶¹

The scholarly literature is also vast, as already noted, with work in recent decades across a range of disciplines. “The humanities are replete with decompositions of flesh-eating ghouls,” for instance, while even zoologists, political scientists, computer scientists, and physicists have studied and written about zombic matters and matter.⁶² And, of course, many scholars have written about zombie cinema, to which our attention now turns.

Zombies in Film: A Brief History

“It’s official,” writes Ian Olney. “The zombie apocalypse is here. The living dead have been lurking in popular media and culture since the 1930s.” Nowhere more so than on film (whether the silver screen or television) do zombies sprawl, spawn, lurk, infect, and cannibalistically devour. They are also amazingly, if unsettlingly, diverse: “fast zombies and slow zombies, flesh-eating zombies and brain-eating zombies, plague zombies and rage zombies, voodoo zombies and demonic zombies, redneck zombies and nazi zombies, teen zombies and period zombies, sex zombies and pet zombies.”⁶³ He could have also added stripper zombies, as there is a 2008 movie called Zombie Strippers, which is basically about a strip club in a fictional Nebraska town named Sartre, where the female dancers become zombies and zombify the male clientele. Toss in zombie monks, while we are at it, and dockworker zombies.

There are many other zombies—too many, to be sure—even on The Simpsons. In one episode titled “Treehouse of Horror Halloween,” Bart is responsible for the zombies’ emergence in Springfield, where they eat brains, only to find that Homer Simpson doesn’t have one of those. So Bart’s dad survives, but not before killing several zombies. One could reasonably argue that the ultimate platform for zombies today is television, with the monsters roaming from The Simpsons to Scooby Doo to the most successful TV series of all time, The Walking Dead. After all (until the advent of the internet and smartphone), according to Pierre Bourdieu, “television enjoys a de facto monopoly on what goes into the heads of a significant part of the population and what they think.”⁶⁴ Launched in 1949, the television soon eclipsed the newspaper as the leading source of information for Americans. This monopoly has offered easier access to zombies; people don’t have to leave their homes to find them. It has also offered a medium through which screenwriters and directors continue to make interesting and often profitable adjustments to the monster, something that is truly global today. It all began on this monopolistic medium with a late episode of the spectacular hit series The Twilight Zone (1959–1964), described here by Luiz H. C.:

Considered a mashup between Science Fiction and Horror genres, one of its last episodes was “Mr. Garrity and the Graves,” set in the late 19th century American West. There (Happiness, Arizona) and then, the title character dupes people into thinking that he can resurrect the dead! Being a recently arrived outsider, and making a seemingly ridiculous claim, Mr. Garrity gains the trust of the locals when he resurrects a dog that had been run over by a horse and wagon! Soon thereafter, Garrity resurrects a man who was shot by his own brother, and Happiness goes into total freak mode, as most folks in the Boot Hill cemetery are likewise murder victims and could exact revenge. I won’t spoil the plot for you, but it is cool that Garrity’s wagon driver was a resurectee named Ace!⁶⁵

There was something of a zombie lull after that, but the undead came raging back on TV screens in the 1990s, with Buffy the Vampire Slayer reigning supreme. Only once, however, did the series turn zombic. It was in Season Three, to be precise, with “Dead Man’s Party” and “Zeppo.” In “Dead Man’s Party,” “a macabre Nigerian mask begins to reanimate the deceased residents of Sunnydale, resulting in undead party-crashers at Buffy’s welcome-back celebration.” “Zeppo” is about “Xander befriending a rabble-rousing group of undead high-schoolers in an attempt to look ‘cool.’”⁶⁶

As Paul Scott observes, “Some recent television series promote a new category of zombie that is neither mindless nor predatory: the British In the Flesh (2013–2014); the French The Returned [Les Revenants] (2012–2015); the Australian Glitch (2015–2019); and the American Resurrection (2014–2015).” Though successful, none of these series were nearly as popular as The Walking Dead, yet they offer a “radical inversion” of the “walkers” hunted down by Rick Grimes and his ever-shifting group of survivors, and they are not “outbreak narratives,”⁶⁷ which The Walking Dead clearly is. Furthermore, there is no shortage of new takes and cultural adjustments to the zombie in Asia, evinced by the recent popular series in Japan Love You as the World Ends and the Netflix series in Korea Zombieverse. It would take an entire book to survey zombie television, a book that would quickly be outdated, given the diversification and cultural and global sprawl. So in this chapter, while tipping our hat to TV, we will focus instead on cinema intended for consumption in theaters (or via streaming services). With popcorn. Loaded with melted butter and salt—and the salt will come in handy should the zombies leap from the screen and toward your seat.

Turning fuller attention to cinema, returning to its very origin, White Zombie appeared in 1932 and captivated audiences throughout the United States. It was an interesting moment in the history of cinema, as the first feature film with sound, The Jazz Singer, had just premiered in 1927, starring the most popular entertainer in America, Al Jolson, a white performer who controversially appeared in blackface throughout much of the movie. Produced by Edward Halperin and directed by his brother Victor Halperin and starring one of the greatest horror actors of all time, Bela Lugosi, White Zombie was filmed entirely in the United States, but the setting is Haiti. It attempts to stick to the Haitian notion of the living dead zombie (zonbi kò kadav) who is forced into labor, the kind portrayed by Seabrook and Hurston, whose writings introduced the Haitian zombie to a receptive American readership in the 1920s and 1930s. White Zombie is based largely on Seabrook’s The Magic Island. The one important deviation is that the zombies who work the sugar mill in the movie are all white, and others who are zombified as the plot thickens are also white. One other key twist in the filmet is that the zombified are not people stolen from graves and barely resuscitated, but victims of poisoning who never experience interment.

By 1940, at least five other zombie films had appeared on the silver screen, including a second by Victor Halperin, Revolt of the Zombies, in 1936. That very year saw another zombie movie appear. This one had the exotic title Ouanga, which was spelled in various ways over the years (the correct spelling in Haitian Creole is wanga) and means “magic charm, amulet, talisman or powder used for either good or evil magic.”⁶⁸ In 1943, the highly praised film I Walked with a Zombie, though set on a fictional Caribbean island, kept the Hollywood zombie rooted in Haiti. That would soon change, but the centrality of whiteness and the otherness of Blackness have long marked zombie cinema, as Olney opines:

The zombie film . . . invites contemplation of white deathliness, specifically in the West’s treatment of racial Others, from the colonial era to our own age of neocolonialism. While its representations of blackness have changed over time, zombie cinema has been remarkably consistent in portraying whites as dead and as bringers of death.⁶⁹

It all launched this way (and more zombies would lurch this way) just after the U.S. Occupation of Haiti, as the bringer of death in White Zombie is a white man named Murder Legendre, played by Lugosi, while the uncured zombified are also white and mindlessly walk off a seaside cliff to their deaths far below–most of them, at least, while Legendre is himself pushed off.

Several other zombie films followed and “generally flopped.” The creature crept out of Hollywood and into places like the Bowery and Broadway, in New York. By the late 1950s, more than twenty zombie movies had been produced, films that are often “most obviously concerned with the appropriation of female bodies, and the annihilation of female minds, by male captors.” There is also a “charged racial tension that pervades these films.”⁷⁰ But it wasn’t until the 1960s that “the protean zombie concept crystallized into its currently recognizable form,” as Dendle argues. The dean of zombie movie studies credits two feature-length films with launching this crystallization, “one in England and one in America: The Plague of the Zombies and Night of the Living Dead.” This is because “Plague established the zombie’s decaying appearance and nasty appearance, while Night established its motives and limitations.”⁷¹ Let us take a brief look at each of these pivotal zombie films.

Produced by Anthony Nelson-Keys, directed by John Gillig, and based on the screenplay written by Peter Bryan, The Plague of the Zombies premiered in 1966. Despite the word “plague” in the title, the zombies in the film are not contagious. There is, however, an ample number of newly dead and buried, victims of a local plague, and many of them are transformed into zombies. Though the setting is England in the nineteenth century, the zombie master, Squire Clive Hamilton, had lived in Haiti, where he learned the secrets of resurrecting the dead. He does this locally, in Cornwall to be exact, to have unpaid laborers toil in his tin mine, so these are Cornish zombies. One unique twist is that Hamilton keeps effigies of his zombies in coffins, which evidently function to keep his workforce zombified. Spoiler alert: It all falls apart for the zombie master when the dolls are torched and the zombies gain awareness of their state, as if they had eaten salt, which is how they come to realize their undead state in Haiti.

Drendle, author of The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia, feels that this film, Plague, has been underappreciated in zombie cinematic history and analysis, and I agree. Here he underscores the importance of the film: “Plague is at the threshold – it relies on the old codes of zombie behavior but pioneers the appearance of the zombies to come.” The new twist with the zombies in Plague is that, though being “still the subservient, mostly passive, non-cannibalistic drones of early zombie films,” in this film we have zombies who “are decayed, blotchy cadavers, staggering around clumsily rather than walking in perfect mechanical rhythm.”⁷² Plague was thus verily a groundbreaking film. In part, this was because it was the product of Hammer Film Productions, which had by then surpassed Hollywood to dominate “the world of cinematic horror.”⁷³ And, although the film does not feature contagious zombies, the outbreak of zombies in the film was “caused by a mysterious illness – albeit one provoked by Haitian rituals,” as Nick Redfern explains. This “ensured that Hammer’s zombie-themed classic significantly helped pave the way for future productions in which matters of a viral, rather than Voodoo, nature were all-dominating.”⁷⁴

George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) is widely considered to be the most important and influential zombie movie of all time, for “Romero is the Shakespeare of the zombie film, and this is his Hamlet.”⁷⁵ Filmed on a low budget (the blood was actually “Bosco chocolate syrup”),⁷⁶ with mostly amateur actors in western Pennsylvania, Night has been the subject of countless scholarly interpretations, commentaries, and at least one documentary,⁷⁷ while Ben Hervey has written an entire book about the movie, “a film that has been called the most terrifying ever made.”⁷⁸ It is based largely on Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend, which had been made into a film in Italy, The Last Man on Earth (1964), starring the legendary Vincent Price (1911–1993), four years prior. Born in St. Louis, Price is widely considered to be one of the greatest horror movie actors of all time. He starred in numerous terrorizing films, including several based on the work of Edgar Allan Poe, and even in a 1969 Western that has nothing to do with zombies or the apocalypse, despite its zombic title, More Dead than Alive. But there really weren’t zombies in any Vincent Price movies, leaving the door open for Romero to release his creatures to rummage, pillage, conquer, devour, and roam.⁷⁹ In Night the word zombie is not used; instead, the dreadful, cannibalistic, contagious, infected beings are called “ghouls.” And it appears that the end of the world is nigh.

Whereas Plague has a central Haitian component, Night does not. Even as earlier zombie films had abandoned Haiti, none were nearly as influential or horrifying as Romero’s classic, in which zombies first shuffle about in a cemetery and then seek to eliminate, if not all of humanity, a bunch of terrified people in Pennsylvania. How did they become zombies, or ghouls, in the first place? Why, radiation from Venus, of course! Some sort of satellite had returned from Venus’s orbit and brought back radiation that turned humans into zombies. In Night, scientists speculate that the reanimation of the ghouls, the living dead, was sparked from space. That is, from a space probe that had been sent to Venus only to explode upon reentering the earth’s atmosphere. This is perhaps why, when Kirkman was asked about the cause of the apocalypse in his imagination and work, especially, of course, The Walking Dead, he replies “space pore,”⁸⁰ tipping his hat to Romero and Night.

Night of the Living Dead premiered in 1968 and was probably the most graphic horror movie ever made up until then. It was also hugely successful, selling out theaters nightly for weeks on end and being the haunting center for midnight viewing parties. It was not a Hollywood production made in some mainstream studio, but an independent effort. And it was totally shocking and revolutionary. The film has been hailed as a statement against capitalist greed, as a reflection of how “othered” civil rights and antiwar activists in America had become, and for having reflected our nation’s gravest fears and social concerns. The timing of Night’s production and appearance have led many to believe that Romero was trying to make a political statement about the war in Vietnam or the civil rights struggle, in part because he cast an African American, Duane Jones, as the protagonist—Ben—who (Spoiler Alert) was heroic in the face of the sauntering zombie attacks but ultimately gunned down by white police officers in the film’s last scene. Furthermore, some have seen the film as a critique of American consumerism, though that seems more resonant an interpretation of his later film Dawn of the Dead (1978), which, after all, is set almost entirely in a Pennsylvania shopping mall. Night of the Living Dead features no shopping malls, just a cemetery, winding country roads, fields, and a farmhouse. In the film’s opening scene, Johnny and Barbara, the latter played by Judith O’Dea, drive to visit their father’s grave. They encounter their first zombies in the cemetery, appropriately, when Johnny utters the iconic line, “They’re coming to get you, Barbara.!”⁸¹

Whether Romero intended Night to be a commentary on the war in Vietnam or on racism and the civil rights movement is unclear. (He contradicted himself on this question across numerous interviews.) Nonetheless, many have interpreted it that way. Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed that year, 1968, the nation was roiled in antiwar protests and racial unrest, cities burned, businesses collapsed, and young Americans died every day in Vietnam in a losing war effort.⁸² This real horror and the relevance of Romero’s masterpiece are stated powerfully by W. Scott Poole:

Romero’s zombies shambled on-screen as Americans became increasingly used to real-life images of graphic death, gore, and body parts being blown to pieces. . . . Romero’s images of rotting corpses on a violent landscape covered with entrails and viscera, and a band of survivors battling it out with faceless hordes and deeply divided among themselves perfectly suited the American mood.⁸³

The United States enjoyed no monopoly on civil unrest in 1968, as riots and strikes in France, led mostly by university students, brought the economy and government to a halt and actually compelled a president, Charles de Gaulle, to seek refuge abroad. The world was on fire. What better time to launch a zombie apocalypse film? Fast forward to when we were mired in a global pandemic that killed millions of people and forced many of us to seek our own refuge, wear masks, and stock up on toilet paper, bottled water, and hand sanitizer, it was impossible to watch Night without thinking about COVID. It was highly contagious, it had killed millions and, in 2020, the end of the world seemed at hand. Romero was the first to wed the zombie, contagion, and the apocalypse, as in the film “the contagious aspect was preeminent, as a deep bite from an afflicted zombie ensured a painful death and transformation into the zombie state.”⁸⁴ But people have always thought that the world was about to end, which is all the more reason to study the history of apocalyptic belief. Our society will persevere through this pandemic and find a way into the future.

Another compelling reading of the film comes to us from Kersten Oloff, who interprets Night in terms of environmental exploitation. Oloff reminds us that the zombie emerged in Haiti out of a culture of the exploitation of human bodies and the earth to serve humanity’s sugar addiction, while “Romero’s zombies are creatures of a petromodern world ecology that took shape with the rise of suburbia and the emergence of automobile culture; the emergence of oil-fueled global transport networks.” The earth once again exploited, only now for oil instead of sugar, et voilà, new valences for the zombie. What unites such valences, despite their differences, is that they are rooted in greed, for “unlike the sugar zombie, the petro-zombie gestures towards representing the unrepresentable: towards the multifaceted and, it would seem, terminal crisis of the capitalist world-ecology.”⁸⁵

Romero’s ghouls were and remain captivating. The movie was “an international hit,” a production of “vast artistic significance,” in Hervey’s assessment, and “the most successful independent film” ever made.⁸⁶ The ghouls in Night are also significant for being removed entirely from Haiti, unlike those in Plague, in being contagious, and in being an elemental and centrally triggering operative part of the apocalypse. For Night is “the first in a new genre of zombie films that would relegate the Haitian folkloric zombie and classic cinematic zombie-sleepwalkers to relics of a bygone era,” as John Cussans explains:

From Night onwards there are no more Svengali-like controllers of remote minds, no more witch doctors with ouanga charms or voodoo dolls capturing the souls of feckless visitors to primitive and exotic lands, no zombie work slaves laboring mindlessly in the mill and no top-hatted Baron Samedi laughing maniacally in the cemetery. From here on, the zombi no longer looks back to Haiti.⁸⁷

The zombie goes so many other places, though, literally all around the world. Later in this chapter we consider the globalization of the zombie film, but first a few words on just a handful of the most important zombie flicks since Night of the Living Dead: 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and World War Z. First, though, a tip of the hat to Romero, who, following up on the success of Night of the Living Dead, made several other well-received zombie films: First Dawn of the Dead (a sequel to Night) appeared in 1979, a movie chock full of “thoughtful and entertaining social allegory.”⁸⁸ The Shakespeare of the zombie film rounded out his trilogy with Day of the Dead (1985), which Jamie Russell describes as “darker than the rest and considerably gorier, yet it has a remarkably upbeat ending,” unlike Night of the Living Dead. The film is also “a grim vision of apocalyptic dysfunction.”⁸⁹

Up until the turn of the millennia, the 1980s saw the production of more zombie films than any other decade. That has all changed, however. Since 2000, zombies have become so mainstream that The Guardian observed in 2005 that “there were zombies everywhere,”⁹⁰ while the following year the New York Times could speak of “a zombie literary invasion.”⁹¹ Soon thereafter, that “invasion continued, with more than 41 films listed for 2008 alone, and the debut of the most popular basic cable drama of all time—The Walking Dead, AMC’s contribution to the zombie canon— in 2010.” Since then, as Dahlia Schweitzer points out, “there are now too many to count.”⁹²

A geographic interlude here, as I love maps and my brother is a distinguished geographer.⁹³ Does it make a difference whether the zombies are in rural or urban spaces? The earliest zombie films, including White Zombie and Night of the Living Dead, take place in rural places. In later films, however, including the blockbuster Hollywood film World War Z, zombies often first appear in cities. Does this make any difference in the processes of othering and the way in which sociophobics of the zombie apocalypse might be considered? Sociophobics doesn’t really offer much help with this question, being more attuned to national societal fears and anxieties. But it does matter—and this is a key point in sociophobics—what contemporary fears and anxieties mean in making sense of popular consumption of zombie lore, especially zombie horror films. So with post-9/11 films, as with the 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead, the zombie film—especially the zombie apocalypse movie—is and has always been “a filmic mechanism for articulating social ills and crises.”⁹⁴ Especially fear, whether rational or irrational. In an urban setting there is more to fear, like crime, getting run over by a car, congestion, pollution, and the proximity of too many people. On the other hand, the celebrated 2017 Australian apocalyptic zombie film Cargo comes to mind, which is compelling for its dramatic outback setting, a film that one critic said George Romero would have enjoyed.⁹⁵ Here, Australia is beset by a horrific virus and resources are depleting, so Aussies arm themselves to ward off not just zombies but other humans who threaten their survival. So, I don’t believe the setting matters much at all, as it is all about othering and fear.

Though we cannot discuss apocalyptic cinema in any broad sense, it is clear that by now zombies have taken over both the horror and the apocalypse genres of film. Still, one should affirm that the apocalypse has enjoyed a rich cinematic history of its own, most of it long before its collision with the zombie in 1968. Per Stephen Prince:

Apocalypse narratives have held great appeal throughout human history, and their roots lie in legend, folklore, and religions. The stories focus on cosmic battles between good and evil (readily lending themselves to Marvel superhero narratives)…. In cinema, these dangers take two forms: alien invasions and collisions with celestial objects such as meteors and asteroids. Each can be severe enough to trigger an apocalypse…. In doing so, these films light a candle. They fashion beguiling visions from daunting conditions that have seemed inescapable to the human psyche throughout its centuries of existence.⁹⁶

Then just add zombies, stir, and the world is transformed and on the precipice of fin!

In 2002 Danny Boyle released a British film that takes its landmark place in zombic cinematic history, 28 Days Later. As Maria Pramaggiore explains, this movie is highly significant for, among other things, being “a turning point that marked the transition from the slow, shuffling zombies associated with George Romero to a new, fast and furious version for the 21st century.”⁹⁷ Some might argue that an earlier comedic zombie, Dan O’Bannon’s celebrated 1985 Return of the Living Dead, is the first to have speedy living dead. While it is true that here we watch zombies moving faster than they ever had in cinematic history, they are more or less only capable of jogging and hardly lightning fast. As Dendle puts it, the film’s “sleek, shambling zombies . . . aren’t slow, but run as fast as their mucky legs can carry them.”⁹⁸ It is likely, though, the first movie in which zombies eat brains, so credit is due there, certainly, but Return of the Living Dead’s zombies are easily outrun by any able-bodied living human being. In any case, zombies have sped up, and it’s been out of control ever since, although they still saunter in The Walking Dead and in other meaningful places. Not everyone is happy about fast zombies:

We Zombiephiles feel that it’s time this trend stopped! Zombies are zombies, and vampires are vampires. Zombies belong in zombie movies, and vampires belong…well, we won’t share how we feel about most vampire movies.

The point is, the Zombie, and the central lore of zombieness, should be considered as set in stone, irrevocable, immutable and unchangeable. It’s movies like 28 Days Later that had to come along and “up the ante” on zombie movies – like that even needed doing.

Join us in our stand against fast, agile zombies! We demand the return of slow, shambling, brain-craving re-animated corpses, not virus-infected, flesh-eating cannibals! Zombiephiles of the world, unite!”⁹⁹

This zombiephilic rant against the vampire is a little over the top, as the vampire was the original contagious monster, not the zombie, and one can wonder if the zombie would ever have become contagious without Dracula, who paved the bloody way.

All that aside, two years after 28 Days Later appeared, another highly praised zombie movie hit the big screen, Shaun of the Dead, and the zombies slowed back down again. Produced by Edgar Wright, it has been hailed as “the film that single-handedly saved contemporary British horror.”¹⁰⁰ Like in Night of the Living Dead, there is an outer-space connection to zombification, but unlike Romero’s zombie films or 28 Days Later, this is a comedy, one that succeeds marvelously in making zombies and modern life in the capitalistic Western world out to be both laughable and regrettable matters.¹⁰¹

Already we have a sense of the global spread of the zombie film, a topic that we are about to leap into in some detail, but there are a couple of other influential movies to briefly consider first. Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2009 “ultraviolent reappropriation novel” Pride and Prejudice and Zombies made the New York Times bestseller list and was made into a film in 2016.¹⁰² Lauro is not exactly a fan of the book, which she describes as an example of a quirky literary trend of “appropriations, adaptations, and mash-ups,”¹⁰³ and her opinion matters, as one of the leading zombie scholars in the world. The novel is, of course, an appropriation of the classic 1813 Jane Austen romance Pride and Prejudice. I, for one, cannot say that I enjoyed reading the zombie mash-up, but the book was a hit, although the 2016 film by the same title was something of a commercial flop. As one cluster of critics put it, “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies manages to wring a few fun moments out of its premise, but never delivers the thoroughly kooky mashup its title suggests.”¹⁰⁴

Judging from the frequency with which people look them up on Google, since 2004 the most captivating zombie films have been Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Zombies 2,¹⁰⁵ but we should add a word here on the Resident Evil film series, the first of which appeared in 2002. The series is based on a highly successful Japanese video game, first released for PlayStation in 1996. This is quite unique in zombie cinematic history, as usually it is the other way around—films become video games, backpacks, pinball machines, lunch boxes, and so on. Resident Evil movies and their successful game forebear inspired many other popular video games, while the films themselves, though “featuring decapitations and torrents of blood, never move much further from the game.”¹⁰⁶

Finally, we briefly turn our attention to the most expensive zombie movie ever made, World War Z, which premiered in 2013. Based on Max Brooks’s successful novel by the same title, the film has been criticized as being little more than “an empty vehicle for ‘Hollywood himbo’ Brad Pitt to once again save the world.”¹⁰⁷ That the savior is a white male, furthermore, distances the film significantly from Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, though even there Haiti is entirely absent. Hugely successful, World War Z grossed over half a billion dollars and is significant for, at least, having made the zombie apocalypse global. Pitt’s lead character, Gerry Lane, was once a UN agent and finds himself confronting the first waves of the zombie invasion while sitting in traffic in Philadelphia. There, the dashing Lane commandeers an RV and makes it to Newark, New Jersey, where the UN has him helicoptered onto a U.S. naval vessel somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, from which our white savior is flown to South Korea and then on to Jerusalem. Next he winds up in a Cardiff lab, where he figures out the secret to defeating zombies, and later he is in Nova Scotia to effectuate matters. Then a vaccine is produced and, voila, the world is saved.

Globalizing the Zombie

Speaking of globalization, let us here briefly consider the international spread of the zombie film and the zombie apocalypse film, which has been altogether impressive, and take note of some of the most acclaimed foreign films in the genre. Writes Drendle:

Meanwhile, the zombie has internationalized in unprecedented manner, with feature-length offerings from such places as Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Turkey, Serbia, Finland, Pakistan, and Malaysia, and others being filmed in Bulgaria, the Cayman Islands, and West Africa. There are zombie films in Hebrew and Russian, and the DVD for Attack of the Moon Zombies! (2011) comes with a menu option for subtitles in Esperanto. Thus the zombie has expanded into settings hitherto unimagined.¹⁰⁸

The zombie gets around, as it were, and the apocalypse implicates us all. Although recently zombie films have been mass produced and are extremely popular in South Korea and Japan, one might suggest that the first foreign zombie film was made in the United Kingdom in 1958, The Woman Eater. However, in this film the zombie-like creature is actually a tree that devours women, hence the title, even if an Amazonian serum to revive the dead is part of the story. So it is not really a zombie film. In 1961, two truly zombic foreign films were produced and premiered. Benito Alrazaki made Muñecos infernales (lit. “Infernal Dolls,” released in English as Curse of the Doll People) in Mexico, while George Fowler produced one of the first color zombie films, Doctor Blood’s Coffin, which would find its way into theaters around the world, from Argentina to Greece. A year earlier an obscure independent zombie film appeared in color, The Dead One, which features a zombie that is “the snappiest dresser in the film,” a film that was lost to history for over forty years and recently rediscovered.¹⁰⁹ Significantly, “Alrazaki tried his hand at more living dead cinema by creating the first in a series of zombie movies starring masked wrestler El Santo (a.k.a. Rudolfo Guzmán Huerta), who became a popular icon in Mexican cinema,” as Russell explains:

In Invasion of the Zombies (El Santo contra los zombies, 1961), the first of a series of several Mexican wrestling/zombie mash-ups, the masked wrestler fights an evil mastermind sending radio-controlled zombies on a crime spree across Mexico. Despite talk about Haiti, they are more like high-tech automatons that are kitted out with special belts that let their master use them as his goons.¹¹⁰

Thus, by the early 1960s the zombie had begun to globalize beyond Haiti and the United States, as it was enculturating elsewhere, whether in English mines or in Mexican wrestling bouts.

Like Mexico and England, Spain would also develop something of a cottage industry for zombie films, a bit later, in the 1970s. Chiefly credited and celebrated in this regard is Amando de Ossorio, who produced four popular zombie films, Tombs of the Blind (1971), Return of the Blind Dead (1973), Horror of the Zombies (1974), and Night of the Seagulls (1975).¹¹¹ Russell esteems Ossorio’s films as “something of a breath of fresh air” for “having reworked emphasis on the physicality of the body into a curious blend of sex, violence and death.” The productions were also timely, as the brutal fascist Franco regime was falling, though Ossorio was still forced to do much of his work abroad, in Portugal.¹¹² Italian zombie films would soon follow, most notably Lucio Fulci’s Zombi, “a bravura piece of exploitation filmmaking that was so successful it was rumoured to have out-grossed the very film that it was unabashedly imitating, Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.”¹¹³ It was the first of Fulci’s three zombie films.

Those are a few of the earliest influential foreign zombie movies, and admittedly much is being glossed over and ignored here, as the zombie genre of cinema was becoming more expansive as the twentieth century steamrolled toward its end. Our attention now turns to Asian zombie cinema, and perhaps the best way to transition here is to include another long, relevant quote from Russell, whose Book of the Dead offers the best, most detailed discussion of the globalization of the zombie film:

By the mid-2000s zombies were taking over the world. Z-culture had spread to even the most unlikely nations. Greece, Chile, Norway and Pakistan were among those who would make their contributions to the genre as the zombie renaissance grew and grew. It seemed that the more popular zombies became, the more assured local producers could be that there was a viable, international market for their movies.¹¹⁴

Although Pakistan has since proven to be a minor contributor to the zombie genre of cinema, other Asian nations have been at the forefront of its globalizing popularity, none more so than Japan and Korea. Filmmakers in India, the Philippines, Thailand, and Taiwan all joined the gravy train, but Japan and Korea reign supreme in the cinematic Asian zombie universe (as they do in Asian zombie television). The first Japanese zombie film evidently appeared in 1999,¹¹⁵ while the earliest Korean entry, Strange Dead Bodies, dates to 1981. It should be noted, though, that the very first Asian zombie film appeared in Hong Kong in 1959: Zombie in a Haunted House. Sadly, it is evidently lost to history. Meanwhile, as Jaecheol Kim explains, there has been a “recent zombie craze in Northeast Asian films from Japan and Korea.” Zombies “are now flourishing in an East Asian cinematic context preserved in a globalized form.”¹¹⁶ There now seem to be more Asian zombie films than can be counted, a centerpiece among many appropriations of the zombie in Asian popular culture. But here we concentrate, with Kim, on just two films that have been highly influential and popular, the 2015 Japanese movie I Am a Hero and the 2016 Korean movie Train to Busan.¹¹⁷

Kim interprets both movies to be critiques of capitalism and its ramifications, for “the zombie has come to Japan and Korea amidst growing concerns about accelerated capitalism, reflecting the general economic conditions of post-IMF neoliberal Korea and post-bubble neoliberal Japan.”¹¹⁸ Since the 1960s, concerns about a capitalist absorption of humanity and its dehumanization of laborers and the poor (something that Karl Marx already saw in the nineteenth century) has been one of the leading theoretical interpretations of the zombie craze. These concerns seem quite relevant to understanding the rise in popularity of zombie cinema in East Asia.

Because I Am a Hero became “a stunning blockbuster” in Japan, it is the heart of what was “the year of the Japanese zombie renaissance,” 2015, with several other films of this genre also filling theaters and gaining critical acclaim.¹¹⁹ Like Night of the Living Dead and The Walking Dead, the creatures that devour and infect in this film are not called zombies. Here they are called ZQNs, and I don’t know what that might stand for. The ZQNs are viral, as they “attack the living and devour human flesh, thus creating swarms of undead.”¹²⁰ Train to Busan, meanwhile, is the most successful Korean zombie film ever, one that gained international acclaim and is quite innovative in that most of the action during a zombie invasion happens “across a series of horrifying train journeys.”

Will McKeon’s interpretation of the film is the most common reading of zombie cinema, especially since Romero’s classics: as critiques of capitalism and neoliberalism. Of course, zombie films are also about survival, fear, and sacrifice, but we should place them in social, cultural, and political contexts:

What Train to Busan ultimately demonstrates is that the impulse to self-sacrifice channels this neo-liberal tendency and maps out its pressures, but because of this impulse the trains of thought carrying the neo-liberal compulsion fall ironically short of their destination.¹²¹

Conclusion

The universe of zombie literature and film is vast and ever expanding. As soon as humans could write, they expressed their captivation with dead-like or resurrected human beings, from Gilgamesh, through the Bible, and on to the present spate of zombie comic books and novels. But technically speaking, the zombie first emerged in the Caribbean in the seventeenth century, a creature who seems to have originally been a blend of West African notions of a fearsome nocturnal bogeyman who haunts forests and the French folk belief in the revenant, a human who returns from the grave. Those origins are discussed at length in Chapter Five, while here we have refuted claims—in ancient and modern literature, from Gilgamesh to Defoe, Shakespeare to Shelley—of the presence of zombies in print.

Also in Chapter Five, we detailed the first true zombie novel, Blessebois’s 1697 Le zombi du Grand Perrou, which was written on the colonial French Caribbean island of Guadalupe. In the previous chapter we considered the first influential English texts that brought the zombie and Vodou to the popular American imagination: those by Hurston, Seabrook, and Wirkus. A turning point in the zombie apocalyptic literary world would follow in the form of Matheson’s I Am Legend, which, though not really featuring zombies, is an apocalyptic prelude to the explosion of zombie literature and films that would soon follow. The pivotal moment in that explosion is, of course, Romero’s classic 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, which is based largely on Matheson’s novel.

Despite a saturation of texts and movies, zombie literature and film remain enormously popular, not just in the United States but throughout much of the world. In this chapter we have only scratched the surface, limiting ourselves almost entirely to texts in English, though we did take a brief trip to Mexico, England, Spain, Italy, South Korea, and Japan for a glimpse of the dizzying globalization of zombie cinema. Somewhat ironically, for these genres that are usually quite apocalyptic in form, there is no end in sight, for they are highly profitable and millions of people clearly need them. And capitalism, and the critique thereof, is one of the central forces that led to the merger of the zombie and the apocalypse in literature and film in the first place. In a review of Lauro’s important book The Transatlantic Zombie, I argue that the author makes “a shaky case for the zombie being as much about resistance as it is about capitalism or empire.”¹²² I stand by that critique, for how can one resist when one is catatonic and when the catatonic hordes produce five billion dollars a year in the capitalistic zombie industry?

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