Zombie or Media Tool: The Role of the Zombie (among other things) in American Cinema

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                  To be dead is one thing, but to be forever in the state of death, not dead and not alive, is torture indeed. Zombies, the living dead, have interested mankind forever. Yet Zombies perform a function that many other monsters also perform in literature. It is that of addressing seldom discussed or repressed feelings and ideas. These most often are feelings of fear or ethics. We all have aspirations for the advancement of technology, but films like Resident Evil demonstrate the ethical side of the equation. The implications of creating a virus that could turn the dead into zombies are graphically portrayed. Yet other zombie movies deal with issues closer to home, those of racism, cultural divides, and civil chaos. As Kyle Bishop writes in his introduction to the book American Zombie Gothic, “Of course, even though zombies are certainly uncanny and frightening by themselves…such monsters would not prove much of a threat to if actualized in the modern world; most probably the police or military could quickly exterminate these aberrations. However, zombie movies are almost always set during (or shortly after) the apocalypse where those reassuring infrastructures cease to exist.” (Bishop 22)Yet it is precisely those “reassuring infrastructures” that modern people hold so dear. What would a world without morality or propriety be like with no force to keep order? We have a glimpse when we look at a society overrun by zombies. The producers and directors of zombie film are not different than other directors. They seek to give a message. Be it on racism, the world after 9-11, bioweapons, world peace, etc., each director has a way of conveying that message. For some it is through comedy, others through science fiction. In recent days a favorite of horror movie directors has been to emphasize their message by adding zombies. The vampires of the Twilight saga represent ostracization. They are “reformed” vampires, never dying, but who long to be in society. Many ethnic groups experience this exclusion and hopefully the exposed feelings of the Cullen’s will have an effect upon our prejudice. In the wake of the anthrax scares in the months and years following September 11, we have seen movies like the one mentioned earlier, Resident Evil, that urge us to avoid growing our bio-technology in that direction. While zombies and vampires take these social and ethical issues to an extreme, it demonstrates a vivid point nonetheless.

Works Cited

Bishop, K. W. (n.d.). Introduction-The Zombie film and its cycles. In American Zombie Gothic. Jefferson: MacFarland and Co.

Here is a link on Zombies:

http://www.umich.edu/~engl415/zombies/zombie.html