The Zombie Renaissance in Popular Culture

L. Hubner, M. Leaning, P. Manning, L. Hubner, M. Leaning, P. Manning

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137276490
• eBook ISBN: 9781137276506
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This collection addresses the significant cultural phenomenon of the 'zombie renaissance' – the growing importance of zombie texts and zombie cultural practices in popular culture. The chapters examine zombie culture across a range of media and practices including films games, music, social media, literature and fandom.

Part I

The Zombie Renaissance

1

Introduction

Laura Hubner, Marcus Leaning and Paul Manning

We are currently experiencing a global explosion of zombie mania, with zombie representations and zombie-related material infiltrating the media and contemporary society in multiple and changing forms. This collection addresses the significant cultural phenomenon of the ‘zombie renaissance’ – the growing importance of zombie texts and zombie cultural practices in popular culture. Cultural critics have highlighted the recent upsurge of interest in the zombie motif not only in mainstream cinema but also in video games, literature, television drama, social media and even popular music. Moreover, the zombie phenomenon has extended far beyond the text to find expression in a rich variety of fan practices, most notably zombie walks, which frequently occur in towns and cities around the world, online fan forums and discussion groups, and ‘zero budget’ DIY filmmaking.

The idea for this edited collection originates from an academic conference, ‘The Zombosium’, held in October 2011 at the University of Winchester. The conference attracted considerable national and international press attention: it was mentioned in every major newspaper in the UK, was covered by BBC Radio 4 and Irish Talk Radio and featured on the flagship news programme of BBC World Service. It also appeared on numerous English language websites, including the BBC and the Huffington Post, and a variety of websites located across the globe: in Germany, Hungary, Spain, the USA, Malaysia, India and China.

Inspired by the international and interdisciplinary focus of the conference, chapters within this volume draw on a wide range of disciplines and fields of interest, presenting a critical discussion of the various theoretical explanations for the emergence of zombie culture from different cultural perspectives and at the same time providing a review of its historical antecedents. An important international perspective is offered, examining how zombies are present in different national cinemas and media forms – looking at zombie cultures in the context of the UK, the USA, Australia and Europe, for example – and how they may be understood from diverse historic and contemporary perspectives. Furthermore, this volume engages with contemporary fan practices and fan communities, discussion groups, online fandom and ‘zombie survivalists’, as well as zombie films, zombie television, zombie music culture, zombies in literature and social media.

As popular interest in zombie culture has increased, scholarly attention is also growing, with critics seeking to theorise the undead, and the reanimation of the undead, using a variety of approaches. Zombie texts usually explain the rise of the dead through familiar narrative devices (contagion, nuclear hazard, bad science and so on) or in many cases take simply the arrival of zombies in the neighbourhood as a ‘given’ to let the action begin. But zombie scholarship has to apply a more curious approach in trying to make sense of zombie culture. In recent years the range of zombie scholarship has proliferated and a number of distinct but often overlapping theoretical approaches have emerged to assist us in making sense of the zombie. Kevin Boon suggests that we can distinguish two broad approaches to theorising zombie culture and texts, the socio-historical and the psycho-philosophical. The former tries to make sense of zombie texts by examining the ‘socio-historical evolution of the myth through and across cultural landscapes’ (2011a, p. 6). In other words, the meaning of zombie texts is related to the wider social formations and specific historical circumstances in which they emerge. The latter approach, according to Boon, ‘involves psycho-philosophical critiques of the zombie designed to clarify the nature of the myth and its relationship to human consciousness’ (2011a, p. 6). This distinction is a helpful place to begin in a discussion of theory within zombie scholarship, but it is really just a start. In relation to these two approaches or ‘categories’ of theory, we can actually make a number of finer distinctions, which are outlined here. These theoretical approaches often overlap in application as most zombie scholars draw upon more than one approach in their various accounts of the ‘zombie renaissance’, but nevertheless it is helpful in an introduction to draw out these analytic distinctions.

Boon’s distinction helps us to pick out first what could be described as ‘text centred’ approaches. These are approaches which tend to assume that the secret of audience engagement with zombie texts lies, at least partly, in the characteristics and properties of the texts themselves, and in turn, it is audience engagement with form that ‘explains’ the proliferation of zombie texts and culture in recent years. In its most pronounced versions, this is a kind of formalism which is preoccupied with the form of the zombie text, its horror sub-genre features, tropes, narrative structure, zombie characteristics and so on. Thus, for example, Boon offers us a typology of nine zombie types based upon a survey of zombie texts, which distinguishes the ‘zombie drone’ from the ‘zombie ghoul’, the ‘bio zombie’ from the ‘tech zombie’, zombies that ‘channel’ the will of others, ‘psychological zombies’, ‘cultural zombies’, zombie ghosts and the zombie ruse in which zombies turn out not to be zombies at all (2011a, p. 8). The zombie character here is classified on the basis of what the text tells us about the nature and origins of the zombie or the function of the zombie as a textual device. Formalist approaches of this kind prompt important and illuminating debates about, for example, the emergence of ‘fast’ zombies or ‘sentient zombies’ and the extent to which such innovations in form anticipate the requirements of younger, ‘millennial audiences’ (Dendle, 2011); they pose challenging questions about whether or not the living infected can be regarded as zombies or just rather seriously ill people – the revisionist position adopted by director Danny Boyle in relation to 28 Days Later (Zombiepedia, 2013) – and they underline the significance of the emergence of zombies with ‘personality’ (Bishop, this volume; Murphy, 2011).

However, while the form of the zombie text is clearly central to any understanding of the meaning and popular resonance of the text within popular zombie culture, attention to the form alone cannot help us with some important further questions. To begin to explore the nature of the pleasures or fascinations that zombie texts may generate, many zombie scholars introduce concepts drawn from psychology. They suggest that we have to employ theory beyond an exclusive formalism in order to consider the mechanisms through which audiences engage with the formal properties of the text. To do this a number of writers have turned to Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny in order to analyse exactly how properties of the zombie text fascinate the audience. The uncanny refers to that which threatens because it is both simultaneously familiar and strange. The uncanny might provoke in us a reconnection with fears and anxieties that were first encountered in childhood, and as these anxieties penetrate through the unconscious they force a recognition of the continual internal struggle to suppress them (Freud, 2003). According to many scholars of horror, this is one of the prime mechanisms that triggers the fearful response of the horror audience and, of course, the zombie is a particularly good example of what was once familiar but which now returns in a more distant, often decomposed but still recognisable form (Bishop, 2010, p. 110; Derksen and Hick, 2011, p. 16).

But there is something further that resonates along the psychological dimension according to many zombie scholars. Zombies are grotesque; that is to say their physical form violates our ‘normal’ boundaries of taste. In compelling the audience to confront processes of decomposition and the eruption of blood, bodily fluids, entrails, not to mention messy saliva, the audience cannot avoid contemplating normative boundary violations that Mary Douglas would understand as taboo – literally matter out of place (Douglas, 1966). A similar approach is offered through the application of Julia Kristeva’s (1982) idea of the abject which refers to that which cannot be psychologically reconciled within the ‘safe’ and ‘normal’ boundaries of our understanding. The abject occupies a liminal or transitional and ambiguous space, and is therefore deeply troubling to us. For writers like Emma Austin (this volume) and Marcia England (2006), the zombie, just like Kristeva’s example of the corpse, refuses to be easily classified, managed and ‘safely’ disposed of. It cannot be understood as either ‘alive’ or ‘dead’; it is in transition and it is this which has the powerful and disturbing effect upon us.

This also helps to explain the horror that is experienced as a psychological condition, but it also encourages us to think more widely about the social context in which these processes of audience engagement occur. Following Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) a number of zombie scholars note that the grotesque zombie body is also an unruly body. In violating bodily norms, the zombie can induce disgust and fear but there can also be, in the inversion of social conventions, the pleasures of the carnival. In other words, zombies can be simultaneously disgusting and funny; and they can be subversive. In forcing us to confront the material body in all its messiness we are invited to be not only disgusted but also to revel in a carnival which not only inverts the social conventions of the body (and bodily fluids) but potentially disrupts and threatens the social order in other ways too (Badley, 2008, p. 46; Bishop, this volume).

However, we know that there have been important changes in the formal properties of zombie texts since the emergence of the early zombie films in 1930s cinema and it is likely that there have also been important shifts in patterns of audience engagement since the 1930s too. Theoretical explanations which focus exclusively upon properties of the formal text or with universal psychological mechanisms of audience engagement are less helpful in addressing questions of change – the diachronic as distinct from the synchronic. Just as the concept of the grotesque and of carnival point to the importance of the social in zombie analysis, these questions of change also underline the importance of exploring the socio-historical context of zombie culture. Is there a relationship between developments in zombie texts and culture, on the one hand, and social change on the other hand, as one set of particular historical circumstances gives way to new ones? Should zombie scholarship seek to theorise a relationship or ‘affinity’, to use Max Weber’s term, between particular instances of zombie culture and particular historical moments? It seems unlikely that texts as permeable as those of zombie culture would not reflect or engage with, in some ways, the wider cultural, economic or political currents of the times. Indeed, it might be the case that part of the explanation for the durability of zombie texts lies precisely in their ‘blankness’ which permits a variety of rather different narrative concerns to find them a workable vehicle, with each narrative reflecting the social anxieties or concerns of a particular historical moment. And, indeed, zombie scholars have sought to theorise such relationships from the very earliest times in which zombie texts emerged. Thus, Jamie Russell claims that in 1930s America,

the zombie and the stock market crash segued neatly together, expressing the powerlessness that so many felt as they suffered under an unstable economy that reduced princes to paupers, bank managers to bums . . . The zombie, a dead worker resurrected as a slave into a hellish afterlife of endless toil was the perfect monster for the age.

(2005, p. 23)

So for Russell, the possessed zombies of films like White Zombie (Halperin, 1932) or I Walked with a Zombie (Tourneur, 1943) were very much products of their times. Similarly, Kyle William Bishop relates the films that were anticipating the Romero zombie in 1968, such as Seigel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) or The Last Man on Earth (Salkow, 1964), to particular moments in American history, times in which social and political anxieties about communism and mass society were widespread (Bishop, 2006). Boon theorises the arrival of the zombie renaissance as a response to the collapse of modernism in the aftermath of Hiroshima and the arrival of the post-nuclear age in the second half of the twentieth century (2011b, p. 55). Brad O’Brien has argued that the emergence of Italian zombie cinema in the 1970s and 1980s can be understood through the ways in which these films articulate the particular anxieties associated with Italian Catholicism and the fear of social collapse precipitated by terrorism and economic stagnation during ‘the years of lead’ in Italy (2008). Now a number of scholars find an affinity, which is actually acknowledged by screenwriters such as Simon Pegg, between the zombification of the slacker and experience of work and leisure in contemporary capitalism, in films such as Shaun of the Dead (Wright, 2004) or Deadheads (Pierce, 2011). Lynn Pifer (2011) and Peter Dendle (2011), for example, both theorise the rise of the ‘slacker zomedy’ in these broad terms. Clearly, these kinds of ‘zomedies’ derive their humour in part from the eruption of the grotesque into carnival, as discussed above, but according to scholars like Pifer and Dendle, to fully understand the success of these kinds of films we have to acknowledge the extent to which these films offer back to us a version of our own routine, everyday experience in late modern capitalist societies.

However, while the formal properties of the text, the psychological mechanisms that engage these texts with audiences, and the social and historical conditions in which these texts are produced are all likely to be important considerations in theorising zombie culture and the recent ‘zombie renaissance’, some critics would point to a further element which can be rather neglected in zombie theory and that is to do with the activity of zombie fans themselves. For example, Natasha Patterson draws upon feminist and cultural theory to explore the active relationship between female fans and zombie texts. While earlier feminist scholarship has often understood the horror film genre as a space which permitted misogynistic modes of representation to flourish, she argues that at least in the era of Romero, zombie texts have refused the older patterns of gendered representation, but crucially it is through active fan engagement that it is possible for some recent zombie films to break traditional gender–genre alignments (2008, p. 115). A number of scholars have pointed to the ways in which zombie texts can be appropriated and enjoyed by fans who read them for meanings that are resistant to power structures, hegemony and patterns of domination. These approaches are rooted partly in Bakhtin’s writing on carnival but also in the ‘culturalist’ or neo-Gramscian traditions within cultural studies. For Bishop (this volume), there is a collectivism or communitarianism in zombie culture which speaks to those who are alienated by the individualism celebrated in contemporary neo-liberalism. The zombie walk can be carnival and fun but also in some ways resistive. Austin (this volume) also understands the zombie walk as both ‘play and protest’. Equally, Robin Wood suggests that zombies challenge dominant power structures whether patriarchal or capitalist (1986), though Sarah Juliet Lauro sounds a cautionary note. For her, zombie walks demonstrate the potential of collective strength as hundreds or even thousands gather together for a zombie event, and yet zombies rarely articulate a coherent political project and zombie fan culture is continually vulnerable to reappropriation by Hollywood and the agencies of fan commodification (2011, pp. 227–228). Nevertheless, as Paul Manning argues (this volume), if there is a renaissance in zombie texts and fan culture, the explanation must in part be related to the accessibility of zombie culture, its inclusiveness, the opportunities zombie texts offer for cultural appropriation and the ways in which the ‘blank’ text can be inscribed with meanings that resonate with the very uncertain times in which we now live.

These preoccupations with the phenomenon and meanings of ‘the zombie renaissance’ resonate throughout this volume but are engaged with most prominently in the remaining chapters of Part I, focusing on the relevance and role of the zombie within contemporary culture. Ian Conrich opens discussion with a panoramic but historically rooted survey of the contemporary zombie renaissance. He locates the roots of this eruption in the E...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Part I: The Zombie Renaissance
• Part II: Zombies Go to the Movies
• Part III: Zombies Invade Television, Video Games and Music
• Part IV: Zombie Fans and Digital Cultures
• Part V: Zombies in Writing and Culture
• Index