BiblioVault - Books about Zombies in motion pictures

Infected Empires

Decolonizing Zombies

Patricia Saldarriaga

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Given the current moment—polarized populations, increasing climate fears, and decline of supranational institutions in favor of a rising tide of nationalisms—it is easy to understand the proliferation of apocalyptic and dystopian elements in popular culture. Infected Empires examines one of the most popular figures in contemporary apocalyptic film: the zombie. This harbinger of apocalypse reveals bloody truths about the human condition, the wounds of history, and methods of contending with them. Infected Empires considers parallels in the zombie genre to historical and current events on different political, theological and philosophical levels, and proposes that the zombie can be read as a figure of decolonization and an allegory of resistance to oppressive structures that racialize, marginalize, disable, and dispose of bodies. Studying films from around the world, including Latin America, Asia, Africa, the US, and Europe, Infected Empires presents a vision of a global zombie that points toward a posthuman and feminist future.

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Not Your Average Zombie

Rehumanizing the Undead from Voodoo to Zombie Walks

By Chera Kee

University of Texas Press, 2017

The zombie apocalypse hasn’t happened—yet—but zombies are all over popular culture. From movies and TV shows to video games and zombie walks, the undead stalk through our collective fantasies. What is it about zombies that exerts such a powerful fascination? In Not Your Average Zombie, Chera Kee offers an innovative answer by looking at zombies that don’t conform to the stereotypes of mindless slaves or flesh-eating cannibals. Zombies who think, who speak, and who feel love can be sympathetic and even politically powerful, she asserts.

Kee analyzes zombies in popular culture from 1930s depictions of zombies in voodoo rituals to contemporary film and television, comic books, video games, and fan practices such as zombie walks. She discusses how the zombie has embodied our fears of losing the self through slavery and cannibalism and shows how “extra-ordinary” zombies defy that loss of free will by refusing to be dehumanized. By challenging their masters, falling in love, and leading rebellions, “extra-ordinary” zombies become figures of liberation and resistance. Kee also thoroughly investigates how representations of racial and gendered identities in zombie texts offer opportunities for living people to gain agency over their lives. Not Your Average Zombie thus deepens and broadens our understanding of how media producers and consumers take up and use these undead figures to make political interventions in the world of the living.

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Zombie Cinema

Olney, Ian

Rutgers University Press, 2017

It’s official: the zombie apocalypse is here. The living dead have been lurking in popular culture since the 1930s, but they have never been as ubiquitous or as widely-embraced as they are today.

Zombie Cinema is a lively and accessible introduction to this massively popular genre. Presenting a historical overview of zombie appearances in cinema and on television, Ian Olney also considers why, more than any other horror movie monster, zombies have captured the imagination of twenty-first-century audiences.

Surveying the landmarks of zombie film and TV, from White Zombie to The Walking Dead, the book also offers unique insight into why zombies have gone global, spreading well beyond the borders of American and European cinema to turn up in films from countries as far-flung as Cuba, India, Japan, New Zealand, and Nigeria. Both fun and thought-provoking, Zombie Cinema will give readers a new perspective on our ravenous hunger for the living dead.

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Zombies

A Cultural History

Roger Luckhurst

Reaktion Books, 2015

Add a gurgling moan with the sound of dragging feet and a smell of decay and what do you get? Better not find out. The zombie has roamed with dead-eyed menace from its beginnings in obscure folklore and superstition to global status today, the star of films such as 28 Days Later, World War Z, and the outrageously successful comic book, TV series, and video game—The Walking Dead. In this brain-gripping history, Roger Luckhurst traces the permutations of the zombie through our culture and imaginations, examining the undead’s ability to remain defiantly alive.
Luckhurst follows a trail that leads from the nineteenth-century Caribbean, through American pulp fiction of the 1920s, to the middle of the twentieth century, when zombies swarmed comic books and movie screens. From there he follows the zombie around the world, tracing the vectors of its infectious global spread from France to Australia, Brazil to Japan. Stitching together materials from anthropology, folklore, travel writings, colonial histories, popular literature and cinema, medical history, and cultural theory, Zombies is the definitive short introduction to these restless pulp monsters.

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