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Session 2: Zombies, Zombies Everywhere
Chair: Paul Dobraszczyk

The Zombie as Barometer of Cultural Anxiety
Peter Dendle
Penn State University, United States of America

Borrowed initially from Caribbean folklore during the American Occupation of Haiti, the zombie was initially a cultural symbol of dehumanization in the context of industrialism, economic inequality, and social oppression. Rooting itself in the American horror film industry of the Depression and World War II, the zombie quickly adapted itself to the cultural preoccupations of middle-class white America . I will talk about the changing nature of the zombie on screen in response to broader social and political trends in the postwar world. The zombie has adapted itself to reveal such cultural anxieties as race and gender tension, military/civilian disconnect, nuclear family breakdown, drug abuse, and biomedical/health-care concerns in an era of increasing life expectancy.

Ontological Anxiety Made Flesh
Kevin Boon
English Program Coordinator, Penn State University, United States of America

The etymological roots of the monstrous imply a boundary space between human and non-human (originally, human and animal)—the imaginary space that lies between being and non-being, presence and absence. The zombie transgresses this boundary, giving corporeal shape to all that is not spirit—the remains of our humanity after the loss of any unique soul. Thus the zombie is the antithesis of our human identity (therefore, monstrous). This paper seeks to formulate the characteristics of the zombie myth as it is found in literature, film and culture, tracing its collision with the ghoul (originating in literature with H.P. Lovecraft and in film with George Romero), and examine the role identity plays in shaping the reception of the zombie in popular culture.

Fearing the Dead: The New Image of the Zombie in Modern Pop Culture
Bryan Jenness
Department of History, Goldsmiths College, University of London, United Kingdom

Modern pop culture in the last decade has seen a sudden change in the depiction of the Zombie, the transformation mirroring the shifting social fears of western culture in regards to the archetypal image of the Crowd. In mid-twentieth century Western culture, the underlying social fears of an unemotional, often faceless governmental crowd that demanded conformity was mirrored in the media depiction of the zombie: a likewise unemotional, seething mass, that not only killed but played upon fears of conformity by altering one so that he/she became in turn one of the crowd. In the past decade, this image has subtly and not so subtly changed in media depictions, particularly in movies. Zombies are still depicted as a crowd of relentless monsters; but now, they’ve become a crowd driven by primal rage- a fast, seething mass of swift destruction. This change comes with the growth of sudden riots and destructive marches of the last two decades that often began peacefully but descended into an anarchic, anger-filled crowd that left a swath of destruction in its wake. This archetypal image of the crowd becomes even more apparent as the new zombie has been given a monstrous birth in the media through the faults of corporations and biological science, often the target of such riots and marches. This image of the zombie is apparent in such media depictions as the movies 28 Days Later and Residential Evil, as well as the sudden mass of comic books and novels with zombies as the central monsters. This swamping of the pop culture media market with the monstrous image of the zombie shows the growth of the fear of the crowd and society’s acceptance of these fears.
Monsters in media depictions must hold an element of fear recognisable by society. The re-birth of the zombie in pop culture media uses current recognisable social fears of the Crowd, and through this fictitious monster, displays those fears.

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