Zombie Movies Research Articles

Fast Zombies and Social Rights: The Case of Umberto Lenzi’s <i>Nightmare City</i> (1980)

In the tense atmosphere that preceded the May 1981 Italian referendums on abortion, Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City is released. Included in several ‘Best Zombie Movies’ lists, Nightmare City is important for at least two reasons; first, because it inaugurates a significant and eventually successful variation on the zombie image: the fast zombie; second, as a commentary on the most salient social debate of the late 1970s and early 1980s – the one on the self-determination of Italian women. The aesthetic and the metaphorical levels of Lenzi’s film are strictly connected and the infected people running around drinking the blood of others are the embodiment of a reactionary response to the ongoing social transformation. Nightmare City joins the Italian political dispute of the late 1970s by openly opposing the women’s freedom of choice and by channeling and amplifying the most conservative side of that quasi-eschatological battle.

The Hollywood Undead: Zombies Interpreted Scientifically

Modern media is fascinated by the undead. Zombie movies and shows comprise an entire genre by themselves, and there are many different renditions of the creatures in pop culture. This review was performed with the goal of analyzing the characteristics of zombies from The Walking Dead. This is organized around four major topics: organization of the biological hierarchy, energy and matter, interactions between systems, and evolution. These are the unifying principles of biology, and thus appropriate for assessing the biological principles behind zombie physiology. This review aims to show that some common features of zombies are simply exaggerations of preexisting human functions, and that they are not so removed from what we perceive as normal human behavior.

Biopolitics of the Zombie Corpses: Collectivity, Contagion, and Alterity

Inasmuch as the society is considered as a body today, social problems should be defined accordingly, as problems of hygiene and cleanliness. In this regard, various representations of zombie corpses in zombie movies can be conceived as concrete examples of threat and a perception of disease. In this article, I claim that the zombie figures in cinema bear a positive potential for the social life of humanity, and I will define this potential as a new opportunity for meeting the absolute alterity. Within this context, I analyse 28 Weeks Later and The World War Z and The Girl with All the Gifts to put forth the idea that what enables emancipation of humanity is contagion and alterity. Rather than destroying the capitalist rationalization without offering any alternatives, zombie corpses enounce the birth of a new form of social life as analysed through Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Special Effects and the Making of Pseudo-Monsters in Nollywood Zombie Films

Horror movies are artfully constructed to simultaneously elicit fear and thrill audiences. They essentially integrate gory, frightful and obscene creatures (notably the living dead, the undead, paranormal beings and aliens), as well as scary or terrifying scenes all designed to build the fear appeal or the fight-or-flight response. The mobilization of such scary scenes and creatures always entails the use of relevant, realistic – and professional-quality – costumes, make-up, special effects and editing among other technical tools. These tools are generally extremely exorbitant and not affordable to small-budget African filmmakers like the majority of Nigerian videastes who most often rely on very meager resources to produce their movies. In effect, the inability to lay hand on professional-quality make-up and special effects causes most Nigerian video filmmakers to rely on sub-standard tools which do not always actualize the aesthetic and fear appeal expected in a horror film. This scenario could well be illustrated using the way monsters and apocalyptic scenes are treated in most Nollywood zombie movies. In such movies, the leverage of sub-standard and grotesque make-up and special effects most often leads to the creation of pseudo-zombies which, instead of instilling fear and the fight-or-flight response, are susceptible to baffle or amuse film viewers and critics.

Language, Feminism, and Racism

Jennifer Saul is Waterloo Chair in Social and Political Philosophy of Language at the University of Waterloo. Originally American, she spent twenty-four years at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. Her current focus is manipulative political language, which she explores in Dogwhistles and Figleaves: Linguistics Tricks for Racist and Conspiracist Discourse (forthcoming, Oxford, 2024). She has also written books and articles on feminism, lying and misleading, and implicit bias. She founded the blogs What is it Like to be a Woman in Philosophy and Feminist Philosophers, and was Director of the Society for Women in Philosophy UK 2009–19. Along with Helen Beebee, she published two reports (in 2011 and 2021) on the state of women in philosophy in the UK and drew up good practice guidelines which have been adopted by dozens of departments. She’s also proud of having been a philosophical consultant on a zombie movie.

Zombies and COVID-19: An Examination of the Psychological Contagions Through the Pandemic and Zombie Movies

Two and a half years ago, a new infectious disease later named COVID-19 caused a respiratory illness outbreak in Wuhan, China. By now, much research has been done across various fields on its biological effects on the human body for the sake of controlling the virus, while researchers across the world have conducted limited studies regarding its psychological and socio-political impacts on the population. This research focuses on the effect of three types of contagions, consumer behavior contagion, deliberate self-harm contagion, and hysterical contagion, on people's behavior. By comparing the effects of these contagions in COVID-19 and several zombie movies, this research paper concluded that the spread of fear in both COVID-19 and zombie movies is causing the spread of these contagions.

Re-imagining Time in the Midst of Crisis: From Sci Fi Thrillers and Zombie Flicks to Young People’s Lived Temporalities of COVID-19

ABSTRACT Popular films often depict pandemics in apocalyptic ways, temporally portraying how day by day, fear increases as a virus takes over the world. The speed of transmission, alongside the virus’s seemingly unstoppable global spread, evoke a sense of being engulfed by the extraordinary, creating an experience of time characterised by feelings of intensity and fear, both on and off-screen. In contrast, the lived realities of young New Zealanders during the COVID-19 pandemic speak to a more elongated, ‘empty’ experience of time that lacks such intensity. Our interviews with New Zealand youth revealed their sense of time as ever-shifting, characterised occasionally by moments of fear and anxiety, but much more so by long hours of boredom and disturbing lack of structure, particularly during lockdowns. This paper draws on Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope, alongside Bergson’s insights into lived experiences of time and Deleuze’s Cinema books, to compare the emotional temporalities of two leading science fiction pandemic films, ‘Contagion’ and ‘Outbreak’, and a range of popular zombie movies, to young New Zealanders’ lived experiences of multiple COVID-19 lockdowns. We consider how New Zealand youth (in our interviews, but also on social media) narrate their lived experiences of COVID-19 by drawing upon an ‘imaginative repertoire’ made up of sci fi films, zombie references and moral ideas of the self, which can help us to better understand how temporality is reshaped during a pandemic, particularly for young people.

Editorial Commentary

Editorial Commentary

좀비 영화의 상업성과 예술성

Movies are a community of commerce and art, but cinema movies that emphasize virtual reality produced in the post-Avatar era pose a potential threat to the artistry of movies. Excessive emphasis on technology causes such films to be outside of reality. Especially with regard to digital movies, it is even more necessary to strike a balance between commerciality and artistry. Regarding mechanical reproduction technology as a medium or tool, intervention in the field of art, and how consequences should be evaluated, Benjamin and Adorno have published relevant discussions. Their theories still have sufficient reference significance today. This article attempts to analyze the relationship between the commerciality and artistry of movies based on Benjamin and Adorno's discussion on the commerciality and artistry of film and the relationship between the two, emphasizing that artistry cannot be divorced from reality. Through the establishment of a model of the role image and narrative mode of zombie movies, the analysis here shows that zombie movies realize the symbolic and metaphor of actual society by combining reality and fantasy. The inseparable characteristics of zombie movies and reality are the key to the balance between commerciality and artistry.

The Female Burden Visualized: Cinematic Representation of Women during Epidemics

The Female Burden Visualized: Cinematic Representation of Women during Epidemics

The entrepreneurial imaginary: The hyper-real case of the Zombiepreneur

Contemporary representations of entrepreneurship only reflect the past and present, not the utopian or dystopian futures that entrepreneurial behaviours may create. Given calls for alternative narratives of entrepreneurship that challenge the orthodoxy, there is a need to critique the multiple simultaneous representations of entrepreneurship and their potential impact on our future. Using Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra, this paper proposes a new epistemological way to interrogate future entrepreneurial reality through a radical hyper-real frame and an empirical deviation from the norm. The paper introduces and critiques representations that contribute an entrepreneurial imaginary based on contemporary discourse. Through viewing and coding for entrepreneurial behaviours observed in the top-30 Zombie movies, a deviant simulacrum that is far from our field is constructed. This is used to generate a new empirically derived taxonomy that challenges existing entrepreneurial representations and suggests the impossibility of a single entrepreneurial reality. Through this deconstruction, we highlight how entrepreneurial behaviours take on alternative meaning when explored through other realities. By comparing the Zombie genre as simulacra with extant entrepreneurial simulacra, we critically challenge our entrepreneurial system of meaning, providing a perspective where entrepreneurial behaviour may lead to different outcomes depending on the reality pursued.

An unconventional zombie: Subcultural genres, global art cinema and bio-power in Sebastian Hofmann’s Halley (2012)

With an unconventional living-dead protagonist and a minimalist auteur style, Halley brings to the fore how the tensions between genre movies and art cinema operate in a transnational context. Halley surprises the audience with the story of a security guard who is dead but remains alive. While his flesh decomposes, Beto goes to work and continues with his lonely life pretending that everything is fine. In this sense, the film presents an unconventional zombie: Beto is not a monster, he is harmless and he is an obedient worker, but his condition exhibits his alienation in society. This article analyses Beto’s impossible embodiment from the perspective of film categorization, taking into account the intersections between auteur cinema and subcultural genres such as zombie movies in a transnational context. To that end, I rely on Dolores Tierney’s mapping of cult cinema in Latin America as well as on Ignacio Sánchez Prado’s analysis of global art cinema in México, both of which are related to international film circuits. Secondly, this article focuses on the sociopolitical implications of Beto’s living-dead body. I trace the trope of the living-dead character and analyse its political commentary from the perspective of bio-power. Drawing from Giorgio Agamben’s exploration of the homo sacer and bare life, this article explores how Beto’s embodiment evokes his diminished agency but also its subversive potential. With a body that transcends basic medical categorizations of life and death, Beto confronts Foucault’s idea of bio-power and resists the clinic.

Corona II – eclipse

Corona II – eclipse

Zombie Bolaño: Revolution and the Undead in “El hijo del coronel”

This article interrogates two curious claims made by Roberto Bolaño in “El hijo del coronel,” an understudied and posthumously published short story about a zombie movie. The first claim is that the zombie feature upon which the story is based serves as a “biography or autobiography” of the writer’s life, and thus that Bolaño, too, is a zombie; secondly, Bolaño insists that the movie and zombies are about revolution. I argue here that one should take Bolaño seriously on both accounts: meaning that he is some kind of zombie and that zombies signify the potential for some kind of revolution. In the course of my discussion, I engage with scholarship on and mass obsession with Bolaño—and join in current debates within the emerging field of zombie studies. I further mobilize related concepts of posthumousness, the autoimmunological, and the interregnum, ultimately arguing in favor of the reanimated revolutionary promise of both zombies and an undead Bolaño in an all too dead world.

Mary's Guide to Divination and Fortune-Telling

Mary's Guide to Divination and Fortune-Telling Hannah Dow (bio) [YOU WILL MAKE HEADS TURN] Perplexing that you walk at allwithout seeing the cavernous mouthsof the people who feel themselvespass by, if not through, you. [LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO HOLD GRUDGES] I ran away from home when I was six years old, angryat my mother. I packed my baby doll and saltines to avoidhunger. When baby began to cry, I went home. If God had leta bitter child die, what kind of God would this be? [ONE IS NOT SLEEPING, DOES NOT MEAN THEY ARE AWAKE] You have stopped sleeping because there is too much else—you fold laundry and watch zombie movies on TV and I stay upwith you because I'm afraid you are asleep behind your eyesand in a dream-like state you'll rememberyou are human, turn on the stove, burn yourself. [WHEN THE MOMENT COMES, TAKE THE TOP ONE] In the middle of the night, a camp counselor woke meto ask if the boy who wet his bed could share my bunk.In the morning, I saw his drooling face there, rememberedwhat mom once said about sleeping with boys.When she picked me up from camp, I cried the whole way home. [BIRDS ARE ENTANGLED BY THEIR FEET AND MEN BY THEIR TONGUES] I cracked open a cookie that looked likea vagina or a bird's beak, ate onehalf of it, postponed the lectureI had come to give you. [End Page 44] [YOU WILL KISS YOUR CRUSH OHHH LALAHH] Standing sideways before my bedroom mirrorI sucked in my stomach and became a sheetof paper. I thought about kissing on the mouth,forced my lips into some shape a boy might find suitable. [YOU CREATE ENTHUSIASM AROUND YOU] Your face might be made of plaster. You might bea floppy little doll, a doll that bends in halfat the waist. This is my interpretationof what the people whisper as they look away. [SOON, A VISITOR SHALL DELIGHT YOU] I convinced myself I was pregnant and told no one.I asked myself several questions, notably, ifI had had sex. I thought I was a virgin but my stomachgrowled and ached in unordinary ways such thatI knew there was someone else inside me. [LET THE DEEDS SPEAK] If a child is anything other than parasiteI would ask my mother to speak now. As the un-intended consequence of a deed, product of a uterus, I feelI must not use my mouth for anything other than apologies. [OLD FRIENDS MAKE BEST FRIENDS] When your body is forced to invent creative waysof feeding itself, it ages. Only months sinceI last saw you, but you have aged years. A fetus,too, grows wrinkled in a matter of only months. [End Page 45] [OUT OF CONFUSION COMES NEW PATTERNS] Standing sideways before my bedroom mirror Isucked in my stomach and wondered whether the raisedknoll had been conceived through my imagination,God, man, or eating for two: myself, and you. [WHEN HUNGRY, ORDER MORE FOOD] The beauty of a fork is its willingnessto bend and not break. No matter howmany times I allow food to pass through me I worryit will get stuck along the way, take hold, growinto something God herself could not digest. [End Page 46] Hannah Dow Hannah Dow is the author of Rosarium (Acre Books, 2018). Her poems have recently appeared in The Cincinnati Review, North American Review, and Ninth Letter. She reads poetry for Ploughshares and Memorious. Copyright © 2019 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

Surviving a zombie apocalypse: Leadership configurations in extreme contexts

What can the classic zombie movie, Day of the Dead, tell us about leadership? In our analysis of this film, we explore leadership behaviours in an extreme context – a zombie apocalypse where survivors face persistent existential threat. Extreme context research presents methodological challenges, particularly with regard to fieldwork. The use of films as proxy case studies is one way in which to overcome these problems, and for researchers working in an interpretivist perspective, ‘social science fiction’ is increasingly used as a source of inspiration and ideas. The contribution of our analysis concerns highlighting the role of leadership configurations in extreme contexts, an approach not previously addressed in this field, but one that has greater explanatory power than current perspectives. In Day of the Dead, we observe several different configurations – patterns of leadership styles and behaviours – emerging, shifting and overlapping across the phases of the narrative, each with radically different consequences for the group of survivors. These observations suggest a speculative theory of leadership configurations and their implications in extreme contexts, for exploring further, with other methods.

Ficciones víricas y ficciones sacrificiales. Notas sobre biopolítica y contagio en España

Este artículo examina los límites del discurso neoliberal tal y como se despliegan a lo largo de dos diferentes líneas narrativas, ubicuas en la cultura de masas de los últimos años: las ficciones de la infección vírica y las ficciones del sacrificio social. Las primeras incluyen películas sobre zombis y relatos sobre el contagio en general (28 Days Later, Land of the Dead, The Walking Dead, Contagion, Containment, Contracted, etc.); las segundas se centran normalmente en una civilización distópica cuya estabilidad sólo puede ser garantizada por el sacrificio de uno o varios de sus miembros, casi siempre bajo la forma de un juego (The Hunger Games, The Purge, The Cabin in the Woods, Elysium, The Thinning, or The Maze Runner). La atención que estas dos narrativas prestan a la inmunización las separa de aquellos relatos que se sustentan sobre la amenaza de – y el conflicto con – cierto género de alteridad, pero también las condena al callejón sin salida de la ideología neoliberal, donde el nuevo orden no parece dejar espacio a una alternativa viable. Como trato de mostrar, sin embargo, las ficciones víricas y las ficciones sacrificiales están ya asfaltando el camino hacia la superación de este callejón sin salida. Estudiando estas narrativas desde el punto de vista de dos hitos de la historia reciente española (el nacimiento de la telerrealidad a principios de los 2000 y el primer brote de ébola en 2014), defiendo que la ideología neoliberal es, en su forma más pura, un discurso traumático que sólo se puede manifestar como un estado de excepción siempre a punto de dar paso a otra cosa.

The Rise of the Outbreak Genre: 28 Days Later and the Digital Epidemic

The Rise of the Outbreak Genre:28 Days Later and the Digital Epidemic Julia Echeverría-Domingo (bio) The opening of the twenty-first century has witnessed what film scholars have described as a "zombie renaissance" (Bishop, "Dead Man" 16–25; Bishop, American Zombie 16; Dendle, Encyclopedia 172; Hubner, Leaning, and Manning; Kee 12) or a "post–9/11 zombie movie craze" (Roche), in reference to the high number of movies and extra-cinematic cultural artifacts that have plagued popular culture with hordes of living dead creatures. Ever since George A. Romero set the conventions of the genre with his influential living dead trilogy, which dissociated the zombie from its Haitian voodoo origins, these monsters have been commonly understood as metaphors providing insightful commentary on sociopolitical and ideological concerns. Zombies have been read as allegories of such diverse topics as post-colonial fright and forced labour (Dendle, "Barometer" 46; Williams); mass consumerism (Bailey); representations of race (Dyer 157–60), gender (Shaviro 87), sexuality (Moore), and displaced peoples like immigrants and refugees (Stratton); ecological disaster (Pollock); post–9/11 terrorism (Bishop 29); the so-called "risk society" (Luckhurst 11); and concrete historical episodes like the Vietnam War, usually underscored in accounts of Romero's 1968 Night of the Living Dead (Bishop, American Zombie 14), [End Page 49] to name but a few examples that give an idea of the extended literature that has been (and continues to be) written on the subject. The figurative capacity of the zombie, its "polysemic, opportunistic quality" (Boluk and Lenz, "Introduction" 9), allows for these varied interpretations and re-appropriations of the monster to appear, confirming its value as a repository of circumstantial anxieties. This historical and ideological approach has proven to be especially adequate for understanding the rise of the zombie in the rather tumultuous postmillennial context. One of the main novelties of this new cycle is the greater emphasis placed on the notion of contagion, which becomes in many cases the central premise of these narratives. Movies such as 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle 2002) and its sequel, 28 Weeks Later (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo 2007), rely on the idea of a disease spreading through the population rather than on the supernatural premise of dead bodies rising from their graves. This aspect, mostly disregarded by film criticism until very recently (Lauro; Boluk and Lenz), not only provides a touch of scientific verisimilitude to the survival horror genre but, as I argue here, it aptly serves to encapsulate the gist of the current viral, digital era. 28 Days Later is recognized here as a pioneer both of the emerging scientifically inspired virus genre and of the use of digital technology. Boyle's film meaningfully blends these two elements by resorting to the rich rhetorical qualities of the virus. Released right at the opening of the twenty-first century, the film incorporates visual techniques and narrative elements that advance the later "outbreak" both of postapocalyptic tales and of digital cinema. This article offers a generic, aesthetic, and technological analysis of the film that aims to disentangle the interconnections existing between the epidemic genre and a culture of viral flows that render the film relevant nowadays. The zombie and the virus In her renowned article "The Imagination of Disaster," Susan Sontag makes a distinction between two types of dehumanization processes that take place in science-fiction movies. On the one hand, the old vampire-like fantasy by which human cordiality is converted "to monstrous 'animal' blood-lust (a metaphoric exaggeration of sexual desire)" (47), as in the paradigmatic Dracula (Bram Stoker 1897). And, on the other, the opposite process by which human beings become more efficient, "the very model of technocratic man, purged of emotions" (47), as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel 1956) or Village of the Damned (Wolf Rilla 1960). According to Sontag, science-fiction films of the 1950s and 1960s usually [End Page 50] opted to represent their creatures following that second over-rational self-contained model, characterizing the menacing individuals as emotionless machinery. Sontag understands this historically specific trend as an allegory reflecting the depersonalizing conditions of postwar urban society in a period of deep anxieties surrounding nuclear scientific advances. More...

Los zombis como símbolo cultural contemporáneo: evolución, características y exploraciones educativas a través de la radio

Video games, novels, comics, television series... and especially movies which is the resource from where its representation and meaning has developed throughout history. In this article we make a tour of the background needed to understand where these monsters come from, their main features and their evolution on the cinema from 1932 to the present. Likewise, a review is made of the main metaphors and social readings associated with these beings and we reflect if we can learn something about them. Ultimately a radio experience about the zombie movies is presented, we intend to approach formatively the living dead and their most relevant films over time that have become today a whole counterculture icon.

“What do we Know … What have we Learnt?”: Zombified Neoliberal Fantasies in Go Goa Gone

Placing the Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK directed zombie comedy Go Goa Gone (2013) within the recent zombie movie spurt of production in South Asia, this paper analyzes the ambivalent position adopted by the film text towards discourses of neoliberalism and the desires it unleashes in India. I argue that Go Goa Gone demonstrates a playful and ironic engagement with the vicissitudes of everyday life in urban centers in India and also with the new economies of affect, especially those fueled by relatively novel patterns of consumption and participation in forms of new media. Simultaneously the essay also perpetuates some problematic aspects of racialized cultural fantasies associated in India with the paradoxically inside-outside topos of Goa.