Zombie Talk

Culture, History, Politics

John Edgar Browning, David Castillo, David Schmid, David A. Reilly

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137575241
• eBook ISBN: 9781137567727
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

Zombie Talk offers a concise, interdisciplinary introduction and deep analytical set of theoretical approaches to help readers understand the phenomenon of zombies in contemporary and modern culture. With essays that combine Humanities and Social Science methodologies, the authors examine the zombie through an array of cultural products from different periods and geographical locations: films ranging from White Zombie (1932) to the pioneering films of George Romero, television shows like AMC's The Walking Dead, to literary offerings such as Richard Matheson's I am Legend (1954) and Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride, Prejudice and Zombies (2009), among others.

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Survival Horrors, Survival Spaces: Tracing the Modern Zombie (Cine)Myth through to the Postmillennium

John Edgar Browning

Abstract: Crucial to this chapter is the need to resituate the (terato)genesis of the modern zombie cinemyth to Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), which has been obscured or devalued over time by the work of George A. Romero and an ever-increasing body of films and video games that, like Romero’s films, have appropriated essential elements from Matheson’s work, like the “survival space.” The contention here is not to diminish the significance of Romero’s filmic work and its impact on zombie cinema, but to recognize, rather, both Matheson’s and Romero’s respective configurations of the zombie mythos that have afforded the zombie subgenre its longevity and, more crucially, offer us the most compelling conceptual tool with which to trace through to the postmillennium the zombie’s trajectory in popular culture and media.

Castillo, David R., David Schmid, David A. Reilly and John Edgar Browning. Zombie Talk: Culture, History, Politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. DOI: 10.1057/9781137567727.0005.

Introduction: of vampires and revenants

Of the particular vampire fiction that has, in the last 60 years, crossed over into film and subsequently redefined the vampire subgenre¹—that is to say, dismantled its “inherited conventions of the particular filmic kind in order to display [its] formal and ideological complexity, but also in order to put them back together, so to speak, in better working condition than before,” to borrow from Carl Freedman’s analysis² of the works of Stanly Kubrick—none in this category has achieved greater distinction perhaps than Richard Matheson’s 1954 vampire novel I Am Legend.³ The novel’s first years alone saw at least four editions, from Fawcett (New York), Buccaneer (Cutchogue, NY), Nelson Doubleday (Garden City, NY), and Walker (New York), and the next five years would bring the novel’s first international editions, with Je suis une légende (Paris: Denoël, 1955), translated by Claude Elsen; I Am Legend (London: Transworld, 1956); and Soy leyenda (Buenos Aires: Minotauro, 1960). In hindsight, these early years merely foreshadow the novel’s resilience, which has scarcely diminished after at least 65 editions and 15 international translations.

Breaking from the long tradition of vampire fiction before the 1950s, Matheson’s novel, to borrow again from Freedman, “offers a critical reflection on its respective generic framework, working to lay bare the absolute presuppositions of the latter—while at the same time also exemplifying its genre with rare brilliance.”⁴ More precisely, Matheson’s vampires diffuse from their literary foreparents: figures “derived from folklore but now bearing precious little resemblance to them,” as observed by Paul Barber.⁵ The vampires of Matheson’s text resemble rather the relatively older, pre-literary revenant, the peasantry’s vampire. Hailing from some distant land far removed from the civilized capitals of Europe, the revenant is typically a local villager who returns from the dead to attack his family and neighbors. In this regard, I Am Legend (hereafter IAL) comes to us much in the same vein as the “proto-strain” of zombie films preceding the novel, famously with White Zombie (1932). The zombie of the proto-strain, like its Eastern European cousin the revenant, is generally portrayed as a distant, geographically isolated, and relatively surmountable (i.e., “single”) threat. Matheson’s zombie-vampires (vampire-zombies?), on the other hand, diverge from this earlier conception, helping to birth what would eventually become an entirely new breed of zombie.

Prompting this study are two things. First is the need to map out the structural principia upon which modern zombies have generally come to be defined. Second, and perhaps more crucial, is the need to resituate the (terato)genesis of the modern zombie cinemyth to Matheson’s novel, which has been obscured or devalued over time by the work of George A. Romero and an ever-increasing body of films and video games that has followed in the wake of Romero’s films. My contention, however, is not to diminish the significance of Romero’s filmic work and its impact on zombie cinema. Rather, I wish to recognize both Matheson’s and Romero’s respective configurations of the zombie mythos that have helped to institute, in distinct but overlapping ways, the particular tropes with which film-makers and video game designers continue to embody zombies. The present study shall consider these tropes, while offering an account of their narrative complexity and continuous hybridization by other, more non-traditional, genres and narrative forms. An intersectional analysis of earlier zombie films with the more recent ones is therefore instructive for understanding not only the function of these narratives within a general zombie discourse, but also the historicity underlying the most recent string of iterations: video games. Before proceeding, however, an overview of Matheson’s novel and a brief outline of the zombie’s filmic progeny and its particular strains are essential.

Beginnings and bloodlines

To begin, while Matheson’s text is among the first works of fiction to graft the vampire and zombie mythos with dystopian elements, its principal narratological features have gone relatively unnoted. Specifically, the novel’s greatest achievements lie in the way (1) it forever infuses the figure of the zombie with mob-like tendencies; after IAL, the zombie would no longer be understood in mere singular terms, but would instead comprise an insurmountable force—or “multiple threat,” a term I shall reiterate later. Moreover, (2) because the central “threat” in the story is re-centered around the Gothic edifice or enclosure (in this case, a house), rather than inside it, the setting depicted in Matheson’s novel is an inversion of typical Gothic space and geography. As a result of this viable ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Our Zombies, Our Remnants
• 1  Survival Horrors, Survival Spaces: Tracing the Modern Zombie (Cine)Myth through to the Postmillennium
• 2  Zombie Masses: Monsters for the Age of Global Capitalism
• 3  The Coming Apocalypses of Zombies and Globalization
• 4  The Limits of Zombies: Monsters for a Neoliberal Age
• Afterword: What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Zombies?
• Bibliography
• Index