The Zombie Renaissance in Popular Culture

Over the past decade audiences have struggled with increasingly ambivalent attitudes towards zombies. What were once horrifying creatures — first pathetic monsters born from imperialistic violence and enslavement, later mobs of flesh-eating corpses drawn from the mind of George A. Romero — are now more complicated figures. The most recent explorations of the zombie have asked audiences to see the walking dead in more empathetic terms, as the tragic and misunderstood victims of an uncontrollable force, infection or evolution. In fact, as some film posters, DVD covers and book jackets indicate, with the outstretched and grasping hands of their featured monsters, the contemporary zombie seems to be reaching out to its human counterparts, inviting them to join their unified and heterogeneous ranks. As the twenty-first-century zombie narrative continues to develop and change, it increasingly challenges the customary definition of ‘monster’, often exploring the potential benefits of being a zombie. These attempts to align audience sympathy with the once-monstrous foes have even transcended the movie screen and the printed page, resulting in a new cultural movement of zombie imitators, from zombie walks to zombie raves to zombie proms. What motivates and explains this recent and seemingly mystifying desire to identify as one of the walking dead? For those tormented by post-9/11 anxieties and the stresses of millennial living, contemporary zombie narratives cast the former monsters as almost redemptive ‘missionaries’, inviting fans to join their masses while promoting an easier, less angst-ridden existence.

The zombie has not only infected film and literature, but can also be found lurking in unexpected areas of popular culture. This chapter examines the relationship between psychobilly subculture and zombie mythology. The focus here is on the inception and early development of psychobilly in the 1980s as a means of expression and identity for the disaffected and culturally isolated youth, in an emerging conservative capitalist society, acting as a challenge to dominant ideological discourses. The psychobilly resists the powerful through an illusory celebration of death, adopting practices associated with the Danse Macabre, carnivalesque and fabulation. As Scholes (in Arva, 2008: 67) argues, in keeping with our ‘Cosmic Imagination … [we can] … live as comfortably as any character in fiction’. He further posits, ‘We must see man as himself imagined and being re-imagined, and now able to play a role in the re-imagination of himself.’ The zombie is one of the few cultural metaphors that can be linked directly to fan culture and its influences as opposed to those of the media. It can be used to describe a world after the apocalypse and, unlike other mythical monsters, it has no overriding narrative set out in literature. The psychobilly operates in a world full of reimagining and redefining what it means to be human through subcultural practices.

Although not the first horror game Resident Evil, released by developer Capcom in 1996 for the Sony Playstation, certainly helped to popularise horror games, spawning numerous sequels and imitators, not to mention a successful film franchise. Much game scholarship has focused on this game and its role in the establishment and determination of the survival horror game. But, although the game is certainly legitimately established as canon in this respect, it is odd that, given the importance of representations in horror games, one of the central aspects of this horror, the zombie, is largely ignored in favour of situating the game within broader genre categories.

This chapter seeks to draw together insights from the earlier debates about fan cultures and the politics of taste with more recent commentaries on fan practices and digital technologies. It will first consider the suggestion that the recent proliferation of zombie cultural artefacts is a product of the post 9/11 ‘cultural consciousness’ or whether we need to look beyond the properties of particular zombie texts to the wider cultural infrastructures, particularly fan cultures and the digital ‘paratexts’ (Kackman et al., 2011, p. 2) that exist in interdependence with zombie texts. The ‘almost straight to DVD’ film Zombies of Mass Destruction (Hamedani, 2009) will be discussed as a case study and means of exploring the importance of online fan practices in zombie culture because as a self-conscious ‘zomedy’ it has provoked interesting and extreme fan reactions.

The history of the zombie is part of a larger set of discourses generated out of industrial modernity relating to notions of the ‘unhuman’ and concepts of ‘unlife’ that develop from unease over the intersection of technology and human life. Beginning with the golem of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a collection of dead body parts galvanised into life, such concerns continue through twentieth-century modernity into the present to include undead things such as zombies, which are created by the diseases or viruses that first destroy the vestiges of the human life before returning the zombie to unthinking mobility, and in technological life-forms such as robots and cyborgs, where technology animates machine-life or reanimates and modifies the human to extend it into the posthuman. Initial concerns with the simulation of life and its threat to the status of humanity develop different narratives within representation that further question, for example, the claims of humans to have exclusive access to consciousness, autonomy and agency (androids and AIs) or generate in the cyborg a postmodern blurring of boundaries that collapses distinctions between living and dead, subject and object, or human and machine. Within this, the conceptualisation of zombies as living dead is important because of the permeation of speculative and science-fiction texts by the technological zombie (robots, androids, cyborgs), a creature that is variously either empty of consciousness, delibidinalised or animated into life by technology rather than by what are referred to in H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘Herbert West — Reanimator’ as natural ‘life-motions’ (Lovecraft, 2008, p. 35) intrinsic to a self-regulating organism.