Fear and utopia in the millennial zombie: Digging deep inside Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead

Abstract

Abstract This article analyses Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead through Fredric Jameson’s three horizons of textual interpretation to demonstrate how the film, as an example of the third-strain millennial zombie narrative, supports a socially conservative ideology while simultaneously pointing to the Utopian possibility of communal action in the face of an overwhelming threat. The first horizon compares the formal differences of the visual effects between the remake and Romero’s 1978 original, showing how the removal of the original’s campy special effects repurposes the millennial zombie as a threat to conservative culture, not a vehicle for social satire as Romero had hoped. The second horizon, viewing the remake as a post-9/11 film, sees the symbolic conflict of social classes globalize and manifest as the human-capitalist-American bourgeoisie versus the zombie as the anti-American-terrorist proletariat. The third horizon, focusing on the historic progression of the means of production, sees the film as functioning through the politics of fear and the personalization of fear to serve as a conservative, capitalist economic motivator, while simultaneously inspiring the Utopian hope that humanity might be able to work together as a community.