Transnational Zombie Cinema, 2010 to 2020: Readings in a Mutating Tradition (Lexington Books Horror Studies) 9781666903409, 9781666903416, 166690340X

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Mutations in Europe, Australia, and the Americas
Class and Capitalism, Take 1
Gender, Sex, and Family, Take 1
Race and Nation, Take 1
Self, Society, and State, Take 1
Mutations in Asia
Class and Capitalism, Take 2
Gender, Sex, and Family, Take 2
Race and Nation, Take 2
Self, Society, and State, Take 2
Conclusion
References
Filmography
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

Transnational Zombie Cinema, 2010 to 2020

LEXINGTON BOOKS HORROR STUDIES Series Editors Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Auckland University of Technology Carl Sederholm, Brigham Young University Lexington Books Horror Studies is looking for original and interdisciplinary monographs or edited volumes that expand our understanding of horror as an important cultural phenomenon. We are particularly interested in critical approaches to horror that explore why horror is such a common part of culture, why it resonates with audiences so much, and what its popularity reveals about human cultures generally. To that end, the series will cover a wide range of periods, movements, and cultures that are pertinent to horror studies. We will gladly consider work on individual key figures (e.g. directors, authors, show runners, etc.), but the larger aim is to publish work that engages with the place of horror within cultures. Given this broad scope, we are interested in work that addresses a wide range of media, including film, literature, television, comics, pulp magazines, video games, or music. We are also interested in work that engages with the history of horror, including the history of horror-related scholarship. Titles in the Series Transnational Zombie Cinema, 2010 to 2020: Readings in a Mutating Tradition by John R. Ziegler Star Trek Discovery and the Female Gothic: Tell Fear No by Carey Millsap-Spears Future Folk Horror: Contemporary Anxieties and Possible Futures, edited by Simon Bacon The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Simon Bacon Grief in Contemporary Horror Cinema: Screening Loss, edited by Erica Joan Dymond Supranational Horrors: Italian and Spanish Horror Cinema since 1968, by Rui Oliveira The Anthropocene and the Undead: Cultural Anxieties in the Contemporary Popular Imagination, edited by Simon Bacon Gothic Mash-Ups: Hybridity, Appropriation, and Intertextuality in Gothic Storytelling, edited by Natalie Neill Japanese Horror: New Critical Approaches to History, Narratives, and Aesthetics, edited by Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Subashish Bhattacharjee, and Ananya Saha Violence in the Films of Stephen King, edited by Michael J. Blouin and Tony Magistrale Dark Forces at Work: Essays on Social Dynamics and Cinematic Horrors, edited by Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper

Transnational Zombie Cinema, 2010 to 2020 Readings in a Mutating Tradition John R. Ziegler

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ziegler, John R., author. Title: Transnational zombie cinema, 2010 to 2020: readings in a mutating tradition / John R. Ziegler. Description: Lanham: Lexington Books, 2024. | Series: Lexington Books horror studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023037432 (print) | LCCN 2023037433 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666903409 (cloth; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781666903416 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Zombie films--History and criticism. | Zombies in motion pictures. | Motion pictures--History--21st century. | LCGFT: Film criticism. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.Z63 Z54 2024 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.Z63 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/675--dc23/eng/20230817 LC record available at https:​//​lccn​.loc​.gov​/2023037432 LC ebook record available at https:​//​lccn​.loc​.gov​/2023037433 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Preface vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction xi PART I: MUTATIONS IN EUROPE, AUSTRALIA, AND THE AMERICAS Chapter 1: Class and Capitalism, Take 1: Italy, England, and Cuba

1

3

Chapter 2: Gender, Sex, and Family, Take 1: Belgium, Australia, and Germany

29

Chapter 3: Race and Nation, Take 1: The United States, Canada, and Australia

53

Chapter 4: Self, Society, and State, Take 1: France, Canada, and Ireland

79

PART II: MUTATIONS IN ASIA



105

Chapter 5: Class and Capitalism, Take 2: Malaysia, South Korea, and the Philippines

107

Chapter 6: Gender, Sex, and Family, Take 2: Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines

139

Chapter 7: Race and Nation, Take 2: China, South Korea, and Japan

165

Chapter 8: Self, Society, and State, Take 2: China, South Korea, and India

189

Conclusion

215 v

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Contents

References

223

Filmography Index

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251

About the Author



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Preface

Transnational Zombie Cinema, 2010 to 2020: Readings in a Mutating Tradition surveys recent zombie cinema from outside the United States in order to examine ways in which zombies and zombie films continue to be adapted by filmmakers worldwide as a means to engage with a variety of social, cultural, and economic anxieties. The films under discussion are drawn from the period 2010–2020, a decade that saw increased visibility in the United States of transnational zombie cinema, with South Korean zombie films such as #Alive (2020) and the Train to Busan series (2016–2020) attaining a particularly high profile (alongside South Korean zombie television series Kingdom [2019–]). While the presentation and function of the zombies and zombie outbreaks within these various films are frequently inflected by their nation of origin, the films also, often self-consciously, signal their belonging to the larger, transnational tradition of zombie cinema. This book seeks to contribute to zombie and horror film studies by providing close readings of individual films that demonstrate the range as well as the overarching continuities of the ways in which transnational horror cinema uses zombies to think through problems of capitalism and class, gender(ed) norms, the family, race, national identity and trauma, and the relationship of the individual subject to others and/or Others. In analyzing a representative selection of the multifarious mutations of the zombie movie in an array of countries over the past decade, this book attempts to answer the question of how the currently flourishing transnational zombie cinema adapts a figure that often represents both disempowerment and resistance, in ways that manifest a diversity of social, cultural, economic, and environmental concerns. In its argument and analyses, the volume draws particularly on cultural materialist, feminist, critical race theory, horror studies, and film studies approaches, and it grounds its analyses as often as applicable in the specific sociocultural context of a film’s country of origin. With one exception, the films considered originate outside the United States. The great majority of zombie scholarship deals with American works, vii

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particularly the Dead movies by George A. Romero, Colson Whitehead’s novel Zone One, and The Walking Dead franchise, although some prominent exceptions exist, such as Italian director Lucio Fulci’s zombie films of the 1970s and 1980s; Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) and Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004), UK productions that were integral to the resurgence of zombie films in the first decade of the new millennium; and, more recently, Canadian-born Bruce LaBruce’s queer zombie films Otto; or, UP with Dead People (2008) and L.A. Zombie (2010) and the Norwegian films Dead Snow (2009) and Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead (2014), directed by Tommy Wirkola. The sole American film to be discussed in this book, The Dead Can’t Dance (2010), is also an Indigenous film, and the fact that its Comanche protagonists belong to two nations simultaneously is integral to its sociocultural commentary. Additionally, while a very few of the films analyzed, such as Train to Busan and Cuba’s Juan of the Dead (2011), have garnered appreciable scholarly attention, most of the included films have not, and engaging with them in detail serves to broaden and deepen the scholarly conversation. In doing so, this book does not attempt to be encyclopedic; rather, it aims, by examining small clusters of films with and against one another, to trace some representative ways in which zombie films across the globe have, in the second decade of the millennium, grappled with the construction, policing, and exploitation of individual and collective identities and hierarchies.

Acknowledgments

I would like to offer my gratitude to some of the people who had an impact on bringing this book to fruition: Kevin Bozelka for help with lost movie access; Cain Miller for his thoughts on analytical framing; Noah Jampol for numerous Thursday-night discussions of horror cinema; the BCC library staff; Anthony Anderson, attendees of the PCA and MAPACA annual conferences, and everyone else who has responded to portions of this project over the course of its development; Judith Lakamper, whose interest sparked that development, and everyone at Lexington, including the anonymous reviewer, who helped to improve it; Leah Richards, who provided unflagging support no matter how many times I asked whether this point made sense or that sentence sounded good; and Renfield, Fionna, Trey, and Benny, who were split on the question of sleeping on my laptop’s keyboard.

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The 2017 Japanese film One Cut of the Dead offers a bold example of both the ongoing evolution and transnational flowering of zombie cinema. Its Japanese title, Kamera o tomeru na!, translates to Do Not Stop the Camera!, and One Cut of the Dead begins with characters filming a zombie movie (also called One Cut of the Dead) before then being attacked by real zombies. However, it then transpires that both the film and the attack are part of the one-shot film-within-a-film the creation of which the remainder of (the non-diegetic) One Cut shows us. Guillaume Vétu asserts that the “acted zombies” here represent “zombiness rather than zombie monsters” (2021, 126);1 and this metatextual turn in the film reimagines zombie cinema’s typical anxieties about economics and group hierarchy and cohesion through the lens of artistic creation rather than survival while experimenting with form and formal elements within the genre. While the prominence of the contemporary cannibalistic zombie in Asian cinema presents a relatively recent development, the history of what Sarah Juliet Lauro terms the “zombie myth” (2015, loc. 152) is a transnational history, and if one judges by the fact that 2022 saw the release of a French remake of One Cut of the Dead titled Final Cut (Coupez!; dir. Michel Hazanavicius), its future will continue in the same vein. THE ZOMBIE MYTH The history of the zombie myth is a history, as Lauro and other scholars have demonstrated, of cultural migration, appropriation, and mutation. This “convoluted history,” in the words of Karolina Słotwińska (2015), “unveils the porous geopolitical structure of global society” (154). Lauro (2015) employs the metaphor of the zombie myth as a kind of virus that “infects” a culture at the same time as that culture appropriates and modifies it (loc. 194). By the time of its first appearance in US cinema with Victor Halperin’s 1932 film White Zombie, the zombie myth had already traveled, over the course of xi

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more than two centuries and at least in part due to the transatlantic slave trade and imperialism, from now-obscure origins in Africa to the Caribbean and beyond, taking on new forms along the way. Journalist William Seabrook’s 1929 nonfiction travel narrative The Magic Island, published during the extended American occupation of Haiti, “formally introduced” the Haitian zombie to popular culture in the United States and served as its “entry point” into US film just a few years later (Lauro 2015, loc. 1642). Having made its way into cinema in its Afro-Caribbean form of a corpse revived and controlled by magic, linked primarily with Haiti, the film zombie appeared in varying permutations for the next several decades. During the 1950s, US pop culture media began to more narrowly define the previously capacious category of zombie and to align it with Cold War fears of domestic conformity, communist encroachment, and nuclear apocalypse (Platts 2016, 224–25). But the zombie’s most significant cinematic mutation, into a masterless cannibalistic walking corpse, arrived, albeit unintentionally, with the “ghouls” in George A. Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead. Even if it took some time—and, arguably, Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978)—to solidify the dominance of this form of the myth (Platts 2016, 226–27), the cannibalistic zombie was enthusiastically taken up by some filmmakers outside the United States, such as Italian director Lucio Fulci, who made his first contribution to zombie cinema with 1979’s Zombi. While the zombie maintained a consistent presence in horror films through the ensuing two decades—1985 saw both George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead and Dan O’Bannon’s The Return of the Living Dead, for example, two tonally very different movies that both include critiques of the US military; while New Zealand zombie cinema made its debut in 1992 with Peter Jackson’s splatter comedy Braindead—it achieved nothing like its current pervasiveness in popular culture. That status changed with what multiple writers would later label the zombie renaissance of the 2000s. Kyle William Bishop (2010) tracks a dramatic rise in zombie films in the period following the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and contends that 28 Days Later and its fast-moving, living infected “officially kicked off the ‘zombie renaissance’” in 2002 (10, 16). The film’s imagery of a deserted London, missing persons flyers, and a threatening military resonated with anxieties about epidemics, such as the UK’s 2001 hoof-and-mouth outbreak; 9/11 and terrorism; the US invasion of Iraq; and natural disasters including, for US audiences, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (26–28). Bishop identifies a second mainstream movie, Paul W. S. Anderson’s Resident Evil, as contributing to that 2002 kickoff and views both Boyle’s and Anderson’s films as linked to the video games, especially 1996’s survival horror game Resident Evil (the US title of Biohazard), having “incubated the genre” in a modified form through the 1990s (16). Ian Conrich (2015) singles out 1997’s light-gun

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shooter House of the Dead as well and asserts that it was with these Japanese games “that the zombie revival really began” (17). In addition to Resident Evil sequels in 2004 and 2007, that revival included hit zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead; Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004), which incorporated images evoking the so-called War on Terror; Land of the Dead (2005), the first zombie film directed by George A. Romero in twenty years and featuring a character inspired by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; and Planet Terror (2007), Robert Rodriguez’s half of the double-feature Grindhouse, which links its outbreak to the (at that point imagined) killing of Osama bin Laden by the US military. Amid such preoccupations, and in some of the aforementioned films, this decade also boasted an increase in “hero” or protagonist zombies and zombies with varying degrees of consciousness (Bishop 2015, 13). And, conscious or not, the zombie extended its surging popularity beyond film and video games and into a range of other media and fan practices (Hubner, Leaning, and Manning 2015, 3). Robert Kirkman’s comic book series The Walking Dead, for example, debuted in 2003 (Bishop 2015, 12); and in his article “The Zombie Renaissance,” Mark McGurl (2010) discusses literature such as Max Brooks’s The Zombie Survival Guide (2003) and World War Z (2007) and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) in arguing that the “zombie renaissance registers the rapid corrosion even of our secular myths about the self, not least the myth of its rational autonomy” in a shift away from realism and toward “the weirdness of allegory.” Looking back on the 2000s boom in zombie films, Bishop (2015) attributes their road-trip-style narratives, a contrast to earlier siege-style narratives, to the influence not only of video games and post–September 11 US interventionism but also of “a new globalized Gothic aesthetic” (23). While transnational output such as Japan’s cult zombie films was already reinventing this dominant cinematic form of the myth in the first decade of the millennial zombie resurgence, such globalization would become more pronounced from 2010 onward, creating a wide array of culturally specific adaptations of a “fundamentally American creation” (Bishop 2010, 12). If 9/11 loomed over the zombie revival’s first ten years, the transition into its second decade was marked by two significant events: the global effects of the Great Recession (2007–2009) and the early success of The Walking Dead (2010–2022) as a television series. The Great Recession marked the beginning of a continuing crisis that, although “at bottom a crisis of . . . globalizing, financialized, neoliberal” capitalism, is “simultaneously a crisis of economy, ecology, politics, and ‘care’” (Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser 2109, 16). According to Camilla Fojas (2017), the Great Recession, as a result of which the Global North recommitted to and innovated racialized capitalism and exploitation of

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the Global South, “found its emblem in the zombie apocalypse” (2, 12). The Walking Dead provided one of the most visible of such emblems. Stella Marie Gaynor (2022) views The Walking Dead as “a watershed moment” that initiated a new cycle for US television horror in the 2010s but also points out that the series received a global release in “120 countries and in 33 languages,” doubtless contributing to the ongoing transnational popularity of the zombie (25, 32). If US zombie screen narratives in the 2000s consistently showcased “survivalist fantasies” (Bishop 2010, 19) and, like The Walking Dead, often remained conservative in the 2010s (Fojas 2017, 12), transnational zombie cinema did not always reproduce such characteristics as it adapted and reimagined the zombie myth in the wake of the Great Recession and through unique cultural lenses. The zombie myth’s transnational cinematic circulation and mutation continues today unabated; and even if its filmic manifestations tend not to differ quite as widely from one another as the Haitian from the Romeran zombie, they may derive from various representationally significant origins, possess a significant degree of consciousness, or be vegetarian; and they can act not only as ravenous threats to the living but also as servants, community members, and even romantic interests. Iain Robert Smith (2013) identifies horror as “a genre that transcends a national framework” and displays correspondences in “style, theme and characterisation” across national boundaries (191). Sophia Siddique and Raphael Raphael (2016) submit that horror has always been a “deeply transnational” genre with little respect for corporal, generic, and national borderlines (2, 3). At the same time, note Keith McDonald and Wayne Johnson (2021), horror remains “as bound to regional tensions as it is to [an] international border crossing” (29) that is as “conceptual and entwined with imagined communities” as it is “physical and geographical” (34). Owing to this facility for transcending various boundaries—one which echoes Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s (1996) seminal description of the monster as disturbing and resisting categories and classification (loc. 219)—the dominant forces within horror cinema in the new millennium have largely been “non-Hollywood, national or regional” cinemas (Och and Strayer 2014, 1). Zombie cinema specifically underwent “increasing globalisation” beginning in the early 2000s as part of its resurgence (Abbott 2016, loc. 1146). Conceptualizing contemporary zombie cinema as transnational rather than national, international, or global acknowledges “connections among local, regional and global modes of production” while not eliding their distinctions in relation to economic globalization and “an increasingly mobile Hollywood culture” (Och and Strayer 2014, 5). The contemporary transnational zombie film positions itself within a complex nexus of “global microflows,” to borrow a term from Steven T. Brown’s (2018) analysis of Japanese horror cinema, of influence

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and intertextuality (6). As Emma Dyson (2014) summarizes, “The contemporary cinematic zombie is at once personal, national and global in its meaning, reflecting the changing historical, social, political, and global structures that shape cinematic production” (loc. 2582). The reflection of these structures via the zombie is most often critical, and the structures themselves are, like cinema that reflects them, impacted by a dense network of transnational and local forces. The recurring concerns of transnational zombie cinema suggest that it can be considered part of the “globalgothic,” which displays a “new anxiety about borders, identities and futures” in response to globalized capitalism (Botting and Edwards 2013, 13). Those borders, identities, and futures include those involving class, gender, and race, which are caught up in globalization’s “national, social and subjective dissolution” (Botting and Edwards 2013, 23). An emphasis on the body as a “site of horror” helps to generate horror cinema’s ability to transcend borders and boundaries (Och and Strayer 2014, 6); and the zombie acts as a liminal and “excessive” body that resists “stable meanings” (Siddique and Raphael 2016, 5), making zombie media a fitting vehicle for addressing the types of anxieties to which zombies themselves give embodied form. Doubtless part of the continued popularity of transnational zombie cinema is due not only to increased ease of distribution and access but also to this ability to adapt itself to the threats and destabilization engendered by a cannibalistic global capitalist modernity, which have only increased over the period of zombie cinema’s resurgence. As “plastic, amorphous, and contradictory” (Rutherford 2013, 16) figures that slip “freely across the semantic field” (63), zombies can give form to culturally situated critiques of structures ranging from the dehumanizing neoliberal workplace to manifestations of the patriarchal family to settler colonial systems of identity. On a meta-textual level, David R. Castillo argues that the contradiction of zombies as both products of and warnings about globalized mass consumption makes them “the perfect monsters” for our global capitalist times (Castillo et al. 2016, 59), including the shock waves of the Great Recession and its aftereffects. Because capitalism functions “as an institutionalized social order” (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018, 52), the current, “epochal crisis of capitalism” (10) reveals itself as “not only economic and financial, but also ecological, political, and social” (9). If, as Rahel Jaeggi claims, there is “no corresponding political conflict that adequately expresses the crisis [of capitalism] in a way that could lead to an emancipatory resolution” (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018, 12), then perhaps we might see the zombie film as filling that lack by allowing us to imagine one. This is not to say, however, that zombie cinema always or only foregrounds direct critique of capitalism. Zombie “narratives question Christian chrononormativity, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, neoliberalism, and

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an imposed visuality that is based on Whiteness and abledness” (Saldarriaga and Manini 2022, 129), to name a few examples. Although, as will be seen in this book, such structures may diegetically persist or be restored even after a zombie outbreak, the act of subjecting them to interrogation, disruption, or destruction permits consideration of alternative ways of being on individual, community, national, and global levels. In contrast to the living, zombies can seem to “offer a radically different way of existing” that might “sustain” a new order (Kee 2017, loc. 952); and the fall of the old order, while frightening (and even if temporary), can represent empowerment through choice and agency (Castillo et al. 2016, 85). Zombie cinema, like horror cinema more broadly, can also offer “productive re-engagement with the traumas of national history, their cultural legacy and the possibility of being (and narrativising) otherwise” (Blake 2008, 187). Such opportunities are not less present in zombie comedies, which are counted among the films discussed in this book and which consistently “question the motives, efficacy, and durability of state, corporate media, and social institutions” (Webley 2016, 41) by means of the flexible figure of the zombie. Brad Weismann (2021) claims not only that horror and comedy “naturally” work together in using “timing, nuance, and surprise” to deliver “a primal release” (188) but also that the comedy is an especially “potent” form of the zombie film (180). Nöel Carroll’s (1999) work can add to Weismann’s conception of both genres’ “transgression of a category, a concept, a norm, or a commonplace expectation” (154), and the work of Cynthia J. Miller (2018) can further extend theorizations such as Carroll’s with the notion that spectacle, which gives form to desire, fantasy, and nightmare, heightens emotions and produces an inability “to look away” (loc. 3097). Carroll avers that horror and humor “are so alike that indiscernibly portrayed monsters can give rise to either horror or humor” (147), and Aaron Michael Kerner and Jonathan L. Knapp (2016) similarly assert that laughter can respond equally to humor, disgust, arousal, or “the exhibition of pain and horror” or of the abject—that which, like the corpse, threatens the boundaries between subject and object or self and other (149–50). These contentions are echoed in Linda Badley’s (2008) more specific declaration that zombies, in their grotesquerie, are simultaneously funny and horrifying “and for the same reasons” (35, emphasis in original). Such reasons include the carnivalesque and mechanical qualities of our lives and bodies and the absurd tragicomedy of our inevitable deaths (Badley 2008, 36–38); and the precept that zombies are us aligns with Carroll’s equation of the monster with the clown and the clown with a deformed version of the human body (155). In a further echo of the zombie, the clown’s cycles of injury and recovery can also be interpreted as mimicking death and resurrection (Kerner and Knapp 2016, 141). Horror comedies can comment on or even innovate the genre (Weismann 2021, 188) at the

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same time as they serve as vehicles for cultural critique. The slacker zombie comedy, for instance, of which Shaun of the Dead is an influential exemplar, reflects routinized everyday life under late-stage capitalism (Hubner, Leaning, and Manning 2015, 8; see also Badley 2008, 48). At the same time, such critiques are inflected by the comedic form. While comedy, including in zombie cinema, can and does act as a vehicle for hegemonic subversion, Bishop (2015) argues that zombie comedies, such as Shaun and Zombieland (2009), follow a classical model of comedy, in which “a comedic hero” completes “a perilous quest” that carries the promise of romance “on a note of hope, promise, and stability” that is often linked to “a newly constituted family and/or marriage” (46–47). While the zombie comedies examined in this book may not conform precisely to this model, their employment of some of its elements almost necessarily produces some reactionary tension with their progressive critiques, since family and heteronormativity are, for example, linked to capitalism and oppressive hierarchization. On a more granular level, John A. Dowell and Cynthia J. Miller (2018) coin the term “sLaughter” to refer not to horror comedy as a genre but to “a fleeting moment” (loc. 145) in which someone “experiences an event as simultaneously horrifying and funny” (loc. 122). With its focus on violence done by and to already horrifying bodies, zombie cinema is well-suited to producing such moments. Contemporary transnational zombie cinema is part of the “oscillation between” generic discourses and responses that characterizes twenty-first-century horror film among “the increased effects of globalization” (McDonald and Johnson 2021, 11). Within this process, the zombie myth has mutated (and continues to mutate) on cinema screens so multivalently that the result is not a single overarching narrative of its development but rather a diffuse tapestry of smaller, localized transmutations. Like the transnational vampire films that Peter Hutchings (2014) examines, these zombie films “foreground and draw sustenance” from “national distinctions” as part of revising and reenergizing “particular conventions and approaches” that then circulate transnationally in their adjusted configurations (loc. 1094). As well as adapting conventions of zombie cinema in this way, the transnational zombie film claims a clear place among the horror subgenres, as outlined by Linnie Blake (2008), that function within a “historically determined national context” while simultaneously offering “a trans-historical and transcultural critique of dominant ideologies of race, class and gender” (188). In these dualities, the films duplicate the zombie’s liminality, which poses a threat to hierarchical structures, and thereby challenge hierarchical conceptions of the transnational film industry itself.

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THE STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK David J. Skal (2001) writes that “the underlying structure of horror images” doesn’t change much but their “cultural uses” emphatically do (23). The zombie’s defining emptiness—an evacuation of subjectivity and identity which does not in all cases preclude the reinstatement of that lost selfhood—contributes to a flexibility that has allowed and continues to allow for adaptation in a variety of national and cultural contexts for a variety of purposes. The aim of this book is to survey from a transnational perspective recent directions in what Laura Hubner, Marcus Leaning, and Paul Manning (2015) dubbed at the midpoint of the decade considered here the “global explosion” of “the ‘zombie renaissance’” (3). With its chronological parameters as the second decade of the twenty-first century, this study examines, with one (Indigenous) exception, films from outside the United States through a set of dominant thematic concerns and the ways in which they are localized. Additionally, while engaging with some films, such as Blood Quantum, that enjoy a higher scholarly profile, this volume’s focus is works that have received less critical attention to date. Given the sheer and ever-growing number of zombie films, this study offers an exemplary rather than an exhaustive survey, sketching through the highlighted films some of the significant ways in which zombies have been used across the globe to address a range of sociocultural anxieties, fears, traumas, and tensions. This book divides these concerns into four categories—class and capitalism; gender, sex, and family; race and nation; and self, society, and state—that correspond to some of recent transnational zombie cinema’s more significant recurring (and continuing) considerations. Each of these four categories is employed twice, an arrangement styled as “take 1” and “take 2,” as the book also divides its analysis into two halves that separate the films discussed by their origin in what are commonly constructed as Western or Eastern nations. These particular divisions and juxtapositions, however, make no claim for strict boundaries between or among hemispheres, nations, or themes. Much as with the thematic divisions of the chapters (certainly, some if not most or even all films would sit comfortably in multiple chapters, and the thematic categories themselves overlap and interpenetrate), this division is intended not to establish any rigid lines of difference but to help to suggest resonances and patterns of continuity and divergence while following in zombie cinema what Hutchings (2014) has described in transnational vampire cinema as the individualized “pathways” through a “loose historical network” (loc. 1094). These examples of zombie cinema represent points within a porous, multidirectional cinematic and cultural network in

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which transnational and intranational influences manifest in inextricable relation to one another. The first chapter of this book focuses on three films that differently foreground urban spaces to participate in an ongoing history of capitalist critique that stretches back to the beginnings of zombie cinema. The End? (2017) analogizes the neoliberal dehumanization of workers through the zombification of employees in a Roman office building, a space of entrapment that both represents and implements the capitalist system, a synecdoche, perhaps, for the city itself. The comedic Cockneys Vs. Zombies (2013) expands the scope of its similar critique to the urban neighborhood, as its zombies are unleashed upon the East End of London as a result of gentrification, which the film positions in opposition to a working-class dedication to family and community. As a Latin American film from an officially socialist nation, Juan of the Dead (2011), another comedy, provides a useful juxtaposition to these two European films. Juan points to American imperialism as the source of the undead apocalypse that seizes the Cuban capital of Havana, situating neoliberalism at least partly as an invasive outside force, and the film registers the anxieties of a nation in tension between capitalism and socialism, simultaneously satirizing the Cuban regime and rejecting emigration to the consumerist United States as a solution to Cuba’s ills. Norms of gender and sexuality, including the hierarchies which they generate and are embedded within, are inextricably linked to capitalism and have also been of concern to zombie cinema since its beginnings. Chapter 2 examines the politics of gender and sexuality in a trio of Western films, beginning with Belgium’s Yummy (2019), in which the source of the zombie outbreak is an Eastern European clinic in the cosmetic surgery tourism industry. The film’s castigation of both male and female cosmetic surgery patients, which aligns surgical alterations with the changes brought on by zombification, entangles itself with regressive gender paradigms. Zombie comedy Me and My Mates vs. the Zombie Apocalypse (2015) employs some similarly regressive paradigms in the humor that it directs toward nonnormative masculinity, although it simultaneously demonstrates an ambivalence toward both normative masculinity (including some of the features of its Australian form) and femininity, for which its zombie apocalypse acts as a sort of proving ground. In a contrast to the resiliency of traditional views of gender in these two films, the German Ever After (2018) arguably moves beyond normative gender roles, if not, ultimately, binary gender entirely. Rather than worrying over masculinity, the film completely subordinates it to a vision of a subset of women infected with the film’s zombie virus as avatars of a posthuman and post-Capitalocene future. In each case, a zombie outbreak provides the conditions under which established conceptualizations of gender are tested and, to varying degrees, repudiated or reinforced.

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Chapter 3 turns to Western films that imagine their alternative futures along axes of Indigeneity. The Dead Can’t Dance (2010) and Blood Quantum (2020) both feature a zombie virus to which Indigenous people in the settler colonial states of the United States and Canada, respectively, are immune, a symbolic inversion of historical traumas; and both further feature future-oriented mixing of settler and Indigenous “blood,” literally, through medical procedures, in the former film and through heterosexual reproduction in the latter. Both films, directed by Indigenous filmmakers, also assert visual sovereignty in a cinematic tradition dominated by non-Indigenous artists. Cargo (2017), meanwhile, looks to cultural rather than physical mixing, positioning the hybridization of White and Indigenous Australian cultures as a way forward in the zombie apocalypse, as well as a preferable alternative to prevailing settler colonial culture. All three films, then, extend the critique of a colonialism whose history is inseparable from that of the zombie myth itself. The fourth chapter de-centers—while not ignoring—capitalism, gender, and race in its readings of relations between self and Other(s) in a further trio of Western films. The Night Eats the World (2018) uses the zombie apocalypse to examine the human subject in isolation and posits that mere survival, even with outlets for creative expression, is not enough to remain a “human” self in the absence of other humans, thereby establishing one of the boundaries between life and undeath as relationality with a human Other. Creative expression also serves as a marker of humanity in Ravenous (2017), which can be productively read from an existentialist perspective. The film positions creative expression alongside humor as one of the ways that humans, represented in this case by a small group of Quebecois survivors, can invest a mundane, meaningless existence with self-created meaning and value (the same meaning and value that The Night Eats the World’s apocalypse calls into question). At the same time, Ravenous rejects the very human behavior of (capitalist) accumulation, represented by the towers of material goods assembled by the film’s zombies, as a source of existential meaning and worth. The modes of self-definition with which The Cured (2017) is concerned are tied to intracommunal and even intrafamilial violence, allegorizing the lingeringly traumatic legacy of the Northern Ireland Conflict in the attempted reintegration into Irish society of persons “cured” of a zombie virus and the unrest and factionalism which accompanies this attempt. All three films in this chapter posit that mere survival, or bare life, is equivalent to undeath. In applying Giorgio Agamben’s concept of bare life to the zombie, Jon Stratton (2011) explains that, lacking the protection of the state, “the person reduced to bare life [in this sense] can become transformed into the second understanding of bare life: the liminal condition of death in life” (205). In other words, one might just as well join the zombies.

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Chapter 5 begins the second half of the volume and returns capitalism to the fore, focusing on films from East and Southeast Asian nations (all, incidentally, formerly colonized) that reflect experiences under globalized capitalism. The zombie outbreaks in two comedic films from Malaysia, which has undergone rapid modernization in the twentieth century, center economically precarious heroes. KL Zombie (2013), I contend, displays an ambivalence toward capitalism: for its delivery driver protagonist, the film’s zombie outbreak provides an opportunity for heroic action in place of lowwage drudgery, but a cream sold by a wealthy multilevel marketer turns out to cure zombiism and further enriches this predatory figure. No Other Way! (2015), also features a delivery driver as a protagonist, whose act of ending a zombie outbreak, caused by another wealthy capitalist’s use of magic, merely returns him to the same position of precarity in which he began the film. South Korea, like Malaysia, experienced rapid modernization in the previous century, and the South Korean films examined in this chapter reflect the inequitable results of the nation’s movement into globalized neoliberalism. Unlike KL Zombie and No Other Way!, Train to Busan (2016) evinces little ambivalence toward capitalism in its critique, assigning responsibility for its zombie apocalypse to a biotechnology company and depicting a focus on career as antithetical to family and collectivity; and its animated prequel Seoul Station (2016) focalizes a similar indictment of neoliberalism through an unhoused protagonist and another who is being forced to commodify herself for sex work. Zombiism again comes from for-profit biotech research in the (romantic) comedy Zombie for Sale (2019), and zombie Jjong-bi too is commodified when a struggling family in rural South Korea starts a business after observing that his bite appears to confer rejuvenation. Like this film, as well as the abovementioned Malaysian films, the Filipino film Block Z (2020) highlights members of the precariat from the outset, and its economically struggling protagonists prove immune to the zombie infection that upends the capitalist hierarchy. And if they do not end or begin to reverse the zombie outbreak as in the Malaysian and South Korean comedies, the lack of a return to the status quo leaves room for potential social transformation. Challenges to patriarchal rather than capitalist norms predominate in the East and Southeast Asian films discussed in chapter 6. Miss Zombie (2013) interweaves the economic and sexual exploitation of its titular zombie in a critique of Japanese patriarchy and its manifestation in the form of the (middle-class) family. Contrastingly, Peninsula (2020), which takes place in the Train to Busan universe, posits the family as able to provide a worthwhile life in the postapocalypse, drawing on idealized South Korean expectations of motherhood even as the widespread destruction and abandonment of the nation creates a space for a mother and her daughters to act outside of traditional gender roles. While these two films use the social effects of the zombie

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to offer divergent perspectives on prescribed constructions of womanhood, the heteronormative gender roles challenged in the Filipino film Remington and the Curse of the Zombadings (2011) are primarily male, as the zombies here are men murdered for being bakla—a term that commonly encompasses effeminacy and cross-dressing and may include homosexuality—who are then raised from the dead and ultimately reincorporated into the community. Although Miss Zombie might herself be seen as queer in her ability to make more zombies outside of heterosexual reproduction, Remington more specifically links the queer bakla not only to the zombie but also to a tradition of precolonial queerness which the film celebrates. The legacy of imperialism also informs the East Asian films considered in chapter 7, which use zombies to represent foreign threats to the nation, specifically those rooted in ethno-national histories. In China’s Zombie Island (2018), the zombie outbreak results from ongoing experiments by descendants of Japanese army personnel stationed on the titular island in World War II, extending the national trauma of Japanese biowarfare and medical atrocities committed during that period and, in one character, imagining Japanese identity as itself a kind of infection. A similar dynamic is at play in the South Korean film Rampant (2018). There, although a European ship brings the zombie virus to seventeenth-century Joseon, Qing China presents its own threats to identity and sovereignty in Joseon, threats that the zombie outbreak, which precipitates a regime change and the new leader’s commitment to the kingdom and its people instead of to China, allows for a fantasy of overcoming. Although the zombie infection in Japan’s I Am a Hero (2016) is not presented as of foreign origin, this film too depicts domestic national identity as superior to a foreign alternative. I Am a Hero deals with national identity through the conscious rejection, framed by a conversation of the global place of Japanese media, of a glorification of firearms and gun violence that it associates with American culture and, by extension, with film heroes. As do most zombie films, then, the films discussed in this chapter too fundamentally concern themselves with the violation and preservation of boundaries. Chapter 8 picks up the thread of self-definition in relation not to national identity but rather to nationally inflected attitudes to media in a quartet of East and South Asian films. In the Chinese film Zombiology: Enjoy Yourself Tonight (2017), the suggestion that established cultural forms such as Cantonese opera should evolve doubles as a case for the film’s own innovation of zombie cinema conventions while further suggesting that entertainment media, including itself, offer fans a way to reimagine themselves. Participation in online gaming and social media, both arenas of self-(re)definition, proves, somewhat atypically for zombie cinema, to be a survival advantage as well as a means of preserving relationality in South Korea’s #Alive (2020), reflecting the nation’s robust digital culture. The

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robustness of this culture does not, however, guarantee its positive representation. Another South Korean film, The Neighbor Zombie (2010), deploys some of the stereotypes about media-induced isolation that #Alive subverts, as it draws, sometimes parodically, on genre media tropes. Digital culture has exploded in India as well, and that nation’s Rise of the Zombie (2013), again counter to much horror cinema, connects digital technology—associated with urban space—with safety and interpersonal connection, while isolation in the “wilderness” begets zombification. And becoming a typical cannibal-style zombie, of course, leaves no self to (re)define. Finally, the book concludes with a brief consideration of Zombi Child (2019), from a French director but focused on the Haitian version of the zombie myth. In what can be read as a metacommentary on that myth, the film presents the zombie as historical fact even as it positions the cannibal-style zombie as a fantasy. The conclusion also gestures to areas such as contemporary African zombie cinema, which fell outside of this volume’s scope and which represent further avenues for the future of transnational zombie cinema and its study. A NOTE ON LANGUAGE AND DOCUMENTATION This book analyzes a number of films made in languages which this author does not speak, requiring a reliance on subtitles. However, sets of subtitles are works of translation, and translation can never be transparent. As Abé Mark Nornes (2007) writes, “nothing is simple when it comes to subtitles; every turn of phrase, every punctuation mark, every decision the translator makes holds implications for the viewing experience of foreign spectators” (2). It is therefore important to recognize not only that sets of subtitles vary in quality but also that, as translations, they are necessarily “imperfect” (7). Subtitles, opines Nornes, “even at their finest, hold something in common with the rocky translation for the instruction manual for a cheap VCR from China: they are legible, but inescapably foreign” (8). Nevertheless, while acknowledging that subtitles provide only mediated access to a film text, I have found it useful at times to quote from them. At the same time, I have tried to limit the number and length of quotations from subtitles, and, more importantly, I have endeavored not to rest any points of my arguments on specific word choices or phrasings in such quotes. I have also indicated when quotes from non-English-language films are originally in English. Since most readers of this book will likely access the films discussed under their English titles, I use these titles but provide the original title, where applicable (and Romanized, when necessary), in parentheses the first time that a film is mentioned after this Introduction. When referring to names from

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cultures in which the family name is written first, I follow this practice for film personnel such as actors and directors, except in cases in which an individual is credited in a way that departs from this practice. For written texts, I refer to the author’s name in the way it appears in the publication. Finally, when Kindle editions of books include page numbers, I cite those, but when they do not, I cite the location number, abbreviated as loc. NOTE 1. Vétu places One Cut of the Dead in a larger context of acted zombies in Japanese film.

PART I

Mutations in Europe, Australia, and the Americas

1

Chapter 1

Class and Capitalism, Take 1 Italy, England, and Cuba

The zombies who work Murder Legendre’s sugarcane mill in 1932’s White Zombie first brought to the screen the zombie’s long-standing symbolization of exploited labor. Evoking Haiti’s colonial history on the one hand and America’s contemporaneous Great Depression on the other, the zombies in this and similar early zombie films, while not free from imperialist fantasy, “offer a critique of both slavery and the abuse of the worker under the capitalist system” (Kee 2011, 17). The central characters in White Zombie embody “specific and exaggerated types of economically classed individuals”—elite, bourgeois middle class, agrarian overseer/factory owner—with the zombies representing simultaneously the “ultimate slaves” and the “proletariat labor force” (Bishop 2010, 76). The film evoked “a nightmare vision of a breadline” onscreen and mixed people costumed as zombies with moviegoers in theater lobby promotions offscreen, drawing attention to the figure’s applicability to Depression-era Americans (Skal 2001, 169). Much as sugarcane plantations, with their emphasis on “alienation, interchangeability, and expansion” regarding labor and commodities, provided “the model for factories during industrialization” (Tsing 2015, 39), early screen zombies, with their roots in those plantations, provided a foundation for their flesh-eating descendants’ own capitalist critiques. Decades after White Zombie, another milestone in zombie cinema, George A. Romero’s 1978 Dawn of the Dead, both renamed Night of the Living Dead’s genre-changing ghouls as zombies and featured a satire of consumerism, ensuring that critiques of capitalism and its effects have remained a mainstay of zombie cinema. Robin Wood (2018c) describes the zombies’ need in Dawn to consume, underscored in their “gravitation, from force of habit, to the shopping mall,” as representing “the logical end result, the reductio ad absurdum, of capitalism” (198)—although he clarifies in a later essay that consumerism is “relatively superficial” and thus a relatively comfortable 3

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Chapter 1

target, one which in Romero’s series of zombie films does not shift to capitalism itself until 2005’s Land of the Dead (2018b, 378). In all of these films, though, zombiism, in its evacuation of self-determination, mirrors capitalist societies’ “perverse” surrender of “fundamental questions . . . to an impersonal mechanism geared to the maximal self-expansion of capital” (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018, 25). Globalization has accelerated late-stage capitalism and its harms, and the popularity of apocalyptic representations, contends David R. Castillo, constitutes a reaction to an inescapable and ultimately self-destructive global capitalism (Castillo et al. 2016, 50). If White Zombie condensed the “faceless, frightening [economic] forces” of the time into its zombie master (Skal 2001, 169), this comforting personification has evaporated from zombie films of the post–Night of the Living Dead period, while the forces themselves have become, if anything, more frightening. David A. Reilly enumerates parallels between globalization and a zombie apocalypse: a sense of unavoidable, unmanaged destruction for which we share at least some of the blame; an unending threat beholden to amoral and irrational drives; and a rending of traditions and “cultural and historical fabrics of social interaction” (Castillo et al. 2016, 73–76, 78). The films examined in this chapter—Italian film The End? (The End?—L’inferno fuori; 2017), English film Cockneys vs Zombies (2012), and Cuban film Juan of the Dead (Juan de los muertos; 2011)—may not explicitly depict or confirm a global zombie apocalypse, but they nevertheless evince the parallels that Reilly describes in their local responses to the global reach of capitalism, each framing its critique in a differing scope—a single building, a neighborhood, and a capital city, respectively. All three movies also feature zombies that paradoxically embody the destructive forces produced merely by “our functioning as autonomous consumers in a late capitalist economy” (a subject position that is more complex and ambiguous in Juan of the Dead, set in nominally socialist Havana) as well as the desire to escape from those forces (Castillo et al. 2016, 112–13). While each of these three films foregrounds different aspects of globalized neoliberal capitalism—including labor precariousness, housing displacement, and the legacies of imperialism—taken together, they demonstrate the continued flexibility of the zombie genre within its long tradition of economic critique. A ROUGH DAY AT THE OFFICE: NEOLIBERAL PRECARIOUSNESS AND DEHUMANIZATION IN THE END? The critique of a dehumanizing and precarious capitalism presented in The End?, directed by Daniele Misischia, comes after a drought in Italy’s output

Class and Capitalism, Take 1

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of zombie cinema. The Italian film industry, once a prolific exporter of cinema, including horror films, underwent a “contraction” beginning in the 1970s and completed in the 1980s, and now produces little genre cinema for international markets (Rushing 2016, 25). Italian zombie cinema reflects this arc, with the wave of films kicked off by Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 (1979) relatively quickly turning to a trickle of four movies from 1982 to 1990, a few more from 1991 to 1994, and less than a handful from then until The End? more than twenty years later (O’Brien 2008, 65–67). The End?, in fact, was the first release from a production company with the aim of “reviving Italian genre cinema as produced by Italian auteurs” (Scarpa 2018).1 Despite the gaps in this tradition, and while the gore of the early Italian zombie films is most prominent in popular discourse, the social and economic critique apparent in Misischia’s film picks up a thread that is similarly present in those antecedents. Brad O’Brien (2008) points to social unrest in 1970s Italy, including among exploited workers, as a possible driver for the appeal of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, the success of which with Italian audiences led to the brief zombie boom in the nation’s film industry (62). Within some of those late 1970s and early 1980s films, for example, Russ Hunter (2014) identifies contributions to a “national discourse” regarding environmentalism that resulted from the “the impact of several environmental disasters” (locs. 2007, 2048). In these films, argues Hunter, it is the use of science and technology to “underpin” an avaricious capitalist system that renders them destructive (loc. 2287). The End? too represents the destructive force of capitalism, albeit not on the natural environment—although its congested urban setting can reasonably be seen as an environmental effect of capitalist growth and expansion—but on the worker as an individual and interconnected subject. The intrusion in The End? of a zombie apocalypse into the life and workspace of corporate businessman Claudio Verona (Alessandro Roja) gestures to Italy’s uneasy relationship to its transformation into a predominantly neoliberal state. In the 1980s, Italy began to undergo neoliberal reforms that markedly weakened the strong worker protections and job security that its labor force had previously enjoyed (Molé 2012, 8). The rise of neoliberalism, in tandem with globalization—which included decreased wage demands (Simoni 2010, 229), diminished welfare benefits, and increased privatization and short-term employment—increased labor instability and precarity through the 1990s and 2000s, changes that were significant enough to merit the moniker of the “new economy” (Molé 2012, 4, 8, 21–22).2 In 2014, against a background of recession and high unemployment and public debt, in part spurred by the global financial crisis beginning in 2007–2008, further reforms proposed by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi—who served until 2016, the year before release of The End?—were met with large-scale protests

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Chapter 1

(“Italians” 2014) and general strikes (Zampano 2014) from those who saw them as further eroding workers’ rights and protections. It is within the context of this atmosphere of socioeconomic anxiety that The End? presents both its protagonist’s neoliberal capitalist values as something to be overcome and corporate space as a site of entrapment, hazard, and death. The film’s plot is straightforward: Claudio travels to his office, anticipating an important meeting, and becomes stuck alone in an elevator in his office building as the zombie apocalypse unfolds. Eventually, Claudio having been relatively powerless to intervene in the carnage that he has witnessed from his—and the audience’s—limited view through an opening between the elevator doors, a police officer arrives, and the two work together such that Claudio, though not the officer, is able to escape the building into a city still undergoing a zombie outbreak. Chera Kee (2017) observes that in apocalypses on film, the wish for a liberation from capitalism commonly conjoins with the wish for liberation from the White heteronormative patriarchy supported by capitalism (loc. 1105). Claudio clearly begins the film as the avatar of this nexus of dominant ideologies: a wealthy, straight, White, cisgender male businessman whose behavior toward his wife and mistress betrays the close relationship between the attitudes of capitalism and patriarchy. In a phone conversation with a colleague, Sara (Bianca Friscelli), several minutes into the movie, Claudio asserts that a man who is causing problems for an acquisition deal in which he is involved will go from “breaking balls” to “licking” their collective “ass” once they close the deal because “everybody loves money and success.” Even though the coworker on the other end of the call is a woman, the language of business remains the sexualized language of male competition and dominance, and the acquisitive and status-oriented values which it articulates are assumed as universal. Too, when Claudio instructs Sara to offer another man involved in the deal coffee, breakfast, and a smile while they wait for Claudio to arrive, it may be good business practice, but it also evokes gendered labor.3 Claudio’s behavior continues to demonstrate the interrelation of heteropatriarchy and neoliberal capitalism when he arrives at the office. When a trainee named Silvia (Benedetta Cimatti) hands him a coffee as soon as he enters and he says that he will have her join his team, the promise appears related to the fact that Silvia is an attractive young woman rather than to any particular business acumen, and Claudio’s parting declaration that she should know for next time that he takes his coffee unsweetened reinforces both this impression and his position of power over her. In no time, Claudio finds himself alone with Marta (Euridice Axen), a coworker with whom he had been having an affair, in the elevator in which he will shortly be trapped for much of the film. He wants a kiss, and dismisses her protestations that she has told him that the affair is over and that she is getting married by

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noting that he himself has already been married for five years. He then grabs her and presses the emergency stop on the elevator, forcing her to push him away multiple times and finally to grab him by the testicles while she castigates him for his promiscuity as a filthy pig and unworthy of being her partner. Claudio’s conduct hints at the ways in which sexual harassment can be socially constructed as a “‘natural’ workplace feature for women” (Molé 2012, 87) and, more directly, reflects the way in which legal decisions in Italy concerning sexual harassment have often “frame[d] Italian women as social actors always already desiring sexual attention and Italian men as endlessly battling their uncontainable desire for women” (132). We might note here that a zombie body is similarly subject to uncontrollable desires, manifesting the dehumanizing intersection of patriarchal and capitalist drives. The precarious neoliberal economy had come to be figured by many—including, significantly, by billionaire Silvio Berlusconi, who served as prime minister multiple times, most recently from 2008 to 2011, and in admixture with an “irreverent machismo”—“not [as] the monogamous and faithful husband married to his workers, but rather the elite bachelor-entrepreneur able to change partners with ease” (24). While Claudio may not be a bachelor, neither is he faithful to either his spouse or his workers, embodying instead the entrepreneur who can cycle through multiple (sexual and business) partners. In addition to his infidelities, he resists the role of dutiful spouse when he refuses his wife, Lorena’s (Carolina Crescentini) request that he buy milk on his way home (while he refuses because he has a busy day ahead, his agitated “Milk! For fuck’s sake” after he ends the phone call suggests that he resents being asked to perform a domestic and therefore feminine-coded task, busy day at the office or not). Claudio later reinforces the privileging of the machismo-infused sphere of business over the sphere of domesticity and marriage when Lorena calls back to tell him that she is afraid because someone is pounding on the door, the landline phones are out, and the police are unreachable. Claudio advises her to lock herself in the bedroom but denies her entreaty that he come home and offers to send his driver instead, not because he is stuck in the elevator but because it’s an important day for him at the office.4 If the workplace is a space dominated by the interrelation of patriarchal masculinity and capitalist accumulation, then its transformation via a zombie outbreak into a space of entrapment, violence, and death functions as a critique of the underpinnings and effects of neoliberalism. Early in the film, Claudio’s driver, who says that he earned a degree in economics and has been following Claudio’s career, asks him for help, and Claudio’s rebuff that he is sorry that the driver is involved in economics not only signals a lack of cross-class solidarity, a separation visually indicated by their separation in the front and rear seats of the vehicle, but also foreshadows this critique.

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The first hint of the zombie outbreak emerges in the same scene and places the zombies too across a class boundary: closing a story that we don’t hear with a comment about a hard knock for the government after recent events, the news program on the car radio reports overnight riots in Rome by groups of “hoodlums.” However accurate the implied class attribution here, it might evoke for Italian audiences the mass economic protests of recent years, especially paired with the image of governmental difficulties. And what supposedly begins among hoodlums spreads into the spaces of corporate capitalism, flattening hierarchies of class and space. While The End? focuses narratively and visually on the space of Claudio’s office building, and particularly an elevator therein—a dimly lit, largely featureless metal box that becomes soiled with the blood of laborers—it also presents the surrounding spaces of the urban capitalist landscape as claustrophobic and confining. The initial images in the film intermix sped-up shots of crowds and vehicular traffic with panning shots of Rome and its skyline. Claudio’s chauffeured car is immediately stuck in worse-than-usual traffic after it picks him up, and Claudio remarks that traffic is bad every morning (an effect of urban development and of the necessity of commuting—essentially an unpaid portion of a workday).5 This (over)crowding of the streets and, initially, being stuck in an elevator offer more mundane versions of Claudio’s later confinement in an office building crowded with the undead. Before Claudio enters the building, he looks up at it, and a shot that pans upward, mimicking his gaze, reveals a facade comprising row upon row of close-set identical mirrored windows, suggestive of the interchangeable workers within. Significantly, the crowds and the traffic will have disappeared in the film’s final scene, when Claudio exits the building, and in its final shot looking down on the city, as the zombie outbreak has interrupted the machinery of capitalism. The association of capitalism with entrapment extends to domestic space as well. Claudio is introduced in another elevator, on his way to exit what we can assume, since he is being picked up to be driven to the office, is his place of residence; and his suit, sunglasses, and briefcase suggest his socioeconomic position. Claudio moves, in other words, from one elevator to another, from one small, enclosed space to another via a third (the car). Like the crowded roads and sidewalks, the elevators provide access, both to the home and to wealth accumulation, as well as mobility, both literally and symbolically. The elevator at his office, then, ceasing to function as a result of the zombie outbreak, evokes Claudio’s entrapment within a system that fails to deliver on the social and hierarchical mobility that it promises, and the film returns often to a shot looking down on the elevator car immobile in its shaft. In an ironic echo of his attempt to use the stopped elevator to disempower and impose his will on Marta, Claudio himself is disempowered by being trapped in the

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same space and threatened with the zombification that spreads through the rest of his coworkers, literalizing the dehumanization that heteropatriarchal capitalism enacts and encourages. At the same time, the elevator becomes the “‘survival space’”—the conception of which John Edgar Browning credits to Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend (1954)—an enclosure that a survivor must defend against a multitudinous, outside threat (Castillo et al. 2016, 13). Browning contends that Romero, by adding multiple people to a zombie survival space, remakes it into a space of “socially turbulent—and predominantly anti-capitalist—configurations” and social negotiations (14).6 Claudio’s survival space partakes of both Mathesonian and Romeran incarnations: he occupies it both singly and for a time with a police officer, and, more importantly, it is a capitalist space that causes Claudio to critically reflect on himself and his behavior as a heteropatriarchal, neoliberal subject. Camilla Fojas (2017) attributes the post–Great Recession ubiquity of zombie stories to the fact that they “imagine popular movements represented by the massified undead who rise up to invade the major institutions of capitalist culture” (148). Here, the office building, penetrated by (and then adding to) the zombie mass, embodies that culture.7 The violence that occurs within this space highlights the way in which precariousness in Italy gave rise to a conception of “the neoliberal workplace as preternaturally dangerous and foreboding” (Molé 2012, 41). The “fear, anxiety, and dread” (18) caused by the rapid removal of workers’ social and economic security could only be sharpened by an accompanying expansion of “quality checks” and “surveillance” in the workplace (83), an atmosphere conjured by the name of the company for which Claudio works: Panopticom SPA, a portmanteau which suggests the company as panopticon, which in Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth-century designs was “a prison engineered for maximum control of inmates in order to profit from their labor” (Perelman 2000, 21; emphasis added).8 Such dynamics may be normalized—perhaps best emblematized when Claudio pushes zombie-Marta’s corpse out of his view after killing her and attempts to cover the puddle of her blood in the elevator with pages from a Panopticom document—but, in the zombification of Claudio’s coworkers, the film foregrounds their monstrousness in a way that neither Claudio nor the audience can continue to overlook. Even before these coworkers begin literally to devour one another, their lives are already being consumed by a capitalist system of production that has expanded “to include all facets of human social being—its corporeal, intellectual, creative, affective, and sociable components” (Datta and MacDonald 2011, loc. 1608), leaving workers only their own “‘dead meat’” (loc. 1613). Within this already enervating system, labor insecurity in Italy fostered paranoia and feelings of precariousness that were “not merely economic but affective, immaterial, existential” (Molé 2012, 40). Such feelings would apply

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Chapter 1

equally to the subject under the threat of zombification. Included among the causes of such malaise is the practice of “mobbing,” recognized by the Italian courts,9 which involves harassment of workers whose terms of employment make them difficult to terminate so that they will leave the position on their own, and whatever the medical evidence, “work harassment and worker alienation” are perceived as significantly injurious to health (164). In a discussion with ethnographer Noelle J. Molé, a pair of Italian women compare victims of mobbing to zombies, but one might equally imagine the image of attack by a zombie mob as fitting for the perpetrators’ tactics, and Molé herself extends the zombie metaphor to apply more broadly to the liminality and volatility introduced into the workplace by neoliberal reform (39–40). Not all Italian workers may identify for or against precariousness, but for many, the awareness of being at the mercy of “unknown perilous conditions” increases “workers’ capacity for rage or Zombiedom” (40). Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (2015) argues that fast zombies display rage, an affective display absent from slow zombies (159),10 and perhaps Claudio’s initial evaluation of his fastmoving, cannibalistic colleagues as having all gone insane gestures to a tipping point for life and work under contemporary capitalism, one past which rage and literal zombiedom unite, the latter a vehicle for the former. The corporate structure (in both senses) of Panopticom turns out to be a literal dead end for most of those inside, a place where workers turn on one another and human connections are severed as Claudio fails to save his coworkers: he does not persuade the maintenance worker on the intercom to flee; cannot squeeze Silvia through the gap between the elevator doors or distract either the zombies who kill her or the ones who later kill Sara; tells a male colleague that he cannot unblock the doors; and ends up having to shoot the only other person who does make it into the elevator, police officer Marcello (Claudio Camilli) (of whom more below). He also kills zombie-Marta and shoots a group of zombies trying to force themselves into the elevator, and, in the latter case, expresses the emotional difficulty of killing those he sees as colleagues with wives and families whom he knows, rather than merely, as Marcello does, the “infected.” In this dismantling of interpersonal connection, as well as Marcello’s convincing Claudio to no longer see his coworkers as human, the zombie infection functions in a way that makes a reality of metaphors of labor insecurity such as the Italian Communist Party’s comparison of precariousness to a “‘disease that kills social cohesion’” (Molé 2012, 26) or its earlier campaign equating the expiration of contracts with the expiration of life for a dehumanized collective (41).11 As the film progresses, the camera returns repeatedly to the increasingly bloody hallway in Claudio’s sightline, a visible aftermath of harm to workers that has spilled beyond the elevator and presents no hope of being concealed by paperwork; and a late shot of

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Claudio’s reflection in the pool of blood from the final zombie whom he kills on his way out of the building acknowledges his implication in such harm. When Claudio exits the Panopticom building at the end of the film, he is also leaving behind the system and associated behaviors and practices that it represents. In doing so, he is at least opening up the liberatory potential that Fojas (2017) sees in reading post–Great Recession popular culture narratives of survival in “social and economic conditions of ruin” as encouraging revolution rather than adaptation to precariousness (14). Several moments mark Claudio’s movement away from his previous alignment with neoliberal masculinity. When Silvia dies after killing a zombified male superior with his favorite golf club, a sign of his patriarchal capitalist privilege, Claudio compliments her. Later, he throws his no-doubt expensive wristwatch to try to distract zombies from pursuing Sara. Finally, he admits in a conversation with Marcello that he is not a good person, citing his adultery and the disagreement with his wife over a liter of milk (or over the unpaid domestic labor that her request represents). When his wife, whom he had thought dead, reaches him by phone, he appears overjoyed, and the call seems to inspire him to action—reactions that, while not challenging heteronormativity, do signify a rejection of his capitalist playboy persona—and he is able to finally unblock the elevator doors by standing on Marcello’s corpse, an act which merits brief consideration here. As a police officer, Marcello represents a social institution that is intimately connected with capitalism. David Correia and Tyler Wall (2018) note that Karl Marx linked policing with “the birth of capitalism” (loc. 172), and police continue to function to defend ruling class interests such that “when we talk about police, . . . we’re talking about capitalism” (loc. 176). “If capitalism is anything,” Correia and Wall summarize, “it is a well-ordered police state” (loc. 177). In The End?, however, both of these institutions have become disordered.12 Marcello is alone, has lost contact with his headquarters, and believes that the rest of the officers with whom he worked are dead. The incursion by the zombie mass has disrupted the spaces and processes of policing as it has those of neoliberal production. And Claudio must separate himself from the former just as he does from the latter: his reluctance to kill the infected Marcello results in Claudio’s being wounded, but he must instrumentalize and then climb past the dead body of this agent of state power in order to secure his freedom. Claudio’s escape from the office building reveals an urban space where, as per the question mark of the film’s title, social institutions—and thus late-stage capitalism—may or may not have ended.13 Although Marcello mentions shelters, Claudio’s wife says that she had been saved by soldiers, and one of a pair of soldiers shoots a zombie threatening Claudio, the final sequence emphasizes the emptiness of deserted, corpse-strewn streets and

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leaves unknown whether the aforementioned soldiers respond to Claudio’s cries for help. Ultimately, whether neoliberalism can reassert itself in Claudio’s Italy, his experience has registered its violence and dehumanizing effects and introduced the possibility of a postcapitalist existence. LONDON CALLING TO THE ZOMBIES OF DEATH: THE HORROR OF EAST END GENTRIFICATION IN COCKNEYS VS ZOMBIES If The End? demonstrates only secondary interest in Rome as a capitalist space, expressing anxieties about economic precariousness primarily through confinement within a single space within a single corporate office building, the horror-comedy Cockneys vs Zombies, directed by Matthias Hoene, uses a single building to anchor movement within as well as larger commentary upon working class struggle and housing precariousness in East London. As one of the main drivers of the narrative, the imminent demolition of a retirement home by developers represents the threat that gentrification poses to the “old”—not only the actual elderly who inhabit the building but also the traditional conceptions of the district and the working-class family and community mores with which it is imaginatively associated. In this depiction, the film simultaneously employs and pushes back against a long-established tradition that constructs the East End as a space of horror. In its opening scene, Cockneys vs Zombies invokes both the past and present of London’s East End.14 Its first, screen-filling shot is of a signboard advertising “Luxurious Living in the Heart of East London.” As the camera pans up, it reveals a pair of vultures perched atop this advertisement: blunt symbolism, like the mound of construction-generated rubble behind them, of the process of gentrification. The film’s zombies are unleashed by workers digging on the site, framed in a pair of shots leading up to the zombies’ unearthing by the towering cranes that have become a familiar punctuation of the London skyline. The workers discover a catacomb labeled as sealed by order of King Charles II in 1666. Two workers—who, based on their working-class accents, likely wouldn’t be among those to reside in this development—break into the catacomb, hoping to supplement their income with whatever is inside, and become the first victims of the zombie outbreak. Charles II’s reign (1660–1685) returned England to monarchy after its failed foray into ostensibly republican government during the Interregnum, rendering his restoration a concentration of heretofore distributed power in the hands of the elite that echoes gentrification. In its relation to Charles II, this zombie outbreak is doubly associated with the elite, linked both to royalty and to real estate developers.

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However, similar to the tension within the film’s positioning of the East End as a site of horror as well as a space to be preserved, the outbreak also introduces a tension between a threatening variation of the “old” as a monstrous past that erupts from containment and the “old” as people, places, and ways of being worthy of defense against the threat of capitalist redevelopment and erasure. Such redevelopment and erasure finds in enclosure an analogue in England’s (monstrous) past. In the sixteenth century, the first “socially disruptive” wave of enclosure took place, which encompassed “not simply a physical fencing of [common] land but the extinction of common and customary use rights on which many people depended for their livelihood,” provoking periodic riots throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Meiksins Wood 2002, 108). The “class robbery” (Thompson 2016, 282) of enclosure took aim at the ability of people to provide for themselves in order to force them into wage labor and acted as a mode of primitive accumulation, which was both “a prerequisite for . . . the social relations of capitalist production” (Perelman 2000, 168) and a “crucial force” in their ongoing development (369). “No society went so far as the British” in primitive accumulation (24), and gentrification, as seen in the London of Cockneys vs Zombies, represents a form of “accumulation by dispossession” intrinsic to how “contemporary capitalism operates” (Kallin 2018, 50). Focusing on London, Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz (2011) identify a tradition stretching back to the early modern period in which “textual articulations of anxiety regarding biological infection” express “anxieties arising in response to the interconnected changes wrought by the onset of modernity generally and the spread of capitalism specifically” (127). They write that the zombies in 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead both stand in for the plague and represent the “ever-accelerating viral nature of global capitalism,” in which the “figuratively infectious spread” of globalized capitalism enables the spread of literal disease, causing “a crisis in capitalism” (127). In Cockneys vs Zombies, the zombies are both a symptom of and an interruption to capitalist redevelopment, as if enacting one of the “periodic crises” endemic to inherently “self-destabilizing” capitalist societies (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018, 28). Such ambiguity aligns with the imagination of the East End across many years and many texts as home to a “proud” working class but also as an “exotic, alien” space, and as the focus of both “horror” and “nostalgia” (Newland 2008, 16). 1665 and 1666 saw London ravaged by both plague and the Great Fire (Marriott 2011, 37).15 The zombies’ entombment in 1666, then, additionally links them to such crisis events. More broadly, as Boluk and Lenz (2011) contend, “To situate a cinematic narrative of zombie infection in London is to locate it within the city’s history of plague” (137). One doomed worker in the film identifies the catacomb as a “plague pit,” underlining the collapse of bubonic plague and zombie infection—with

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plague not only serving as a metaphor for the predations of developers but also gesturing to the role that disease has historically played in conceptions of the East End. As a result of cholera outbreaks beginning in the 1830s, for example, the East End became a national “battleground” regarding “sanitary reform” (Marriott 2011, 123), one effect of which was the emergence of the view that the environment in which the poor lived was not merely unhealthy but caused “moral and social pathologies” (133). And the area has retained, into the twenty-first century and in the face of massive change, its “powerful mythic status as [a] sick, diseased and cancerous part of the body of the city” (Newland 2008, 16). In the film, a radio report renders the zombie outbreak in precisely these terms, announcing, “There is a viral infection concentrated on the East End of London and spreading fast through the capital. The army have sealed off the East End to try and contain the virus.” While the infectious East End cannot be excised from the urban body, it can at least be ghettoized, its sickness (hypothetically) contained. Within this mythic sickness, criminality has historically occupied the third place in a triad with literal disease and pathologized poverty. A period of industrialization in the eighteenth century boosted East London’s economic importance (Marriott 2011, 47) but also resulted in an “exodus” of “metropolitan bourgeoisie” (60), and by the latter part of the century, the myth opposing “the poverty and danger” (63) of East London to “the gentility, wealth, and glamor of the West End” had gained currency (63). The idea of East London as a threatening, uncivilized and “alien presence” was focused and strengthened by the Whitechapel murders beginning in 1888 (154). Indeed, Paul Newland (2008) points out, it is the “impoverished, criminal, horrific” (78) East End crystallized in the 1880s and 1890s that began to receive even then a “proto-cinematic” visual representation in connection with the murders and which remains one of its foremost popular imaginings today (57). Cockneys vs Zombies links two of its central protagonists, brothers Terry and Andy MacGuire (Rasmus Hardiker and Harry Treadaway), to both poverty and criminality in their first appearance, as Terry criticizes the well-worn van obtained by Andy for their planned bank robbery, intended to save their grandfather’s retirement home. Their cousin, Katy (Michelle Ryan), can hotwire cars and pick locks, and their parents died in a shoot-out with the police. The MacGuire brothers are also victims of crime, presenting their having had six months’ savings stolen in a burglary as one justification for their bank robbery (in regard to these savings being kept in an apartment, it is worth noting that London continues to have some of the largest numbers of unbanked individuals in the UK, a situation related to socioeconomic factors such as unemployment and poor credit history [Jones 2019]). The bulk of the film follows Terry, Andy, Katy, and their accomplices as they deal with both the zombies and a pair of hostages as they make their way to the Bow Bells Care Home,

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where they help to save the surviving residents from besieging zombies by arming the residents and transporting them on a hot-wired London bus to a boat on the Thames. A number of the residents, who include the brothers’ grandfather, Ray (Alan Ford), are implied to have pasts as “gangsters”: one, Darryl (Tony Selby), sells his medication to earn “a crust.” In this assortment of characters, Cockneys vs Zombies would appear to align with the numerous British films that use “the figure of the cockney gangster” to mark the East End as a diseased, criminal urban space (Newland 2008, 160).16 At the same time that Cockneys vs Zombies draws on a tradition of imagining the East End as a place of poverty, criminality, disease, and horror, however, the film strongly and positively links the East End with working-class identity and solidarity, both of which are under assault by gentrification. Newland proposes that contemporary East End films either repackage the late nineteenth-century myth of the area or present the area as a contemporary “transitional space that can be seen to be changing materially” while still “haunted” by that myth, which allows for subversion of “generic expectations” (Newland 2008, 249). Although the monsters in Cockneys vs Zombies—the undead ones, not the representatives of financialized capitalism who are materially changing the East End—are Restoration rather than Victorian dangers, the film otherwise participates in this latter dynamic. One might even see an acknowledgment of the film’s substitution of zombies for more Victorian-flavored threats when one character misidentifies the zombies as vampires and proclaims the need for Christopher Lee’s help (perhaps also forgetting that he usually played the vampire), invoking the high Gothic of Hammer’s horror films. The film undercuts its depiction of the East End as a site of danger and lawlessness in the motivation for the bank robbery, specified as the brothers’ first, which is to prevent the destruction of Ray’s home and, by extension, community by the same developer that unleashes the zombies, the ironically named Heartman Construction. As Katy puts it, “They’re closing down our granddad’s old people’s home. He’s lived in the East End all his life. We’re doing this so he can stay here with his friends.” Katy’s explanation fits comfortably among common postwar representations of British “working-class life . . . as communal, close knit, locally based” (Dodd and Dodd 1992, 126). Ray himself says that he has “never been further north than Walthenstow dog track [in East London], and that’s far enough for” him. The sign outside the care home advertising the “Luxury Apartments” that will replace it gestures to the contrast not only of “discrete geographies of wealth and deprivation sandwiched together” by the East End’s property market (Polsky 2015, 97) but also between an imagined East End working-class way of being, oriented toward and loyal to an established local community, and the “Modern Living in the Heart of London” promised by the sign.

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These strong community bonds are also linked to strong family bonds. In addition to family members undertaking a bank robbery for one of their own—an action that Ray tells Katy, Terry, and Andy not to repeat but admits that he is “impressed” by—the film features a flashback, warmly lit in contrast to the scene in which it appears, to the brothers’ father explaining that they will have a hard time in life because of where they’re from, since people don’t respect the working class. Consequently, he tells them, they need to work hard, “stick together as a family,” and “always stick up for what’s right,” an admonition that is humorously juxtaposed to his and his wife’s immediately exiting for an armed confrontation with the authorities but nevertheless serves as the film’s ethical framing of these characters. Cockneys vs Zombies, then, shares with soap opera EastEnders (1985–), which has “defined East London for a new generation,” an “emphasis on community and family values” (Marriott 2011, 2).17 The film’s care home, as a site of both (working-class) family interaction and communal (though most likely for-profit18) living, delivers the same emphasis in microcosm—one which the MacGuire brothers’ legal job, delivering Meals on Wheels, including to the care home, reinforces. Patrick D. Murphy (2018) describes Cockneys vs Zombies as a “celebration” of resourcefulness and “the transformative impact of collective problem-solving” (51), and Anne-Lise Marin-Lamellet (2016) mentions the film as part of a trend in “youth, lad and horror films” of replacing an individual hero with a group of “sidekicks” (158), which she hypothesizes may in part stem from a nostalgic desire “to return to a form of collective spirit” and which attempts to “re-establish a sort of utopian and egalitarian community” (160–61). This impulse is arguably of a piece with EastEnders’ preservation of a mythic “traditional working-class East End socio-cultural milieu” (Newland 2008, 190) that, if it ever existed in some form, has been fractured by redevelopment (Dodd and Dodd 1992, 126), including the appropriation of postwar public housing to benefit the wealthy and the sale of council land and housing to private redevelopers (Polsky 2015, 97, 103). However, although both EastEnders and Cockneys vs Zombies assert the “power of place” in the face of globalization (Newland 2008, 193), EastEnders creates its portrait of working-class community largely by effacing gentrification and its effects (Newland 2008, 190; Dodd and Dodd 1992, 126) while Cockneys vs Zombies depicts its working-class protagonists actively resisting both the developers and the zombies whom they unleash. In other words, the film critiques rather than occludes gentrification and its consequences by adapting the trope of the diseased East End to make monstrous the developers and their activities. There is some irony to “cockneys” acting here as the subversive foes of gentrification. The term cockney, which dates to the seventeenth century, was pejorative, but nineteenth-century music hall performances, aided by periodicals such as Punch, helped to reinvent the cockney as a “comic figure

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of sham gentility” (Marriott 2011, 200). The cockney metamorphosed again during the Blitz into a witty “folk hero” with an enduring “determination to carry on” (312)—a figure possibly advanced as a response to fears of social unrest (319). Ray has a direct link to World War II, though as an underaged soldier rather than a resilient civilian (fighting Nazis, apparently, was the exception to never leaving his neighborhood), and MacGuire accomplice Mickey’s steel plate and brain damage from his time serving in Iraq testifies to the military’s continued reliance on working-class recruitment.19 But when faced with an assault and insufficient governmental support, these cockneys do not provide an example of wisecracking perseverance but rather organize an armed resistance. The protagonists’ military service and use of criminality to survive and to preserve family and community contrasts the self-enriching corruption and profit motive of the bankers and developers. Bank teller Clive (Tony Gardner) is merely classist, dismissing client Emma (Georgia King), who later graduates from hostage to ally of the protagonists, “back to her bedsit.” Heartman Construction, however, appears to be actively corrupt, with one of its personnel making a phone call about needing to “move” the money held at the bank because inspectors are coming (it is possible, though somewhat unclear, that the bank is abetting the developer’s dubious behavior). The MacGuire group’s wearing stolen Heartman Construction vests and hardhats during the bank robbery underscores that the MacGuires’ foray into crime is driven by Heartman’s gentrification and will aid not only their grandfather but also at least the small community contained in the care home, while the developer’s criminality benefits only itself at the cost of the communities in which it operates. Seen through the conception of redevelopments as making “dead” spaces “‘productive’” again (Newland 2008, 263), the name of the bank used by Heartman and robbed by the MacGuires and their associates, Phoenix Bank, points to the resurrection of the East End itself; but all that is actually resurrected, all that the land under redevelopment produces, is the undead.20 If there is any metaphorical rebirth that results from Heartman’s actions, it is of the elderly in the care home, who, like the spaces targeted for redevelopment, are no longer economically productive. Gerry Canavan (2016) proposes that the millennial resurgence in zombie media should be linked to anxieties about both the aging bodies of “the WWII and Boomer generations” and the “younger and poorer” generations’ (in)ability to subsidize them as they age (17–18). The resistance enacted in Cockneys vs Zombies by the elderly21 (and/as the working class), who might otherwise be seen as zombielike, lends them agency and value in the face of such anxieties. The links between the mental and physical decline of old age and the zombie condition (as when a zombie very slowly pursues one character who is using a walker) do not preclude the active contribution and important roles of the elderly

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(Eljaiek-Rodriguez 2019)—they work together and save the aforementioned man, for instance, and they prove proficient with firearms. This dynamic is crystallized in a sequence in which one man kills a zombie with his prosthetic leg after the leg saves him from a bite: if zombies are posthuman (Lauro and Christie 2011, 2), this puts him closer to cyborg than zombie.22 In relation to aging, the zombie can also embody anxieties about the interruption of “the circuit of family” (Canavan 2016, 22), a trope that the film similarly recasts with Ray’s emergence, guns blazing, in slow motion, and to dramatic music, from an apparent self-sacrificial death or zombification (and in another image of resurrection), after which the family, shot like action heroes with bursts of speed ramping, coordinates to kill the remaining zombies in the immediate vicinity. This cinematography straddles parody and sincerity; and, most significantly, the family members all simultaneously shoot a now-zombified Heartman employee involved with the care home demolition—the united working-class family overcoming the man in whom zombiism unites the cause and the effect of gentrification. Much as with the disruption of the neoliberal workplace in The End?, however, to what extent this victory and the zombie outbreak signify a larger, more permanent interruption of the capitalist system is left unresolved. As the assorted survivors (care home residents, MacGuires, and Emma) escape the outbreak area first via a hot-wired double-decker bus—public transportation enabling communitarian heroism—and then via a boat on the Thames— which, as a shipping conduit, has played such an important role in the past and identity of East London—the cockneys’ flight may seem to decouple them from the East End. Yet Terry’s declaration that the “East End’s been through far worse” and always bounced back, along with Ray saying that they will fight as they have for centuries and yelling at the zombies to “get the fuck out of my East End,” suggests a project to reclaim the space, or a version of it, for the working class, not unlike how the film itself imaginatively reclaims that space by drawing on while subverting nostalgic and horrific conceptual traditions regarding the East End. The stolen money does not go to rescue the care home by the film’s end, so in that way the protagonists are not reinscribed within the capitalist property market, but the closing images of the East End as a disaster zone in need of recuperation establishes a continuity with rather than a break from its history, mythic or otherwise. The openness of the film’s ending carries an openness to a return to the (capitalist) status quo, if not the (capitalist) past, or a nostalgic version of it (the emphasis on “family” itself could be seen as nostalgic or reactionary, as well as characteristic of comedy)—a return without which the “impressive” spoils of the bank robbery would be less than useful.

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LIVING ON THE EDGE: THE PRECARIOUS CAPITALISTS OF JUAN OF THE DEAD Juan of the Dead, as Sarah Juliet Lauro (2015) comments, “returns” the zombie, in its post-Romero American form, to the Caribbean (loc. 2136). The zombie, “once extracted from the Caribbean and transformed by subsequent global iterations,” in Bianka Ballina’s (2017) formulation, is reclaimed by the film and functions alongside this Cuban and Spanish co-production’s use of “transnational resources to produce a critical mediation of the current Cuban reality” (198). This horror comedy sees the title character, a resident of Havana, his daughter, and a few friends decide to sell their services as zombie killers when the city suffers an outbreak. Following the outbreak becoming overwhelming and an encounter with the military, the survivors of this group escape to the shoreline, intending to float to Florida in a modified car. The film, directed by Alejandro Brugués, was in fact “the first Cuban film” created entirely without any funds from the governmental Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (Cuban Film Institute), which was established in the wake of Cuba’s 1959 revolution (García 2015, 2). In contrast to the individual and local framings of The End? and Cockneys vs Zombies, Juan of the Dead uses its setting of the Cuban capital Havana more explicitly to stand in for the nation as a whole and situates its critique of capitalism (and socialism) within the context of United States imperialism. Ballina (2017) notes the importance of Cuban genre films such as Juan in engaging with the “tension of a society that stands between socialism and capitalism” (198). Emily A. Maguire (2015) similarly observes that the film mocks both systems by means of its “zombies’ disruptive conformity” (179) and equally valorizes and lampoons “emerging guerilla capitalism” (177). Such in-betweenness is encapsulated by a scene in which Juan and his associates assemble by force of tradition at a meeting of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution but stand apart and do not participate, their purpose being to discuss their own, extralegal business matters among themselves. In the end, though, Juan chooses to remain in this contradictory, guerrilla capitalist space rather than emigrate to the fully neoliberal, consumer capitalist United States, asserting an independence from America much as the film itself links itself to yet distinguishes itself from American pop culture. The film’s opening conversation, which takes place while the characters float on a homemade raft, anchors Juan (Alexis Díaz de Villegas) within this nexus of socioeconomic tensions when he denies to his friend Lázaro (Jorge Molina) any desire to strike out for Miami, saying that in Miami he would have to work rather than, as he does now, waiting, “like the aborigines,” for opportunities to arise. Juan here constructs the United States as a site of

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mandatory participation in the exploitative capitalist labor market, but his comparison of himself to an Indigenous person also links that market to US imperialism by evoking the “racialized inequities” and “legacies of colonial rule” that structure capitalism and continue to maintain the ascendency of the Global North over the Global South (Fojas 2017, 2). At the same time, it is worth pointing out that the difference is in some ways negligible between Juan’s survival in the interstices of the formal economy and the way that neoliberal economies continue to “siphon off value” from the large numbers of people whom it has pushed into “informal gray zones” (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018, 22). Juan adds that he has survived, among other things, the Special Period in Cuba’s history, a time of severe economic distress that followed the disintegration of the Soviet bloc (Ballina 2017, 194).23 Bill Clemente (2016a) describes the Special Period as particularly “devastating” for AfroCubans— one reason for which was a lack of relatives sending money back from the United States—while pointing out that all of the main characters in the film are Black or mestizo rather than of Spanish ancestry (67).24 When Lázaro does at one point briefly set out for the United States as part of a throng of emigrants fleeing the zombies in rafts and boats, Juan, hanging on to the side of Lázaro’s raft, tries to dissuade Lázaro and returns to the idea of America as a place that requires one to work. Lázaro’s response that Cuba is an impossible place to live and that the current situation might take fifty years to resolve would make just as much sense were there no zombies involved. Juan and his circle, like many Cubans, have struggled to deal with more than two decades of economic adversity (Ballina 2017, 201), which the film recognizes early and often. For instance, an early scene of Juan helping an elderly woman to navigate an elevator in his apartment building that only stops between floors sketches their living conditions, and when the same woman’s husband becomes a zombie, she blames the local clinic’s use of expired drugs. As a response to such adversity, Juan and his associates, like the central characters in Cockneys vs Zombies, engage in criminality—most of it low-level, although Lázaro does commit a deliberate murder (over a debt, of course, a reason instantly convincing to his companions) that is played as a punchline at the end of a humorous(ly violent) montage of zombie killing set to the jazz-rock fusion of Cuban musicians Sergio Valdés y Los Fantasmas de Elevense. After Lázaro swings his blade twice, the camera cuts away to the others in the group killing someone who had just been bitten and cuts back after Lázaro’s victim is dead, making it less uncomfortable to laugh at this moment (in other words, abetting sLaughter, as defined in this book’s introduction) but also linking the fantastical and acceptable violence against zombies with quotidian violence born of economic desperation.25 While not demonstrating revolutionary values, argues Enrique García (2015), their

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lifestyle would nonetheless render Juan and his friends sympathetic antiheroes for post–Special Period Cuban audiences (167). Prior to the zombie outbreak, Juan tells Lázaro that he should steer his son toward studying and away from following his own father’s footsteps as a criminal; but it turns out that the outbreak itself means that such betterment does not have to wait for the younger generation. In what Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodríguez (2018) characterizes as a subversion of a subgenre known for critiquing consumerism, Juan and his friends take advantage of the outbreak to start their own zombie-killing-for-hire small business (albeit one that Eljaiek-Rodríguez sees as doomed based on an ever-decreasing client base) (43). Before Havana is overrun by the undead, Juan’s daughter Camila (Andrea Duro) remarks that things happen to Cuba, but Cuba never changes, and that the same applies to Juan himself. The radical disruption of the zombie disaster does, however, create the conditions for Juan to change by the end of the film, so perhaps it does so for Cuba as well. Juan’s entrepreneurship reflects the burgeoning of “self-employed business ventures” that has accompanied reforms in Cuba enacted since 2008 (Clemente 2016a, 75). Patricia Saldarriaga and Emy Manini (2022) view Juan and his associates’ business as “a satirical commentary on gore capitalism,” a type of entrepreneurship under neoliberalism that allows for “active performance of violence upon the body to produce capital” and “radiates from the United States” (67, 66, 67). Their business also reflects, according to Jossiana Arroyo (2018), a relocation of “affect and emotions” from the family to the state, insofar as the business offers to take care of zombified loved ones and zombification, she argues, primarily represents capitalism and neoliberalism “coming,” like gore capitalism, “from outside” (342). The film’s attitude toward capitalist systems and activity, though, is, as mentioned earlier, less straightforward than these readings allow. Ballina (2017) highlights the tensions since the 1990s in Cuba’s era of “marketization” between stasis and change and between the “promise and perils of consumption” (195) as the context within which Juan of the Dead both “lampoons and extends” Romero’s zombie-based critique of capitalism (199).26 When explaining his zombie-killing business plan, for example, Juan, like a good capitalist, pronounces charging people to be much better than helping them, and his decision in the end to stay in Havana and fight for something beyond himself can be seen as a move away from “the egotism and self-interest of the new ‘do it yourself’ Cuban capitalism” (Maguire 2015, 182). Juan also at one point becomes willing to leave Cuba, even for Miami, since capitalism, he says, will ultimately take its toll on them anyway. Further, Juan and his friends do adopt throughout the film their government’s propagandistic labeling of the zombies as “dissidents,” adding in one scene, “imperialists, slaves, plebs,” rendering their association with capitalism both a joke and not

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a joke.27 That association itself bears contradictions, according to Boluk and Lenz (2011), figuring capitalism both as the end of history and as destined for self-destruction (139). Equally, however, the film represents “socialist action” as “ineffective,” zombifying both “old revolutionaries” (such as the head of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, the second zombie in the film and the first we see on Havana’s soil) and those looking to enact a new Revolution (some soldiers—one of whom puns on a well-known slogan from Fidel Castro [García 2015, 168]—who attempt to conscript Juan and his friends to build the walls of their new community but fail to recognize the zombie already in their midst) (Maguire 2015, 180–81). Additionally, just before the zombie outbreak really accelerates, Juan remarks that Havana, shown with closed stores, streets empty of cars, and shuffling zombie citizens, appears the same as in the Special Period. In a later scene, he makes a similar comparison, observing that zombies only want to eat, like people in the Special Period, just not only cats. The symbolic associations of the zombies, then, remain flexible. When a public bus crashes into and brings down a billboard reading “Revolución o muerte” (“Revolution or death”), the attacking zombies onboard might implicate simultaneously globalized neoliberal and domestic socialist harms in this image of collapse. Neoliberal globalization is linked from the beginning of Juan of the Dead with imperialism: the film’s very first zombie, found floating in the sea, wears a jumpsuit that suggests a Guantánamo Bay prisoner (Armengot 2012, para. 3). While David S. Dalton (2018) claims that in contrast to US and Western European representations of the zombie as an infection to be fought, “the post-Romero zombie in Latin America vaccinates the region against the imperialistic tendencies—both internal and external—that still lie dormant within its population” (13), Sara A. Potter (2018) puts forth a more ambivalent view of the contemporary Latin American zombie, describing contagion in Juan of the Dead as “double-edged,” a tool either “of resistance or oppression” (1). Murphy (2018) likewise perceives the film’s zombies as paradoxical, figures not only of “the mindless, idle masses produced by the [socialist] state” but also of “the fear of the external, infecting [capitalist] source” (50). Even as official channels assert that the zombies are dissident groups paid by the United States and Lázaro’s son, Vladi California (Andros Perugorría), mistakes a crowd fleeing the zombies for invading Americans and pulls out the American flag that he seemingly carries in anticipation of just such an event, Juan also says that their business will use their defense training against a “real enemy,” not Yankees, and, earlier, Juan and Vladi worry about absence of tourists. Zombified Spanish tourists become later targets of mockery even as the woman who called Juan to remove them profits by renting these external capitalists more rooms than she legally declares. Juan’s own business charges double to foreigners and people with relatives living abroad,

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but this would include his own daughter, Camila, who lives abroad with her mother28 (the “California” in Vladi California suggests a similar transnational doubleness; and Ballina [2017] notes that his participation in the sex trade renders his body a “global commodity” [209]). Despite Cuba’s politicoeconomic contradictions, Juan, joined in the animated end-credits sequence by his compatriots, ultimately decides to stay and fight for his nation, rejecting (emigration to) the United States and the consumerist dream—and labor nightmare—that it represents.29 This rejection occurs in a film that notably does not similarly reject US (and European) film and popular culture. The very title Juan of the Dead places the film in relation both to Romero’s seminal Dawn of the Dead and to numerous films, particularly Shaun of the Dead, the punning titles of which form a tradition of their own—some of which, such as Shaun and Flight of the Living Dead (2007) allude to Romero’s work and some of which, such as Zombeavers (2014), do not. Juan’s title, then, signals a place in the “almost compulsive structure of repetition” in zombie cinema’s “epidemic-like multiplication of films, series, remakes, homages, and parodies,” in which the “contagious nature of the zombie is reflected in this serial, intertextual structure of filmmaking” (Boluk and Lenz 2011, 136). The title of Cockneys vs Zombies similarly situates that film within a crowded intertextual transnational film tradition stretching not only from Mexico’s Santo vs. the Zombies (Santo contra los Zombies; 1962) and Germany’s Urban Scumbags vs. Countryside Zombies (1992) to America’s Zombies vs. Strippers (2012), Australia’s Me and My Mates vs. the Zombie Apocalypse, and more, but also, and more broadly, within a long line of monster and horror films from Japan’s King Kong vs. Godzilla (1963) to Vampires vs. the Bronx (2020) and beyond. Lauro (2015) writes that Juan chooses his “ultimate act of defiance” even though it appears to conflict with his “politics and economic philosophy” (loc. 2136), but this type of contradiction is in keeping with the unresolved tensions that run throughout the film. It is also in keeping with Reilly’s observation that both zombie and globalization apocalypses simultaneously threaten and empower us (Castillo et al. 2016, 86), as well as with Ballina’s (2017) description of contact—as related to globalization-fueled anxieties around “epidemiological, financial or ideological” transmission—as a source of both danger and hope in contemporary zombie narratives (204). There is certainly some room for hope in the conclusion of Juan of the Dead—even if, in terms of classical comedy, the protagonist’s quest remains incomplete— particularly given that one can interpret the male child whom Juan rescues just prior to the ending as a symbol of the country that he ultimately refuses to abandon (helping to make this identification available, the boy’s cries for help are initially acousmatic, as if arising from Havana itself) in the hope that others will see his example and join him (the boy is absent from the closing

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credits sequence, presumably left in the relative safety of the group’s floating car). Furthermore, Juan rescues the child from the child’s zombified police officer father, a representative of the failed government whom Juan kills and “supplants” (García 2015, 175). This conclusion nevertheless leaves Juan, along with his friends, in a space in which governmental and economic systems, however fraught with contradictions, have been suspended, a condition not unlike that of the zombies he battles, who, caught between life and death, exist outside of such systems and without nationality. For Havana, like for Rome at the end of The End? and for the East End at the end of Cockneys vs Zombies, and hearkening back to the tentative possibility held out in Dawn of the Dead’s conclusion of building “a new social order” in the postapocalypse (Wood 2018a, 169), the future may hold for economic ways of life a return to the status quo, the potential for radical change, or, should the undead prevail, nothing at all. CONCLUSION The End?, Cockneys vs Zombies, and Juan of the Dead illustrate one of the ways in which the global reach of the zombie myth enables transnational critiques of globalized capitalism, with each film grounding that critique in the way that capitalist practices play out in and affect a different type of space— the office building, the urban neighborhood, and the city (as metonym for the nation). Since all three films deal with the onset of a zombie outbreak rather than an established postapocalypse, their emphasis rests on such critique, on visualizing the monstrosity and dehumanizing effects of the entrenched systems of capitalist exploitation rather than on the exploration of alternatives to them. “The zombie,” writes Fojas (2017), “is not just a ‘monster of capitalism’ but capitalism itself” (64). Whatever the localized manifestations of that monster, its damaging appetites remain consistent across borders. But if the zombie in these films embodies capitalism itself, such a monster simultaneously comprises its own victims: the businesspeople who both consume and are consumed by one another in Rome; the London developers and the East End residents whom they displace; and the mélange of socialists, guerrilla capitalists, and foreign capitalists who populate Havana—all are subsumed into the beast, leaving in each case only an uncertain path forward for the uninfected outside of the undead mass.

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NOTES 1. In this light, it is interesting to note that the would-be horror filmmaker villain of 2021’s Italian horror film A Classic Horror Story complains about the lack of scary movies in Italy, for which he blames Italian audiences, and asserts that he would be more successful in the United States. The end of the film depicts a comment thread (on Netflix stand-in “Bloodflix”) which includes one comment that “us” Italians are not good at making horror movies and another that encourages support of the director because he is Italian. 2. A member of the maintenance department who complains to Claudio via elevator intercom that no one listens to the old man who has worked there forty years could be read as a figure not only of the working class but of the old, now-ignored modes of long-term, protected employment. 3. In a second call made when Claudio first becomes stuck in an elevator, he again tells Sara to smile at the man. 4. Claudio and Lorena’s apparent lack of children also mirrors a widespread replacement in Italy of fatherhood by career as “the dominant symbol of masculinity” (Molé 2012, 85). 5. In the same year that the film was released, one company released figures ranking Rome as the second-most-congested city in Italy and the worst for morning rush hour, with commuters spending an average of forty-two minutes in traffic jams each day (“Commuters” 2017). 6. Browning also notes that many post-2001 survival spaces have become “ambulatory” (24). While Claudio does eventually ambulate through the building, the film ends at the point when the sort of nomadic movement that Browning refers to might begin. 7. This setting represents a version of the urban apartment building setting in a cluster of European zombie films of the late aughts—Spanish film REC (2007), French film La Horde (2009), and German film Rammbock (2010)—that Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (2015) discusses in contrast to American zombie films’ on-the-road settings during the same period and as channeling Western European anxieties about being “transformed into the equivalent of colonial subjects” by governments that embraced neoliberal economics and “colluded with corporate power” (160–61). 8. SPA stands for società per azioni, a joint-stock company, which is owned by its investors and thus focused on producing shareholder profits. 9. This recognition has, as one might expect, been narrowed. See Molé (2012), 127, for a 2005 decision that restricted harms to those caused by intentional actors rather than the general conditions of neoliberal labor. 10. Soltysik Monnet (2015) also compares fast zombies to “angry rioters” (159). 11. The comparison dates to 2006 and the campaign to 2004. 12. Religion too might be added as another social institution undermined by the zombie outbreak. Catholicism occupies “a particularly significant and unifying place” in Italy (Molé 2012, 81), and a reporter speaks of the zombies as possessed people. But Marcello tells Claudio that there is no God here, which can refer simultaneously

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to the capitalist space of the office building and, more broadly, to a Rome (and perhaps Italy) under assault by zombies. 13. The film’s original title, In un giorno la fine, literally, “in a day the end,” suggests rather less ambiguity. 14. John Marriott (2011) acknowledges the lack of a single agreed-upon set of boundaries for “East London” and sets his own as the area currently comprising the Tower Hamlets and Newham boroughs (6). Newland (2008) also notes the absence of firm boundaries and calls the East End a “profoundly amorphous, ambiguous space,” as much imaginative as material (17). Marriott asserts that East London can be seen to have its own identity by the beginning of the eighteenth century, following a period of urban expansion and development (42–43). The term “East End” itself, though, did not appear in print until the 1820s (Newland 2008, 47). 15. The plague killed many weavers in 1665–1666, people who during the Civil War had supported the parliamentary cause and, with other artisans, kept London from Royalist hands (Marriott 2011, 36–37): a coincidence, but perhaps an illuminating one. 16. Cockneys vs Zombies self-consciously inserts itself into the tradition of London gangster films not only with some editing that seems designed to evoke the work of Guy Ritchie but also with the casting of Dexter Fletcher, who played one of the protagonists, Soap, in Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), as Terry, Andy, and Katy’s father and Ford, who starred in both that film and Ritchie’s Snatch (2000), as their grandfather. The younger MacGuires, then, represent a kind of intergenerational intertextual descent. 17. See also Newland 2008, 189–93 for discussion of the show’s representation of the East End. 18. In the year that Cockneys vs Zombies was released, only 10 percent of care home residents lived in “council or NHS-run institutions” (Lakhani and Whittell 2012). 19. A scene in which a zombified Mickey is repeatedly shot in the head, leaving metal visible through the wounds, does not merely make him look like a Terminator; it also exposes to view the often-obscured toll of wartime service on the working classes (and, in Mickey’s case, on people of color in a majority-White nation). 20. One might see monstrous resurrection as reflecting not only the damages of gentrification broadly speaking but also the failed promises of revitalization by large-scale projects such as the Thames Gateway plan and redevelopment for the 2012 Olympics (see Marriott 2011, 350–54). 21. For an analysis, focused on space/place and memory, of another, nearly contemporaneous British zombie film dealing with the elderly, Harold’s Going Stiff (2011; dir. Keith Wright), see Bacon 2017. 22. On “hybridized cripborg bodies,” see Nelson, Shew, and Stevens 2019. 23. Enrique García (2015) goes so far as to call the zombie apocalypse just another of the “social and economic changes that have affected the island for centuries” and one that highlights Cuban survival by means of adaptability (161). 24. Clemente (2016a) is a reprint, with minor changes, of Clemente (2016b).

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25. He also causes the deaths of several other living people, but unintentionally (with the possible exception of a man in a wheelchair who ends up, offscreen, being left to the zombies). 26. Clemente (2016a) compares Juan to Dawn of the Dead but without suggesting an element of parody. 27. Murphy (2018) seems to view the characters as accepting the propaganda, calling Juan’s business “patriotic” and categorizing Juan of the Dead with zombie films that legitimize the need for “the centralized state” (50). I align instead with Sara A. Potter (2018), who sees rather “a continuous parody of revolutionary discourse” that never actually misleads the central characters (4). 28. Camila’s backstory is the result of the transnational financing of the film (she is played by a Spanish actress), which is itself the result of the politico-economic history with which Juan engages. See Ballina (2017), 192, 209–10; Clemente (2016a), 74; and Stock (2012). 29. Alongside allusions to Cuban cinema (see García 2015, 164–65), Juan makes numerous allusions to transnational pop culture, including vampire and possession films, a list that includes, in addition to Dawn of the Dead and Shaun of the Dead, The Terminator (1984), with Lázaro’s line “Come with me if you want to live”; Jaws (1975), with Sara (Blanca Rosa Blanco) being dragged through the water by an unseen force beneath; Zombi 2, with a shark fortuitously eating a zombie; the 1932 and 1983 versions of Scarface, as well as a porn parody starring, according to Lázaro, Italian actor Rocco Siffredi; Ghostbusters (1984), with a montage of client customer phone calls about zombies; The A-Team (1983–1987), with the climactic DIY conversion of a car into an weaponized amphibious vehicle; Mike Tyson, with the facial tattoo sported by El Primo (Eliecer Ramírez), a muscular Black man; a Sid Vicious cover of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” (1978); and, according to Potter (2018), the resemblance of Camila’s clothing to that of Lara Croft of the Tomb Raider franchise (10). On such intersections, see Maguire (2015), 173; and Brown (2018), 7–8. See also Eljaiek-Rodriguez (2018), 40–47, for an extended reading of the film against North American and European zombie cinema.

Chapter 2

Gender, Sex, and Family, Take 1 Belgium, Australia, and Germany

As with critiques of forms of capitalist exploitation, concerns with the nexus of gender, sexuality, and the family have been central to both the Afro-Caribbean and Romeran cinematic zombie traditions as early as White Zombie and Night of the Living Dead, respectively. That anxieties around capitalism often surface in a given zombie film in tandem with anxieties around gender, sex(uality), and/or the family arises from the fundamental interrelation between capitalism and these other social configurations. Gender difference, argue Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi (2018), is produced by “power dynamics that assign individuals to structural positions in capitalist society,” and such difference took on “its modern male-supremacist form only in and through capitalism’s separation of production from reproduction” (111), a separation that also “creates ‘the family’ as the complementary counterpart to ‘the market’” (88). In White Zombie, Murder Legendre, master of the zombified Black Haitian mill workers, expresses an “all-encompassing desire,” according to Roger Luckhurst (2015), one that appertains not only to Madeline Short (Madge Bellamy) but also to fellow capitalist, French plantation owner Charles Beaumont (Robert W. Frazer) (80). The “real horror” for audiences, writes Kyle William Bishop (2010), “is the violation of the white heroine” in Madeline’s ultimately reversed zombification by Legendre (79). Legendre, “swarthy” and “of indeterminate origin” (Kordas 2011, loc. 443), reduces the American Madeline to the same status as “servile” Blacks (loc. 393); but Madeline herself is presented as “complicit” in her own perils, evoking the twentieth century’s New Woman as “troublesome” (loc. 484) yet, unlike the female zombie, a desirable spouse (loc. 553). In Madeline’s temporarily colonized body, apprehensions about racial and sexual purity collide in the context of imperialism. As the Afro-Caribbean-derived screen zombie moved toward its mutation into a cannibal ghoul, anxieties around gender, sex, and (the) family remained 29

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part of the zombie myth’s deployment. Robin Wood (2018a) contends that the zombies in Night of the Living Dead “have their meaning defined fairly consistently in relation to the family and the couple” and that their assaults on the living both stem from and embody “psychic tensions that are the product of patriarchal male-female or familial relationships” (162). Bishop (2010) includes white patriarchy, misogyny, and “the collapse of the nuclear family” (95) among the terrors embodied by the zombie in and following Night, which he, similarly to Wood, describes as commenting on “the state of the family” (121) and “the liberated status of women during the 1960s” (126).1 In many ways, and across national borders, the areas of disquietude that Bishop enumerates obtain as strongly in contemporary zombie films, even if their specific forms have modulated over the decades since 1968. As demonstrated in the trio of films from European and European-settled nations that this chapter explores, zombie cinema continues to provide sites to think about (and against) heteropatriarchal normativities; however, as distinct from zombie cinema’s treatments of capitalism, even when it critiques these norms, their collapse, absence, or fundamental reimagining is less likely to be depicted. The Belgian film Yummy (2019) takes issue with cosmetic surgery in a manner perhaps intended to be feminist but which ends up as reactionary. Australian horror-comedy Me and My Mates vs. the Zombie Apocalypse (2015) exhibits a similarly equivocal approach to gender roles and expectations, one torn between mocking and endorsing normative masculinity. In contrast to these and to most zombie films, the German film Ever After (Endzeit; 2018) imagines a movement beyond heteropatriarchy, as well as beyond the human as currently constituted. In each of these three films, gender roles and expectations are also entangled with the patriarchal family: its destruction, its qualifications for inclusion as a patriarch, and its obsolescence, respectively. THE WRONG KIND OF ARRESTED AGING: ZOMBIFICATION AND COSMETIC SURGERY TOURISM IN YUMMY In comedic horror film Yummy, directed by Lars Damoiseaux, Alison’s (Maaike Neuville) breasts pose a big problem no matter what she does. Because of the difficulties that they cause her, she decides to undergo a breast reduction, but her trip to a foreign country for an affordable procedure leaves her; her mother, Sylvia (Annick Christiaens), who also plans to have some more traditionally “cosmetic” procedures done; and her boyfriend/would-be fiancé, Michael (Bart Hollanders), embroiled in a zombie outbreak originating in the clinic. In their participation in cosmetic surgery tourism, Alison

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and Sylvia can be regarded as “patient-consumers” (Holliday, Jones, and Bell 2019, 11), an example of Fraser and Jaeggi’s (2018) contention that—as part of bourgeois capitalism’s struggles over the “‘shape’” of and division between social, political, and economic spheres—neoliberalism attempts to extend the boundaries of the “domain of matters subjected to an economizing logic of market relations” (173–74). Cosmetic surgery tourism points not only to the “globalization and neoliberalization of health care” (1) but also, argue Ruth Holliday, Meredith Jones, and David Bell (2019), to cosmetic surgery as an investment in a “beauty capital” that is particularly significant to “working- and lower-middle-class women” (39–40). Decisions to purchase cosmetic surgery, they conclude, “have as much to do with class as with gender” (8). Class and gender also figure largely in inaccurate stereotypes about cosmetic surgery tourism, such as that its patient-consumers are predominantly wealthy, “cosmopolitan” Westerners traveling to “less-developed” nations (Holliday, Jones, and Bell 2019, 13); are almost entirely female (84–85); and are suffering either as victims of media portrayals of beauty or their own overwhelming vanity (2).2 With Alison and Sylvia, Yummy diverges from the stereotype of wealthy patient-consumers. When Michael observes upon arriving at the Klinika Krawczyk that it appeared much nicer on its website, Alison responds that perhaps that is why it is so cheap, suggesting that cost was a primary driver in the decision to take part in cosmetic surgery tourism. As Belgians traveling to a fictional Eastern European country, the protagonists do, however, reinforce the stereotype of cosmetic surgery tourism as a one-way flow from more- to less-developed nations (a stereotype to which this chapter will return later). The presence of a male celebrity, William Maier (Tom Audenaert), who is there under a pseudonym (pointing to the shame that can be attached to cosmetic surgery, perhaps even more so for men) and is well known enough to be recognized by Sylvia and another patient-consumer, Oksana (Taeke Nicolaï), similarly deploys the stereotype of cosmetic surgery tourism as an elite domain but also acknowledges that this domain is not exclusively female. It is still, however, on the film’s patient-consumer side, just about solely female; and Yummy not only validates the view of patientconsumers as vain (and in that, perhaps, victimized) but also—although it satirizes the social attitudes that reduce Alison to her breasts and establishes that her decision to undergo surgery does not stem from vanity—ultimately associates her, through her death, with the other victims of beauty standards or/and zombies, thereby robbing such distinctions of significance.3 Yummy introduces Alison by establishing her as the target of sexualized harassment because of her large breasts. A group of young men in a van alongside the car in which Alison is seated notice her and flock to the van’s windows to shout remarks (muffled by the glass) and make obscene gestures.

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The camera, positioned outside the vehicles, alternates between the men and Alison in medium close-up, so that the men’s gestures are reflected in Alison’s car window and overlaid upon her. Michael does not notice any of these goings-on and asks her if she is cold when she zips up her hoodie, suggesting that he is oblivious to such harassment because, as a man, he is far less apt to experience it. Shortly after this incident, Alison seeks assurance that Michael will still love her with smaller breasts, pointing to anxiety about the association of “large breasts . . . with stronger perceptions of femininity and . . . women’s sexualization and womanhood” (Swami and Tovée 2013, 1200). While there are individual, cultural, and contextual variations in judgments about the attractiveness of female breasts, size is the “most public” variable, as well as “the principal way in which women’s breasts are embodied and objectified in popular culture” (1199). One study found that a preference in men for women who are “traditionally feminine” (and thus perhaps unthreatening to patriarchal heteronormativity) predicted a preference for larger breast size; and it further noted an association between that latter preference and a “tendency to objectify women,” which operates to reinforce patriarchy and its norms (1203–4). Alison also teases Michael in the abovementioned exchange about his small beer belly, pointing to the existence of masculine aesthetic norms and pressures as well, although under these norms and in contrast to the relationship between Alison’s breast size and her perceived femininity, Michael would be unlikely to be viewed as less attractive or less masculine if he reduced his beer gut. Penis size, which William has had surgically increased, functions as a somewhat closer masculine analogue to breast size, but it is less publicly visible and thus less liable to street harassment. Alison, meanwhile, experiences a second bout of street harassment (leering and comments in a language that she does not speak) when stopping at a gas station on the way to the clinic; and once there, the head surgeon, Dr. Krawczyk (Eric Godon), assumes that she wants an enlargement, saying in English (the lingua franca within the clinic) and after presumptively unzipping her hoodie and feeling her breasts for what one reaction shot of Alison and another of Michael averting his gaze suggest is a bit too long, “I would suggest G cup.”4 Given the objectification and harassment which Alison experiences, her choice to purchase a breast reduction might be viewed as a kind of aesthetic choice, a change meant to influence the reaction of others to her appearance. However, while women may choose to undergo breast reduction for appearance-related reasons such as self-consciousness or “social embarrassment,” they may also make this choice for a variety of other reasons, including “back, neck and shoulder pain, pressure grooves from bra straps, posture alteration from the downward pull of heavy breasts, mastodynia (the breast itself is painful), difficulty in playing sports,” skin inflammations, “difficulty

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in finding adequate clothing, and low self-esteem” (Rogliani et al. 2008, 1647). Indeed, in response to staff member Daniel’s (Benjamin Ramon) reaction to her planned procedure—“Really? Pity. You’ve got a body to die for. Why mess with God’s work?”—Alison clarifies her reasons: “Everybody says that, but . . . I mean, I have back problems. I can’t run for the bus.”5 Daniel’s comment about interfering with “God’s work” also points us toward how the movie worries about the altering of (especially female) bodies through cosmetic surgery, even when these changes are being sought, as by Alison, for reasons that do not align with stereotypical assumptions of cosmetic surgery patient-consumers’ vanity. Alison’s mother, Sylvia, in contrast, embodies these assumptions, with her character defined by concern with adhering to dominant beauty standards, even as “inexhaustible enhancement leaves ideals of beauty behind,” along with any “final point where one is allowed to be satisfied” (Botting 2008, 151). She advises Alison not to frown lest she develop wrinkles and has booked a number of procedures: a grin lift, tummy tuck, Brazilian lift (the transfer of fat into the buttocks from the “hips, abdomen, lower back, or thighs” [American Board of Cosmetic Surgery 2021]), and eyelid lift, as well as anal bleaching. The length of the list and its inclusion of anal bleaching invite the audience to laugh at Sylvia’s vanity, but as she finishes enumerating these procedures, the camera also pointedly focuses on a bin full of bloody sheets that is wheeled by, suggesting the association between cosmetic surgery, mutilation, and monstrosity that emerges in the film. Dr. Krawczyk himself views his patient-consumers according to the stereotype which Sylvia embodies, greeting Sylvia, Alison, and Oksana by saying, “Beautiful ladies. I will make you even more beautiful.” The doctor’s promise to make the already beautiful more beautiful suggests the expansion of the category of which bodies need to be corrected, which David J. Skal (2001) regards as an effect of the cosmetic surgery industry (321). But the doctor also assumes, as does the dominant popular discourse on cosmetic surgery, a pursuit of greater aesthetic/sexual appeal rather than a means of correcting deviation “from socially valued bodies” (Holliday, Jones, and Bell 2019, 51) or “investing in a self of value, for example in the markets for labour or relationships” (61). Sylvia employs the same assumption, even more unfoundedly, when she tells Alison, whose reasons for surgery are physical discomfort and limitation, that she is crazy for wanting a B cup. More importantly, however, Sylvia earlier phrases the same sentiment as an assertion that Alison should be happy with what nature gave her. What is more significant than Sylvia’s obvious hypocrisy, which Alison points out, is that her admonition forms part of a pattern in Yummy. Daniel, as mentioned above, similarly refers to Alison’s body as “God’s work,” and another staff member, a doctor named Yonah (Nabil Ben Yadir) concludes regarding the zombie outbreak, “God is punishing us

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for interfering with his creation.”6 Although it seems that Yonah might be referring specifically to the secret experiments that cause the outbreak, he is later surprised that Dr. Krawczyk “know[s] the virus” and demands to know if the zombie virus was “created in special youth treatment program,” suggesting, particularly in the context of similar comments by other characters, that he was drawing a line not between the zombies and goings-on to which he was not privy but between the zombies and the clinic’s services more generally. The film, then, links both the vanity of seeking cosmetic surgery with the vanity of performing it and the unnaturalness of cosmetic surgery with the unnaturalness of the zombie. When Alison angrily demands of her mother—rhetorically, since Sylvia has already been infected—why she must keep looking like a teenage whore,7 her question draws on vanity stereotypes but also further connects cosmetic surgery and zombification with Sylvia’s implied unnaturalness, in appearance and behavior, as a mother and an aging woman. Daniel brags that one perk of his job is that, after surgery, the women (he says girls) “feel all yummy and sexy, and they want affirmation.” His assertion that he benefits from female vanity and insecurity invokes the film’s title, which puns on tropes of—in this case, predatory cis hetero male—sexuality as consumption or devourment; but the pun acquires an additional dimension in the literal devourment of flesh by the zombies, many of whom are female, inverting the gendered flow of power in Daniel’s boast. Skal (2001) posits a parallel between “the spectacle of infinitely plastic human bodies” enabled by latex foam in late twentieth-century horror, sci-fi, and fantasy films and the concurrent “quantum growth of cosmetic surgery” (312). Although zombies are not generally among the more “plastic” horror monsters, Yummy does include some, such as a zombie who ambulates despite missing her lower torso, who present functioning bodies in atypical shapes. But the film’s zombies also represent both what the majority of its cosmetic surgery tourists wish to avoid—having “incorrect” and/or aging bodies—and the consequences of their attempted avoidance of this as consumers of cosmetic surgery. In counterpoint to Dr. Krawczyk’s goal to develop “a brand new rejuvenation treatment, based on experimental skin cell technology,” the zombie, which his pursuit of anti-aging techniques creates, “reminds us that we will soon be rotting flesh” (Tenga and Zimmerman 2013, 78). Yummy underscores this dimension of the zombie not only through patients and staff becoming zombies but also through multiple instances of the still-living being confused for the walking dead: Michael thinks that the man recovering in the next bed is a zombie based on the sounds that he is making; William refuses to open a door to a woman whom he takes for a zombie because her chemical peel has burned her face; and, most significantly, Alison deliberately kills a limping Michael with a car when she mistakes him for a zombie and then dies

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in the subsequent crash, sustaining facial wounds such that she too resembles one of the undead. The zombie as “a painful reminder of physical infirmity” (Tenga and Zimmerman 2013, 79), aging, and death overtakes the clinic devoted to eliminating such reminders. In Julia Kristeva’s (2020) notion of abjection, the abject is that which “disturbs identity, system, order” (97), and the Other, as “alter ego,” enables abjection, creating and delimiting the “territory” of the self by “point[ing] it out . . . through loathing” (102). Within the flux of abjection, the corpse—of which the zombie represents an even more troubling form—along with excrement and bodily fluids, manifests what the subject “permanently thrust[s] aside in order to live” and brings the subject to “the border” of life and death, revealing “the limit” beyond which the self and its “entire body” will eventually and inevitably fall (97). Aaron Kerner argues that the abject “is a non-object, a feeling without a signified” prompted by not merely the corpse “but rather how the corpse is presented,” such as in “stylized” presentations of “excessive elements” including “sex and violence” (12). Yummy’s zombies, therefore, insist on abjection not only by their presence but also by their presentation, and they do so alongside a monstrous version of the same cosmetic surgery that aims to occlude or efface the abject. Leaving aside the zombies’ own missing limbs and flesh, surgery is linked with mutilation, a nightmare inversion of bodily correction, within the clinic. Alison accidentally flips a switch that pumps fat back into a liposuction patient until his abdomen explodes, Yonah (rather improbably, it must be said) removes most of his infected arm using what appears to be a shredder, Oksana inadvertently sets fire to William’s recently enlarged penis, and Michael uses his knowledge as a med-school dropout to amputate several of Alison’s fingers.8 In their irony and gory excess, these mutilations, Alison’s excepted, also provide opportunities for moments of sLaughter (as defined in this book’s introduction), and laughter itself can be “a way of placing or displacing abjection” (Kristeva 2020, 100). Like laughter or sLaughter, though, cosmetic surgery in Yummy accomplishes such displacement only momentarily. Dr. Krawczyk’s stated desire “to make people happy,” “stop aging,” and “make the world look more beautiful” echoes dominant perceptions of cosmetic surgery patient-consumers as “self-obsessed women who aspire to the goal of ultimate beauty and eternal youth” (Holliday, Jones, and Bell 2019, 2) while instead delivering disfigurement and the suspension of aging only in the suspension of life.9 Yummy intermingles its parallels between the bodily changes of zombification and mutilation and the bodily changes wrought by cosmetic surgery with constructions of cosmetic surgery tourism anchored in denigration of the foreign Other. While Belgium itself is, for instance, a popular destination for UK residents seeking breast augmentation (Holliday, Jones, and Bell 2019,

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43), Yummy’s locating its clinic in Eastern Europe fits neatly into common narratives of cosmetic surgery tourist destinations as “countries with cowboy surgeons and substandard healthcare” (179). Although a destination such as Poland can indeed offer procedures for “as much as 80% less than in Western Europe” (Mendes 2015, 85), the film’s indeterminate Eastern European setting also allows it to displace anxieties about cosmetic surgery beyond Belgium’s own borders and its health care system. Klinika Krawczyk appears to live down to discourses of “bad cosmetic surgery abroad” (Holliday, Jones, and Bell 2019, 55), with Michael questioning whether the clinic adheres to European Union regulations, the unhygienic drinking of coffee in the operating room, and whether the staff knows or will check Alison’s blood type. Alison is not told beforehand that Dr. Krawczyk will not be the surgeon operating on her,10 and William’s penis catches on fire because neither he nor Oksana can read the label written in what Daniel at one point derides as “dog language” on a tube of what turns out to be inflammable cream. Then, of course, Dr. Krawczyk, with his secret experiments, is a cowboy surgeon if there ever was one, and the fact that these experiments actually employ stem cells from the gratis abortions that the clinic provides to pregnant teenagers connects the zombie outbreak to anxieties around reproduction as well. Skal (2001) observes that “men playing God with the bodies of women” has figured in horror films since the 1930s and forms part of a tradition that imagines “circumventing or modifying ordinary methods of reproduction” (320). While circumventing heterosexual reproduction is a side effect rather than an aim of Dr. Krawczyk’s experiments, it is nevertheless the outcome, with zombie reproduction born from arrested human reproduction. The “queered horror” of zombie reproduction results from a desire that “does not have as its object the reproductive results deemed appropriate by the dominant heteronormative culture” (Rees 2016, 217). This horror is intensified because the involvement of these particular stem cells in the zombie outbreak suggests promiscuous reproduction of and contamination by foreign bodies. Furthermore, the repetitive desire of zombies’ hunger, observes Shaka McGlotten (2011), “refuses a before” such as “the couple . . . and after” such as children “in favor of something beyond the established teloi of life and death” (loc. 4043). Capping off these reproductive horrors, the final image of the film is of the engagement ring that Michael earlier tried to present to Alison rolling to a stop in the street, after which there is a hard cut to black, highlighting the destruction, with their deaths, of the film’s only potential nuclear family. Ultimately, in condemning an obsession with appearance, Yummy simultaneously reinforces problematic gender paradigms. One can read Yummy as punishing not only Sylvia for performing femininity and motherhood

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improperly but also Alison for seeking a breast reduction, even though her motivation is not the vanity that the film wishes to satirize. Alison—by then slick with the abject bodily fluids of blood and tears—even eventually apologizes, while Michael bandages the stumps of her severed fingers, for bringing Sylvia and Michael to the clinic and says that there’s nothing wrong with an F cup. Alison may not attempt to exercise agency over her body for the same reasons as her mother, but she is judged for it according to the same gendered stereotypes and expectations, an elision of difference between Alison and Sylvia that is suggested when, after the zombie outbreak is underway, Alison dons her mother’s tight, cleavage-baring shirt and formfitting pants to replace her surgical gown. Men too, even leaving aside William’s punishment for penis vanity and plans for liposuction, are judged according to patriarchal conceptions of gender, if less prominently. Michael follows a typical arc of increasing “masculinity” through the film: early on, Sylvia mocks the clumsy, blood-phobic Michael, and the more confident, aggressively sexual Daniel competes with him for Alison’s attentions,11 but by the end, a blood-soaked Michael is snapping off a zombie’s rib to stab it with and uncoiling its intestine for possible use as a rope (squishing noises and his grunts of exertion highlighting the scene’s abject excess), tying his status as a man and a potential husband to his capacity for and desensitization to violence (though the transformation does not save him from being run down by his intended). Neither Alison’s repentance for coming to the clinic, nor her taking an ax to her zombie mother (and the stereotypes that she represents), nor Michael’s enhanced masculinity can overcome the zombifying virus that, in the film’s reckoning, has been unleashed by vanity’s commodified pursuit of youth and beauty, reversing the imagined West-East flow of patient-consumers to contaminate the world beyond the clinic. ME AND MY MATES [AND MY MASCULINITY] VS. THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE Me and My Mates vs. the Zombie Apocalypse, written and directed by Declan Shrubb, evinces a tension in its gender politics similar to that displayed in Yummy. While social institutions collapse, boundary work around gender, and particularly around (White, working-class) masculinity, continues largely— though, significantly, not entirely—uninterrupted and unchallenged. Even though policing of gendered boundaries is presented via comedy, humor can “do significant social work” and express aggression as much as it promotes bonding or community (Miller and Van Riper 2016, xiv). Within the film’s homosocial micro-community of survivors, nonnormative masculinity presents an additional and perhaps comparable threat to that of the encroaching

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zombies, and the two threats, neither in the end contained, become one in the location of the initial symptoms of infection on the genitals. Me and My Mates vs. the Zombie Apocalypse focuses on a trio of working-class telecom employees, one of whom is accompanied by his daughter, Emma (Adele Vuko), who hole up in a telephone exchange building when the zombie apocalypse happens. They are subsequently joined by two apprentices, one of whom is Emma’s boyfriend, and the film follows the group’s attempts first to defend the building and later to escape it once it is breached by the undead, with Emma and the apprentices ultimately the ones who escape with their lives in a van. Emma is the sole woman in the group of protagonists, and, as one might expect in a homosocial setting, relationships between several of the men—her father, fling, and boyfriend—are defined in relation to her sexuality, but her often greater capability and progressiveness compared to the men around her offers a minor critique of their masculine norms and self-image. Emma’s first action in the film is to kill a zombie that has infiltrated the building before survivor Darryl (Alex Williamson) can work up the courage to shoot it, an act for which he grants her an “assist” in order to assert his own, manly bravery. She is similarly the most proactive survivor at other points, assessing the building’s safety, pressing for plans to be made, and fixing boyfriend Lachlan’s (Andy Trieu) jammed paintball gun while under assault by zombies. Her correction of her father, Roy’s (Greg Fleet), discriminatory speech, such as referring to the zombies as “’tards,” positions such masculine coarseness as regressive, and she tells Lachlan and Roy that neither of them gets to “dictate how I live the remainder of my life.” Importantly, given that Roy, Darryl, and Lachlan all concern themselves with her sexuality, she also exercises sexual agency. Before Lachlan unexpectedly shows up, Emma initiates sex with Darryl, even as her prefatory remark that “apocalypses can make you go a bit crazy” acknowledges the encounter’s transgression of expected female behavior. This transgression is underscored by the way in which the camera glides around from behind a table that obstructs our view of the coupling couple except for the bobbing of Darryl’s scavenged Australian military slouch hat to reveal that the hat is now on top of Emma’s head (as she is on top of Darryl). During the encounter, Emma tells Darryl to “say you’re my zombie slave,” to which he, misunderstanding whom Emma means by “you,” replies with “You’re my zombie slave, bitch,” a statement that evokes figures of female submission through zombification from White Zombie’s Madeline to the eponymous Deadgirl (2008), whom teenage boys employ like an undead sex doll. Immediately corrected, Darryl concedes: “I’m your zombie slave, bitch.”12 The two then put hands over each other’s mouths, with Emma saying, “You’re so much sexier when you’re quiet,” further reinforcing Emma’s masculine-coded position of dominance. Both Emma’s having sex with Darryl, consistently marked as weak and

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so less manly, and her subsequent choice to resume her relationship with Lachlan, who is Asian, subvert patriarchal hierarchies: neither man holds the full power of traditional White masculinity, yet Emma chooses both as sexual partners. However, Me and My Mates is more ambivalent toward upsetting these hierarchies than Emma’s competence and sexual choices might suggest. Emma herself undermines her own move away from heteronormative monogamy when she gets angry at Lachlan for admitting to having had sex with another woman, even though he provides almost the same apocalypse-related rationale that she does for having sex with Darryl. In terms of the male survivors themselves, not only can the line between laughing with and at a character such as Darryl be blurry, but also much of the film’s comedy derives from adherence to or deviation from stereotypes of normative masculinity. Much of the dialogue reflects how, as Anna Hickey-Moody and Timothy Laurie (2017) write, “hegemonic masculinity is maintained through certain kinds of homosocial ridicule, or men laughing at other men” (215). Hickey-Moody and Laurie elaborate, “The forms of masculinity that become sites of shaming through ridicule are largely non-dominant performances of masculinity—that is, those marked by their distance from White, middle-class heterosexuality,” and move on to cite the stand-up comedy of Jim Jeffries, who in the film plays Joel, a colleague of telecom tradesmen Darryl and Roy, as a specific example of this dynamic (216). Darryl is the most commonly targeted for shaming and ridicule regarding his inadequate masculinity. Early on, when Joel mocks the riding mower that Darryl has arrived on, he responds that he “feel[s] like some kind of junkie Mad Max,” establishing an unflattering comparison between himself and the manly, muscle-car-driving hero of a different Australian cinematic apocalypse. References to Darryl having thrush, diabetes, and a fear of the dark (reasonable, one would think, in the zombie apocalypse) further establish his distance from ideals of hegemonic masculinity. But the most sustained means of homosocial ridicule is by association with queerness. Roy, for instance, asserts his dominant position by instructing Joel and Darryl, “You two homos come up with a plan, and I’ll tell you if it’s any good.” Chastised by Emma, he claims that he can’t be homophobic because he has gay friends, and “even Darryl here is a bit gay.” Near the end of the film, when Darryl informs Roy, “I love you. Like a friend,” an admission that falls outside of the typical channels of homosocial bonding, Roy deflects: “Yeah, like a gay friend.” Shortly after, he ponders aloud, “My only daughter got rooted by a gay bloke. That is so modern.” Here, as throughout, Darryl denies any queerness (“I’m not gay, Roy”), but other jokes rely on Darryl implying exactly what he denies. When Roy wants to kill Darryl after he finds out that Darryl shot Roy’s zombified wife in addition to having sex with his daughter—both challenges to his

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patriarchal masculinity—Darryl inquires if he can masturbate if Roy chokes him, so that there’s something in it for him. He then proposes, “Can’t you just rape me for a bit?” Lachlan too invokes sexual violation, lamenting when he breaks his ankle with an audible crunch while in the presence of a number of zombies, “I’m out for the season. I’m gonna get raped.” If “humor and horror abuse the body” not only through “affliction” but also “ejaculations and bodily fluids, and nudity” (Misch 2018, loc. 1957), then this moment displays the former to gesture to the latter, collapsing multiple forms of bodily abuse as it collapses horror and laughter. Hegemonic masculinity insists on “proper men’s bodies as strong and muscular, healthy and not disabled, and thus able to fulfil . . . an embodiment that allows men to perform normative roles such as worker, sportsman and father” (Holliday, Jones, and Bell 2019, 184), and Lachlan reacts to the loss through injury of his proper body by expressing it as a loss of the role of sportsman and a fear of zombies, beings with even less proper bodies, forcing him into a nondominant sexual role. When the injured Lachlan grabs his friend Ryan’s (Matthew Popp) shirt—both are wearing brightly colored shirts with the sleeves removed in a parody of tough-guy masculinity—after escaping from the zombies into a van commandeered by Emma, Ryan accuses Lachlan of trying to kiss him, marking Lachlan’s new departure from the heteronormative masculine ideal and, perhaps more importantly, maintaining that ideal’s prohibition against weakness, physical or emotional. Even Roy—who, as an imposing, bald, “worker, sportsman, and father” who thinks that “people need to stop being so soft,” represents the closest within the group to an embodiment of the hegemonic masculine ideal—is subject to such policing. Darryl calls Roy a “soft cunt” for using an electronic cigarette and later describes him as crying “like a bitch” while concealed inside a toilet stall. Even Emma adopts the strategy employed in such policing of coding perceived male weakness as female, calling Lachlan a “pussy” both before he manages to get into the van and again when he thinks he is going into shock because of his ankle injury, not the sprain that he thinks it is but a horrific compound fracture revealed in a quick cut to a close-up for another moment of sLaughter. As Margaret Jolly (2008) explains, “Being a ‘proper’ man in Australia means not being a ‘sissy,’ feminized, weak” or gay, “conforming to a heterosexual script” even while spending a great deal of time with other men in “homosocial worlds” related to sports, drinking, and labor (5). The maintenance of these boundaries is complicated, however, by Lachlan: a “pussy” who offers to have sex with Ryan to make up for cheating on Emma and asks her to hold him when zombies eat some soldiers, he nevertheless gets the girl in the end, escaping with Emma and Ryan, while Darryl, whose requests for masturbation and penetration destabilize heteronormative homosociality, is paired with Roy: the film concludes with the conversation

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in which Darryl declares his platonic love for Roy, both of them having been bitten by zombies, as they lie on the grass, shoulders touching in a medium close-up shot that, ignoring the blood that covers the pair, wouldn’t look out of place in a romantic comedy. Also transgressive is Darryl’s linking of sports and queerness when as part of his rebuttal when Roy calls him “a bit gay,” he admits that once “leant on a cock” in the showers after a game of footy, or Australian Rules Football. While Lachlan’s connection of sports and potential rape when he breaks his ankle aligns with the hierarchies of hegemonic masculinity, Darryl’s admission of touching another man’s penis in a space related to homosocial bonding does not adhere to these norms. In this lack of adherence, Darryl’s remark, like his comments that imagine Roy as a participant in Darryl’s masturbation or rape, acts as a small destabilization of heteronormative masculinity. Primarily, though, the film portrays sports as vehicles for masculine strength, leadership, and homosocial belonging. Displaying “that supposedly most Australian of all traits, a fanatical attachment to sport” (Craven 1994, 101), neither Joel nor Darryl wants to kill Roy’s zombie wife lest it affect Joel’s current or Darryl’s desired spot on the cricket team that Roy captains. In Australia, cricket has long functioned as “a key cultural domain of white masculinity” (Hughson and Hughson 2021, 1392)—more than one Australian prime minister has averred that the captain of the national cricket team occupies a more important leadership position than their own (1390)—and Joel and Darryl begin a game of cricket to avoid talking about Joel’s uncomfortable intimation that he was molested as a child by his uncle. Later, Roy instructs Darryl that his part in their survival plan requires the same “patience, dedication, and . . . ability to follow direction” as being on the cricket team, transposing his dominant position from the homosocial arena of sports to the typically homosocial arena of his workplace/survival space. Roy explicitly connects his masculine dominance to the submission and humiliation of other men when he responds to Darryl’s complaint that Roy’s urine (another abject fluid) is splashing him by simply saying, “Cricket team.” Darryl’s choice to remain with the infected Roy rather than escape with Emma, Lachlan, and Ryan because “a player never leaves his captain” evinces such thinking while also demonstrating the processing of homosocial relationships in sports terms.13 Although membership on the team has become a moot point, after Darryl bowls a grenade into a crowd of zombies, Roy, in a sign of acceptance, invites him to be part of the team. Moreover, the paintball guns brought by Lachlan and Ryan, who arrive outfitted as if for a match, are, while comic versions of the firearms commonly wielded by the heroes of zombie films, also sporting equipment and prove relatively effective against the undead. Even sports fandom provides a means of displaying proper manliness. In addition to playing sports, watching and discussing them also help to

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construct masculinity in Australia (Wedgewood 1997, 29), and earlier in the film, Roy credits his ability to make his way through the crowd of zombies outside to attending football grand finals. Additionally, the ritual of bonding through insults, including identifying one another as female, observed among White working-class male cricket spectators in Australia (26) is also enacted among the overwhelmingly White working-class male cricket fans in the film. Further, Joel and Darryl’s two-man version of cricket played with a wicket made of empty beer cans gestures simultaneously to the connection between sports and beer and, reinforced by further references to needing and searching for beer, alcohol consumption as “a central feature of hegemonic masculinity in Australia,” with greater consumption considered to indicate greater masculinity (26). If humor used to question one another’s gender and sexuality performs masculinity and enacts male homosocial bonding, so too does “obscene humor targeted at women” (Hickey-Moody and Laurie 2017, 218). Me and My Mates deploys such humor early and often. When Joel and Darryl first reunite early in the film, Joel has secured Roy’s zombified wife in the covered bed of a truck, and the two trade comments on her attractiveness without Joel revealing that he is commenting on her appearance as a zombie. After Darryl defends himself from being called a virgin by announcing that he has had sex with one woman, “all three holes,” he says he wants to see Joel’s “surprise” if “it’s got a pulse and a vagina.” Roy’s wife has only one of these, but even zombification does not shield a woman from sexualized humor, with Darryl noting that she has “got more than three holes” and Joel adding, “Even Roy wouldn’t smash that.” In a later scene, Darryl opines of the zombie hordes, “Some of them are still pretty fuckable. I find the virus takes them from a ten out of ten down to about a seven.”14 Although some scholars have viewed zombies as genderless, “asexual walking flesh” (Jones 2011, loc. 829),15 here it seems that in being closer to a body without subjectivity, female zombies become even easier to objectify.16 At the same time, this objectification emphasizes what McGlotten (2011) terms “the stubborn zombie dumbness of desire” (loc. 3960) as well as the ways in which “interchanges between sexual voyeurism and zombies throw doubt over the presumed lines between ‘disgusting’ and ‘desirable’” (Jones and McGlotten 2014, loc. 214). Even when they are not sexually objectified, there is an emphasis on zombies’ gender (Lachlan apologizes, “I never hit women, ever,” after elbowing a female zombie who is chasing him with her intestines hanging out, not only violating the boundary between inside and outside but also revealing parts of the body typically concealed; a dead male zombie is stored in the men’s room because, Darryl says, it would be “rude” to put a man in the women’s toilets) and genitals (Ryan apologizes to a female zombie for shooting her in the crotch with a paintball gun, while he says of the male zombies, “One shot to the nads and

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they’re down”). Such insistence on seeing zombies as occupying established sex roles represents an attempt to maintain the system of gendering and the gendered systems which the walking dead threaten to disrupt. The male characters’ sexualization of zombies speaks to the fundamental importance of “evidence of ‘heterosexual’ desire” in male homosociality, a mechanism that “marginalize[s] the women themselves” (Hickey-Moody and Laurie 2017, 219). Both zombie women and living women are similarly fitted into this framework, emphasizing their similarity in relation to heteronormativity in place of their difference. When Darryl first sees Emma, he calls attention to how she has “grown out,” the first but not only comment on her sexual attractiveness. Magazine pin-up pages are visible tacked up in the men’s restroom where the dead zombie is brought, as well as in a later shot elsewhere in the building. Darryl shares that he will miss a certain category of porn video in the internet-less apocalypse, and near the end of the film, he and Roy reminisce about advances in pornographic media as they prepare for their last (unsuccessful) stand against a mob of approaching zombies. Roy’s reference to having been relieved of his position coaching Emma’s under-fourteen soccer team over a “hugging-based controversy” may also, more problematically, qualify as such evidence. Related to assertions of heterosexual desire are assertions of control over female sexuality, control which acts as evidence of masculine power. In addition to Roy’s abovementioned anger at Darryl having had sex with Emma, Roy corrects Darryl’s assumption that Roy dislikes Lachlan because he is Asian, explaining that he dislikes Lachlan because “he’s having sex with my daughter.” Roy also tells Emma herself, “Look, as far as I’m concerned, you’re as pure as the driven snow.”17 However, here too we find challenges to normative masculinity. Immediately after this statement eliding Emma’s sexual agency, Roy draws attention to such masculinity as performative by laughing with his daughter about a pregnancy scare that she experienced. Similarly, when Lachlan asks Roy’s permission to marry Emma, approaching him as a traditional patriarch, Roy instructs him to ask Emma. At the same time that the zombie outbreak provides a venue for the overwhelming, although not total, “affirmation of certain kinds of masculinity as dominant and the exclusion” of others (Hickey-Moody and Laurie 2017, 219), the zombie infection itself represents a threat to manhood. Even when zombies are not involved, genitalia “are frequently privileged as points of toxicity, leakage, or a general openness to other organisms” (Grizzell 2014, loc. 2441); and here, Roy reports, based on what he has heard on the radio, “The first sign of infection: purple spots on your genitals.” (In a deflection of anxiety, he and Darryl agree on the hilarity of this fact.) When Lachlan and Ryan first arrive, Roy wants to see their genitals to make sure that they are not infected, conjuring the uneasy “comic disgust” of heterosexual men

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having to look at other men’s bodies while avoiding any homoeroticism (Hickey-Moody and Laurie 2017, 221). Upon seeing the marks of infection on himself, part of Roy’s reaction is to say, “Fuck me in the ass and throw me down a volcano,” an exclamation that connects his infection to being penetrated, itself further connected to voluntary death. The anchoring of the zombie infection in the male genitals is also reflected in Ryan’s abovementioned endorsement of shooting male zombies in “the nads” as an effective strategy, which posits the zombie’s genitals as a weak point and site of a displaced castration anxiety. But what begins as a problem with the genitals then transforms the entire masculine body so that it no longer is and no longer can be the proper, closed body of hegemonic masculinity. Zombies lack the proper embodiment (as well as the proper mental acuity) to act as masculine figures such as the athlete, laborer, patriarch, or heterosexual partner and therefore represent the feared worst-case scenario for characters seeking a place within the hierarchy of dominant masculinity. It is worth noting, then, that in a post-credits scene, Roy and Darryl, representing contrasting positions on the spectrum of normative masculinity, haven’t yet died despite having had their legs chewed off by zombies: the patriarch(y) is very, very slow to die, but nondominant masculinities prove equally resilient. NEW EVES FOR A NEW EDEN: EVER AFTER In contrast to the attempts to construct, perform, and preserve normative masculinity that Me and My Mates vs. the Zombie Apocalypse foregrounds, Ever After, an adaptation written by Olivia Vieweg of her graphic novel by the same name and directed by Carolina Hellsgård, imagines the way forward in its zombie apocalypse in assertively female terms. Examining the history of representations of female monstrosity, Sady Doyle (2019) writes that women “are the end of the world that was, and the first sign of the world to come, in the age after patriarchy, when monsters rule the earth” (244). This observation describes Ever After quite well, as the film presents its zombies as arising from a female-coded Earth, while its protagonists, a woman and a female zombie-human hybrid, ultimately decide to not to return to the remains of a civilization that represents a destructive, male-dominated past. Unlike the vast majority of zombie films, Ever After focuses nearly completely on female characters. Aside from an elderly man (Axel Werner) who plays a part early on in protagonist Vivi (Gro Swantje Kohlhof) fleeing Weimar—one of only two communities, the second being Jena, to survive—men are relegated to nonspeaking roles as background characters in the settlement and zombies. The two cities are connected by an unmanned,

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solar-powered supply train, and no resident is supposed to leave either city. Vivi, haunted by guilt and a lack of closure related to the loss of her young sister, Renata (Amy Schuk), in the beginning of the zombie apocalypse, has been under psychiatric supervision; she stows away on the supply train at the same time as Eva (Maja Lehrer), whom Vivi witnessed being scratched and infected by a zombie when Eva, at the behest of her female supervisor, had to execute a woman who had been bitten. When the train breaks down, Eva and Vivi, unaware at this point that Eva is infected, set out together, continuing on foot their journey away from Weimar and its policy that anyone injured by a zombie must immediately be killed and toward Jena and its search for a cure. In contrast to the emphasis of the original, German title Endzeit (meaning “end-time”) on the film’s apocalyptic elements and Biblical imagery, its English title, Ever After, points to the fairy tale overtones of Vivi and Eva’s journey: women leave behind their home—and a controlling mother figure in Weimar’s warden (Barbara Philipp)—for the wilds beyond, except here the fields and forests hold both danger and promise for the future. Eva genders the zombie apocalypse and attributes it to nonhuman nature, identifying the Earth as a wise old woman who is carrying out an eviction of the human race. A woman (Trine Dyrholm) whom Vivi and Eva encounter on their picaresque travels and who identifies herself as “the gardener” offers a similar explanation. She describes the zombie outbreak as a necessary and long-delayed purging of “unwelcome guests” from the Earth, a formulation that echoes Donna Haraway’s (2016) reminder that “we are all lichens; so we can be scraped off the rocks by the Furies, who still erupt to avenge crimes against the earth” (56). Later, the gardener expands on her view of this purge, effected by a virus carried with humans for millions of years, as an opportunity for change following humanity’s brief existence relative to the scale of natural history. Her assertions that humankind’s uncontrolled greed precipitated its undoing and that humanity squandered its opportunity to live in “paradise” imply a condemnation of the environmentally destructive Capitalocene era,18 an era that “signifies capitalism as a way of organizing nature—as a multispecies, situated, capitalist world-ecology” (Moore 2016a, loc. 205). The gardener’s reference to a lost paradise links her firstly with nonhuman nature. She delivers these lines in a huge, thriving greenhouse, a location that evokes stewardship of and domination over nature in tension with one another. As the gardener and Vivi walk the rows during the scene, the camera returns more than once to Vivi’s point of view for shots of brightly colored tomatoes amid the lush greenery and at other times shoots the characters through the foliage, causing them to appear enveloped by it. At the same time, the non-POV shots keep the human-constructed greenhouse walls or ceiling inescapably in frame. Secondly, the reference to paradise links the gardener with Biblical imagery: as the gardener, she will participate in a new,

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post-Capitalocene form of the Eden lost by humanity, and Vivi’s being called an angel by the old man in Weimar suggests that she too will have a place in this altered, revitalized world.19 The gardener’s contention that “something new will arise” in place of humanity is supported by the multiple types, or perhaps more accurately the spectrum, of zombies that populate the German landscape. There are typical zombies of the fast variety, but Vivi and Eva also encounter a zombie in a wedding dress with weeds, Eva observes, growing from her face, something that she has never seen before. This zombie otherwise behaves as one would expect, so the growth suggests that she represents an interstitial step toward the gardener’s something new, an evolution which includes the gardener herself. These changes resonate with Dawn Keetley’s (2016) description of plant horror as depicting an “event,” a complete and seemingly agentless “rupture” of “normality,” the known, and the “fundamental structuring rules” of the world (22). Although the gardener acts and speaks like an uninfected human, she too has plant material growing from her face and neck. She says that she no longer needs humans around her, implying that she no longer considers herself one of them, and when Vivi directly asks if the gardener is human, she responds, “I am what you see.” Vivi, first seen watering indoor plants with an eyedropper and sporting dyed hair that might evoke a flower, does grow some plant matter from her wounds when she sleeps in the forest next to her sister’s corpse, though she plucks it out.20 Less overtly, Vivi’s eating a tomato in the gardener’s greenhouse gestures toward how human consumption of plant matter situates plants “often uncomfortably” within the “material cosmology” of the body (Blazan 2022, 6). Eva, however, seems to represent an even further evolution. The gardener, having shallowly buried the infected Eva, resurrects her for an “extension” by feeding her a(nother) tomato. Eva retains her power to speak when she revives, and after she is later further wounded by zombies, she returns in the film’s ending with plant material growing from the wounds on her own face and neck. Unlike the bridal zombie or the gardener, though, and although she does not speak in this scene, Eva exhibits blooming flowers. Deborah Christie (2011) writes that the zombie embodies “our discomfort with that boundary space that exists in us all, that objectness of our inherent material makeup whereby we transition from human to post-(as in no longer)-human” (71). In Ever After, the boundary at issue is not only that between living and dead or human and object but also that between the constructed categories of human and nature. Elizabeth Parker (2020) notes that ecocentric accounts of “trans-corporeality” remind us that human bodies are “permeable and . . . porous” and already “permanently intermeshed with the nonhuman” (32). Keetley (2016) posits that, although plants may be seen as monstrous because they represent an “absolute ‘other’” and unsettle systems of categorization (much as zombies do) (7–8), violation of the boundaries of

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the human in plant horror films need not be horrifying: in some cases, “it’s not about remaining human (as we know it), but becoming some new kind of human” (25). More specifically, Parker (2020) views scenes of human-plant hybridization in the film Annihilation (2018) as suggesting that the imagined necessity, seen in a number of texts, of “some sort of ‘death’ of the human as we know it” in order to become “‘one’ with Nature . . . might not be a bad thing” (134). Ever After offers much the same perspective on the demise “of the human as we know it.” While the transition into the posthuman might be uncomfortable, it also represents—in a group of women—hope for the future of the planet. Leaving behind the vanishing human society that produced the Capitalocene also means leaving behind gender as an axis “of domination” (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018, 109) produced by capitalism as a system of “‘socioecological relations’” (93). Parker (2020) credits women’s and nature’s “shared history” of subjugation and silencing for their portrayal as “in dark sympathy with one another” in a number of “ecofeminist revenge” narratives (114). It is significant, then, not only that the zombie in a wedding dress is, despite her weeds, not the same sort of rational posthuman as Eva and the gardener but also that when the bridal zombie returns to pursue Vivi after Vivi had earlier foregone the chance to kill her, the gardener does it instead: the new eliminating the old. Another symbol of the roles being consigned to the past is the Barbie doll that Vivi finds and examines at the location of a group suicide, a doll that has pinkish red in its hair like Vivi does, highlighting it as another potential model for her. Meanwhile, we meet no infected men of the gardener’s or Eva’s type, only those who act like traditional cannibalistic zombies. One in particular, whose blindness can be viewed as symbolizing the blindness, willful and otherwise, of the male-dominated Capitalocene to (the loss of) the possibility of Earth-as-paradise mentioned by the gardener, is the first one whom Vivi, late in the film, fights and kills. Her weapon is a shovel, a gardening tool, and while she loses an eye in the fight (the screen cuts to black just before her eye is penetrated, aligning the audience’s vision with Vivi’s), her vision is changed rather than, like the male zombie’s, lost. Further, the spread of zombiism obviates the centrality of the traditional reproductive family. One can certainly, for example, view Ever After as an ecofeminist text, and while some strains of ecofeminism actually operate “in the service of reproductive futurism: that is to say, they assert the absolute centrality and importance of the Child for environmental activism as a result of their tendency toward maternity-centric accounts of women’s relationships with proximal ecosystems” (Hester 2018, 41), Ever After’s various types of zombie create more zombies via viral infection rather than maternity. This method of reproduction removes the Child (a figure of the heterosexual future rather than any historical, embodied child) from its dominant position, as

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well as from women’s relationships to ecosystems. As Keetley (2016) points out, plants also challenge human reproductive norms and are, like zombies, devoted not only to consumption but also to excessive and therefore terrifying reproduction (15). “Alternatives to reproductive futurity” can also “help us rethink modes of intimacy, sociability, and solidarity beyond the nexus of the nuclear family” (Hester 2018, 57). Or, in Haraway’s (2016) phrasing, “‘Make Kin Not Babies!’” (102). Vivi is driven through much of the film by finding her sister but is able to let go of her after spending some time with her corpse. Renata’s remains lie on the bank of a river in the forest, encroached upon by moss and leaves, and her red swimsuit echoes the other uses of red and pink in the film to suggest flowers, of which a few small purple ones can be seen on her skull in a close-up. These details imply “the stark fact that we become fodder for plants” and the “terrifying ability of vegetal life to swallow . . . and outlive humans” (Keetley 2016, 5), if not humanity, but the calm cello music that accompanies part of Vivi’s time with the body and her emotional breakthrough from doing so simultaneously work against such terror. Vivi tells Renata’s corpse that she cannot stay with her and makes kin with Eva instead. As the virus has bloomed in Eva by the time that she and Vivi walk off into the distance together at the end of the film, this kinship, in the sort of entanglement of which Haraway would likely approve, crosses the boundaries both of genetic family and of species. Eva and Vivi undergo the sort of contaminating encounters, to borrow Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s (2015) term, and collaboration “both within and across species” (29) that allow not only for survival but also potentially for “new directions” (27). Although Vivi and Eva do come within sight of Jena, they choose, finally, a new direction for themselves, one that is reflective of the new course that the post–zombie outbreak world is taking into a posthuman future. In the film’s warmly lit conclusion, Vivi, alone, gazes upon Jena in the distance, on the far side of some hills and divided from her by a large fence on the near side that stretches entirely across the frame, and sits down in the sun on a grassy hillside. When Eva, with her flowering zombie infection, emerges from the trees and walks up to Vivi, they both look toward the city before walking hand in hand away from it toward the sun, rejecting a return to existing civilization for a life in better alignment with nonhuman nature. After they begin walking away and before they join hands, Vivi pauses, looks back toward the city, and recites part of a prayer to gods of the sun and mountains that her sister had created, positioning the city and what it represents as something from which they require protection. After this moment, the camera, which had been moving with the women, ceases to follow them, marking the dividing line of what Vivi tells us in voice-over—the end of which is punctuated by a musical crescendo—is not an end but a new beginning in which they will live without rage, greed, or fear, but with nature and with what grows in their veins. This

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female-led future points to an older meaning of apocalypse as not an end but “a revelation of a new relation to the world and each other” (Saldarriaga and Manini 2022, 122). The exclusionary character of the Capitalocene’s nature/society binary accords with a “seemingly endless series of human exclusions,” including the subordination of women (Moore 2016a, 139). Germany itself, despite having been led by Chancellor Angela Merkel for thirteen years by the time of Ever After’s release, continues to struggle with gender equality, including in politics and the workplace (Grieshaber 2021). In a broader view, as Eimear McBride (2021) puts it, “There may be differing social models, traditions and conventions but there is no other world” than the one historically “forged by . . . men” (159). This world, which the zombie virus is bringing to an end and which Vivi and Eva choose to walk away from, is one that in addition to fostering patriarchy and capitalism and their disastrous effects on socioecological relations, has and continues to “denigrate women at the most fundamental level of their humanity, their bodies” (159). So when Vivi tells Eva just before they definitively turn their backs on Jena that she doesn’t think that people would like Eva there, Vivi is most obviously talking about Eva’s monstrously posthuman body, but a body that remains female in its monstrosity. In renouncing even the possibility of a cure, of Eva’s body being corrected to conform to what a dying order considers proper, Eva, along with and alongside Vivi—a beast accompanying an angel, something that the gardener had earlier described as the sign that the end has come—embraces not only a new, ecologically attuned form of post-humanity but also the decidedly female cast of that future. CONCLUSION In addition to demonstrating, in different ways and to different degrees, the embeddedness of sex and gender differences within the system of globalized capitalism, the films discussed in this chapter also foreground the body as a locus of such differences. This is perhaps not surprising in zombie cinema: as a nonnormative body most often with minimal or no consciousness, the zombie helps to draw attention to the body as a site of the construction and performance of sex and gender, as well as, in its reproductive capacity, involved in the replication of the reproductive futurist family unit. In Yummy and Me and My Mates vs. the Zombie Apocalypse, critiques of normative sex and gender roles and expectations circulate in tension with deployments of these same roles and expectations: in order to criticize the cosmetic surgery tourism industry, Yummy employs regressive conceptions of women’s agency in changing their bodies; and Me and My Mates vs. the Zombie Apocalypse

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subversively establishes a mutual affection between its most and least hegemonically masculine characters by its end but engages in much reinforcement of hegemonic masculinity along the way, especially in its humor. Women’s pursuit of beauty leads to the destruction of a nascent reproductive family in Yummy, and Roy’s relationship with his biological daughter in Me and My Mates largely (though not entirely) reinforces and excuses his traditional patriarchal masculinity. If concerns with sex, gender, and family forms have filtered into zombie cinema since its beginnings, engagement with these concerns has also long produced ambivalence: Night of the Living Dead, which evinces more than a little skepticism of the patriarchal family, also includes Barbra, whose loss of “independence and subjectivity” once inside the farmhouse “manifests cultural anxieties concerning the liberated status of women during the 1960s” (Bishop 2010, 126). In comparison to Yummy and Me and My Mates, though, Ever After assertively repudiates existing hierarchies of difference in its vision of a post-heteropatriarchal, postcapitalist, and posthuman world. Vivi must put to rest her last remaining tie to her biological family and take up a found, and no longer human, family in its place. And while all three films depict the existing apparatus of sex and gender as difficult if not impossible to escape—with undead bodies continuing to be perceived in terms of their gender, from the female cosmetic surgery patients in Yummy and the zombie bride of Ever After to the conversations about zombies’ sexual attractiveness in Me and My Mates—Ever After also intimates at least the potential for such an escape, if only through the end of humanity as we know it. NOTES 1. Bishop links this commentary to the Gothic literature tradition through the film’s farmhouse setting. 2. Male patient-consumers are underrepresented in imaginings of cosmetic surgery tourists because procedures like hair transplants and dental work are often not counted (Holliday, Jones, and Bell 2019, 85). 3. Just as occurs with the cinematic zombie myth, idea(l)s of beauty arise from a process in which “the global and the local mix together, each reworking the other, producing new hybrids” (Holliday, Jones, and Bell 2019, 77). 4. While multiple languages are spoken in Yummy, including a fictional one among natives of the generically Eastern European country in which Klinika Krawczyk is located, any direct quotations in this chapter are of dialogue spoken in English. 5. Daniel, asked if he is a driver but preferring to call himself a travel agent, represents one of the numerous workers, many nonmedical, who make up what Holliday, Jones, and Bell (2019) term the “cosmetic surgery tourism assemblage” (89).

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6. Daniel’s skeptical response of “Oh please” is undercut somewhat by his own earlier remark. In ironic juxtaposition to these comments on bodies as the work of God and/or nature, when Oksana first meets Alison, she tells her that she has a “beautiful body” and asks if her breasts were the result of Dr. Krawczyk’s work. 7. The reveal of what is popularly called a tramp stamp reading “Destyny” on Oksana’s lower back when she is gunned down by the military performs a sexist and sexualized mockery similar to Alison’s criticism of her mother, as does Alison’s own assertion that her mother would never go outside without makeup. 8. In a similar surgical inversion, the zombie in Damoiseaux’s 2016 Patient Zero— a pre-Yummy short film running approximately three minutes and shot from the point of view of a patient who becomes zombified during a cosmetic procedure involving stem cells—tears out and bursts a breast implant from a sedated patient. 9. Daniel sees the doctor’s experiments differently; in his summation, “It’s all about money.” 10. Until staff members begin evacuating, Alison still plans to go through with her procedure, mentioning how friendly the staff are, which reflects a common, sometimes Orientalizing perception that staff in the destination country are more caring than those in the patient-consumer’s home country. See Holliday, Jones, and Bell (2019) 109, 154–55. 11. After he is infected, Daniel attempts to rape Alison, evoking the sort of harassment that she experiences in the opening scenes of the film when he says, “Let me finally feel those knockers.” 12. If Darryl’s brief imagining of Emma as his zombie slave recalls Madeline, it does so in the absence of the threat to White womanhood about which White Zombie worries. One might view such anxiety as displaced onto Lachlan, whom Emma chooses over Darryl and who will propose to her, as the film’s only non-White character. The film allows audiences the option to view the racism that Lachlan experiences—being expected, as an Asian, to have “ninja” skills—as meta-humor because of actor Trieu’s previous martial arts career, and the absence of any Indigenous characters avoids direct engagement with Australia’s colonial past. 13. We might see in the idea of the cricket team a contrast to the military, another male-dominated hierarchy to which Ryan attributes both the start of the zombie plague and a massacre of uninfected civilians. Joel’s attempt to get the attention of the unit dispatched to the telephone exchange results in his death, and the soldiers prove themselves additionally incompetent with their own quick demise by zombie. One soldier’s exclamation, “Pretty sure I can power through this,” as he is being eaten alive reads as a mockery of masculine bravado. 14. A character in The Dead Can’t Dance, discussed in the following chapter, similarly sexualizes zombified women. In one scene, he notes that one “hoochie” zombie is “kinda hot,” going back to take a second look at her, and in a second scene, set in a small go-go bar, he calls the still-performing dancers “my kind of zombies”; admires the “slow one” who “can’t talk,” wishing he had a dollar to tip her; and momentarily seems tempted by another, who licks her lips at him. We might add this scene to Steve Jones and Shaka McGlotten’s (2014) examples of how zombie strippers in other films render “sexual objectification as both oppressive and absurd” (loc. 221).

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15. Jones (2011) also observes that one may read the zombie, lacking rational control and reproducing excessively, as a female-coded “figure that designates revolt, threatening the patriarchal order” (loc. 784). 16. It should be noted that the zombies in Me and My Mates do display some intelligence—Emma claims they aren’t “brain-dead” but “hive-minded” or “stupid,” and Ryan says they are “not technically undead”; one zombie finds and uses a keycard to enter the telephone exchange building; and the zombies work together while inside to break through an electrified barrier erected by the survivors—but this aspect is never particularly developed. 17. Roy’s nickname for Emma, Puppy, similarly casts her as innocent, with the added benefit that a puppy will not mature into a sexually active woman. 18. For a brief discussion of Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies (Angriff der Lederhosenzombies; 2016), a film from neighboring Austria that features zombies as the result of capitalist greed in the age of climate change, see Fuchs (2020), 41–43. 19. Patricia Saldarriaga and Emy Manini (2022) regard the gardener as representing both a “relapse” to a misogynistic religious tradition in her use of Biblical imagery and eco-fascism from the “Nazi past” through the present (113–14). Both of these points seem in part to rely on the contention that “the food she grows . . . protects her from the zombie virus,” but I argue that she displays one of a spectrum of manifestations of the virus (113). Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (2022) also describes fantasies of punishment by the planet and “post-apocalyptic renewal” more generally as “fascist” due to their tendency toward conservative racial and gender politics (175–76). While Eva and Vivi, as paired representatives of such renewal, are both White, they do not reproduce heteronormative dynamics. 20. The contrast between the domesticated indoor plant and the wild vegetation outside the settlement (and inside the infected) parallels Vivi and Eva’s movement from “society” into “nature.”

Chapter 3

Race and Nation, Take 1 The United States, Canada, and Australia

Just as imperialism and racial hierarchies, like gender oppression, are essential to capitalist societies (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018, 39), so is the history of the zombie myth inseparable from that of colonialism. Sarah Juliet Lauro (2015) points out that, from various geographical and cultural origins, “the raw material of the zombie myth . . . came together in the Caribbean by means of the slave trade and colonial rule” and was “solidified as an anticolonial mythology as well as the product of empire” by means of the crucible of the Haitian Revolution, which began in the late eighteenth century (loc. 733–41). The result was a figure that “metaphorizes both slavery and slave rebellion” (loc. 640) and embodies “mythmaking” as “one mode of resistance” (loc. 684). The Afro-Caribbean zombie’s dual qualities of disempowerment and resistance have carried over into its later, cannibal-style incarnations. Camilla Fojas (2017) views contemporary zombies as continuing to be “racialized figures” and so as “useful tropes in antiracist storylines that show how to survive the recurrence of violent histories of racism and genocide” (62). If the “woes of colonizing projects and peoples” are, as Donna J. Haraway (2016) describes them, “entities that seem permanently undead” (87), then the zombie myth continues to present a natural vehicle for thinking through and (re)imagining such woes. Zombie cinema has a long and well-documented history of engagement with colonialism and Blackness, but some recent zombie films, some by Indigenous filmmakers, have addressed the colonial legacy through a focus on Indigenous people in contemporary settler colonial nation-states. In complicating Richard Dyer’s conception of cannibal-zombie viruses as representing a “terrifying whiteness” in their function of effacing “all difference” through zombies’ transformation of the living to resemble themselves, Chera Kee (2017) contends that because most survivors in cannibal-style 53

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zombie films are White and because their zombies both can be distinguished from the living via physical difference and evoke racist ideas of contamination, zombies, even White ones, continue to be racialized in their deviation “from living whiteness” (loc. 993–1010). However, centering Indigenous people in zombie films changes this dynamic. In both 2010’s The Dead Can’t Dance and 2020’s Blood Quantum, it would be difficult to see zombies as Othered through a divergence from “living whiteness” when only Indigenous people possess immunity from the zombie infection.1 These films, both by Indigenous directors, disrupt the status of Whiteness as “the center against which all else is compared and toward which everything else is encouraged to gravitate” (Kee 2017, loc. 969), destabilizing historical and contemporary settler colonial hierarchies of power and imagining inverted versions of the traumas engendered by settler colonialism. While Indigenous people in Australian film Cargo (2017) do not possess immunity, the contrasting White and Indigenous conceptualizations of and responses to zombies instead anchor a critique of the dominant, settler colonialist culture, particularly in its constructions of family, community, and nature. INDIGENOUS IMMUNITY AND/AS SURVIVANCE: THE DEAD CAN’T DANCE In Lee Schweninger’s (2013) study of Indigenous North American film, he borrows the term “imagic moments” from Anishinaabe author and scholar Gerald Vizenor to describe stories offered “by Indigenous people of themselves,” in contrast to “‘images of Indians,’” which “mainstream culture offers back to mainstream culture” (1). The “self-representation” provided by Indigenous North American films, he stresses, functions as “a form of resistance” and testifies to “Indigenous survival” (3). In place of “survival,” many scholars, including Schweninger at various points in his study and again drawing again on Vizenor’s work, adopt “survivance,” “a narrative resistance to absence, . . . nihility, and victimry” (Vizenor 2009, 1). The Dead Can’t Dance, written and directed by Rodrick Pocowatchit (Comanche, Pawnee, and Shawnee), turns a zombie outbreak to imagic ends, telling an Indigenous story of survivance in a cinematic genre which most often features White or White-dominated stories in its North American output. In the film, which combines horror comedy and family drama, Dax Wildhorse (Rodrick Pocowatchit), his brother, widower Ray Wildhorse (Guy Ray Pocowatchit), and Ray’s son Eddie (T. J. Williams) have paused at a Kansas rest stop because they have become lost on a car trip to take Eddie to college. While they are at the rest stop, everyone except the Indigenous Wildhorses, who turn out to be immune to the zombie virus, suddenly collapse and revive as zombies,

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forcing the family to fight for survival—and creating a space for them to come to terms with traumas and anxieties—until Ray and Eddie ultimately find safety at a government rendezvous point and Indigenous blood proves integral to a vaccine. In contrast to the conception in settler cultural narratives of the apocalypse as a future threat, the apocalypse which the zombies of The Dead Can’t Dance embody represents for many Indigenous persons and communities “a continuing condition” in which “Indigenous people are continuing to rebuild postapocalyptic worlds devastated by ongoing colonial genocide” (Mitchell and Chaudhury 2020, 324). Set in Pocowatchit’s native Kansas, the film uses its zombie outbreak and its Comanche protagonists’ immunity to the zombie infection to reflect this continuing condition while subverting and inverting colonial stereotypes and dynamics. A film made and set in the Midwestern United States might seem like an odd fit for a book focused on zombie cinema outside the United States. However, not only do North American Indigenous identities not align neatly with the boundaries of settler nations, but also “Native American nations . . . recognize themselves as sovereign and are often recognized as such by the settler nation in which they reside,” a recognition which “calls into question the legitimacy of the United States and Canada” (Raheja 2010, loc. 3612n5). Sovereignty, Michelle H. Raheja (2010) explains, is for Indigenous people in the United States a complex term that at once precedes and incorporates European ideas of “nation-to-nation political sovereignty,” “political autonomy and jurisprudence” (loc. 2946) as well as distinguishes North American Indigenous peoples’ difference from groups such as communities of immigrants “in terms of political structure, epistemology, and relationships to specific geographical spaces” (loc. 2939). Bringing this concept to bear on cinema, Raheja proposes “visual sovereignty” as a way of thinking about “self-representation and autonomy” as well as engagement with “the powerful ideologies of mass media” in Indigenous North American films (loc. 2930), dynamics in which The Dead Can’t Dance clearly participates. At the time that The Dead Can’t Dance debuted, “23,330 people self-identified as Comanche wholly or in combination with another tribe” (Rholetter 2014, 553). That the film’s trio of protagonists are, like the Pocowatchits themselves, members of the Comanche Nation is immediately established through Ray’s “Property of Comanche Nation” T-shirt, itself an Indigenous revision of a mainstream, mass market cultural product. Even such identifications, Raheja (2010) reminds us, are rife with complexity, since the tribal acknowledgment process in the United States not only “imposes European American racial, political, and social definitions” on people and communities but also “privileges the invasion-contact period as the static and absolute moment of tribal organization” (loc. 247). The Dead Can’t Dance foregrounds such identificatory complexities in a dream that Eddie has

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while sheltering in a school. He dreams of a White woman teacher (Chelsea Lee) holding a textbook adorned by a bald eagle and an American flag and titled Rewriting History: Revealing the True Story Behind the United States of America. The title of the book (which is not to my knowledge an actual textbook) points to Indigenous resistance and self-representation in relation to historical narratives, as well to cinematic narratives, many of which participate in mythologizing the United States and its history. The teacher’s question, “Who can tell me which state was the last to allow Native Americans the right to vote and in what year?,” underscores the extent to which Indigenous people have not been considered full citizens in this history, belonging and not belonging to the settler nation-state (the answer, Utah in 1956, demonstrates the ongoingness of this partial belonging). Governmental entities in the United States consistently opted for “separate schooling” for Indigenous children “until late in the twentieth century,” and that education was “marked by persistent assumptions about the natural inferiority of these children” (Glenn 2011, 2). The teacher in Eddie’s dream betrays such assumptions by accusing him of not listening and calling him “Stupid, stupid, stupid” when he does not know the answer to her question. In this scene, the score of which includes an ominous droning, she is shot waist-up from a lower angle than Eddie is, as if from Eddie’s perspective and highlighting his perception of her threatening authority. As the scene goes on, that perception is further emphasized as she leans into the camera (i.e., toward Eddie/the viewer), filling the frame as she gets closer and closer. When the teacher tells Eddie, “You just don’t belong in college,” it reflects, then, not only his individual anxieties (the life-and-death situation in which the Wildhorses find themselves eventually prompts Eddie to admit to his concealed reluctance to begin college) but also a broader history of inequitable and discriminatory education. And in this light, Dax’s anecdote about getting sent to the principal’s office for being “difficult” when he said that he did not know how to pronounce an “Indian” word in a history book gestures to the persistence of such inequitable treatment across generations. In line with this gesture, not only Eddie but all three Wildhorses are trapped for a time in the school by a mob of zombies. Joshua Miner’s (2020) claim that the cinematic Indigenous “truant spatializes the presence of settler management in her desire to escape cultural conversion into undeath” (468) has relevance here. Although Eddie is not a truant, he does want and need to escape the space of the school as well as wanting to avoid going to college. Miner writes, “A conceptual paradox emerges as truants become or come into contact with zombies and vampires. These undead figures transgress several inviolable binaries—life and death, civilized and savage, and so on—that allow them to disrupt the logic of settler surveillance” (475). Eddie of course comes into contact with zombies both inside and outside of the school, but

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Dax also jokingly calls Eddie himself a zombie before the outbreak occurs, which prompts Eddie to perform a brief imitation of the moaning undead, linking him in multiple ways with such disruptive transgression. Although both Eddie’s perception that Dax wanted him to attend college “so bad” and his later change of heart about attending complicate the Wildhorses’ relationship to educational spaces, importantly, the film returns to the space of the school as part of a montage after Dax dies from an injury. Scored by local country/folk/lo-fi pop artist Black Golden Bull’s spare, melancholy “Death on a Farm,” the camera pans slowly across a display of students’ drawings of what they want to be when they grow up, as well as the Rewriting History textbook and an upside-down globe (which emblematizes the zombie outbreak’s inversion of existing hierarchies) in the classroom from earlier. As images with which the film marks Dax’s death, these shots associate the school’s halls and classrooms with lost life and lost potential. When the teacher tells Eddie that he doesn’t belong in college, she adds, “You don’t belong anywhere,” the last word of which is slowed and deepened for emphasis, demonstrating the inextricability of issues of inclusion and equity in education from larger questions of Indigenous identity and belonging within a settler nation. During Dax’s conversation with Eddie in the darkened classroom, Dax hypothesizes that in these “politically correct” times, he’d “get sent to the principal’s office just for saying ‘Indian.’” Whatever the complexities flattened into the phrase “politically correct,” Dax’s feeling that he lacks control over his own self-identification is both clear and grounded in a history of sociopolitical disempowerment. Seated across a stack of books from Eddie, he continues, “Native person. Indigenous people. Nothing is quite right,” indicating his dissatisfaction with available identificatory terminology beyond his more specific self-identifications as Comanche/Nʉmʉnʉʉ [the People],2 terminology that bears the influence of settler culture ontology. At the same time, Dax’s lament that none of these terms is “quite right” resonates with Eddie’s anxiety over not “belong[ing] anywhere,” and elsewhere in the film, Eddie reveals feelings of disconnection from his heritage. Worried about how ill he feels, he says to Dax, “I never got to dance at powwows like you did.” More significantly, especially given the historical emphasis on proportions of Indigenous “blood,” Eddie wonders if he feels unwell because his “mom wasn’t Indian.” Through Eddie’s fear that his blood isn’t pure enough to confer immunity from the zombie infection, the film communicates larger anxieties about where and how an Indigenous person like Eddie belongs in a settler nation. Dax attempts to strengthen Eddie’s connections to his heritage by practicing speaking Comanche with him, and it is noteworthy that when Dax and Eddie agree during their conversation in the classroom to stop “mumbling” and always “speak clearly” to one another, the exchange is bilingual.

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This exchange also functions as a metatextual reference to the film itself as a vehicle through which Indigenous voices can speak loudly and clearly. Such cinematic self-representation, Kerstin Knopf (2008) argues, provides an opportunity for “creatively returning the gaze of power” and for “turning Western filmmaking techniques into an instrument for the dissemination of anticolonialist media” (358). One strand of anti-colonialism in The Dead Can’t Dance is its inversion of narratives of Indigenous trauma, both historical and contemporary. Displacing narratives of Indigenous people as vanishing from the settler nation, in part due to disease,3 or, when they haven’t disappeared, as racked by poor health and addiction, the film reveals not only that Indigenous people are immune to a zombie infection that a radio announcer describes as having “wiped out most of the central United States” but also that, as Eddie, who suffers from hypoglycemia, hears on a later broadcast, “The same characteristics that caused Native people to be susceptible to diabetes, alcoholism, and other factors is the same thing that is saving them now.” Schweninger (2013) observes that Pocowatchit, as he does in his two preceding films, uses “death to emphasize the survival of Indigenous peoples” (221). After almost everyone around the Wildhorses has suddenly and simultaneously collapsed and died but before they have revived as zombies, Ray immediately assigns culpability to the settler nation-state: “Damn government. They know what’s going on.” While Ray may, based on historical precedent, have good reason for this assumption, the zombie plague turns out to be a mutated strain of tuberculosis.4 Indigenous immunity to the zombie virus presents another ironic inversion, this time of the historical weaponization of smallpox, intended or enacted, against Indigenous American populations (see Jones 2004, chap. 4). When Ray learns of this immunity, he says, “Of course, you know, we were the first ones here and the last ones to leave. That’s fucking poetic justice,” a sentiment that substitutes permanence for vanishing and imagines a return to a post-settler era that, with Indigenous people as the only ones remaining on the land, resembles the precontact era. In an interview with Pocowatchit, this poetic justice is linked to the director’s view that Americans are “‘all still trying to evolve, and I think of all the races that were affected by White settlers, Native America never really bounced back’” (Silversmith 2013). Near the film’s conclusion, when Ray and Eddie have reached the government rendezvous point, another Indigenous man, who is, significantly, helping Ray to support Eddie as they walk, says to them, “We made it, didn’t we, brother? All this time, the one thing that was killing us ended up saving our lives. History, ain’t it a bitch?” Although “one thing” may be biologically reductive, the man’s words highlight the counternarrative established by the Indigenous characters’ immunity, one in which history being a “bitch” refers both to the traumatic past and the ironic reversals occasioned by the

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zombie outbreak. This context also allows one to read the soundtrack song which plays during this scene—“Search for Life,” by Wichita hard rock band BarrelBright—as commenting on the United States (and its “bitch” of a history), particularly in its refrain: “Search for life here / Call out when you find it—/ ’Cause I haven’t seen much intelligence here” (ReverbNation n.d.). For most of the film, the only life (and so also the only intelligence) has belonged to Indigenous people, and it is only at the rendezvous point that non-zombified White people reenter the narrative, under altered hierarchies of power. The masked White soldiers at the rendezvous point, on whose guns the camera repeatedly focuses, imply that such alterations may be temporary,5 but nevertheless, the scene privileges the Indigenous characters’ status as survivors, “literally and figuratively” (Schweninger 2013, 222), a status underscored by a sign reading SURVIVORS that Ray and Eddie pass on their way into the rendezvous point, as well as by the ways in which Dax’s “legacy” will “live on” in them despite his death (221).6 In Pocowatchit’s formulation, “‘The Natives are the heroes, they’re the ones that are everlasting’” (Silversmith 2013). Indigenous people are the heroes in the film not only because of their immunity and survival but also because their bodies, which have historically marked them as Other (Ray notes of a dead White store employee, “On a normal day, if three skins were walkin’ in here and she was by herself, she’d already have the police on standby”) make possible a vaccine for the zombie infection. According to Pocowatchit, in the film, “‘There is something in Native blood that preserves civilization, and that is the ultimate heroism’” (Silversmith 2013). In place of the historical flow of sickness from settlers to Indigenous people is a curative flow of bodily material from Indigenous people to settlers. During a coda that takes place “Way later (Kwasiku),” the radio announces, “Vaccines are being developed thanks to the help of Native American leaders and tribal doctors with the donation of Native people’s blood.” As the United States moves past the zombie crisis, then, its existence continues to require the blood of Indigenous people, as it has throughout its violent past, but now the Indigenous people themselves must volunteer that blood. At least temporarily, this dependence of the settler population for its own survival on the Indigenous population represents a significant alteration in the racialized power dynamics within the United States. Further, if “racism,” as Benedict Anderson (2016) writes, “dreams of eternal contaminations” (153), then the widespread injection of a vaccine developed using Indigenous blood provides a positive mirror image of fears of the contamination of Whiteness observable both in many Hollywood depictions of Indigenous people7 and in examples of zombie cinema stretching back to White Zombie.

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Eddie too, a representative of the future both in his survivance and his youth, presents a similar image with his own “blood” blending that of Indigenous and non-Indigenous parents. The character of Chris Clooney (Randall Aviks), meanwhile, offers a more satirical instance of such blending. White in appearance, Clooney claims to be one-eighth Indigenous, evoking the numerous Americans who have “claimed Indian ancestry even against rather conclusive evidence to the contrary,” perhaps in part in order to establish a connection to a mythic preindustrial American past (Baird 2003, 156). Unlike in many cases, there must be some truth to Clooney’s claims since he does not succumb to the zombie virus, but Ray nonetheless perceives him as a “crazy White guy.” And while Clooney allies with the Wildhorses, he eventually betrays Ray, knocking him out, and steals Dax’s car because Clooney wants to find his wife and child rather than return to the school and to Dax and Eddie. In this decision, Clooney privileges the nuclear family— his own blood—over larger communitarian bonds and recalls the settler who steals property from and breaks agreements with Indigenous people. This resemblance associates Clooney with the zombies, a non-Indigenous crowd who more than once lay claim to spaces through a threat of violence that forces the Wildhorses to move to new spaces in a parallel to historical forced relocations of the Comanche and other Indigenous peoples. When they first meet Clooney, he believes that the sudden, widespread deaths were caused by aliens whose language he cannot speak, an image of invasion that also hints at and links him with Indigenous displacement. Dax’s refusal, then, to steal a car because it is “not ours” even though, as Ray points out, “everyone’s dead” critiques this displacement in its contrast to Clooney’s decision to steal a car from the few living people in the area, a theft that does not even attempt to justify itself by relying on mass death to signal lack of ownership. Indigenous films such as The Dead Can’t Dance can also “talk back to Hollywood” by countering long-circulated stereotypes (Schweninger 2013, 12). One such cinematic stereotype is the Indigenous sidekick (Cobb 2003, 209; see also Raheja 2010, loc. 114). The Dead Can’t Dance shifts the sidekick role to Clooney, especially in his relationship to Ray, but it also includes a second comical sidekick in a zombie whom Ray refers to as “Stupid.” Stupid, a White man in an “I’m with Stupid” T-shirt, seeks help on multiple occasions from the protagonists because he wants to hear music from first a portable radio and then a flip phone, returns the favor by fighting off some zombies who are attacking Dax, and even, it is implied during the coda, learns how to call Eddie’s cell phone (Rays asks if it is their “old friend again” and says “Stupid zombie”). Stupid’s rudimentary intelligence may arise, according to the film’s scientifically dubious explanation, from him being too congested to breathe in enough bad air to be fully zombified, but his role as a bumbling but noble secondary character comes straight from numerous mainstream

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film depictions of Indigenous characters,8 which themselves go hand in hand with centuries of “colonial infantilization” (Owens 2001, 19). His vocalizations contain no actual words, much as the speech of Indigenous characters in cinema has often ranged from “grammatically incorrect sentences and pidgin phrases” to “toddler-like . . . speech patterns” and “‘baby talk’” (Raheja 2010, loc. 1410; see also Knopf 2008, 9). And he is childlike too in his wonder at and inability to operate the radio and flip phone, displacing onto Whiteness the stereotype of the ignorant savage who marvels without understanding over settler technology, seeming to justify in that lack of familiarity a need for paternalistic guidance. Other stereotypes are challenged by the Wildhorses themselves. Pocowatchit has said that the film “shows Native people are special because of their culture, but they’re also just like any other person who runs out of gas” (Silversmith 2013). In this light, the White radio announcer’s reports of “heroic victories from these modern-day warriors” should be received ironically, since it recognizes the heroism of the Indigenous characters but through the lens of what Knopf (2008) identifies as the dominant stereotype of the Indigenous Plains warrior (256–57). The announcer continues, “Some have called the incident an ancient curse. Scientists are now calling it a deadly strain of tuberculosis.” The “ancient curse” gestures to settler tropes of Indigenous mysticism, the supernatural dangers of so-called Indian burial grounds, and Indigenous cultures as always already (in the) past, while the juxtaposition of the scientific explanation for the zombies simultaneously undermines such stereotypes (recall that “tribal doctors” are involved in making vaccines) and nods to the same sort of complexities and contradictions of contemporary Indigenous identity as Eddie’s classroom dream addresses. The Dead Can’t Dance more directly subverts the tropes of Indigenous persons as mystical and as warriors in a scene in which Dax uses a cassette tape of music, which Eddie has given to Dax in the hope that he can use it practice powwow dancing again in the future, to lead away the crowd of zombies in the school hallway. Shortly after Eddie says, “The music’s protecting us,” the cassette player destroys the tape, comedically undercutting any attribution of mystical power to the Indigenous music. Dax’s reaction enacts a similar comic reversal, first invoking before almost immediately abandoning the warrior stereotype: “We’re Comanche. Nʉmʉnʉʉ. Descendants of Wild Horse. We stand strong and proud. And . . . oh, let’s just get out of here.” Ray calling Dax “a disgrace to your tribe” in the opening scene of the film because Comanches are “not supposed to get lost” performs a similar subversive self-representational function, as does Dax’s reaction as he gazes out over the wide-open landscape: showing little evidence of a deep spiritual love of nature,9 and against the expectation created by a cut to a slow pan from his point of view, he deadpans to himself, “Pretty.”

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In addition to inverting and subverting Indigenous stereotypes, which cinema has played a large role in propagating and maintaining, The Dead Can’t Dance also asserts Indigenous artists’ place in a dominantly non-Indigenous North American cinematic history through visual and dialogue references to film tradition. Citing Shaun of the Dead (2004) as an inspiration, Pocowatchit has acknowledged paying homage to movies that he “‘grew up watching, like drive-in movies’” (Silversmith 2013) as an important element of The Dead Can’t Dance. The radio announcer is shot only in extreme close-up showing his mouth and his microphone, echoing Walter Hill’s The Warriors (1979) and Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), and Pocowatchit’s freeze-frame character introductions recall work by directors such as Guy Ritchie and Ritchie influence Sam Peckinpah, while Ray’s “Rezervation Dogz” T-shirt more specifically alludes to Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992). The shirt, in putting an Indigenous spin on a well-known Hollywood film, can be seen as emblematic of how The Dead Can’t Dance, like other Indigenous films, uses “subversive quotations, mimicry, allusions, jokes, and other references” to create “an answering filmic discourse” that talks back to the established settler cinematic tradition (Knopf 2008, 355). In a further example of such answering discourse, Ray alludes to Planet of the Apes (1968) when he says, “Take your paws off him, you damn dirty zombie.” His reference to a film in which a group (the apes) thought by the dominant group (the humans) to be primitive and subhuman has risen to dominance resonates with the Indigenous characters’ hierarchical repositioning in relation to the White zombies. Finally, the Wildhorses, unlike characters in many, perhaps most, zombie films, are literate in the genre (Ray admonishes Dax for having stabbed a zombie in the neck rather than the brain: “Have you seen a zombie movie before?”), and The Dead Can’t Dance links itself to important works in the genre in its references to zombies eating brains (a trope popularized by 1985’s The Return of the Living Dead), its zombies’ pale white Night of the Living Dead–style aesthetic, and Ray’s shooting a zombie in a camouflage jacket who brings to mind Romero’s Day of the Dead (1985), while Stupid more particularly recalls the zombie Bub in Day, who tries to use a telephone and is pacified by music played on headphones. By means of these linkages, The Dead Can’t Dance simultaneously situates itself as part of and as an imagic response to dominant film traditions both within and beyond zombie cinema.

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INDIGENOUS IMMUNITY AND/AS SURVIVANCE (CONT’D): BLOOD QUANTUM Blood Quantum, written and directed by Mi’kmaw10 filmmaker Jeff Barnaby, has fewer overt references to Hollywood cinema than The Dead Can’t Dance—Gisigu’s (Stonehorse Lone Goeman) application of a line from Pulp Fiction (1994), ”Zed’s dead,” to a zombie providing a notable exception—but it uses a similar conceit of Indigenous immunity11 to a zombie infection in order to craft its decolonizing self-representation of survivance. As Michael Truscello and Renae Watchman (2022) write, the film “speaks of colonial horror from within an existing occupation and offers a vision of a paracolonial or Indigenous futurity” (2).12 Blood Quantum takes place in 1981 in Quebec, a location in which issues of sovereignty in relation to the Canadian settler state13 are additionally troubled by a drive for separatism that dates back to the French colony’s seizure by the British in 1752 and persists, with variations in intensity, today (Newbold 2019, 764, 771). More specifically, Blood Quantum is set on the fictional Red Crow reservation, which also served as the setting for Barnaby’s earlier film Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013), which deals with the intergenerational trauma of residential schools; and that setting adds further extradiegetic context to Blood Quantum’s central “struggle over land” (Dyer 2020, 365).14 The reservation, which is connected by a bridge to the area where the “townies” live and becomes, in one of the film’s inversions, a desirable destination in the zombie apocalypse, was “played,” so to speak, “by Listuguj, a Mi’gmaq community in Quebec where Barnaby grew up” (Knight 2020). Quebec police raided this community in 1981 over fishing rights, resulting in a standoff and a 1984 documentary, Incident at Restigouche, that Barnaby calls “empowering” and “a political awakening,” adding that Blood Quantum featuring the bridge seen in Incident at Restigouche as the point where the Indigenous residents control access to the reservation by both zombies and survivors “was a very blatant we’re-still-here statement” (Knight 2020). Blood Quantum first establishes both the arrival of a zombie infection at the Red Crow reservation and Indigenous immunity to it when some characters are bitten but not zombified. It then jumps ahead six months to when, thanks to this immunity, the reservation has become a walled-off safe haven. After an infected woman who had asked for shelter attacks a young man, Lysol (Kiowa Gordon), who had opposed admitting White survivors, he releases her inside the walls, the reservation falls, and the surviving characters, including Charlie (Olivia Scriven), a White woman pregnant by Lysol’s half-brother Joseph (Forrest Goodluck), attempt to flee by boat. The film opens with another statement, sequentially displayed in two blocks of text,

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that plays on ideas of settlement and survival. The first reads, “Take heed to thyself, that thou make no treaty with the inhabitants of the land whither thou goest lest it be cause of ruin among you. Break down their altars, smash their sacred stone and burn down their groves.” The second continues, “Take heed to thyself, that thou make no treaty with the inhabitants of the land for when they whore themselves to their demons and sacrifice to them, you will eat their sacrifices. And when you choose some of their daughters for your sons they will lead your sons to do the same.” These lines are a translation of Exodus 34:12–17, instructions from the Judeo-Christian God to the Israelites, but the film’s identification of them at the end of the sequence as an “Ancient Settler Proverb” radically alters how we read them. Identifying the “thou” of the Israelites with settler colonialists and “the inhabitants of the land” to which they are going with Indigenous North Americans reframes the warnings against treaties (and the choice of the word treaty over “covenants,” which appears instead in many versions of the passage), exhortations to the eradication of Others’ spiritual beliefs and to environmental destruction, and hostility to sexual or marital mixing with Others as having deep roots in the Western tradition. This reframing proposes the fundamentality to Western culture of what we would recognize as a colonial mindset, as well as satirizing the persistent stereotypes of ancient Indigenous wisdom. Several of the issues alluded to in this textual opening appear again in the film’s narrative. For instance, unlike in The Dead Can’t Dance, Indigenous immunity to the zombie contagion remains unexplained, but an Indigenous man named Moon (Gary Farmer) suggests world ecological exploitation as the cause of the apocalypse. He describes the planet as “an animal. Living and breathing,” something that he says, switching to Mi’gmaq, that “White men don’t understand.” Returning to English, he denies that God is the cause of the dead returning to life and attributes the zombie apocalypse instead to the Earth being “so sick of our shit. This old, tired, angry animal turned these stupid fucking white men into something she can use again—fertilizer.” Moon’s avowal that the planet is “sick of our shit” echoes Peter’s (Ken Foree) pronouncement in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth,” presented as a proverb inherited from his Trinidadian vodou-priest grandfather (in another intertextual echo, Farmer, who plays Moon, has uttered the phrase “stupid fucking white man” in Jim Jarmusch’s postmodern Western Dead Man [1995] and Ghost Dog [1999]). Moon’s theory, accompanied at this point by animation of a now-monstrous female figure from earlier in the film who represents the land, closely recalls the explanation for the eco-zombie virus in Ever After (see chapter 2), but here the (presumably Capitalocene) “shit” that drives the Earth to vengeance is explicitly ascribed to White society. Moon concludes by asking, “Who says we’re immune? [switching to Mi’gmaq] Maybe the earth just forgot about

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us.” Here, he refigures the trope of the vanishing Indian as an advantage: to be forgotten by a wronged and vengeful planet allows for continued survival. In keeping with Moon’s hypothesis of an angry planet, the zombie infection initially makes itself known through its effects on nonhuman animals. Gisigu is the first to notice something amiss when the salmon that he is cleaning resume moving despite having been gutted. His later comment to his son, Traylor (Michael Greyeyes), chief of the Red Crow police, that he has never seen such a thing in sixty years of fishing the rivers conjures an image of ecological degradation, a process that can be linked to the capitalist systems of the settler state. As Gisigu stares at the reanimated salmon, the film cuts to a long shot that centers him in the bottom of the frame, a small figure against a backdrop of water, mountains, and sky: the “groves,” perhaps, of “the inhabitants of the land.” Following this visual positioning of the individual within a larger ecology, the title of the film fades in as a transition into an animated sequence of a ravaged landscape, littered with skulls and dead trees and hazy from pillars of smoke. The camera pans down to reveal a pregnant Indigenous woman on a hillock, which Truscello and Watchman (2022) identify with “Turtle Island, Mother Earth” based on its shape (14),15 and as green tendrils rise toward her and her belly becomes transparent, the camera continues downward, showing a second occupied womb in the earth under the hillock. This second womb suggests that the woman represents the Earth herself, though whether she is giving birth to the plague that will avenge the ruined landscape or, anticipating the film’s ending, to humankind’s future within this apocalyptic environment remains ambiguous. As the camera continues along the ground, the shot transitions back into non-animated “reality” and a series of high, swooping, tilting shots of the setting—including the bridge leading to the reservation—the movements of which symbolize the changes in perspective central to the film. Displaced White residents seeking refuge at the secure reservation represents an inversion of historical Indigenous trauma, “reversing course” and “imagining resistance” (Cornum and Moynagh 2020, n.p.) to the “zombie imperialism”—defined by Jodi A. Byrd (2011) as “the current manifestation of a liberal democratic colonialism that locates biopower at the intersection of life, death, law, and lawlessness” (269)—of the settler nation. Prior to the zombie apocalypse, the bridge into the reservation serves as the site of a humorous version of the deadly serious postapocalyptic conflict over access to that land, with Traylor’s son Joseph having been arrested by the Quebec police (distinct from the Red Crow police) for defecating from a height onto a townie car that was crossing the bridge. Demonstrating that the state does not limit its use of violence and oppression only to Indigenous people, a Quebec police officer excessively beats an infected man (who has bitten both him and Joseph) and refers to him as a hillbilly. Traylor’s later assertion that the

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townies’ ambulance service never picks up the phone similarly points to malfeasance by representatives of the settler state, here more specifically focused on its discrimination against Indigenous people. The radical shift in power six months into the apocalypse is evident in Alan, known as Lysol, Joseph’s brother by a different mother, making a sort of art project out of a mutilated White zombie soldier, incorporating his body into a spray painted slogan that stretches across the gates of the reservation’s central settlement and plays on Indigenous “vanishing” and White violence: “IF THEY’RE RED THEY ARE DEAD / IF THEY’RE WHITE THEY BITE.”16 The Red Crow residents have built a blockade on the bridge and have been exterminating the local zombie population, with Gisigu even regarding zombie hunting as recreation, and they have returned to hunting and trapping for food, having determined that moose and deer are uninfected. As Barnaby puts it, “‘The Mi’gmaq have been dealing with post-apocalyptic conditions for so long, they’re accustomed to living in these ends [sic] times’” (Knight 2020).17 As a result of Indigenous success in creating a survival space, the reservation becomes a desirable space rather than one to be disdained or ignored, as by preapocalyptic emergency services. At the same time, the fact that “white survivors covet reserve space” also “dramatizes” how the “settler state primarily targets Indigenous land over Indigenous labor” and that state’s exploitative “relationship to the land and others” (Dyer 2020, 368). In these conflicts, Dyer (2020) reads Blood Quantum as merging the Afro-Caribbean zombie myth’s trope of “eternal Black slavery” with that of “eternal Indigenous dispossession” in order to show Whites as “eternally (self-)enslaved to boundless systems of accumulation” and to highlight the limits of Western epistemology (372). Disagreements over taking in refugees eventually result in the enclosed settlement on the reservation falling to the zombies, and the conflicts over land are based in and inextricable from conflicts over racialized identity. The title Blood Quantum itself of course refers to a “Western concept” of measuring percentages of Indigenous ancestry that serves “as a legal marker of belonging” (Raheja 2010, loc. 1724) and, like the modern zombie myth, has its roots in Black slavery (Campbell 2013, 300). Such “blood logics” work to dismantle Indigenous sovereignty “as indigenous identity becomes a racial identity and citizens of colonized indigenous nations become internal ethnic minorities within the colonizing nation-state” (Byrd 2011, xxiii–xxiv). This system of quantification is also “at odds with pre-contact Indigenous ways of being and relationality” (Truscello and Watchman 2022, 12). Traylor’s commonly being addressed as “Chief” points, in its evocation of both Indigenous and settler social structures, to some of the complexities of Indigenous belonging, as does Lysol’s doubtlessly traumatic experience in the foster care system after his mother died and Traylor did not take him in. Regarded as a criminal by the townie police, Lysol also feels that he has “no family” on the

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reservation. At the start of the zombie outbreak, an Indigenous man named Shooker (William Belleau) claims that no one would let him and his pregnant partner inside to use a phone because she is White, suggesting a substantial resistance to mixing with the townies even before the apocalypse. Six months later, some people in Red Crow are unhappy about the number of White survivors seeking help, and a remark that they and zombies are attempting to cross the bridge in comparable numbers erases any distinction between the two groups, figuring them both as dangerous would-be invaders. Lysol’s angrily demanding of Traylor whether he wants to “open up the floodgates and let them stay” displays the same perception, and Lysol’s comment that some of the people seeking refuge aren’t local and haven’t “seen a brown person since their grandparents owned one” emphasizes the history of enslavement and imperialism underlying the zombie figure with which the White survivors are now identified. Transposing who occupies the position of zombie in a colonized nation—here, an Indigenous nation within a settler colonial nation—allows, Fred Botting (2013) observes, for an “overturning of power relations” (188). Traylor himself—who by now bears numerous scars from zombie bites, a microcosmic symbol of Indigenous injuries—responds to one man’s assertions that they are “supposed to be helping people” by saying that they are “supposed to be surviving.” Lysol expresses an anxiety that the White survivors will attempt to reclaim their dominant position, wondering how long until they, with their greater numbers, “get tired of being herded by a bunch of Indians.” This anxiety prompts him to accuse one small group with a bitten girl of “plant[ing] this infected bitch right on our doorstep”; and that the burning of the girl’s bloody blanket alludes to epidemic disease historically suffered by Indigenous North Americans seems confirmed by Barnaby’s comment that he chose a “zombie plague” because “to do smallpox was too close to the bone” (Knight 2020). Because of these anxieties, Lysol and a group of followers ultimately “replicate the brutality of the colonial system” and “end up polluting” the land (Dyer 2020, 368). Lysol releases a zombie within the gated reservation settlement, and then his group plans to use the survivors gathering in a church as bait, burning the living and undead alike once the zombies arrive. Moon, framed at points in the darkened church by torch flames, describes this plan as “a chance to get rid of all these fucking dependents once and for all.” His use of dependents to describe the White survivors turns back on them the Indigenous stereotypes of impoverishment and laziness (see Knopf 2008, 12), just as his exclamation “And that’s fucking all of you. After all this, that’s all you fuckers,” turns back on them the colonial desire for genocide. Lysol conceives of his actions in terms of emancipation or revolution, maintaining to Joseph and Gisigu that he has “set you all free.” Given Lysol’s embrace of extermination rather than reciprocity, it seems significant that he sometimes wears a skull-like white mask.

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The conflicts over land and identity are also bound up in sexuality. Characters violate with regularity the Ancient Settler Proverb’s prohibition against sexual mixing between groups. It is mentioned that a couple of Indigenous men have been telling young women that performing oral sex on them will grant immunity, another reversal, perhaps, of past patterns of exploitation; and the zombie whom Lysol releases into the settlement is a woman named Lilith (Natalie Liconti) with whom he has previously had sexual encounters and who has concealed her bite wound in order to be admitted to the settlement. Lilith turns and attacks Lysol while they are alone on a mattress together, and it is this attack that prompts his decision that it must be “us or them,” a racialized distinction with which Joseph disagrees, countering, “There’s only us.” If we read Lilith’s name as referring to Adam’s first wife, then it not only links her to the religion of the Ancient Settler Proverb but also underscores the contrast between her and Joseph’s White girlfriend, Charlie: like her namesake, Lilith will not be the mother of humanity’s future (although the reveal of her bent over the wounded Lysol just as Moon finishes saying in voice-over that the angry Earth will turn White men into fertilizer links her with that angry Earth and Lysol, again, with those White men). Shooker’s “woman” provides a similar contrast, giving birth to and eating a deformed infant. The future of humankind in Blood Quantum rests on heterosexual reproduction: oral sex does not result in reproduction, Lilith reproduces only zombies, and Shooker’s partner cannibalizes her offspring, but Joseph and Charlie together produce a child who “can’t get sick.” Joseph and Charlie’s child can be viewed as another version of the sharing of Indigenous blood with White survivors that takes place in The Dead Can’t Dance, ironically only made possible by the apocalypse itself, which erupts as the couple wait for an abortion. In another similarity to The Dead Can’t Dance, representatives of the older generations die but will “live on” in the younger generations. Traylor, who dies in helping to ensure that his grandchild has a chance to be born, requests, in Mi’gmaq, that Joseph and his mother, Joss (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers), tell that “grandchild big stories about” him. Gisigu appears to perish fighting a horde of zombies by himself rather than boarding a boat with Joss, Charlie, and Joseph because, he says, “I’m not leaving this land again.” His defense of the land might “become the stuff of legend” in the community, a “common trait in Barnaby’s work” (Stewart 2021, 172). Indeed, an animated scene of Gisigu standing up over a pile of dispatched zombies, raising a severed head, and announcing, in Mi’gmaq, “None of you are getting past this line” may mean that he was not killed after all, or the shift to animation may signal a shift into the mode of legend. That an elder makes a similar gesture at the beginning of Incident at Restigouche (see Saldarriaga and Manini 2022, 49) itself represents a kind of mythologizing through Gisigu. Gisigu’s heroism, like Traylor’s, also helps to ensure the

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birth of the next generation, and while the trope of the child of heterosexual parents as a guarantee of futurity may align with patriarchal values, the film does position that future outside of the nuclear family.18 Charlie, bitten because of Lysol, is euthanized at her request by Joseph after she holds her child, and the final shot of the film shows Joss holding the baby in the small boat’s stern beside a lighted lantern hung there and against a background of water, a hopeful echo, complete with beacon, of the scene in which Gisigu stares at the reanimating salmon. Dyer (2020) notes that Charlie handing her baby over to Indigenous characters “upturns Canada’s genocidal education and childcare policies” (370), and it also specifically contrasts Lysol’s having been committed to foster care. This ending situates Blood Quantum as part of a wave of Indigenous films that “weave traditional knowledge and historical traumas together” and “the circular narrative movement” of which “pushes them to open onto new territories and possibilities where past, present, and future collide to offer guidance, hope, and transformative change and reconciliation between Indigenous relations” (Stewart 2021, 166). At the center of such a collision, the baby’s possession of immunity positions Indigenous “blood” within a hybrid identity, but outside of any legal framework policing degrees of Indigeneity, as one way forward. THE FUTURE LOOKS ROSIE: HYBRIDIZING ABORIGINAL AND SETTLER CULTURES IN CARGO Cargo, directed by Ben Howling and Yolanda Ramke, similarly to Blood Quantum, suggests hybridity, albeit cultural rather than genetic, as a desirable alternative to dominant settler culture.19 Stacey Abbott (2016) argues that undead creatures such as zombies are “inherently hybrid” in their mingling of “life and death in one body” (loc. 2555), and in Cargo, this undead hybridity finds its mirror form in a beneficial hybridizing of settler and Aboriginal cultures, grounding itself in the same “particular, localised cultural and historical context” that typically accounts for the paucity of zombies in Australian cinema (Allen 2015, 70). Contemporary Australia, according to Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs (1998), exists in a state of continual “(re)negotiation” (loc. 520) between Aboriginal sacredness and modernity and a “ceaseless movement back and forth between” reconciliation and division, resulting in a climate of national uncanniness (loc. 558). This uncanniness means not only that “one’s place is always already another’s place and the issue of possession is never complete” but also that the “conventional colonial distinctions between self and other, here and there, mine and yours, are . . . by no means totally determinable” (loc. 2593). These unsettled boundaries find a reflection in the zombie, stripped of culture and ontologically disruptive, which

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functions in Cargo as a negative image of the hybridizing of Western and Indigenous cultures that, like the hybridization via blood in The Dead Can’t Dance and Blood Quantum, potentially ensures human futurity. In Cargo, Andy (Martin Freeman) is bitten by his zombified wife, Kay (Susie Porter), after a car crash, leaving him approximately forty-eight hours, the time that the film’s virus takes to fully transform an infected person, to find a safe haven for his baby daughter, Rosie (Nova and Finlay Sjoberg and Marlee Jane and Lily Anne McPherson-Dobbins); this ultimately turns out to be the Indigenous community to which Thoomi (Simone Landers), an Indigenous girl who becomes his traveling companion, belongs. Like his own White family, the other White characters whom Andy encounters during this period live isolated from larger communities. A nuclear family camping along a riverbank, in an enactment of one of the outcomes that Andy is trying to avoid, perishes by murder-suicide, and a fatally ill former teacher lives alone in a deserted school building. Most significantly, Andy meets Vic (Anthony Hayes), who occupies a natural gas plant with a woman named Lorraine (Caren Pistorius), a sort of hostage-wife. Vic’s compound can be read as analogous to the houseboat on which Andy, Kay, and Rosie are living when the film begins, as can Andy’s breaking off a door handle to prevent Kay from leaving their vehicle to Vic’s de facto imprisonment of Lorraine. These similarities imply that the dominant culture as a whole encourages damaging behaviors, but beyond this implication, Vic also clearly represents a figure of settler colonialism: he hoards goods in the hope of later profit, loots zombies, and cages Aboriginal people. Aalya Ahmad (2011) remarks that zombie narratives commonly incorporate a “critique of disaster capitalism” (loc. 2886), an apt term for Vic’s “plans for when things get back to normal,” as Lorraine describes them. Vic himself explains, beginning over a close-up of a caged and silently crying Thoomi, “When this country gets back on track, people are gonna want things. Whoever controls the market, power, gas . . . all the shiny shit . . . will be sitting pretty.” Australia getting “back on track” would involve not only the return of capitalism but also the restoration of the settler government and culture to dominance. It is in anticipation of these restorations that Vic has laid claim to the natural gas plant in which he and Lorraine previously worked, including, he says, the “wells . . . along with what’s in ’em.” Such exploitation of the land is inseparable from Australia’s colonial past, as unfair compensation (Desai et al. 2008, 53) for “resource extraction on Aboriginal-owned land” (Musharbash 2014, 50) has resulted in continued poverty for Indigenous communities and tremendous wealth for the settler nation. The film hints at fracking as the cause of its zombie apocalypse, and “diggers,” Vic’s term for the zombies, refers literally to their habit of burying

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their heads in the ground,20 but it also evokes the resource extraction in which Vic has participated in the past and hopes to revive in the future. As what he calls a “side earner,” Vic also loots the corpses of the zombies whom he shoots in the vicinity of cages to which they are attracted by the Aboriginal people whom Vic locks inside, a racialized parallel to his confinement of Lorraine that connects the assertions of ownership over human beings common to both colonialism and heteronormativity. Vic makes one such assertion explicit when Andy escapes from a cage with Thoomi. “What you took didn’t belong to you!,” Vic exclaims; and, more straightforwardly, as he fails to locate the escapees in the dark, expansive landscape beyond the light from his truck, “You give me back that fucking black bitch. She’s mine!” Vic’s settler colonialist, capitalist, heteronormative mindset reduces land, people, and even zombies merely to potential sources of profit. Contrastingly, the film’s Aboriginal community believes that the zombies possess souls, and it communally approaches the undead not as sources of profit but as an infection of the land. This differing relationship to the undead arises from a relationship to death in Aboriginal Australian communities that differs from that in settler culture not only in significantly higher mortality rates and lower life expectancies among Indigenous Australians (Burbank et al. 2008, loc. 347) but also in how their traditional cosmologies conceptualize death. To the Warlpiri people, for instance, there exist no “natural causes of death” (Musharbash 2008, loc. 937), so adult deaths (though not the deaths of the very elderly and of young children [loc. 884]) are seen as requiring vengeance. The mourning rituals for these deaths are termed “sorry business”21 and take precedence over any other event or obligation. In Indigenous Australia’s “kin-based societies” (Burbank et al. 2008, loc. 413) participation in sorry business is frequent and may require traveling long distances (loc. 443). All of this puts sorry business into conflict with capitalism, as a result of which the Australian government has pressured Indigenous Australians to change or abandon their traditional mourning practices (Redmond 2008, loc. 2227). Funerals may involve most of a settlement or even multiple settlements, and in the case of the Warlpiri as an example, the rituals, which take place over the course of multiple gatherings, include communal wailing, self-inflicted wounds, ritual performance of vengeance for the death, redistribution of the decedent’s possessions, and removal of traces of the deceased by sweeping the settlement and ceasing to use the decedent’s name (Musharbash 2008, loc. 877–984). The Warlpiri also, significantly for Cargo, apply white ochre to the face, arms, and breasts to enter mourning (loc. 877) and to express “deep social . . . connection” (McCoy 2008, loc. 1771). In Cargo, Aboriginal characters (they are never identified as a specific Indigenous people) employ such paints for protection against zombies’ ability to smell them. Based on the evidence of mass-produced “Containment

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Assistance” kits, one of which Andy examines, the settler government either did not know of or did not acknowledge this strategy. Overall, the materials in these hinged plastic containers—particularly zip ties, a mouth guard, wearable forty-eight-hour countdown timers, and a cylindrical tool with a spring-loaded spike—focus on restraining and killing the infected, presumably including oneself. Andy is unaware of the postapocalyptic use of the ochre until Thoomi explains it and applies some to Rosie. Andy, who is infected, a transitional stage between human and zombie, does not need any pigment because, Thoomi informs him, “You smell like them already.” Thoomi’s approach to her zombified father, Willie (Bruce R. Carter), further contrasts the settler government’s recommended approach to zombification: in addition to using ochre for self-protection, she smears her blood on trees to herd Willie in particular directions and sustains him on a diet of dead animals. Her practices here also depart from those of her community, representing an alternative, individual set of practices. Although the Aboriginal community in Cargo does not, like Thoomi, seek to preserve zombies in their state of undead animation, its conception of them does diverge from that of settler culture. Thoomi refers to zombies as “the ghosts” because she conceives of zombification in relationship to a soul, a belief that she has either received from her community or constructed herself based on its ideas about and around death. Anthropologist Ute Eickelkamp (2014) discusses a “malignant power called Mamu . . . , often translated as ‘monster’” (57). Part of the cosmology of “Aboriginal people in the eastern part of Australia’s Western Desert,” “Mamu . . . bite out the soul from the body, making that person sick. A healer can retrieve the soul and put it back into the person” (58). Thoomi’s description of the Clever Man of her community, a figure who, in simplified terms, serves as a channel between the material and spirit realms, marks him as just such a healer: he is “a magic man. If you’re sick, he can give you good medicine. And if someone steals your spirit away, he can put it back again.” Andy grasps that Thoomi likely thinks that her “dad is acting the way he is because he lost his soul,” but he discounts this view, denying the possibility of healing Thoomi’s father or any of the other zombies. The contrast in Andy’s and Thoomi’s views of zombification as an issue of infection versus an issue of the soul parallels the contrast between the cannibalistic permutation of the zombie myth and its Afro-Caribbean forebears. Within the latter, which themselves hybridized African and Catholic beliefs (Rushton and Moreman 2011, loc. 75), a zombie might be a soul purloined from someone living, a deceased person who had given over his or her body to be used by vodou gods, or a soulless corpse reanimated to serve a master (Kordas 2011, loc. 279–93). Thoomi’s view of the zombie as reversibly dispossessed of a soul is strongly reminiscent of

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while not identical to these variations, further linking Cargo’s zombie apocalypse to histories of colonialism. Also distinct from the settler culture represented rigidly by Vic and more flexibly by Andy is the Aboriginal community’s conception of their own and the zombies’ relationship to the land. Rather than Vic’s lens of profit, the Aboriginal characters employ a lens of wellness. In a flashback, the Clever Man says to Willie and Thoomi, “They’re poisoning this land, you know? This country [a word that encompasses spiritual and cultural connections to the land] changing. It’s sick. We all get sick. You get sick, too.” This difference in attitude does not absolve the Aboriginal characters from any complicity in capitalist exploitation of the land, since Willie himself worked for the same gas company as Vic, a fact emphasized by a close-up shot of Willie’s jacket in this scene. But their reaction to the explosion of this sickness into the zombie apocalypse is not, like Vic, to seek ways to continue the exploitation that led to the current situation but instead to, as White schoolteacher Etta (Kris McQuade) formulates it, “cleans[e] the land of the sick ones.” To this end, Thoomi’s community form hunting parties (shown to include both men and women) that kill and burn—but do not loot—the zombies. Etta also emphasizes relationship to the land, as well as collectivity, in comments on her former students, who are shown in a photograph to be Aboriginal. She describes them as having adapted by “living in the old ways. . . . They’re doing better than the rest of us. Mobs from all over the country coming together. They sensed it, those who stayed connected. The whole community up and left back to their country.” “Living in the old ways” does imply a simple reversion to precapitalist, pre-colonization social practices, but Thoomi’s own practices invalidate this reductive view. For example, as a way of engaging in sorry business, Thoomi strikes her head with a stone at her zombified father’s burial site when she discovers that he has been killed by her community. Myrna Tonkinson (2008, loc. 1258), writing of the Martu people, describes such self-harm as still occurring but no longer common in mourning, although Yasmine Musharbash (2008) mentions “many” such wounds at a Warlpiri sorry (loc. 884). Therefore, Thoomi’s clarification that her self-harm comes “from the old ways. But not our ways anymore” could refer to the practice having lost currency, as in Tonkinson’s observation, but it could also refer to the ways in which mourning practices have had to change in the face of death’s transforming humans into bloodthirsty undead creatures rather than well-behaved corpses. The appellation “ghost” can be seen as a similar adaptation of cultural conceptions of death and mourning to a new, postapocalyptic reality. Unlike in settler culture, the dead in Aboriginal culture “remain as part of the landscape and form a bridge between country and the living” (Macdonald 2008, loc. 3338). In this perspective, Aboriginal cosmology offers a distinct means, one version of which plays out in Thoomi’s

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behavior toward her zombified father, for comprehending and reacting to the zombie, a new variation on the deceased person who maintains a presence in communities. Thoomi’s effort to manage her zombified father without community support does, as mentioned, fail in the end. “His spirit’s still loose,” she grieves, blood from her striking herself with the stone visible in close-up shots of her face. “It’s my fault. I took too long.” Her approaches to zombies do, however, successfully contribute to saving Rosie. Rosie survives due to a combination of the government’s mass-produced kits and its focus on infection and threat elimination with Thoomi’s focus on the soul and her use of natural materials such as sticks, ochre, and blood to deal with the undead. As Andy nears the end of his forty-eight hours of remaining humanity, he and Thoomi rig up a raw-meat version of a carrot on a stick using a mouth guard and zip tie from one of the kits along with some sticks in order to keep Andy moving, conveying Rosie in a baby carrier on his back, even after he has completely turned.22 This melding of approaches marks Andy’s distance from his earlier desire to “just . . . stick to what we know,” which at that point was to stay on the houseboat until it brought his family to a military base, a site of now-defunct government power. Andy, like Willie, is killed as a zombie rather than cured and/or reunited with a missing soul, and it emphasizes the distinct Aboriginal approach to zombies that both are “buried in the trees so the ghosts can’t wake” them, as Thoomi describes a funerary process that hearkens back to the pre-settler practices of some Aboriginal peoples (Tonkinson 2008, loc. 1230). Andy’s death signals, according to Kayleigh Murphy (2019), a final turn away from White Australia and its colonial history (36). His death also allows for Rosie’s adoption into Thoomi’s community, which they are able to reach thanks to the combination of settler and Aboriginal approaches to living in the zombie apocalypse which allows Andy to continue to bear the cargo of his kin even in undeath. Etta glosses Rosie’s name as “Little flower,” lending her, like the Indigenous characters, a positive association with the natural world, and the Aboriginal community which she ends up joining is itself shielded by natural barriers, a sort of elevated natural bowl in the landscape shown in an aerial shot that stresses the enormity of both the bowl and the surrounding natural landscape. The community is also presented, in its zombie hunts and in receiving Rosie, as acting collectively; and as Thoomi, Rosie, and the small band of hunters arrive there, the sound of birdsong in the otherwise silent environment gives way to the chatter of smiling, waving people, many sitting together on blankets. Fojas (2017) argues that US zombie films tend to “reject racism through . . . the proliferation of heteronormative couples and families as defense units” (75). In Cargo, however, heteronormative couples and families fail, while the Aboriginal community, based in a “cultural milieu” which

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does not emphasize the individual separately from the social fabric and in which even revenants express kinship connections (Smith 2008, loc. 4738), endures. Andy had sought a substitute mother for Rosie, but she is taken in by an entire settlement instead: the last we see of her, in an ambiently scored sequence, she is being held by Thoomi at the center of a closely arranged group of five other girls and women of various ages. And in contrast to Vic’s profit-oriented question to Andy about the gas plant—“What’s it worth to ya? A safe place for you and your kid?”—Thoomi’s people take Rosie in freely. Rosie’s adoption from White parents into an Aboriginal community also enacts, similarly to the end of Blood Quantum, an inversion of past settler government policies of forced separation of Indigenous children, which included “compulsory adoption of babies from unwed mothers” (Allen 2015, 76) and the removal and institutionalization of children of mixed descent (Elliot 2008, loc. 2714). Such removals were driven by intensifying fears as the twentieth century progressed that the population of “half-caste” Aboriginal people, which had begun to grow at the close of the nineteenth century, would become larger than the White population (van Krieken 1999, 304). The Australian government claimed legal guardianship over all Aboriginal children until the 1960s (307), and its supposedly protective policies separated an estimated more than 100,000 children from Aboriginal families, creating what are now called the Stolen Generations (Desai et al. 2008, 53). Even today, producing what some argue constitutes a new Stolen Generation, Aboriginal children continue disproportionately to be taken from their families and communities, being placed in “out-of-home-care” ten times more frequently than non-Aboriginal children (O’Donnell et al. 2019, 89).23 A 1997 Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission report classified the Australian government’s past policies of forced separation as fitting the United Nations’ definition of genocide (van Krieken 1999, 298). “Half-caste” people threatened the cultural boundaries of “civilization” with what settler culture perceived as their “lack of discipline and productivity” and “group rather than an individual orientation” (305), and this threat justified what can be seen as a state-sponsored attempt at entirely “breeding out” the cultural hybridity that they represented (307). Rosie’s integration into Thoomi’s community reverses such assimilation, and the markings, one Aboriginal and one from Andy, reading “Thank You,” which are painted in white ochre on her body symbolize her future as socioculturally hybrid.24 Ultimately, the film links settler culture, particularly in its capitalist-driven environmental destruction, to the onset of the zombie apocalypse. Andy and Thoomi provide Rosie with a future by escaping Vic, who represents the attempted continuation of this culture, and by drawing on both of their cultures. The final, symbolically resonant leg of their escape occurs in a dark tunnel within which Vic tries to prevent them from proceeding.

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They succeed in both leaving behind Vic, left slumped and crying against the tunnel wall in apparent acceptance that, as Andy insists, “It’s done,” and emerging from the darkness of a past way of being with which he is associated for Thoomi and Rosie to ultimately arrive at Thoomi’s community and its new possibilities. In the end, this turn away from settler culture to survival based on both settler and Aboriginal cultures reverses the “fragment[ation] into familial bands and patriarchal tribes” and then into even smaller units that Gerry Canavan (2010) sees in many zombie narratives (443). CONCLUSION The Dead Can’t Dance, Blood Quantum, and Cargo all present the preservation of future generations—Eddie; Joseph and Charlie’s baby; and Rosie and Thoomi, respectively—who will survive as part of Indigenous communities. In connection with these futures, all three films also propose some form of hybridity as integral to the way forward. In The Dead Can’t Dance, this hybridity occurs through the mixing of White and Indigenous blood via vaccination; in Blood Quantum, it is embodied in a child with White and Indigenous parents; and in Cargo, it manifests both in White Rosie’s implied future upbringing within Indigenous Thoomi’s community and in the ways in which Thoomi and Andy adapt to the zombie apocalypse and work to ensure that upbringing. These depictions of hybridity also intersect in all three films with questions of Indigenous identity and belonging, particularly for the younger generations. Horror films, writes Linnie Blake (2008), offer a “visceral and frequently non-linguistic lexicon in which the experience of cultural dislocation may be phrased” (189), and the films discussed in this chapter take advantage of that lexicon in order to address historical and ongoing Indigenous traumas and struggles, inverting past patterns of genocide and assimilation. That issues of Indigenous sovereignty remain part of such ongoing struggles in the settler nations in which these films were made is starkly evidenced by all three of those nations having voted against the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (Knopf 2010, 90). Indigenous films, Schweninger (2013) argues, often not only counter “Hollywood’s insistence on dying Indians and vanishing race” through Indigenous presence onscreen but also “move beyond more refutation” of this insistence to “demonstrate and embody continuance and survival” even when Indigenous characters die (16). I would suggest that Schweninger’s claim can be extended to the Aboriginal Australian context of Cargo as well, even though this film was not made by Indigenous directors, and would add that these films not only assert Indigenous presence and continuance but also, through their zombie

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outbreaks, reposition Whites as the “vanishing race.” The Dead Can’t Dance and Blood Quantum, created by Indigenous filmmakers, can additionally be seen as effecting a decolonizing control of Indigenous narratives by Indigenous artists. Notably, these two films reverse the historical construction of the colonized body as a “dark source of infection” that threatens White bodies and “civilization” (Haraway 1993, 219). Whether the changes wrought by the advent of the undead appear to be more temporary (The Dead Can’t Dance) or more permanent (Blood Quantum, Cargo), in each case, they decenter settler culture and systems from their positions of dominance. NOTES 1. I follow Kerstin Knopf (2008) in her use of the term Indigenous to refer to “the original inhabitants of North America and their descendants” as well as to the Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia and the term Indian to refer to “constructed, stereotyped and objectified images of Indigenous people” (xxi). Knopf objects to the terms Native American and Native Canadian as having “the derogatory connotation of ‘primitive’” and the term First Nations as excluding Indigenous nations “who did not sign a numbered treaty with the Canadian government” (xxi). 2. The spelling and English translation of Nʉmʉnʉʉ is taken from the Comanche Nation (n. d.) website. Schweninger (2013) refers to this moment in the film in explaining his own choices of and difficulties with terminology in his book (19). 3. Raheja (2010) notes that this myth of the “vanishing Indian” (loc. 114) began with the first European settlers (loc. 3584n9). 4. Mutated viruses escaping from government labs are far from unknown in zombie cinema, but The Dead Can’t Dance never ascribes a specific origin, including a governmental one, to its outbreak. 5. In addition to the camera’s focus on the soldiers’ weapons, they gain emphasis as well from the absence of firearms in the rest of the film aside from the single discharge of a gun by Ray late in the proceedings. 6. Schwenigner (2013) notes the recurrent importance in Pocowatchit’s films of “survival and continuance beyond the end of the film” for Indigenous characters who experience the loss of “an elder or a family member” (222). 7. See, for example, Raheja (2010), loc. 1352. 8. See Knopf (2008), 12. It may be worth noting here that “Tonto,” the Lone Ranger’s Indigenous sidekick, translates to “stupid” in Spanish. 9. See Knopf (2008), 11–12 on this stereotype. 10. The plural form of Mi’kmaw is commonly spelled either Mi’kmaq or Mi’gmaq: since the end credits of Barnaby’s film employ the latter, I follow that choice here as well. 11. Linking immunity to ethnicity is not limited to Indigenous zombie films. The 2019 Serbo-Croatian zombie comedy Last Serb in Croatia (Posljednji Srbin u

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Hrvatskoj) applies this conceit to Serbo-Croatian relations, with “a local community of Serbs” immune to a virus zombifying Croats (Jurković 2020, loc. 20287). 12. Truscello and Watchman (2022) also note some further instances of influence from Tarantino and Alfonso Cuarón but argue that such observations disregard “decades of work by Indigenous filmmakers and scholars” (9). 13. Canadian historian J. R. Miller (2004) argues for “newcomer” in place of “settler” because of what he sees as the latter’s “connotation of agricultural colonist” and the former’s inclusion of current-day Canadians (4). Settler, though, seems more suggestive of the dynamics of power that are important to Blood Quantum, and the film uses the term in its opening text. 14. The name Red Crow for the reservation evokes, whether deliberately or not, the historical Kainai leader Red Crow (c. 1830–1900), who criticized and resisted the government of the Canadian settler state, including over land issues (Dempsey 2020). 15. Turtle Island is sometimes used synonymously with North America. 16. Darrell Varga (2022) identifies a reference to Indigenous filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin’s documentary Kanehsatake in the scene’s image of an “Indigenous warrior and Canadian soldier face-to-face in profile” (25). 17. Some of the actors in the film have expressed similar sentiments (see Dyer [2020], 366). 18. Truscello and Watchman (2022) also see here an unfortunate foregrounding of “genetics instead of kinship relations” (7). 19. A longer version of this section originally appeared as “Zombies and Intercultural Hybridity in Cargo (2017)” in Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural, no. 7 (2021): 93–114, http:​//​www​.revenantjournal​.com​/contents​/ zombies​-and​-intercultural​-hybridity​-in​-cargo​-2017​/. 20. Kayleigh Murphy (2019) reads the zombies’ propensity to bury their heads in the ground as symbolizing Australia’s denial of its colonial past (36). 21. The term “sorry business” may mark other kinds of loss as well. Not all Aboriginal peoples use the term “sorry business,” but it is “increasing in its pan-Aboriginal use” (Macdonald 2008, loc. 3245). 22. In the initial version of Cargo (2013), a seven-minute short with no dialogue, Rosie’s father similarly suspends a makeshift bag of offal from a branch lashed to himself, but there is no Thoomi-equivalent, nor are there any governmental Containment Assistance kits. 23. Unlike earlier practices, contemporary policy tries, with rates of success varying by area, to place removed children with relatives or kin or, failing that, with Aboriginal caregivers or in Aboriginal residential care (O’Donnell et al. 2019, 91). 24. No comparable Aboriginal community exists in the short-film version of Cargo: Rosie’s father is shot by a sniper, and while a White man, a White woman, and a man who may be intended to be Aboriginal prepare to bury him, the woman, played by Yolanda Ramke, discovers and rescues the baby, who has “My name is Rosie” written on her stomach in black marker.

Chapter 4

Self, Society, and State, Take 1 France, Canada, and Ireland

Capitalist systems and the racial and gender hierarchies produced by their dynamics are certainly inextricable from the way in which an individual exists within a particular society, even a postapocalyptic one. And these structures just as certainly play roles in the trio of zombie films examined in this chapter: French film The Night Eats the World (La Nuit a dévoré le Monde; 2018), Quebecois film Ravenous (Les Affamés; 2017), and Irish film The Cured (2017). These particular films, however, foreground psychological or ethical aspects of human existence in order to explore them via the relations to others, or lack thereof, created by the narratives’ respective zombie outbreaks. Critiques of capitalist imperatives and racial and gender hierarchies recede into the background, although they are not entirely absent. For instance, the pairing in The Night Eats the World of its White male protagonist with a woman of color as the only other survivor whom he encounters invites considerations of the significance of race and gender to their interactions, and one can interpret the zombie-created assemblages of items in Ravenous as a commentary on commodity culture. But such thematic or subtextual elements are situated within a focus on the relationship of the individual to other individuals in The Night Eats the World, of the individual to a small community no longer embedded in a state in Ravenous, and of communities to one another and to the state in The Cured. Numerous zombie films, especially those produced by the United States, feature some variation on a band of survivors who scavenge or loot, which may be depicted as varying degrees of “fun,” in the total absence of any “formalized government structures and services” until encountering other survivors who pose a danger to them (Proffitt and Templin 2013, 36). These commonplace components contribute to the “survivalist fantasies” and “fear of other” living people that Kyle William Bishop (2010) observes in “most” American zombie cinema in the wake of Night of the Living Dead (19). 79

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The films examined in this chapter, though, adapt this formula in important ways. The Night Eats the World undermines the fantasies of the rugged individual and the survivalist, its protagonist finding isolation from others finally untenable, even when his physical survival is not in immediate question and he even has time for creative expression. Cut off from human contact, he must invent and then pursue it. Ravenous also assigns some importance to interpersonal connection, but it views those relations, as well as personal expression, through an existentialist lens. Characters are freed from the sort of materialistic social existence that the zombies arguably represent, but that does not remove the absurdity from life, and, in some ways, merely introduces a different kind of repetitive existence. While Ravenous reduces social existence to a small and shrinking group, The Cured looks at reintegration of the formerly infected into a society that withstood its zombie outbreak. In an article focused on 2004 Irish zombie film Dead Meat, Seán Crosson (2012) remarks that from “the mid 90s, and particularly from the early 2000s, Irish filmmakers have increasingly turned to horror as a form through which to explore aspects of Irish society, culture, history and, indeed, their representation” while appealing to international viewers (2). The Cured continues this trend by using the zombie outbreak and its aftermath as a means to consider Ireland’s histories of violent internal conflict, which are rooted in the impacts of English imperialism. In its reflection of political violence, The Cured evinces some similar concerns with sovereignty as do the Indigenous films discussed in the previous chapter. THE NIGHT EATS THE WORLD AND THE NECESSITY OF THE OTHER Maxime Bey-Rozet (2021) dates “French horror proper” to “the early 2000s,” remarking that prior to that, a wide variety of “magical and supernatural narratives” fell under the more flexible generic umbrella of “le fantastique” (192). He views this “very French category” as having been encroached upon by generic conventions of “the (American) category of horror” (192) but credits the films of the French New Extremity, a wave that stretched from approximately 1999 to 2009 and included work by directors such as Gaspar Noé and Claire Denis, with blurring the boundaries between “auteurism and . . . horror” such that it “set the stage” for films such as The Night Eats the World, directed by Dominique Rocher (196). Tim Palmer (2021) calls Rocher’s auteurist zombie film a “linchpin” (7) of what he identifies, drawing on a statement by Denis, as “frontier horror poetry” (3). Palmer argues that frontier horror poetry is a peculiarly French mode that juxtaposes or replaces the rapid pace, bodily vulnerability, explicit violence, and struggles

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for survival of horror with “stasis, quietude,” lyricism, “splendor” embodied in performance, and “a governing diegetic impulse towards artistic genesis and creation, musicality and inspiration” (4). As a “characteristically contrarian new French horror” film that “rework[s] the conceptual circuitry of North American genres,” The Night Eats the World features a narrative and dialogue stripped down enough that an English-language version (the version cited in this chapter) was relatively easily created through reediting (6–7). That narrative “observes its protagonist” as he undergoes “a psychological and social experiment in isolation” (Beugnet and Delanoë-Brun 2021, 220n29). Early in the film, this protagonist, musician Sam (Anders Danielsen Lie), shuts himself in a room alone during a party at his ex’s apartment and sleeps through the onset of the zombie apocalypse. He is then forced to scavenge and pass the time alone inside the building until he meets a woman who is ultimately revealed to be a projection of his own mind, leading to his decision to finally try to leave the building. Sam displays a certain degree of isolation even prior to the apocalypse. Firstly, Sam is an outsider insofar as he is an expat in Paris—the film never explicitly confirms his nationality, but Danielsen Lie himself is Norwegian, and Sam listens to a child speaking Norwegian on a cassette tape. Further, his romantic partner, Fanny (Sigrid Bouaziz), has moved on to a new partner; and there is also some reason to believe that the child on the tape is also Sam’s, though not necessarily Fanny’s. This parentage seems likely if we take Sam’s crying over the tape as connected to his own personal history and Sam’s insults to a zombie, Alfred (Denis Lavant),1 which include that Alfred’s “kids must have been thrilled that [he] was never around” and that he will regret ending up alone, as ventriloquizing criticisms that Sam himself has faced. Significantly, though, the film also establishes Sam as courting his own isolation. In the opening section, Fanny asks Sam to stay at her party, to which he has come only to ask for his cassette tapes back. “Meet some new people. Just try for a change,” she encourages, a suggestion in which Sam appears clearly disinterested. Fanny’s criticism of Sam’s habitual lack of interest in connecting with others echoes some of what he later yells at Alfred, supporting the possibility that his outburst constitutes an act of projection: “Why are you always sulking? Come on, hey. Come on, smile for fuck’s sake. Make an effort. You know what your problem is? You’re such a fucking bore. You don’t know how to have fun.” The opening scenes at the large, crowded party align the viewer with Sam’s dislike of others, from the increasing volume of voices as he moves inside to his observing one guest vomiting in the bathroom to his being hit in the face with another guest’s camera hard enough to cause a nosebleed. On the one hand, Sam’s desire for disconnection causes him to survive the initial zombie outbreak, but on the other hand, Sam’s intensified isolation in the zombie

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apocalypse posits other rational human subjects as fundamentally necessary to existence both as an individual and as an artist. Sam’s growing need for connection once the zombie apocalypse has left him entirely alone finds him attempting to form bonds with beings who cannot rationally reciprocate in the same way that another living human could. As Bishop (2010) comments, many zombie narratives involve “establishing some kind of defensible stronghold” and hoarding supplies, including weapons (23). Sam does this, reclaiming and looting spaces and in one scene arranging his haul, dominated by food and knives, neatly on a blanket. Assured physical survival, however, proves insufficient in the absence of reciprocal relations. Mere survival, or bare life, in Giorgio Agamben’s terms, excludes the individual “from the rights and privileges of the modern state” and constitutes “a living death” comparable, Jon Stratton (2011) argues, “to that of the zombie” (189). At one point, he briefly, and nearly catastrophically, leaves for the first time the apartment building that has functioned as his survival space in order to try to catch a cat. Despite coaxing his potential companion with a “promise” that they “are gonna be buddies,” his attempt at cross-species fellowship fails, and having fled indoors, he sees the cat sitting unmolested near multiple uninterested zombies. Sam fires a gun out of a window, but the shot does not reveal if he shoots (at) the cat, leaving it possible to interpret his action as an expression of anger not only that the cat can coexist with the zombies but also that it chooses them over Sam, echoing how Fanny and others have, in his view, abandoned him. More extensively, and more significantly, Sam also develops a kind of relationship with the undead Alfred, who is trapped in a gated elevator (a visual analogy, as a cage, for Sam’s confinement in the building as well as for his existential state). When Sam first finds Alfred, he secures the gate and raises his gun but then decides not to shoot (bare life, Canavan [2010] reminds us, must always be contained and may always be terminated [433]). Later, Sam begins to have (necessarily) one-sided conversations with this contained zombie. The first instance occurs on a day when Sam shaves and jogs around the building listening to (romantic) music on headphones, and it includes Sam forcing Alfred’s grip on his hand through the gate into a handshake, a performance of social interaction emphasized in two separate close-ups. While these attempts to create a sense of normality may appear to signal that Sam is coping proactively with his situation, they also function as a parodic implementation of Fanny’s advice to meet new people even as they demonstrate how fundamentally he needs connection with another human being. Robert G. Olson (1962) might be describing Sam when he writes, “The Other constitutes me in my being as surely as my past” (loc. 3102). And as Judith Butler (2015) explains, “moments of significant shift or rupture” that divorce the “I” of the self from its “constituting relations” with others (in the

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form of you or they) produce “a rather severe disorientation” that undermine the self’s sense of current and potential identity, and “certain kinds of breaks will raise the question of whether the ‘I’ can survive” (loc. 178). Zombie narratives “provide a space to endlessly rehearse the loss of the self and all its others” and to imagine becoming one of “the subjectless dead” (Rutherford 2013, 95). Sam’s apocalyptic isolation surely constitutes one of the most radical possible breaks between self and others, and his relationship to Alfred underscores the threat which that break poses not only to the physical survival of the self—though Sam does nearly commit suicide at one point—but also of the subject’s concept of himself as a (cohesive) subject. Sam comments to Alfred on this radical separation from other human subjects both when he confesses that the “hardest part” of the zombie apocalypse “is not knowing what’s happened” to people, who presumably played a part in the constituting relations of the self, and when he remarks, “Dead is the norm now. I’m the one who is not normal.” This remark closely echoes protagonist Robert Neville’s sudden thought in Richard Matheson’s (2011) 1954 novel I Am Legend, an acknowledged inspiration for Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, “I’m the abnormal one now” (loc. 2378). Neville is the only living person in a world of the undead, some of whom have formed their own society, and Sam’s remark also posits a sort of community among the undead, a community from which he is excluded and which replicates in a more extreme form his pre-apocalyptic social isolation. Speaking of his mother, Sam assumes that she has died, but he takes comfort in the thought that she escaped an “unfair” death like “cancer or a car accident” and “died like everyone else. With everyone else.” Again, this conception views zombiedom as equivalent to a belonging that Sam’s situation denies him and about which he ironically attempts to communicate to an unknowable Other, an irony underscored by Alfred’s silent, unblinking visage in the shot-reverse shot edits within the scene. Talking to Alfred at a later time, when the zombies outside have dispersed for a few days, Sam identifies with Alfred, displacing his own anger, for instance, into asking Alfred if he is “pissed that they just left” him alone and into a threat that Sam will “get sick of all this” someday and leave Alfred “all alone,” to regret, too late and in perpetuity, letting Sam go. Sam, in addition to using Alfred-as-Other as a substitute “I” which Sam can comment on and even critique, constructs a kind of community from their shared solitude: “Now you and I are the same,” asserts Sam as he leans in close and literally reduces the distance between them; “We’re alone.” Near the end of the film, Sam and Alfred switch places when Sam releases Alfred, who, dressed in a bathrobe associating him with private domestic space, returns to and allows himself to be closed in an apartment rather than attacking Sam, and Sam becomes trapped in the elevator that Alfred had occupied. While this sequence of events underscores the similarity between Sam and Alfred, it

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simultaneously marks Sam’s leaving behind the version of himself that he has displaced onto Alfred. Sam escapes from the zombie-besieged elevator and continues on his way to abandon the survival space of the apartment building to seek out others, while Alfred is willingly—and in preference to acting like a zombie—shut away alone. Before Sam commits to ending his isolation in the apartment building, he first conjures an imaginary companion from a woman whom he accidentally kills by shooting her through the closed door of the room in which he is sleeping. This woman, Sarah (Goldshifteh Farahani), is, like Sam, “a foreigner,” linking them as “outsiders to the French liberal lifestyle epitomized by the opening party” (Beugnet and Delanoë-Brun 2021, 219n10). His plea to her, “Stay with me, please. Stay with me,” expresses his desire for companionship as much as it does his desire that she recover (Sarah’s wounds, meanwhile, reduce her to hyperventilation, rendering her, like Alfred, incapable of verbal response). Sam imagines (and the film leads the audience to believe) that she does recover, and “Sarah” provides an alternative to Alfred as an avenue for Sam to process his isolation. Notably, her reaction to Alfred is one of fear and disapproval, suggesting Alfred’s abjection (a state discussed in chapter 2) and Sam’s repressed awareness of the unsuitability of the undead as the Other in a constituting relation of self. Gabriel Marcel (1995) writes that when a being is present to a subject, the being is “not only before” the subject but also “within” the subject, “or, rather, these categories are transcended, they no longer have any meaning” (38). The zombie, as a figure that both is and is not a (human) being, negates or at least disrupts this relationship, since “presence” requires “a reciprocity” (40). Similarly to Sam, the few other survivors whom Sarah says she has met were mostly men holed up in apartments and mostly “more or less crazy,” she reports to Sam; “Just like you, actually.” He insists, “Being on my own saved me”; and he defends his strategy of remaining in place—echoing the (projected) version of himself that Alfred represents—against hers of constant mobility, but her point that the zombies have unlimited time and nothing else to do highlights how much Sam’s situation resembles theirs and, by extension, how much Sam in his isolation is coming to resemble them and their bare (un)life. Sarah, in her imaginary incarnation, can also be seen as a kind of zombie: Sam’s raising her from the dead in his own mind recuperates his (unintentional) violence against her, a racialized Other, not only by reanimating her but also by positioning her as a companion and romantic interest. However, this mental act also renders Sam as figuratively a zombie master, forcing Sarah not to work in a sugar cane mill but, like Alfred, to serve Sam’s need for companionship and perhaps act as a replacement for Fanny. That Sarah is actually Sam as well brings him again closer to the undead, simultaneously zombie master and zombie.

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In one sense, Sam’s resemblance to the undead in having nothing to do and nowhere to go can be viewed as freeing, as part of what Palmer (2021) maintains is the film’s preoccupation with “an artistic inner life, [and] Sam’s evolution as an experimental musician” as much as with his survival (7). Palmer marks as specifically French the contention that the best way to survive a zombie apocalypse is to “develop your creative capacities” (7). And, indeed, with (the imaginary) Sarah around, Sam returns to creating music using found objects, a process in which she collaborates, spinning a top and singing. It is a measure of the film’s “frontier poetry register,” according to Palmer, that it argues that it is not enough just to stay alive—art itself must be advanced, the habits of creative practice nurtured and sustained” (9). However, I would maintain that the film takes this argument further: it is not enough just to nurture the habits of creative practice; an artist needs an audience to be an artist just as an individual human subject needs other humans in order to remain a functioning human subject—if mere survival is insufficient, so is creative expression that no one experiences aside from the artist.2 Creating art, argues Marcel (1995), necessarily “excludes the act of self-centring . . . which is ontologically speaking, pure negation” (34). It is particularly important in this regard that Sam’s art form throughout the film is live musical performance. He makes use of a cassette recorder as part of a composition but not to record it, rendering his art entirely ephemeral without anyone to witness it.3 Sarah, then, prompts Sam’s return to creating experimental music (something we see him do once before, in a long take lasting one minute and twenty seconds, while still alone) because she provides such an audience, imaginary though it may be. In two separate instances before Sarah, real or imagined, appears, Sam plays a drum kit (generally used alongside other musicians rather than as a solo instrument) and attracts a crowd of zombies. While these zombie audiences react on a basic instinctual level to the sounds that Sam creates, though, they presumably do not react to them as a mode of art, as different from any other aural stimulus, and so cannot be said truly to function as audiences. One of the times when Sam attracts zombies with his drumming, he is playing along to a 2015 song titled “Give Violence a Chance,” by American hardcore punk band G.L.O.S.S. (Girls Living Outside Society’s Shit). The song advocates against pacifism in the face of state violence, particularly by police and the courts against youth and people of color. The room in which Sam finds the drum kit and plays this song is extensively decorated with graffiti drawn in marker, including slogans such as “Just trash it” and “Revolution!!!” Ironically, the zombie apocalypse has accomplished these aims—the state has indeed been violently overthrown—but has seemingly left so few survivors as to obviate the benefits of this revolution imposed by the undead. This scene suggests that, as with the self’s constitution and psychological health, as well as with artistic expression, and in contrast to the survivalist fantasy

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incorporated into many zombie narratives, meaningful individual liberation also requires constituting relations to other human subjects. Sam ultimately admits to himself, convinced both by the imagined Sarah and by the returned memory of the real Sarah’s death, that he cannot remain completely alone and in one place without madness or suicide and chooses to end the “lab-like experience in de-socialisation and individual resilience” (Beugnet and Delanoë-Brun 2021, 220n24) that he has undergone in Fanny’s apartment building. His decision to swing from the roof of that building to one opposite—from there presumably to use the rooftops to get around, as he earlier suggested to himself via Sarah—is marked by several incidents. First, he lays the real Sarah to rest in a bed, establishing a connection to another human via this adapted mortuary ritual. Second, he finds Sarah’s digital camera and on it pictures of her with her husband and children, which give way to pictures from afar of a zombie, highlighting the importance and loss of human relations. Finally, he burns his box of cassette tapes, which represent both his past and, more specifically, his privileging of these objects over human connection at the party in the film’s opening. One might even view this destruction as a further sign that art in and of itself is not in fact sufficient to live through the zombie apocalypse. Taken cumulatively, Sam’s zombie-induced experience of isolation establishes one of the boundaries between life and undeath as conscious connection with others. REPETITION, ABSURDITY, AND THE SELF IN RAVENOUS Much as The Night Eats the World forms part of an increased if idiosyncratic horror output in French cinema, director Robin Aubert’s zombie film Ravenous occupies a similar position in a Québec film tradition, the strong realist bent of which has, since the 1990s, seen a progressively more extensive deployment of “supernatural tropes,” including but not limited to those drawn from the horror genre (Dyer 2018, 6). Lydia Owang (2018) locates the film alongside the “‘New Weird Nova Scotia’ represented by Ashley McKenzie’s Werewolf (2016) and a cluster of skilled young storytellers emerging out of British Columbia and Ontario” while noting the particular allusive power of its Québec setting to the area’s history of separatist political struggles. Ravenous centers on the small number of zombie apocalypse survivors remaining in a rural Québec town. They are joined by a few more of the living, including a young girl named Zoé (Charlotte St-Martin), before they are forced to flee from an increasing number of zombies—who, when they are not biting people, construct towers of objects in the fields. The group encounters a couple of other survivors during their on-foot flight

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through forest and field, but all except Zoé—whose name derives from the Greek for “life,” the same word that Agamben uses for bare life—perish by the film’s end. The zombie apocalypse in Ravenous can certainly be viewed as imagining, in a similar manner to Adam Lowenstein’s (2005) reading of David Cronenberg’s films, the “national body” of Canada as “fragmented, fragile,” including in “Quebec’s contested relation to the rest of” the nation (149). George MacLeod (2021) sees the film as addressing a fracture within Québec itself between urban and rural by using genre tropes to direct “attention toward contemporary socio-economic realities,” particularly rural fear that the state values them less than their urban counterparts, as well as “toward more universal processes of grief and mourning” (107). Such fragmentations are reflected not only in the zombies’ own damaged bodies but also in the fracturing of a society into at least two factions, the living and the undead, engaged in ongoing conflict. However, within this dynamic, the film’s approach to individual lives might be characterized as existentialist. Ravenous allows importance to interpersonal connections and individual expression even as it positions them as embedded in mundanity, materialism, and even absurdity. Ravenous begins with a shot in which the back of a wooden chair emerging from tall grass near a tree line is visible through heavy mist, its incongruous placement drawing attention to the object as an object. This juxtaposition of a material good with a landscape devoid of humans gives way to a jarring cut to a noisy racetrack, where an automotive race is in progress. As the cars circle the track, in an offtrack area, one woman bites another. The racetrack presents a location in which people move in repetitive circles in a competition to win, a state which is only ever temporary, as, in ordinary, non-apocalyptic circumstances, there is always another race to come. Such endless pursuit of fulfillment echoes Jean-Paul Sartre’s assertion that a person “must desire in order to exist, and in the act of desiring he constitutes himself as incomplete and unfulfilled” (Olson 1962, loc. 1897). The opening sequence of images in the film, then, establishes links among materialism, repetition, and zombiedom. These links suggest a fuzzy boundary between the existence of the living and the undead, themselves governed by unceasing desire and, in this film, collectors of material goods. Ravenous jumps forward from pre- to postapocalypse following the racetrack scene and quickly introduces one character, Vézina (Didier Lucien), telling another, Bonin (Marc-André Grondin), a joke involving a man who doesn’t stop masturbating even as his doctor examines him and another about a patient who sees the bright side of the prediction of his death in a week in the fact that he finally has a date with his secretary before that. Mixing humor and the grotesque (as sLaughter, as defined in this book’s introduction, does) and images of life and death, most of this dialogue is heard over a long shot of woodland, a stand of dead trees at first prominent,

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in which the smoke from zombie corpses burned by the two men lingers, as the camera pans slowly rightward to reveal them leaning against their pickup truck holding cans of beer as they talk and laugh before driving off to expose the smoldering bodies. These jokes again highlight unfulfilled desire, and, in different ways, repetitive attempts at fulfillment, as well as a focus on the arguably mundane, even (or perhaps especially), as in the second joke, in the face of death. Owang (2018) characterizes the film’s living characters themselves as “inexorably (if pointlessly) preoccupied with the trappings and personal failings of their pre-apocalyptic lives,” but if human life is already pointless, then value inheres not only in whatever aspects of being, however banal, to which people assign it but also in humor as a way to deal with an existence that is repetitive and absurd even without zombies roaming the landscape. A conversation between Bonin and a bleeding, bitten Vézina as they lie next to one another in the bed of the pickup—presented, with one cutaway to the sky for Vézina’s death, in a meditative version of the same sort of overhead shot that the end of Me and My Mates vs the Zombie Apocalypse uses satirically for Roy and Darryl (see chapter 2)—articulates this view of human existence, as Vézina says that if he had known the apocalypse was coming, he would have spent everything in his bank account to fulfill a promise to take his child to a Disney theme park, while Bonin relates that he would have gone to the house of a girl whom he says hated him to tell her that he liked her. The men acknowledge to one another that these hypotheticals are safe and predictable, given that there is no limit on what they could choose to imagine having done differently. Yet Bonin, who summarizes this exchange with, “Yup, our lives don’t amount to much,” exemplifies, in his persistence, like a Samuel Beckett character, in the face of meaninglessness and in his commitment to jokes rather than despair, that humans can nevertheless invest such small lives with worth in “a world which,” as Olson (1962) describes it, “has no point of reference beyond itself and no meaning other than that which we human beings with our finite personal cares decide to give it” (loc. 774). Humor, in this context, serves as one mechanism for dealing with a trauma of meaninglessness intensified by the advent of the undead, which reduces the scope of human lives even further while the un-lives of the zombies uncomfortably mirror them. What Owang (2018) calls Bonin’s “cornball antics at the end of the world,” then, can also be viewed as an acknowledgment “of the absurdity” (Marcel 1995, 54), as seen in Sartre’s works, “which attaches to existence as such” (54). This acknowledgment and a determination to go on anyway mutually reinforce one another. When Bonin makes a joke in response to a woman named Tania (Monia Chokri) wondering where her family might be, she accuses him of always deflecting serious topics. He replies that he will only stop joking around when he “stop[s] believing.” Bonin adds that humor

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stops him thinking about being the last survivor of a family who saw him as a black sheep and wonders what message that situation holds. (The simple answer is, of course, none: there is no more a greater meaning behind who survives the zombie apocalypse than behind the apocalypse itself.) Earlier in the film, having killed the infected Vézina, Bonin’s friend Paco (Robert Brouillette) says admiringly of the deceased that he still managed to laugh despite having “put down” his whole family. And when Bonin and Tania are driving with Zoé, whom they have taken into their care, Bonin tries to make Zoé laugh with a joke from the “I hate my wife” genre, earning a disapproving look from Tania. The comic and the grotesque, both present here, each “underline life’s absurdity,” the former “juxtaposing things seemingly incongruous” and the latter “fusing the seemingly incompatible” and erasing the boundary between animate and inanimate (Conger and Welsch 2004, 240). Zombies align well with this description of the grotesque, and the juxtaposition of animated corpses to living human beings is certainly incongruous. Therefore, it should not be surprising that Ravenous encourages the audience at times to laugh, like Bonin and Vézina, at its postapocalypse, such as when Bonin solemnly discourses on the process of turning after infection for about a full minute before learning that Tania cannot hear him because Paco had plugged her ears when he tied her up in case what she claimed was a dog bite was actually a zombie bite. The comic and grotesque “constantly threaten to collapse into one another” (Conger and Welsch 2004, 241), potentially creating a moment of sLaughter, as they do when Tania kills a man named Demers (Martin Héroux). Demers, who appears oblivious to the zombies, dresses in military clothes, and thinks he has returned from a mission that he never went on, seems to find jumping out and scaring people hilarious until, in an almost cartoonish sequence Tania, mistaking him for a zombie, blasts him with a shotgun when he does exactly that,4 leading the group of survivors to agree on the lie that Demers had been infected anyway and also to disarm Tania, whom they had just taught to shoot. Demers’s sudden appearance and death take place within approximately three seconds, as the film cuts from the group walking silently through a field to Demers leaping into frame to Tania raising the gun and firing to Demers flying backward out of frame. This instant of surprise violence represents not only an instance of reconfiguring “the narrative elements associated” with fear and humor through “a shock delivered as a gag” (Quiterio 2018, loc 1570) but also the way in which sLaughter, in its “instant awareness of the clash of making meaning in a meaningless system” and of acting, with the pleasure and burden of freedom, despite “unknown and unknowable outcomes . . . is an instant epiphany expressing, embodying, and evidencing the Existential condition” (Urish 2018, loc. 2598). The desire, as well as the ability, of characters in Ravenous to imbue an otherwise meaningless, even ridiculous life with meaning, whether through

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a trip to see Mickey Mouse or through laughter, is perhaps intensified by the increased visibility and possibility of (un)death in their environment. From an existentialist viewpoint, life has “meaning only for the person who lives in the shadow of death,” and “danger, conflict, [and] moral decision” are “heightened” by “consciousness of death as a personal possibility” (Olson 1962, loc. 3465). Surely living in a zombie apocalypse renders that shadow and that consciousness unavoidable. Notably, Patricia Saldarriaga and Emy Manini (2022) echo such a viewpoint when they assert that Sam in The Night Eats the World “will not actually be living” until he abandons the “domestic space” where he has been living and the goods that it contains “and confronts the possibility of dying while pursuing a real life” (58). In Ravenous, when adolescent Ti-Cul (Édouard Tremblay-Grenier), keeping his gaze on the ground, confirms for Zoé both that he has killed someone and that it was hard, she responds that “it’s better than nothing” and insists on that view when he replies, “Maybe.” Zoé’s “nothing” here might point in several directions: the nothing of death or undeath, the nothing of emotional numbness, or the nothing of inaction in response to existential despair. For Zoé, the danger and moral decision involved in the need to kill to live actually works to affirm life. One might view the idea that killing is better than nothing as an example of the way in which awareness of death “releases human energies only by revealing the insignificance of ordinary pursuits, thus breaking through the crust of convention, routine, and habit” (Olson 1962, loc. 3472). Céline (Brigitte Poupart), for instance, confesses to two other survivors, who have been bitten, that she had left her children at home on the day the zombie apocalypse began in order to get a manicure, as well as that her marital sex life was “all about playing the good wife” and part of how she had been trained to be the ideal woman. Her clearly visible pearl necklace makes for an incongruous juxtaposition with her blood-splattered suit while she is speaking, and she contrasts this life, not without nostalgia, with how little “bothers” her in the postapocalypse, implying a freedom from her former, imposed performance of a heteronormative self. At the same time, the film displays ambivalence toward condemnation of the routine and ordinary. Not long after Zoé’s abovementioned exchange with Ti-Cul, for instance, a brief scene cuts back and forth between shots of two unspeaking, basically motionless characters and then to a shot of an inchworm making its slow way along a log, inviting an analogy between the worm’s journey and human existence. But if human lives don’t amount to much more than inching toward death, small things such as making pickles and jellies, as survivor Thérèse (Marie-Ginette Guay) does, can still generate meaning. J. Scott Barton (2017) points to other survivors lining up to receive these pickles as a demonstration that “it is only in the face of death that a person can really appreciate the simple, sensuous, and above all, ephemeral

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pleasures” that are at the center of being human (4). Furthermore, pickling constitutes a creative act, as does joking (and both here are shared with other living humans, in contrast to Sam’s music in The Night Eats the World). Such creative acts in turn constitute acts of will in defiance of the characters’ circumstances, and Marcel (1995) defines hope as the application of the will to “what does not depend on [the will] itself” (33), a dynamic that Bonin makes clear in linking his humorous attitude to his continued “believing.” When Thérèse is forced to shoot Pauline (Micheline Lanctôt) because the latter has been bitten, Thérèse’s final line before pulling the trigger is to ask whether she put too much dill in her pickles, a moment that highlights the interplay between the heightened awareness of death and the value assigned to the simple or mundane. At the same time, the sound of Thérèse firing her shotgun overlays a shot of unsaddled horses running through the forest, which suggests that death provides release or freedom, however much meaning or value one may have derived from homemade comestibles. The zombies themselves, though, don’t seem to be fully released by undeath—which, to be fair, is not identical to death—from the convention, routine, and insignificant preoccupations embodied for them in material goods. Mirroring the human survivors, the zombies appear to congregate in small groups, and they construct towering assemblages of goods that they stand and stare fixedly at. For MacLeod (2021), who observes that many of the zombies would have been farmers, they “appear literally rooted in the fields in which they grew up, contemplating the possessions that may have given structure and meaning to their lives in these rural spaces” (108). The first view of one of these assemblages comes in a panning wide shot that reveals almost twenty-five zombies loosely assembled in a field around a pile of goods nearly four times the height of a person. A few of the zombies carry more items to add to this conglomeration of everything from a stuffed toy animal, tools, and an old cabinet television to pipes, plastic ducting, and pieces from wooden furniture. One zombie, holding a wooden chair, screams to alert his fellows when he sees Bonin (a moment evocative of John Carpenter’s 1988 They Live, which also criticizes subjugation to capitalist materialism). When Bonin flees in a pickup truck with Tania and Zoé, however, the zombies stop and stand in a line rather than continuing their pursuit, as if their main purpose had been to drive an intruder away from their repurposed fruits of a now-ended way of living. A later scene involves a similar dynamic: while the survivors are crossing another field with another tower of objects in it, Zoé accidentally kicks a metal pail, drawing the attention of a female zombie. Zoé freezes in place, and two stare at one another, the ambient sound of insects quickly faded out to emphasize the zombie’s concentration; the zombie then, after turning her gaze away and then suddenly back again, does the same to Réal (Luc Proulx), who has stepped in front of Zoé in the

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meantime. The zombie never moves from where she stands, and she finally returns her attention to the pile (the sound of insects returning with it, like the exhalation of a held breath, to release the tension), again suggesting that attention to these objects, and the living’s noninterference with them, is more important to the undead than their drive to attack the living. MacLeod (2021) offers several possible ways to read these piles of objects in relation to the film’s reflection of the interrelated depopulation and socioeconomic and psychological struggles in contemporary rural Québec (109–10), from the effects of “commodity fetishism” to a critique of the “voyeuristic interest” in rural poverty (112). Scott (2017) interprets the piles as “eerie ziggurats” of a zombie religion that evokes the religious elements of the zombie’s Afro-Caribbean origins (2). At the same time, though, these aggregations suggest both the material accumulation with which the average life is suffused and works of art, with zombies not only a kind of audience that they are not in The Night Eats the World but also themselves a collective of artists, thereby mirroring even more closely the living who find various outlets for creative expression in the postapocalypse. Rather than the zombies of Ravenous having created a religion, Keith McDonald and Wayne Johnson (2021) see them as performing “folk rituals” with “monuments” constructed of “consumerist goods” in pursuit of “some message or rapture” (194). From this viewpoint, material accumulation itself becomes a kind of religion, one the “futility” of which the film emphasizes (191). Saldarriaga and Manini (2022) draw an analogy between the zombies as “debris of a life once lived” and the objects that they collect as the useless debris of a dead capitalist system, which the undead regard in “a sort of zombie nostalgia” (59). Owang (2018) similarly refers to the “empty monuments[s] to materiality” constructed by the undead. If living people can neither stop desiring nor find satisfaction in material goods (Olson 1962, loc. 337), then neither here, it seems, can the zombie, whose never-satisfied desire for flesh appears to extend to human-made objects as well. While the undead mirror the living in their accumulation of material objects, they simultaneously mirror the living as themselves “biological objects,” so that “when we see a zombie, we are seeing everything we are, yet we are incapable of seeing it because we can only perceive the zombie Other as an object” (Pielak and Cohen 2017, 106). It is perhaps because of this reminder of our own object-ness that Céline kills a zombified woman who is sitting on the ground and repeatedly pulling the string of a baby doll—a human in the form of a human-made object—causing it to make a crying sound but who makes no move whatsoever to attack Céline. Her encounter, which takes place in a heavy fog that lends a sense of otherworldliness to the scene, is intercut with Bonin discovering an enormous tower of chairs, and her killing the zombie with the doll incites the zombies

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assembled around and near this monument, causing Céline to be bitten and absorbed into the horde, crossing to the other side of that mirroring boundary. The accordion incongruously carried by Tania similarly emphasizes the thinness of the boundary between undead behavior and human life when the latter is already absurd and meaningless beyond what meaning we ascribe to it. As an object that produces music, the accordion occupies a place somewhere between Bonin’s humor and the zombies’ material monuments as modes of creative expression. But the survivors’ plight also highlights that there is no survival, however meaningless, without repetitive labor (scavenging, fighting, fleeing), even with the larger social structures stripped away, again aligning living existence with undead existence. This resemblance, seen in a number of zombie narratives, points to the “modern zombie narrative” as “the quintessential post-modern existential tale of heroic antiheroism and of creating meaning out of a bleak and meaningless existence” (Pielak and Cohen 2017, 108). The film’s conclusion links acceptance of the absurdity of existence with such creation of meaning. Zoé is picked up on the side of a forest-lined road by an armed, helmeted, jumpsuited driver in a race car, an image the absurdity of which is underscored by her asking if he is an astronaut. Zoé has left behind her gun but retained Tania’s accordion; and this suggestion of an escape from repetition is augmented by the final shot of the film, in which Zoé gazes out of the race car as it drives through the world rather than around a circular track, as in the film’s opening. McDonald and Johnson (2021), though, correctly view the film’s final scene in conjunction with its post-credits sequence as “both optimistic” (Zoé on the road—although the soundtrack there does build to the kind of instantly cutoff crescendo that usually accompanies some final, closure-destroying scare) and “horribly pessimistic” (194). The pessimism comes in the post-credits scene, which reveals undead Tania and Bonin staring at a parrot perched on the monument of chairs. McDonald and Johnson (2021) interpret the parrot as a kind of “preacher” in the zombies’ “alluring” yet meaningless consumerist religion (194), and Owang (2018) sees its “aesthetic excess” as “absurd and even vain amidst the contextual ruins” and thus a further critique of materialism. However, there is optimism here as well: if the parrot represents a figure at once of imitation and mechanical repetition (and thus a symbol of interactions in human social life), it is also a figure of natural mobility and freedom, not unlike the masterless horses from earlier in the film or the red lizard held by Zoé not long before the end of the film. And, Marcia Landy (2014) notes in a discussion of the films of Luis Buñuel, while repetition can be horrific, repetition “that borders . . . on the imitative” can be “identified with humor” and the potential for alternatives (230).

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THE MAZE OF SECTARIAN TRAUMA IN THE CURED While The Night Eats the World and Ravenous consider the individual removed from society by a zombie outbreak—losing in the first case subject-defining contact with human Others and in the second the illusion of meaning and promises of material acquisition—writer and director David Freyne’s The Cured imagines the reintegration of individuals into a society riven by the violence of a zombie outbreak. In the film, a virus causing “violent psychosis” has swept, at the least, Europe and Ireland, and the titular Cured are the 75 percent of the Irish infected who have been successfully treated. Thus, the infected here are akin to those in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002): although not undead (and so, some might argue, not strictly zombies), when untreated, they conform in appearance and behavior to what viewers expect from contemporary cinematic zombies: the infected do not speak and spread the virus through biting, and a government ad inside a bus that asks people to report themselves or their neighbors lists symptoms including “loss of reason,” “animal behaviour,” “extreme aggression,” “blood lust,” and “cannibalism.”5 They also recall the people transformed into “violent, crazed . . . psychopaths” by a “mysterious black rain” in Richard Laymon’s 1991 novel One Rainy Night, which Kevin Alexander Boon (2017) credits with introducing the possibility of reversal to post-Romero zombie mythology (22). The opening of The Cured specifies that the Irish government is debating “the fate of the resistant 25%” of infected persons even as the “the last wave of Cured are ready to be reintegrated into society.” Through this reintegration process—focalized through Cured man Senan’s (Sam Keeley) struggles and divided loyalty between his sister-in-law Abbie (Elliot Page6), an American journalist married to and with a son by an Irish man named Luke (Peter Campion) who was killed in the outbreak, and Conor (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor), who infected Senan and now becomes an organizer willing to use violence on behalf of Cured rights—the film raises some of the same issues of national belonging as films such as The Dead Can’t Dance and Blood Quantum (see chapter 3), although with the element of ethnicity in place of race; and although the Cured, as violent offenders being released from imprisonment, are in a way justice-impacted individuals, the film strongly suggests that they and the infection be interpreted in the context of the political violence of “The Troubles,” or the Northern Ireland Conflict. The “thirty-year long ethnonational and sectarian” Northern Ireland Conflict represents “the most protracted conflict to afflict an advanced democracy in modern times” (Hughes 2014, 246). With the 1998 Belfast Agreement, also known as the Good Friday Agreement, marking an approximate endpoint (245), the Conflict is estimated to have caused more than

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3,600 deaths between 1969 and the Belfast Agreement coming into effect in 1999 (McAlister, Haydon, and Scraton 2013, 2). While one might trace the lineage of political violence in Ireland over hundreds of years of colonial conflict, the violence of the Northern Ireland Conflict most directly derives from the partition and civil war of the 1920s. Under the treaty, signed in January 1922, that followed the cessation of the Irish War for Independence the previous year, the six overwhelmingly Protestant counties that now make up Northern Ireland were given and exercised the option not to be part of the newly created, and overwhelmingly Catholic, Irish Free State (Wallace 1986, 96–97). Just over six months later, the refusal of some Republicans to accept this treaty erupted into a civil war that lasted nearly a year and after which not only did Republicans still view “the government as illegitimate” (99–100) but also “violence had become a way of life with many people” (99). During the ensuing decades, which included the declaration of the Irish Free State as the Republic of Ireland and its withdrawal from the British Commonwealth in 1948–1949 (108), political violence waxed and waned, with militant groups, most famously the Irish Republican Army (IRA), playing a central role. In 1969, fierce rioting in Northern Ireland and the formation of the Provisional IRA (PIRA), a splinter group committed to waging an armed campaign, marked the beginning of the Northern Ireland Conflict (113). The normalization of both state and unsanctioned violence over this period can be linked to the continued occurrence of “‘paramilitary-style attacks’” long after the Belfast Agreement (McAlister, Haydon, and Scraton 2013, 3). The intertitles at the beginning of The Cured mention that although “most of the continent [of Europe] managed to control the contagion, the virus devastated Ireland,” claiming a degree of exceptionalism for the nation’s persistent political violence; and the film’s naming of the contagion as the Maze virus evokes, as Wendy Mooney (2018) notes, the Maze Prison, where “paramilitary prisoners” were held during the Northern Ireland Conflict, and so emphasizes that particular period of political violence (158).7 Dahlia Schweitzer (2018) asserts that in an outbreak narrative, “bodily failure becomes failure of the body politic” (43); and given that the bodily failure in The Cured does not result in death and reanimation and that the Cured present as asymptomatic carriers (its own category of anxiety), the line between zombie and human thins so far as to be barely, if at all, present, making it all the easier to read the Maze virus as a metaphor of political infection. The now-shuttered Maze Prison stands in Northern Ireland, but The Cured takes place almost entirely in the city of Dublin, the capital of the Republic of Ireland and itself on occasion subject to paramilitary attacks, a setting that highlights the reach and spread of that infection. One significant element of the infection of the body politic in the film is that the Cured can remember what they did while untreated. Clips from

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Abbie’s man-on-the-street interviews, which are presented as excerpts from her camcorder footage, inviting connection with actual documentary or newscast coverage of political unrest, touch on this element. One man asks regarding what the infected did, “How do you get over that?” The word “you” here can point not only to the Cured themselves, such as the uncle whom another interviewee reports eventually killed himself after being released from internment, but also the heretofore uninfected public who are now asked to live alongside those who, in a clear parallel to paramilitaries, murdered their fellow citizens and who carry a virus that the abovementioned bus ad proclaims “THE ENEMY.” Graham Dawson (2017) criticizes the widespread conception of teleological “‘traumatic time,’” especially in “‘transitional’ societies like Northern Ireland” (86); and the Ireland of The Cured clearly demonstrates the absence of a unidirectional progress from traumatic memory to what is often termed healing or closure. “Even if temporally located ‘in the past,’” writes Dawson, “emotions are durational and involve complex relations between past, present, and future,” meaning that they may possess “longevity” but may also recur, reemerge, or “ebb and flow” (95). Sgt. Cantor (Stuart Graham), a military officer involved in overseeing the Cured, in fact wishes just such emotional recurrence for Senan upon his release, informing Senan that his nightmares are “there to remind” him of his violent acts. Among these is his participation with Conor in killing Luke, a literal case of brother against brother (described by Conor as “all very Cain and Abel”) that symbolizes the intra-community strife characteristic of the Northern Ireland Conflict (Conor himself killed his own mother, prompting his father to label him “a monster” when Conor comes to see him after his release). Cantor tells Abbie that not only do the Cured remember what they did while infected but they also know what they are doing while infected, and the idea that they are unaware or not in control of what they are doing merely functions to make the uninfected feel safer. He says that the infected “hunt together. They communicate with each other. They decide who to kill . . . and who to infect.” These characteristics map tidily onto paramilitary groups, as does Cantor’s description of the infected as “connected in a way we will never understand,” and from this perspective, conscious killing and spreading of the infection stands in for radicalization. Within that framework, Conor’s attempts to drive a wedge between Senan and Abbie, with whom Senan is staying, by bringing Senan’s involvement in Luke’s death to her attention, as well as Conor’s attempt to convince Senan that Conor is Senan’s “real family,” work to maintain radicalization and manage the radicalized. Further, the concealment of the extent of the Cured’s awareness and coordination while infected parallels the post-ceasefire disinclination toward “truth recovery” found on both sides of the Northern Ireland Conflict (Hughes 2014, 267).

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The persistence of traumatic memory can play a role in continued social division. Dawson (2017) comments, “One emotion or affective state may also transform into another—such as sadness into anger, or anger into guilt—and these may condense together into compound formations” (95). Such modulations are evident among both the Cured and the uninfected, and they relate intimately to and are inextricable from conflicting conceptions of the place of Cured individuals in Irish society. As Dawson (2014) reports, contradictions arise in post-conflict society between the wish to secure forward-looking political arrangements based on negotiated compromises and the desire for justice (including retributive justice) that is often felt to be urgent, paramount and non-negotiable. These contradictions are especially acute for the victims of violence who, confronted by amnesty and other arrangements designed to draw perpetrators into a negotiated political settlement, may be forced to choose between the pursuit of justice and the securing of a peace settlement or the securing of information about the death of a loved one. (266)

Abbie represents one such victim of violence, taking in Senan while not knowing what happened to Luke. A radio debate overheard in the film also exhibits just such contradictions. A man whose Cured daughter was released from internment argues, “People need to give them a second chance,” to which a woman replies, “We’ve given them every chance. They’re not integrating. No wonder crime’s on the rise. They’re not like us anymore.” She rebuts the man’s claim that they need to be “given some choices” by asking has he “seen the news? The violence? The vandalism? There’s something wrong with them. They’re not human.” Sgt. Cantor similarly denies Conor’s humanity by identifying him as the “alpha of the pack,” a strategy for preserving difference and justifying the failure of “integration” complained about by the woman on the radio. Another man interviewed by Abbie proposes an alternative to integration: “Infected, Cured, they’re all the same. Wipe the fuckin’ lot of them out, that’s what I say.” This anonymous man’s response to the release of the Cured reflects both the falsity of the political elite’s perception that, with the Belfast Agreement, “violence as a means of resolving nationalist antagonisms has been transcended, although the antagonisms themselves have not” (Hughes 2014, 252) and anger from some quarters at the Agreement’s “de facto amnesty for perpetrators in Northern Ireland” (266).8 Anti-Cured protestors display a similar anger at a similar amnesty, calling Senan, Conor, and other newly released Cured scum (startlingly punctuated with a protester loudly hitting the outside of the bus) and murderers as a prison bus discharges them, the camera swaying as if it were one of the discharged to align our perception with theirs; and when Abbie is picking up her child from school, another mother confronts

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her, demanding, “How could you take one in? Huh? . . . They’re murderers, the lot of them!” At another point, an interviewee opines that no more Cured should be released because the first two waves have been a “disaster” and “no one wants them here.” These attitudes resonate with moments such as Senan’s passing through a security checkpoint at which he must submit his eyes and his papers for inspection while a report of an assault on a Cured person is overheard on the soldiers’ radios—subtly unsteady camerawork again aligning us with Senan, as well lending a documentary feel to the scene. Such reactions toward and treatment of people like Senan gesture not only to resentments over past violence but also to the persistence of housing segregation (Hughes 2017, 257) and “social enclosure” (255) in Northern Ireland, as well as of “security barriers” along “interfaces between” Catholic and Protestant communities (254). In fact, such barriers were found to have actually tripled in number in the decade after the ceasefire took effect (McAlister, Haydon, and Scraton 2013, 4). Just three years before the release of The Cured, Dawson (2014) could write of “the fear” in border communities “of renewed Republican terrorism, which has increased in intensity, capacity and political significance . . . since . . . 2008, and gives the lie to calls for victims to ‘let go’ of grievance on the grounds that political violence is ‘now in the past’ in a post-conflict society” (284). In the film, the existence of the Resistant, on whom the cure has not worked, points to just such fears. Still fully under the sway of the infection and thus unrelentingly bloodthirsty toward the uninfected, the Resistant can be seen as standing in for those who remain committed to political violence as a means of (as the name suggests) resistance. The government decides that the best solution to what one person calls (using a euphemism similar to “the Troubles”) the “dilemma” of the approximately 5,000 Resistant is to conduct a “humane elimination,” despite worldwide “condemnation,” because it has concluded—wrongly, it turns out—that an effective refinement of the cure will not be possible. This development recalls a similar decision in 28 Weeks Later (2007), another zombie film set in a period of “reconstruction” in the UK. This earlier film justifies anxiety about asymptomatic carriers, as Alice (Catherine McCormack), who does not turn but is infected and contagious, causes a new outbreak that triggers an “extermination” protocol, and her son is later bitten and spreads the infection to Paris. The reconstruction and extermination are administered by an ineffective if not incompetent US military in the “Green Zone,” an evocation of the post-9/11 US presence in Baghdad that makes this film very much of a piece, in contrast to The Cured’s focus on domestic political violence, with the global concerns of the first decade of the zombie renaissance. The UK zombie television series In the Flesh (2013–2014), made in the following decade, provides another, closer parallel to the treatment of the Cured. Gaia Giuliani

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(2015) discusses the government’s exercise in In the Flesh of its power to “let live” in order to aid in negotiating communal trauma through the living’s reconciliation with zombies “made docile” and helped to recover memories by means of medication (370). If the Cured embody a similar approach, the government’s policy toward the Resistant presents a turn back to its “‘power to kill’” (370). This policy, combined with the public resentment and official treatment of the Cured—they are monitored for infractions such as missing work or displaying “anti-social behavior,” and former barrister and election candidate Conor, in circumstances that recall sectarian discrimination, has been assigned work as a cleaner—help Conor to justify his view that the Cured are safer with the Resistant than with “the rest” and that the Resistant hold “the key to our freedom.” Conor, resistant to political if not biological reformation, sets out to turn this key by using the role that he assumes as a leader in the Cured community to reignite violence, which he sees as the only means to his desired end. Conor’s claim that the Cured are “not the only killers . . . just the ones being reminded of it” echoes sectarian post-Conflict disagreements over who should be counted the true victims of its violence (Dawson 2014, 267). At one of Conor’s meetings, a man says that living as a freed Cured person is worse than when he was in prison because the Cured are “treated like lepers,” while from others comes a complaint about “having their every move monitored.” These grievances as they are shepherded toward bare life, the exclusion from citizenship and political life, lead to a call to stand up for themselves and march. Indeed, we later see “Cured rights now!” used as a protest chant. For Conor, however, such approaches are insufficient, particularly given his belief that Irish authorities “won’t stop with the Resistant. They want us all dead. We have to stop them.” Both failure to achieve “social change and hostile confrontations with authorities and police” foster radicalization (Bandura 2002, 111), and Conor turns his followers to violent action, bringing Senan to a basement where they are making Molotov cocktails and bombs. Conor promises Senan that the targets will be unoccupied and no one will be injured, but when this turns out to be false, Conor offers the justification that there are “always casualties” and that the infected are “dying every day because of” the uninfected. Conor’s reasoning represents a means of accomplishing moral disengagement in which “pernicious conduct is made personally and socially acceptable by portraying it as serving socially worthy or moral purposes,” such as “fighting ruthless oppressors” (a situation in which both sides typically condemn the “barbarity” of the other) (Bandura 2002, 103). The bombings, according to a television news report, injure several people and kill one, and they target “the homes of Irish Defense Volunteers.” The name of this fictional organization evokes Conflict-era Unionist groups such as the Ulster

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Defence Association and Ulster Volunteer Force (“A History” 2011), as well as the use during the same period of “volunteer” by Republican groups such as the IRA to designate non-officer members and the IRA’s partial derivation from the early twentieth-century Irish Volunteers (“History” 2022),9 all suggesting a repetition of historical trauma that aligns a new paramilitary group against the Cured Alliance, which takes credit for the bombings and which the government insists is “a terrorist organization.” Conor tells Abbie that the bombings result from the fact that “there’s a lot of anger out there,” especially with the announced elimination of the Resistant. Abbie defends the policy, saying that everyone would be in danger if only a single Resistant were free (the same reasoning used in 28 Weeks Later, in which the uninfected are considered collateral damage), but Conor points out that the danger would only be to the uninfected. Their exchange foregrounds that emotions such as fear can organize people into social groups (Dawson 2017, 94) and, further, that “coercive social conditions” such as those experienced by the infected, not “monstrous people,” create the conditions for cruel actions—even as, here, one side is or has the capacity to again become literal monsters (Bandura 2002, 109). On a metatextual level, such monstrousness adds an additional layer to the ability that Alexander Coupe (2017) assigns to the body of the Other to defy “complete identification” and thus, in “performance,” to “resist the reification implicit in ideologies that seek to privilege one version of the traumatic past over another” (para. 21). In making this claim, Coupe is discussing post-Conflict drama, but there is little reason that his observation cannot extend to film and so to performing the doubly Othered infected. Senan, in contrast to Conor, attempts to resist a return to political violence. Dr. Lyons (Paula Malcomson), who is working to cure the Resistant and who joins the Cured Alliance because of the Elimination and because she counts her beloved among the Resistant, says to Senan that being one of the Cured means that “you get to choose who you want to be.” Senan has already admitted to Dr. Lyons that he can sometimes feel the infected part of himself “screaming to get out.” The cells of the Cured retain the virus, as with someone who has had chicken pox, which explains why the Resistant see a Cured person as one of them and which symbolizes that an “infection” of ideas cannot be expunged but only controlled via an ongoing process of individual decision-making. While, as is true for Conor as much as for Seanan, what an individual considers moral behavior is determined by “the reciprocal interplay of cognitive, affective and social influences,” Senan demonstrates that despite “situational inducements to behave in inhumane ways, people can choose to behave otherwise by exerting self-influence” (Bandura 2002, 102). One of the most significant of these choices is to turn informer against Conor in order to prevent more uninfected being hurt or killed by Conor’s plans. Senan’s appeal to the authorities, however, proves ineffective, as Conor

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suddenly, bloodily, and repeatedly stabs Sgt. Cantor to death with a broken bottle when confronted (mirroring the historical failure of military force to stop the Northern Ireland Conflict) and reiterates his conviction that there are “always casualties.” One of those casualties ends up being Dr. Lyons herself, who discovers too late that Conor’s ultimate aim is to free as many Resistant as possible from their imprisonment and is killed by one of them just after seeing that she has cured her Resistant love, Jo (Hilda Fay). Conor had claimed that having one of the Resistant would force the authorities to listen “seriously” to the Cured Alliance and obviate the need for further bombings and violence. He relies here on the most effective method of “making violence morally acceptable”: judging “non-violent options . . . to be ineffective to achieve desired changes” and asserting that violent actions “will prevent more human suffering than they cause” (Bandura 2002, 106). Conor’s goal turns out to be focused on reducing the suffering only of the infected while also converting more uninfected when his followers launch an attack on the prison where the Resistant are being held, opening all of their cells and destroying gates outside with a suicide truck bombing. The woman driving the truck closes her eyes before the explosion, which may indicate that she is sending a message to the Resistant inside, as the infected have previously been shown wordlessly communing, and they rush to freedom, creating a new wave of mass violence. One result of this renewed violence is a temporary alignment of the infecteds’ and the uninfecteds’ relationships to the authorities: it is now the uninfected who are penned behind fencing (one person can be heard arguing, “You can’t treat people like this”), and Abbie gets punched by a soldier whom she argues with and spits on. During this wave of violence, Abbie’s son, Cillian (Oscar Nolan),10 is bitten by a Resistant man inside their house. The murder of Cillian’s father, Luke, inside their home and with the participation of Luke’s own brother reflects how “children and youth” continued to encounter violence “within families and/or communities” (McAlister, Haydon, and Scraton 2013, 11) in post-Conflict Northern Ireland. Similarly, Cillian’s post-epidemic infection reflects Northern Irish youth’s reports of the unexpected persistence of “strong conflict-related political identities” in some communities and of sectarian violence and rioting, which among young men is linked to feelings of marginalization caused by “local changes . . . alongside global trends” in politics and economics (10). The passing of the infection of sectarian violence to and by younger generations also informs a shot earlier in the film of a sign bearing a drawing representing a child with the words “I HAVE / THE MAZE VIRUS / I’m only small, but / I CAN MAKE YOU SICK.” Cillian’s laugh is heard over the end of the shot, which is followed nearly immediately by shots of Cillian on a merry-go-round, first with and then without Abbie, implying

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the circular nature of the infection that will later take hold in the boy. Senan kills the man who infects Cillian in a sequence that closely resembles Conor’s murder of Sgt. Cantor, but he also convinces Abbie not to kill Cillian in turn, arguing, “He doesn’t have to be like me. Lyons found a cure. I can save him.” Senan then carries Cillian out of the house and out of the city, vanishing into the darkness as he walks away from the camera in the final shot of the sequence, but it proves more difficult to escape the cycle of conflict itself. In the film’s closing sequences, we learn that Cillian is one of an estimated eight thousand new infected, that the government has launched a new humane elimination program, and that there is “growing” pushback against this policy, with families joining the Cured Alliance. One shot during the news report voice-overs that communicate this information shows a wall of graffiti that includes the slogans “Stop the Cure!” and “Only the Cured Die Young,” which suggest both an increased militancy on the part of the infected as well as the murals that became a popular means of political expression during the Conflict, including on barriers, and many of which remained in place at the time of The Cured’s release (Feliciano 2017). Signs on light posts also reveal that Conor is running for office as “The Voice of the Cured,” a move akin to the increased emphasis, beginning in the early 1980s, on electoral politics by IRA-associated party Sinn Féin, itself a change reflected in Northern Ireland’s murals (Crowley 2011, 34–39). Public knowledge of Dr. Lyons’s work also intensifies resistance to officially sanctioned perspectives, with one of the abovementioned reports saying that the government either knew of Lyons’s cure for the Resistant and covered it up or rushed into “the clean-up missions without considering any options.” This return to conditions similar though not identical to those at the beginning of the film points to the cyclical nature of the violence attached to the pursuit of political aims and the durability of sectarian resentments, although Conor’s new status as a politician also suggests how the methods of such struggles can evolve. The breaking news that there are “pockets of infected still remaining in the west of the country” is followed by an ambiguously hopeful concluding scene in which Senan and Cillian, on foot, break off from what is presumably one of these pockets and go their own way in the verdant landscape lit by an only partially set sun, perhaps signaling Senan’s continued desire to avoid a return to militancy. On the one hand, the film’s emphasis on social (re)integration contrasts the individualist survivalist fantasies of much zombie cinema, but on the other, The Cured, much like the era following the Belfast Agreement, provides no clean resolution. In The Cured, it is the zombies who are fast and the fitful process of reconciliation that is shambling.

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CONCLUSION While of the three films discussed in this chapter only The Cured foregrounds a particular political context and transnational trauma, all of them engage with how individuals live together—or apart—from one another and how the relationship to others/Others, or its lack, impacts the self-definition of the individual subject. The Night Eats the World strips its protagonist, Sam, of all social context, leaving him only his own imagination and the radical Other of the zombie against which to define himself, including his identity as a musical artist. Ultimately, sustaining self-definition through projection onto imagined or undead Others proves untenable, and Sam abandons his solitary safety to seek out other living humans. The characters in Ravenous are not isolated in the same way as Sam, though their numbers shrink to almost nothing over the course of the movie, converting most of them to zombies who reflect the living back to themselves much as the zombie Alfred does to Sam in The Night Eats the World. Here, that reflection involves the ambivalence of self-definition in a meaningless existence: pursuit of material goods may itself be meaningless, as implied by the film’s zombies continuing to collect them, but humans may still create their own meaning from meaningless things, some capitalistic, such as a trip to a theme park, and some abstract, such as humor or, as with Sam, music. Self-definition in The Cured occurs within and against groups with conflicting political aims and views of just rights and freedoms. A post-zombie-outbreak Ireland riven by the release of some infected persons back into society and the state execution of others mirrors the socially embedded cleavages that persist following the official cessation of hostilities in the Northern Ireland Conflict and the difficult process of living together when identity remains bound up in sectarianism and an ever-present possibility of a return to violence. While these conflicts remain unresolved at the film’s end, The Cured presents, in Abbie’s acceptance of her infected family members and the nonviolent approaches to the struggle for Cured rights, one example of how blurred boundaries between zombies and humanity can at least potentially provide “a template for an inclusive political identity and an expansive definition of citizenship” (Kamerling 2020, 155). Among the divergent approaches and focalizations of this trio of films, one finds a further commonality in their final images. All three conclude with characters physically traveling into an uncertain future, as do a number of the films discussed in previous chapters and many more throughout the decades of zombie cinema (in terms of the cannibal zombie, as early at least as Dawn of the Dead). In two of them, Ravenous and The Cured, these characters are adult-child pairs, uninfected in the former and infected in the latter. While Sam might positively reinvent himself after the end of The Night Eats the

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World, these children represent—as children also do in the endings of several films discussed so far, such as Cargo, The Dead Can’t Dance, and Blood Quantum—the possibility of reinventing how and in what kind of world the self exists as well. NOTES 1. Palmer (2021) views the casting of Lavant, Claire Denis’s “most iconic acting collaborator” as a nod to her cinematic legacy (7). 2. Angela Tenga (2021) makes a similar point about storytelling specifically, writing that one of the horrors of zombie narratives is “the absence of audience,” which robs storytelling, including telling the story of oneself, of its “humanity-defining communicative purpose” (95). 3. The juxtaposition of the scene in which Sam makes music alone using found objects with a scene in which he lays a corpse to rest in a bed—an adaptation, as in Cargo, of burial practices to a world with zombies—suggests an analogy that underscores the comparable ephemerality of art and human life. 4. This scene is reminiscent of Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) fatally shooting Bill Murray (Bill Murray) in 2009’s Zombieland when the latter jokingly but unwisely imitates a zombie. 5. Notably, Gaia Giuliani (2015) sees 28 Days Later as reproducing the “regime of segregation and totalitarian social control . . . experienced in Northern Ireland and in the colonies” (383). 6. While many online credits have been updated to read Elliot, the film credits Page as Ellen; I will refer to Abbie with she/her pronouns in this chapter since the character presents as female. 7. Mooney (2018) also observes that the film’s allegory might additionally be applied to global situations such as the treatment of refugees (158). 8. The release of “politically affiliated prisoners” was also accompanied by a “withdrawal of the British Army from the streets” (McAlister, Haydon, and Scraton 2013, 16), mirrored in The Cured by the withdrawal of UN troops. 9. One might additionally see reference to the Ulster Volunteer Force, which the Irish Volunteers was formed to oppose in 1913 (“History” 2022). 10. Cillian’s name may, acknowledging a different kind of Irish history, be a nod to Irish actor Cillian Murphy’s role in 28 Days Later and its important contribution to the post-2000 resurgence of zombie cinema.

PART II

Mutations in Asia

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Class and Capitalism, Take 2 Malaysia, South Korea, and the Philippines

Zombies, as demonstrated in the first chapter of this volume, have long provided an apt vehicle for critiques of capitalist systems and ways of being. “Capitalism, like certain bacteria, like the death-drive,” and, I would add, like the zombie, “is immortal” and, further, apocalyptic: “Unlike the multi-species life-systems powering it, the only terminal limit to capital’s perpetual augmentation is, if driven toward from within, external: either revolution or human extinction” (The Salvage Collective 2021, 13). In relation to such characteristics and as evident in the first chapter’s examination of examples from European and Latin American zombie cinema, as well as in subsequent chapters’ discussions of films such as Ravenous (see chapter 4), zombies can represent the predations of (globalized) capitalism or the exploited workers themselves, or even both simultaneously. Zombies, write Patricia Saldarriaga and Emy Manini (2022), participate neither in commodity fetishism nor in the market in any capacity, negating in the process the neoliberal goal of “happiness,” which is equivalent to “labor-based success” (18). But if zombies represent “bodies that have been emptied of their life force and have been reduced to the hunger for what has been stolen from them” by valueand-vitality-sapping capitalist exploitation of labor (62), that same hunger can also represent the devouring forces of an insatiable capitalism. As we have seen, The End?, with its workers who are both victimized within the workplace and, once infected, cannibalize their coworkers, as well as with its protagonist who learns to abandon his dedication to labor-based success, provides a clear example of both of these representational possibilities. In addition, a zombie outbreak or apocalypse can provide context for and bring into sharper relief class conflict among the living, as it does, for example, in Cockneys vs Zombies. 107

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Like the films discussed in chapter 1, those discussed in this chapter, from East and Southeast Asia, participate in the extended transnational tradition of zombie-enabled capitalist critiques while adapting those critiques to engage with local conditions and concerns. Malaysia’s KL Zombie (KL Zombi; 2013) and No Other Way! (Vere Vazhi Ille!; 2015) both feature delivery drivers as their working-class protagonists and contrast them with predatory capitalists, but both also feature an ultimate return to the status quo that sits uneasily alongside any criticisms rooted in class struggle. A third Malaysian film, KL24: Zombies (2017), concentrates instead on bourgeois characters— white-collar workers, housewives, and property owners—and the workplace and middle-class family become primary sites of its critiques, including of the intersection of gender and economic exploitation. Here too the zombie outbreak is (reportedly) contained in the end, although this containment (and thus the return to the capitalist heteropatriarchal norm) is arguably less certain than in the other two films. These resolutions stand in contrast to the more open-ended conclusions of The End?, Cockneys vs Zombies, and Juan of the Dead, in each of which the places that the protagonists inhabit (and in the latter two films, fight to defend) remain overrun with zombies, rendering economic systems nonfunctional and class hierarchies irrelevant (see chapter 1). The returns to order in these Malaysian zombie narratives, all of which can be classified as horror comedies (KL24: Zombies arguably leans more toward zom-dramedy), may be partially attributable, especially in the cases of KL Zombie and No Other Way!, to the inherent structural conservatism that Kyle William Bishop (2015) describes in the classical model of comedy, particularly the fulfillment of the protagonist’s quest and his romantic success (46–47). A second influence, however, may be the “strict film censorship” that has been in place in Malaysia since early in the 1980s, with revised guidelines released in 2010 (A. Y. B. Lee 2022, 72, 75). Although guidelines may have been more relaxed, those for horror films “require the film to conclude with the triumph of good over evil” (325). Mainstream Malaysian horror films, therefore, generally provide a moral, allow good to win, and display very little blood or gore (339). A number of indie filmmakers have chosen to disregard these guidelines (339)—the recent film Possessed (Rasuk; 2022), for instance, from KL24: Zombies codirector James Lee and KL Zombie writer Adib Zaini, ends with the leader of its zombies still alive and possessed/infected in a hospital bed—but even films that might escape censorship by forgoing theatrical release might nonetheless be influenced by such longstanding and pervasive pressures of official culture. Critiquing a different strain of pervasive cultural pressure, the highly successful South Korean film Train to Busan (Busanhaeng; 2016) features a white-collar father who, similarly to The End?’s Claudio, reorients himself away from his focus on neoliberal values of competition and accumulation

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because of a zombie outbreak. This character contrasts another businessman, who remains committed to selfish neoliberal values, while a homeless character makes a heroic, selfless, fatal sacrifice. Seoul Station (Seoul-yeok; 2016), the animated prequel to Train to Busan, focuses equally if not more on economic inequality and destructive neoliberalism. It traces the spread of the zombie epidemic to a refusal to aid homeless persons by those with the power to do so, and the forced sex work of a female character comments not only on class inequality but also on the inescapable exploitation of workers’ bodies under capitalism. In both films, the zombie threat throws into relief how capitalist “imperatives of competition, accumulation, profit-maximization, and increasing labour-productivity,” precepts of market relations into which individuals are compelled to enter in order to survive, “regulate not only all economic transactions but social relations in general” (Meiksins Wood 2002, 11). Such regulation is apparent in another South Korean film, Zombie for Sale (Gimyohan gajok; 2019; alternate English title: The Odd Family: Zombie on Sale), in the commodification of its titular zombie, obliged—for profit—to bite people rather than his preferred cabbages. The final film considered in this chapter, Block Z (2020), from the Philippines, spotlights the relationship between precarity and access to education while ultimately leaving its protagonists with the potential to move outside of existing systems and institutions. Within the variations among all of these films and their critiques is found a constant: the zombie compels viewers to “confront” the effects of “a neoliberalism built on the commodification of life” and creating the conditions for mass death (Saldarriaga and Manini 2002, 72). FROM WORKING-CLASS HEROES TO ZOMBIE HOUSEWIVES: KL ZOMBIE, NO OTHER WAY!, AND KL24: ZOMBIES Mary J. Ainslie (2016) proposes that Thai horror films may have a significant presence in Malaysia because they “offer the urban Malaysian consumer a depiction of Southeast Asian modernity perhaps more appropriate than that represented in the dominant incarnation of Malaysian horror” (182), featuring urban settings and concerns, including those around work and rent (185). Malaysian horror films, in contrast, often take place in rural settings, with “little overt reference to the stresses of city living” (192), rendering them less relevant to the “large, diverse, and increasingly affluent urban population of Malaysia” (194). Mainstream commercial Malaysian films, meanwhile, tend to offer characters who court one other at extravagant dinners (A. Y. B. Lee 2022, 229) and drive luxury cars (269), embodying the glamorous “official state envisioning of a modern and wealthy middle-class Malay” (278).

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Malaysian zombie films, however, present exceptions to these patterns. All three films discussed here take place in urban environments and incorporate economic anxieties, with two of the three explicitly invoking the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital and largest city, through the “KL” in their titles.1 An “economic bubble of the early 1990s” led Malaysia to “economic globalization,” entailing “economic liberalization and cultural reinvention” with nationalist aims (Goh 2011, 144). The nation has attempted to counteract income inequality with “a selective adoption of neoliberal practices alongside extensive state intervention and public welfare provisions,” some involving “ethnic preferential policies” (Lee and Choong 2019, 335); nevertheless, between 2010 and 2017, “the wage premium of professionals and technicians, and clerical and service workers . . . distinctly and steadily declined” (339). An urban service worker fills the role of reluctantly heroic protagonist in director Ming Jin Woo’s horror comedy KL Zombie, adapted by Adib Zaini from his novel Zombijaya (2011), while capitalism itself occupies a more conflicted position. Nipis (established comedian Zizan Raja Lawak), whose [nick]name means “Skinny,” delivers pizzas in Kuala Lumpur, making the zombie outbreak, as in films such as Juan of the Dead, an (almost liberatory) opportunity for a member or members of the working class to inhabit a world, common to zombie narratives, in which individual merit matters while “class, education, and nepotism are meaningless” (Schweitzer 2018, 180). The precarious status that his delivery job affords him is emphasized in moments such as his taking advantage of one customer’s zombification—which Nipis, in an echo of Shaun of the Dead, a film which counts screenwriter Zaini as an acknowledged fan (@NovelZombijay 2014), fails to notice—to keep the change from the money which he takes from the zombie’s hand, as well as his going to an ethnic Chinese cemetery with his roommate to ask for luck with a ticket for Malaysia’s popular 4D (4-digit) lottery from an ancestor presumably not their own and without knowing how to correctly enact the ceremony they wish to perform. This lifestyle is juxtaposed with that of Afiq (Afiq Izzudin), a primary school child whose acclimation to multiple houses and cars and travel abroad for leisure represents inherited capitalist wealth. Even when Nipis fulfills the heroic convention of forming a romantic heterosexual attachment near the end of the film, he has to ask the woman, Nora (Siti Saleha), if she could top up the gas in his motorbike. Nipis’s friend group, who also become, along with Nipis, the group of survivors whom we follow throughout the film, evinces economic struggles of its own. Nora and Sofea (Faezah Elai) sell a cosmetic cream for multilevel marketing (MLM) company Broway, a play on the US-based Amway, which includes Malaysia among the nations in which it operates. Sofea’s boyfriend, Aliff (Zain Hamid) works as a driver and personal assistant for a wealthy man

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who fantasizes about buying all of Singapore and turning it into a golf course. Kamarul (Iedil Putra) wants to be a pop star and auditions for a television singing competition, but his results are as bad of those of a school bus driver who works at the school where Nipis’s sister Ana (Izara Aishah) teaches. Some of the zombies themselves, similar to some of those in Romero’s Land of the Dead, remain trapped in their jobs even after they turn, such as an older man who keeps mixing and serving tea at his food and drink stand and a zombie teacher who keeps “teaching” a class full of zombified students. Before they turn, the infected become extremely hungry, a characteristic the symbolism of which is summed up in the image of the infected Aliff stopping himself from eating one of the cupcakes that he has picked up for his boss, not yet able to transgressively appropriate resources claimed by the wealthy. The zombie virus spreads to the various strata of Kuala Lumpur society through this group. Ana—in what could be read as an instance of conservative gender politics—is infected when she and Aliff, who are both dating other people, kiss. She then spreads the virus throughout her school, Aliff bites his boss on the golf course, and so on. Aliff himself, notably, is originally infected by a dog bite: in the latter portion of the twentieth century, Islam became consolidated “as a formidable, emotive and pre-eminent force of Malay identity” (Goh 2011, 145); and “many Muslims consider the dog to be an unclean animal” (Berglund 2014, 545). This attitude applies to dogs as companion animals, with “functional” or “utilitarian” roles held to be permissible (557), but there is no indication that the toy poodle who bites Aliff (and is later shown licking green goo rivulets of indeterminate origin) is a working dog, allowing his attempt to pet the animal in the street to be seen as similarly transgressive to his illicit kiss. At the same time, dogs as companion animals are becoming more acceptable in Muslim nations, a change that “appears to be significantly related to the reach” of transnational media (557), thereby providing in the outbreak’s origin both a link to globalization and a parallel to the spread of zombie media. Nipis’s new role battling zombies to survive is itself presented through allusions to transnational film in scenes that parody the slow-motion scenes in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes (2009) in which Holmes narrates his technique in voice-over as he fights. Nipis’s signature weapon, a field hockey stick, represents a similar transnational appropriation as equipment for a sport popular in Malaysia but invented in Britain and introduced to the Southeast Asian nation via British colonialism. Significantly, on more than one occasion, his Holmes imitations prove ultimately ineffective or are imagined but not executed, while a primary school student named Lisa (Nur Syafiqah) credits her skills in defeating zombies to having watched a lot of movies, privileging, by implication, the zombie cinema of which KL Zombie is an example over mainstream Hollywood blockbusters, which, along with Hong

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Kong and Bollywood films, many Malaysians still prefer to domestic productions (A. Y. B. Lee, 2022, 20). KL Zombie also separates itself even from many zombie films in its divergence from the trope of the dangerous zombified family member. Commonly, failing to kill a zombified loved one results in the death or moral compromise of one or more of the living characters. Here, though, police officer Azman (Azhan Rani), is justified in preventing Nipis from killing his son when the boy is in fact cured of his zombie state in short order. However, it is not Azman’s “recipes from my forefathers” which have effected the cure but the Broway cream that Nora squirted in the boy’s mouth. Where both government authority and cultural tradition fail, pyramid scheme commodities succeed, a turn toward reassertion of the capitalist hierarchies destabilized by the zombie infection. The commercial that opens the film features head of Broway Bro Khalid (Usop Wilcha), who exits a BMW wearing a flashy purple suit and sunglasses and flanked by two women, and promises that its sprays and creams will make customers more attractive and give them fairer skin. Malaysia is a “post-colonial nation that, for many years, had valorized lighter Anglocentric skin coloring” (Nicholas, Ganapathy, and Mau 2013, 172); and almost 40 percent of surveyed women from China, Malaysia, the Philippines, and South Korea use skin lighteners (which often contain mercury) (Mire 2020, 62), a number that has held steady since early in the millennium (Anekwe 2014, 2). These products sell a “transnational commercialized beauty” (Mire 2020, 70) that “privilege[s] Eurocentric femininity” (57) and “equalize[s] lighter skin with personal happiness and class mobility” (62). Broway’s products, then, intermingle the deceptive practices of MLMs with such colorism, one of the racial hierarchies produced by (globalized) capitalism. When Bro Khalid, who has never used his own products, addresses his MLM employees, he uses White women as models while he holds himself up as a model of social mobility who used to take the train to work and live in an apartment but now owns multiple luxury cars and houses. In the end, while it is Nipis and his associates who administer the zombie cure via Super Soakers and water balloons as they drive through towns in the greater Kuala Lumpur area, it is Bro Khalid who is thanked by the television news and who continues to profit by rebranding Broway’s products as “Bro Set AZ Anti-Zombie Spray.” On the one hand, at least the women models in his Anti-Zombie Spray commercial are not White, but on the other, his continued success in what seems to be a return to a pre-zombie status quo hovers uneasily between a critique and ironic celebration of consumer capitalist society. Like KL Zombie, horror comedy No Other Way!, Malaysia’s first Tamil-language zombie film,2 written and directed by M. S. Prem Nath, features a delivery driver, Surya (Denes Kumar), as its protagonist. Many Tamils arrived in Malaysia from India in the nineteenth century, during British

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colonial rule, and worked for low wages as laborers on plantations (Willford 2009, 228–29). While national policies enacted beginning in the 1970s to spur economic development benefitted “wealthy Indians and Chinese” in their capitalist pursuits, “poverty among Malays (and poor Tamils, and to a lesser extent Chinese) has persisted” (241), as has “the discrimination faced by Tamils in all social spheres” (244). Although Surya does not face any obvious discrimination in the film, he is established from its beginning as a member of the precariat. Not only does he work a low-income job but he loses this job within the first ten minutes of the film, and he receives no salary when he is fired because he had already taken an advance the previous month, suggesting that his job does not pay him enough to meet his needs. His firing precipitates an argument with his stylishly dressed girlfriend, Maya (Jasmine Michael), who is angry not just that Surya has gotten “fired again” but that the position from which he was fired was only an “ordinary delivery job.” Surya (and his suitability as a heterosexual partner) is judged against men with more income: Maya adds that her family criticizes her for “wasting my time on a useless guy,” to which Surya retorts that she should date one of “those fair, chubby guys who drive fancy cars” instead, a remark that ties classism to the colorism reflected in KL Zombie. In what might be seen as a satire of the widespread “disgruntlement over job prospects” among young people in Malaysia that has resulted from its rapid “urbanization and industrialization” (Yusof 2010, 185), Surya is looking at job postings in a 7-Eleven, his complaint that there is nothing for someone of his “caliber” implying that he is unqualified even for these positions, when he receives a call from his boss at a security job from which he had also been fired, offering him a position as security guard for a building to be demolished in two days. Surya is tasked with preventing further thefts from the building of materials believed to have been sold for scrap, the sort of extralegal entrepreneurship that one might find among the impoverished characters in Juan of the Dead. When some gangsters at the building, which becomes the site of a black magic–induced zombie outbreak that Surya and others trapped in the building must try to survive and to stop, later tell Surya about what they do not yet know was a zombie attack on one of their number, he objects that his only job is to “prevent theft,” underlining that capitalism is interested in protecting property but not people. Meanwhile, to put Surya’s income issues in perspective, the guard from whom he takes over calculates that the RM 3,000 that Surya has been promised for this two days’ work, which converts to roughly $678 as of this writing, equates to three months of his own salary. Maya, when she comes to see Surya during this job, does in fact catch a thief in the building, a man who otherwise sells cendol (a sweet dessert popular in Southeast Asia) and tells Surya (in English), “I just try to earn a living, sir.” This cendol vendor spends most of his onscreen time seated

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subordinately on the floor while handcuffed and hooked to a wall, and unlike other characters in the film, he does not receive a name: he is identified in the credits and by one of the other characters only as Cendol Man, collapsing his identity completely with his low-wage labor. Others in the building are similarly members of the precariat: two members of a struggling rock band rehearsing in a small, poorly lit, windowless room in the building always get their cendol on credit from the Cendol Man, and one of them, Bubo (Alvin Martin), worries at one point that he may have to “work at the car wash again” and at another that if he had studied hard (and by implication qualified for jobs that better compensated him for the exploitation of his labor) like his parents said and not become a rock drummer, he might not be trapped in a building full of zombies. In addition, Surya’s first act as security guard is to accept a bribe from head gangster Anthony (Magendran Raman) to disregard the blood left behind from the beating of a man who borrowed and cannot repay money from Anthony’s criminal organization. Both this indebted man and Surya stand in contrast to Anthony, who speaks in the foreground of a shot on his cell phone about the things he is buying for his daughter’s birthday party while the beating goes on behind him and who acts as the equivalent to a manager within the same category of gore capitalism to which Juan of the Dead’s zombie-killing business belongs. Importantly, Surya’s apparent inability to maintain low-wage employment can be seen as a form of resistance to capitalist insistence on and profit from productivity. When Surya is first introduced, he says (in English), “Facebook time!,” and starts scrolling on his smartphone (“liking” what appears to be a post advertising a horror film) while sitting on his parked motorbike in a city street rather than delivering a customer’s biryani in a timely fashion. Neither does it take long for Surya to sit down during his security guard shift and, as he says, “begin my work” of checking Facebook. The “restrictive economy,” represented by Surya’s boss at his delivery job and the customer angry about her late biryani, who lives in a gated home with a sports car parked outside, “only considers activities whose goals are gains, acquisition, usefulness, and conservation,” while Surya’s use of Facebook while working instead falls into an opposing “general economy” that “includes waste, loss, exuberance, destruction, and so on” (Saldarriaga and Manini 2022, 23). At the same time, although Surya’s waste reduces the value that can be expropriated from his labor by his direct employer, it creates profit for a multinational corporation instead, one that a few years before the film’s release boasted 10 million users in Malaysia, the “17th largest concentration of Facebook users in the world” and the third largest in Southeast Asia (Mustaffa et al. 2011, 6).3 One might go so far as to see a nod to the company’s monetization of surveillance in the refusal of the biryani shop owner to believe the (untrue) excuse that Surya was stuck in traffic—the same (also untrue) excuse that Nipis

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uses for his own, less extensively foregrounded resistance to productivity in KL Zombie—because he liked a Facebook post ninety minutes after he left to make his delivery. Nonetheless, Surya’s lack of productivity can still be interpreted as mirroring zombies’ “protest,” through their own wastefulness and destructiveness, “against the restrictive economy whose neoliberalism subjugates human beings” (Saldarriaga and Manini 2022, 23), particularly since the zombies in No Other Way! are the products of attempted exploitation of evil spirits by a wealthy swami, making them in turn mirrors of living workers. The film traces its zombie outbreak—which is, atypically for contemporary zombie cinema, also a possession4—to a property dispute. An animated segment prior to the opening credits, which begins by telling viewers that when (a) man reveals his greed, he reveals his true nature, flashes back to 1982 to tell the story of the fight between brothers Pratap and Prakash over their inheritance from their deceased father, an “ancestral property, a plot of land.” This inheritance is properly supposed to be divided equally between heirs, but Pratap, “consumed by greed,” wants the property entirely for himself. The family name is tarnished, the battle ends up in court, and Pratap ends up in prison over a forged will. Subsequently, and accompanied by a shift to live action, Pratap (David Anthony) enlists a shaman who, it is later clarified, comes “from the mountains” and specializes in enslaving evil spirits, a power that he uses to curse the disputed land in a ceremony involving a book of spells and a goat sacrifice. As this is the land upon which stands the building that Surya is hired to guard in the film’s present, one might see this curse as an inversion of property developers’ involvement with spirit cults, which coincided with a development boom beginning in the 1990s, a period in which at least one scene of the movie takes place (Goh 2011, 146). Developers, a “predominantly ethnic Chinese” (152) cohort, would arrange “voluntary propitiation of keramats—a Malay Muslim guardian spirit—at their construction sites” (149), despite keramat worship, with its transcultural history, being frowned on by orthodox Islam (156). The shaman’s assistant later, it is heavily implied, kills the shaman and steals his book of spells, imprisoning numerous souls of sacrifices and people who oppose him in a “cursed vessel” while accumulating—and profiting from—many followers as a swami (Janani Balu in his diegetically current self and Danish Supramaniam in his younger incarnation). The actions of both the shaman and the swami align with those of keramat-appeasing developers as examples of how “powerful capitalists” can embrace “supernatural activities” more commonly thought of as sites of resistance to capitalist exploitation “in the course of pursuing their economic goals” (146). The swami embodies what the film’s prologue condemns as spiritual leaders who trick and “ensnare followers” to gain wealth and status, creating their

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own “kingdom[s],” cults that represent the “pinnacle of heresy.” He arrives at the building that Surya is guarding, where the swami and his followers are sixth-floor tenants, in a chauffeured Mercedes and enters via a red carpet lined by his acolytes. The swami’s henchmen tell Surya that if he wants to enter the sixth floor, he must pay RM 1,000 to become a member of their group, a fee ($226 as of this writing) that represents a month’s salary for the security guard Surya relieves and to which Surya objects that an “ordinary man earns only 900” (although he does not specify if he means per month). The swami is there that night to conduct his “ultimate satanic ritual,” which ends up accidentally releasing evil spirits through a portal to hell that possess the swami and his followers, turning them into zombies—although fewer than there might have been because the swami has lost attendees to another ritualistic capitalist enterprise: a football match. While the zombies resemble and behave like those in the Romero tradition, including turning others through their bite and being susceptible to attacks to the head (although here the brain need not be destroyed), the origin of the outbreak recalls instead the Afro-Caribbean branch of the zombie myth, especially because the swami’s ritual is said to require a body stolen from a cemetery. From this perspective, the swami represents a (failed) capitalist zombie master of the Murder Legendre variety, although his failure and zombification should not be read as symbolizing the supersession of the Afro-Caribbean zombie by the flesh-eating zombie. Rather, the film—which defines a zombie in English and Tamil on an opening title card as the “reanimated corpse of a dead human being by of [sic] viral, fungal, chemical, witchcraft or supernatural means; devoid of thought and emotion, no sensation of pain, driven only by the insatiable drive to consume the flesh of the living”—amalgamates these types of zombie together with, arguably, elements from the Malaysian hantu tradition. “Belief in demonic possession is widespread in Malaysia, deriving from animist beliefs” (Sahdan, Pain, and McEwan 2022, 289), and hantu, which means ghosts or spirits but can refer to a wide variety of supernatural or demonic beings (289–90), possess “supernatural powers that enable them to possess human beings” (289). Hantu “are a natural part of Malaysian life. They . . . co-exist and occasionally participate in day-to-day interactions with humans. Similar perspectives about ghosts exist in many other non-Western communities” (Nicholas, Ganapathy, and Mau 2013, 164), such as the Aboriginal community in Cargo. Stories of hantu “are concomitant with Malay culture, [but] they are also familiar in Malaysia’s non-Malay communities, and their popularity is strongly ensconced in the general Malaysian culture” (164), making them widely available to domestic audiences as a point of reference for the film’s take on zombies. Suggesting such potential associations, Anthony says to an infected underling that he told him to wear a clown costume (which he is, as a likely cheaper labor option for Anthony’s daughter’s birthday party),

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not to become a ghost, and Surya says that his failure to be suspicious of the high pay he was offered has landed him “among demons.” Hantu are not necessarily evil or frightening, but they can be harnessed, typically by male owners, in pursuit of wealth and status (164, 173–74),5 the same way that the shaman and swami harness (not always evil) spirits. No Other Way!, like films such as The Dead Can’t Dance, asserts the place of its particular permutation of the zombie myth in a largely White, Western cinematic tradition. As in KL Zombie, one character, Nithya (Farah Hanim), explicitly draws on her knowledge of zombie cinema as a resource during the outbreak. When others hypothesize that Anthony’s clown-costumed underling is a demon, a person infected with Ebola, or a vampire, Nithya avows that, as a filmmaker, she knows for certain that he is a zombie. The popular valorization of zombie cinema, including No Other Way!, through which knowledge such as Nithya’s is transmitted, is suggested when Anthony and the band members immediately agree that they need to take a selfie with the man if he is a zombie. A comparable moment occurs in KL24: Zombies, when a character named Steven (Lim Benji) says that he knows the rules of infection from watching zombie movies and castigates his father for wasting his time on romantic comedies. That Nithya’s filmmaking currently consists of a project for college involving filming the band’s rehearsal shows a low-budget spirit that evokes No Other Way! itself, as does a conversation between the band and a manager or producer who pushes the artists to change their songs to English for greater salability. “A Tamil song doesn’t have to have Tamil lyrics,” he advises them, advocating for what he says is the popular trend of English songs with Tamil rap breaks. The film resists this variety of market pressure: while it does mix influences, only the Cendol Man speaks in English (scattered phrases such as “Facebook time” aside). His explanation is that a teacher told him when he was young that he was killing Tamil, so now he speaks English so that he will “kill” it and “Tamil will live forever lasting,”6 a joke that serves as metacommentary on the film claiming a place for Tamil-language cinema within the transnational zombie canon. The film also prominently includes and acknowledges filmic influences from outside the Western zombie tradition, as in a nearly four-minute relationship-centered musical scene, which includes shots of a band performing and Surya and Maya dancing in various costume changes, that, although the characters themselves do not sing, perhaps shows the lingering influence of “Indian film and narrative style” in Malaysian cinema (A. Y. B. Lee 2022, 95). In the final scene of the film, a jiāngshī, seemingly the body stolen for the swami’s ritual, emerges from a coffin in the trunk of a car and hops away. Some consider the traditional jiāngshīi to be more like a vampire and some to be more like a zombie (an indeterminacy not unlike that of the film’s own demon-zombies), but the modern image of a hopping male vampire in a Qing robe derives from

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Hong Kong cinema starting in the 1930s (Bai 2013, 109–10). This brief inclusion of the jiāngshī, then, points to the transculturism of both the film and of Malaysia as a nation. One might also perceive the jiāngshī, whose power the swami apparently meant to harness, as alluding to Malaysia’s successful ethnic Chinese capitalist class. Its presence following Surya’s victory over the zombified swami and his living spell book extends the ambiguity surrounding that victory. The climactic burning of the swami and the book, which banishes the evil spirits and returns any still-animate zombie to normal, can be seen as a victory by the working class over a wealthy, predatory capitalist and as heroic working-class action in opposition to both the fair-skinned, chubby men with fancy cars whom Surya invokes and the swami’s zombified (metaphorically or literally) followers. However, after finally emerging into daylight from the dim interior of the building, Surya gets a call offering him a security job at another building, and although Maya says she’ll kill him if he takes this job, the exchange reminds us that he will need to take some sort of work, returning most likely to his cycle of low-waged exploitation. Even as Surya is depicted walking off into the sunset with Maya and two other survivors, he has won at best a temporary victory: not only has he not defeated all of the building’s monsters, but also, and maybe worse, he has not escaped the market. KL24: Zombies depicts characters as trapped by market relations as well. In an interview, James Lee, codirector with Gavin Yap and Shamaine Othman, positioned KL24: Zombies, made for YouTube distribution rather than commercial release, as a return to the “cult movies . . . with very low budgets” that made up the zombie genre before the “blockbuster spectacles” and “mainstream” popularity of properties such as World War Z, Train to Busan, and The Walking Dead, emphasizing that zombie films are “rarely done in Malaysia” (Suzira 2017). Lee himself was a pioneer of indie digital video filmmaking in Malaysia (A. Y. B. Lee 2022, 134) and the first Malaysian filmmaker to consistently cross over between indie and “mainstream commercial filmmaking” (322).7 As such, he led “the venture into commercial filmmaking through the horror genre” (322) while resisting “Islamisation and local cinematic guidelines for the horror genre” (323). One might expect more working-class heroes from Lee and his codirectors in an avowedly “cult” film, but in contrast to the delivery drivers at the center of KL Zombie and No Other Way!, the protagonists of KL24: Zombies come almost exclusively from (or are dependents of someone from) the professional class. The bulk of the film is divided into three narratives, with some intersection: in the first, the spreading zombie virus penetrates an office where a few workers and their boss remain; in the second, a family ends up facing zombie threats from both inside and outside their apartment or condo unit; and in the third, set again in what seems to be a condo unit, conflicts within a polygamous

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family (a daughter from which is dating the previously mentioned family’s son) are exacerbated when one wife turns out to be infected. In the film’s final ten minutes, four survivors from these narratives attempt together to reach an evacuation zone. That large portions of these characters’ dialogue is in English as well as Malay reflects the preference of middle-class Malaysians to converse in English (A. Y. B. Lee 2022, 212). The class status of the film’s central characters does not mean, however, that all of them are economically secure. One office worker, Joe (Joseph Germani), also works part-time as an Uber driver and makes sure to remind Farah (Sharifah Amani), a lawyer for a women’s rights NGO who lives in the same building, to rate him when he drops her off. At the office, Joe worries, in the midst of growing evidence of violence and an unchecked epidemic of what they think is a flu, that if he and his project team take medical leave, they will miss their project deadline. Joe’s coworker Fahad (Fahad Iman), similarly forced to choose between his health and safety and his income, indicates that he is willing to take unpaid leave, since he has already used up his allotted medical leave. Supervisor Alfred (Alfred Loh) interrupts this conversation and admonishes Joe, Fahad, and the third team member, Videsh (Jiven Sekar), to get back to work on their presentation on apps and the attention economy, a subject which calls to mind Surya’s Facebook use. He also gives Joe his lunch order, precipitating Joe’s visit to an infected food vendor. Alfred’s vexation that his presentation is ruined after he collapses because he is infected and his forcing Joe, Fahad, and Videsh to stay at work to fine-tune the presentation—while the rest of the staff are allowed to leave due to conditions outside—continues the dehumanizing emphasis on profit at the expense of workers’ bodies, and Alfred’s confiscation of the trio’s keycards underscores the control that he has over those bodies and their movement. Once Alfred becomes a zombie (and is immediately recognized as such by Videsh8), they are trapped in an actively, lethally dangerous capitalist workplace in the same way as Claudio in The End?. These conditions betoken the “tragedy of the worker,” which “is that, as long as she works for capitalism, she must be her own gravedigger. Capital never extracts energy from the earth, but it makes a taxing withdrawal from the worker’s body” (The Salvage Collective 2021, 34). Both Alfred (who is killed) and those whom he kills represent victims of such debilitation. Even after escaping the building—with the help of a working-class figure, the security guard (Azman Hassan) who killed zombified Alfred—and having just sneaked by someone being killed in the street by zombies, Fahad panics that he didn’t apply for leave before they got out. In the film’s third segment, which focuses on the Muslim Farah’s family, the zombie infection threatens bourgeois domestic space as well, much as it does in the middle segment focused on Farah’s boyfriend Steven’s family.

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Husna (Amanda Ang), one of the four women polygamously married to Farah’s father, Karim (Na’a Murad), believes that infection “won’t happen to people like us”; and when Farah’s mother, Salwa (Fatimah Abu Bakar), asks her to clarify, Husna specifies “people who live in this area,” which might refer to an ethnically homogeneous neighborhood but more likely refers to an area defined by a certain class status, which Husna believes will insulate her from the city’s problems. Husna is wrong (this is, after all, a zombie film); and the infection enters the household via the commodification of women. Karim’s wives have consciously removed themselves from the labor market. One, Karina (Alia Kearney), reveals that she married Karim because she was “so tired of working” and “just wanted to live a comfortable life,” and Salwa says that she gave up her career as a financial planner and became completely dependent on Karim. But their exit from the labor market has merely differently commodified their bodies and time, as highlighted by Karim’s son Imri’s (Ali Alasri) comparison of Karim’s multiple marriages to collecting Pokémon (monsters in a long-running video game and multimedia franchise), as well as by their connection to the workplace. Karim recounts that it was other men in his office getting married that influenced him to marry his first wife, Salwa. Husna was an interior decorator at his office with whom he was having an affair; Karina pursued him at the workplace as well; and he was the boss of his youngest and most recent wife, Melati (Siti Farrah Abdullah), before adding her to his collection. Melati, a symbol of Karim’s inability to stop accumulating women—even one who, unbeknownst to him, was seeing his son and is carrying Imri’s child—is the vector by which the zombie infection enters the wives’ domestic space. Melati is also associated with the accumulation of other types of property, as Karim is giving her a new condo (decorated by means of Husna’s labor). Karim’s actions evoke “popular discourse” in Malaysia that views men as more likely than women to “give in to their passion” and to “take younger wives to satisfy their lust” (Gray 2010, 124), as well as widespread gossip in Kuala Lumpur suggesting that condos are “populated by the second wives and mistresses” of the wealthy (123). “We can’t be zombies in our marriage,” says a tearful Salwa, summing up the first three wives’ dissatisfaction with their treatment compared to that of Melati and linking them to the zombie as an exploited body. When they do become zombies, breaking free, symbolically, from a storage room and eating Karim before being killed by Imri (objectification destroying the family unit much as in Yummy), it can be viewed as both an act of resistance and a domestic parallel to Joe and his coworkers’ dehumanizing experience in the office. In the end, the security guard from earlier in the film (who declines to give his name, saying that he is “just a security guard” and reinforcing his status as a working-class everyman9) helps Farah (notably, as an NGO employee,

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neither a capitalist nor a bourgeois housewife) to escape via helicopter from a Kuala Lumpur which has fallen to zombies. Farah hands over a canister that might help develop a cure to the soldiers overseeing evacuations, and a final television news bulletin asserts that the outbreak has been contained, suggesting a return to the patriarchal capitalist status quo. However, such a return is rendered questionable by repeated undercutting of the trustworthiness of televised news. The English-language newscast that opens the film includes a chyron urging viewers not to believe “all the ‘Fake News’ websites and articles on their Facebook feed,” while other television reports identify the infection as an unknown strain of influenza, claim that Malaysia is garnering praise for its containment of the outbreak, and insist that the infection is not a zombie outbreak as reported in alternative media. These untruths lend diegetic weight to Steven’s father’s criticism that mainstream print and television media invent the news as they go along, to which Farah replies that people only get their news from Facebook now anyway. Further calling into question a return to a pre-zombie status quo are the images that precede and follow the final news bulletin: the first of the security guard smoking atop a car, surrounded by zombies, as the last helicopter flies away, and the second of two characters about to eat food in a shot that links back to the infected food vendor whom Joe visited. The juxtaposition of these scenes to a newscast that the film has taught viewers not to trust suggests at least the potential for continued disruption of the capitalist system and its marketization of social relations. WHEN THERE’S NO MORE ROOM IN NEOLIBERAL HELL, THE DEAD WILL WALK THE EARTH: TRAIN TO BUSAN, SEOUL STATION, ZOMBIE FOR SALE, AND BLOCK Z The success that Train to Busan, directed by Yeon Sang-ho, has enjoyed is such that, six years after its release, a character in the second episode of the South Korean zombie television series All of Us Are Dead (Jigeum Uri Hakgyoneun; 2022) can refer to the film’s title as a shorthand for the zombie apocalypse. Prior to Train, South Korean zombie cinema has a somewhat spotty history, due in part to “restrictions on the distribution of American and Japanese films” prior to 1988 (Lee 2019, 151). 1981’s A Monstrous Corpse (Goeshi) offered “the first attempt to depict the zombie in the Korean cinema” (Elidrissi 2021, 275), followed by its absence from Korean film until the fourth segment of the 2006 anthology film Dark Forest (Juk-eum-yi soop), which mingles, like No Other Way!, “zombies and shamanism” (278). Although ghost narratives may still dominate Asian cinema (A. T.-G. Lee

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2022), including that of South Korea, the zombie gained ground there from 2010 on, with Busan kicking off a resurgence in its popularity in South Korean film and television that has yet to abate (Elidrissi 2021, 278). A proliferation in the nation’s cinema since the 1990s of self-interested capitalistic characters as villains can be linked to the continued focus on profit by some while others fought to end the autocratic rule that came in 1997 (Austin 2020, 20–21). Train, Seoul Station (written and directed by Yeon Sang-ho), and Zombie for Sale (directed by Lee Min-jae) all provide examples within the zombie subgenre not only of this paradigm but also of the symbolization by South Korean zombies of “a particular necropolitical [i.e., encompassing decisions about who lives and who dies in a society] inequality when it comes to class and labour that is specific to South Koreans” and that contrasts zombies’ commonplace symbolization of “over-consumerism” in Western cinema (8). In Train, which has received substantially more scholarly attention than the other films discussed in this chapter, fund manager Seok-woo’s (Gong Yoo) prioritization of his capitalist career over his family strains his relationship with his daughter, Su-an (Kim Su-an) and likely figures in his divorce. His priorities mark him as “the archetypal neoliberal subject,” an “entrepreneurial individual whose only relationship to other people is competitive self-enhancement” within a “dominant model of social organisation” that is competitive rather than cooperative (The Care Collective 2020, 4). Seok-woo is in fact trying to improve his relationship with Su-an by taking her to see her mother for her birthday when a zombie outbreak spreads to the train on which they, along with passengers from a cross-section of South Korean society, are traveling and within which much of the film unfolds as the passengers struggle against the zombies and one another for survival. Seok-woo’s shortcomings as a husband and father both emphasize the contradictions of patriarchal masculinity under capitalism and his failure, at least initially, to embody the “hypermasculine patriarch” perpetuated in “Korean national myth” to “compensate for [historical] domination from outside forces” (Koo 2020, 166). The titular train, in fact, the Korea Train eXpress (KTX), runs on a modified railway line “laid during the Japanese colonial occupation” (Kim 2019, 444) and the stops of which evoke the retreat of the South Korean military early in the Korean War (Gardener 2021, 42).10 But the threats of neoliberal globalization are internal as well as external, and this particular train also, as Ryan Gardener (2021) and others note, symbolizes the “Ppalli-Ppalli culture,” which means “quickly quickly, or hurry hurry, culture” and “has come to underlie South Korea’s rapid economic growth and modernization over the last few decades” (47; see also Elidrissi 2021, 286). The very rapidity of this process acts as a source both of national trauma and fetishization of productivity and overwork (Koo 2020, 171). Seok-woo begins the film as an avatar of this work culture and “the

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new Korean class system,” which is negatively associated with egotism and individualism (Austin 2020, 17). Seok-woo, to take one example, explicitly articulates an individualist outlook when he crouches down to tell Su-an, who has given her seat to an older woman because she knows that her own grandmother experiences knee pain, that she should only look out for herself in “a time like this,” and fellow passenger Yoon Sang-hwa (Ma Dong-seok) calls Seok-woo “a bloodsucking ‘anteater’”—playing on ants as a nickname for small players in the stock market (Kim 2019, 446)11—who “leeches off others” upon learning that he is a fund manager, one who profits without producing (Sang-hwa proudly points out in the same conversation that he “made” the fetus his wife is carrying). Later, when Seok-woo wishes to conceal from the other survivors a way to avoid quarantine, Su-an, who wishes to share this knowledge, tearfully asserts, underscored by a slow zoom in on her face, that his wife left him because he cares only about himself. However, Seokwoo “ends up redeeming himself later” by “working . . . for the ‘collective’ good” (Austin 2020, 17). His change in orientation contrasts the unflagging commitment to self-interest of business executive Yon-suk (Kim Eui-sung), a man who, Austin (2020) notes, enacts necropolitical decisions (8) and directly sacrifices multiple people to save himself before eventually being bitten. Seok-woo, the man who “epitomizes Ppalli-Ppalli work-life,” in the end sacrifices his own life to save those of his daughter and the pregnant Sung-kyung (Jung Yu-mi) (Gardener 2021, 49–50). While a renewed focus on biological family is not inherently a progressive mode of resistance to neoliberalism, Will McKeown (2020) critiques Seok-woo’s sacrifice on different grounds, arguing that it imposes on his daughter a debt, a state of independence mirroring that valorized by neoliberalism, and an obligation to keep surviving—a process of meeting objectives which beget further objectives that McKeown likens to the “pressures” (79) of neoliberalism itself (77–79, 82). From this perspective, although Su-an might be reunited with her mother eventually, the film’s end leaves open the possibility that she has escaped from the zombies but not from the system that gave rise to them in the first place. Seok-woo represents both a victim of and “a predator in this zombified capitalist world,” much like the zombies themselves (Kim 2019, 446); and his involvement with that world is directly connected to the zombies’ origin. The outbreak is caused by a leak at a biochemical plant that is important to his financial dealings. When an increasingly distraught coworker reveals the outbreak’s origin in a phone call, he seeks absolution from Seok-woo, asking whether they bear blame and saying that they only did what they were told. He, in other words, disregards a system-level view in order to insulate himself from culpability. But if “capitalism can—must—be described as a death cult” since its “unconditional imperative to accumulate” propels participants “to the horizon of human extinction” (The Salvage Collective 2021, 14)—here in

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the form of the zombie apocalypse—this individual analyst is still an enabling member of that cult, whether he personally intended to cause any harm or not. “Neoliberal market exchanges are primarily controlled by extremely powerful marketplace actors that are opaquely interconnected” and “globalised” (The Care Collective 2020, 10), making the victims of the “faceless financial capital that controls people lives” (Kim 2019, 445) and unleashes the zombie virus equally faceless to those victimizing them. This dynamic also makes it easier to blame individuals for their own exploitation, as when Yon-suk tells Su-an that she will end up like the unhoused man on the train (Choi Gwi-hwa) if she doesn’t study, a sentiment that echoes the drummer’s worry in No Other Way! and which Su-an’s mother has taught her is espoused by “bad” people. In the film’s opening scene, under a portentous overcast sky, the farmer who is stopped on the road by men in protective clothing to disinfect his vehicle does not believe their explanation of a “tiny” biotechnological leak. Gardener (2021) argues that the leak suggests that Ppalli-Ppalli culture fosters inattention to safety (48), and scholars have linked Train’s critiques of profit-prioritizing government and corporate entities to a 2013 train crash that shut down “rail traffic between Seoul and Busan” (Elidrissi 2021, 282), to inadequate handling of the 2015 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) crisis (282; see also Kim 2019, 445), and, most popularly, to the 2014 sinking of the Sewol ferry, which killed more than three hundred people, most of them high school students (445; see also Elidrissi 2021, 281–82; Austin 2020, 20; Koo 2020, 167–68). Luisa Koo (2020) interprets the group of high schoolers on board Train’s train as evoking these victims (172); and Gardener (2021) views Yong-suk as representing not only “widespread perceptions of the prevalence of corporate corruption in South Korea” (49)—notably, Kristeva (2020) calls corruption the “socialized appearance of the abject” (106; see also chapter 2)—but also, as chief of a transportation company, the ferry disaster specifically (Gardener 2021, 48–49). Even the military, until arguably the film’s final scene, “offer no protection from a disaster . . . produced by capitalist modernity itself” (Höglund 2017, 9). The television news, meanwhile, similarly to broadcasts in KL24: Zombies and Juan of the Dead, asks viewers to trust the government, assures them of their safety if they just stay home, and blames the whole thing on rioters. While untrue in a literal sense, the characterization of the zombie apocalypse as riots does accurately point to an apropos anxiety: zombies represent “work without reward” and the fear of “riot and disorder” resulting from capitalist oppression (Tenga and Zimmerman 2013, 82). Here, then, the zombies, whose inability to see in the dark Keith McDonald and Wayne Johnson (2021) see as nodding to “a nation blindly accepting economic neoliberalism” (286), simultaneously rebel against that acceptance. One passenger, Jong-il (Park Myung-sin), even comes around to their side after initially criticizing the violence she sees on

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a TV as people being willing to “riot over anything” these days. Much later, she opens a door between her own train car, where the other survivors are fighting among themselves, and one packed with zombies—including her sister, visible against the door’s bloodied window, whom she laments always helped others first and who died doing exactly that. In allowing the zombies in, Jong-il punishes the living for behaving egoistically rather than collectively (a problem the zombies do not have). The first nonhuman worker in the film, and the first thing that we see, is not a zombie but a simple automation waving a traffic baton, complete with a face, helmet, and reflective vest, a literal embodiment of repetitive and dehumanized labor, and in that a close cousin to the zombie. Those who become or are threatened with becoming zombies aboard the KTX train represent a “cross-section of South Korean society,” an executive, a “corporate salaryman,” a working-class couple, students, a child, elderly people, and even an unhoused man (Gardener 2021, 49). It is this last character who sacrifices himself by holding off zombies to save Su-an and Sung-kyung. This sacrifice also conveniently removes him and what he symbolizes, which can in turn be linked to the sense of homelessness created by the moving train (Kim 2019, 445) and its own symbolizations of neoliberal culture, from the social order. With the death of Yon-suk and Seok-woo, though, the “two core staples of corporate Ppalli-Ppalli life (the executive and the worker)” are also removed, and with them “Korea’s corrupt corporate structures,” leaving only Su-an and Sung-kyung (and her female fetus) (Gardener 2021, 50). Jaecheol Kim (2021) reads this ending as expressing the abandonment of social reproduction by a generation in economic despair (447), but I would suggest that it can also be viewed more optimistically: as the failure of historically lionized “notions of unfettered male autonomy and independence . . . defined primarily in opposition to the ‘soft,’ caring and dependent world of domesticity” (The Care Collective 2020, 23). It is precisely those who are associated (albeit conservatively in terms of gender) with an ethic of care and interdependency who not only survive—with no help from the male soldiers rushing to meet them as the film closes—but also represent three generations of the future. Train prequel Seoul Station, which expands the role of the unhoused and makes its gendered oppression more explicit, ties the spread of the zombie infection to the absence of an ethic of care under patriarchal capitalism.12 Andreas Chatzidakis, Jamie Hakim, Jo Littler, Catherine Rottenberg, and Lynne Segal, publishing as The Care Collective (2020), write, “Economists . . . have vividly demonstrated how ever-rising income inequality is not an accident, but rather a key structural feature of neoliberal capitalism that is still increasing exponentially” (10) at the same time that this system unremittingly devalues and undermines care, defined as “our individual and common ability to provide the political, social, material, and

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emotional conditions” that would permit “the vast majority . . . to thrive” (6). The first line spoken in the film, in fact, is a man opining to his friend that “universal welfare” is needed. However, all it takes for him to abandon his intention to help the bleeding homeless man who walks by, ignored by the many other pedestrians, is the latter’s smell. The police similarly remark on the smell of a small group of unhoused survivors seeking their help and are prevented from throwing them out of the police station only because pursuing zombies break through the doors. The man who has been bitten returns to his unhoused community in Seoul Station, a border space between the wealthy and impoverished (Saldarriaga and Manini 2022, 67) where many unhoused people have resided since 1998 (Austin 2020, 12–13), and his brother is the first person who attempts to help him. But when the latter tries to secure a space in a shelter, which is full, no one will give up his bed, and the men staying there run him off, demonstrating that the neoliberal mindset of competition persists even among a population with good reason to reject it. A station employee also fails to offer help, kicking the brother out and remarking that his being there is “terrible.” A female shopkeeper does buck this trend, giving the brother painkillers and an energy drink even though she has already closed and even though he cannot pay—the shelter employee who tries to help him is also a woman, gendering, as in Train, collective care—but her help comes too late, leaving the brother to admonish a trio of station employees who are talking about how the bad economy means one shouldn’t invest in real estate that their refusal to listen has resulted in a death. The now-undead corpse has disappeared when they investigate, however, failing to alter their perception that the unhoused are merely, as one employee gripes, a “pain in the ass.” Like the passersby and employees at Seoul Station, law enforcement and the military also demonstrate that under neoliberalism, “careless communities focus on investing in policing and surveillance rather than in social provisions to promote human flourishing” (The Care Collective 2020, 12). Saldarriaga and Manini (2022) describe the film’s unhoused characters, in their lack of property and “domestic space,” as “halfway to being zombies” (61), but the police do not see even that much difference. Just before the zombies breach the police station, the officers angrily try to shoo them away as if they were more unhoused people, and the surviving officer, who takes shelter in a cell with other survivors, radios in a report that it is the homeless who “are on a rampage.” One unhoused man’s response that they “didn’t cause this” refers to the zombie outbreak, but it can also be seen to extend to the neoliberal social conditions that reduce the distance between human and zombie in the first place. The officer also proves to be a menace rather than a help twice over, first firing his gun at the survivors and then attacking them as a zombie. Law enforcement acts scarcely better toward those of higher status, attempting to disperse a crowd of living citizens that it terms “an unlawful assembly.”

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One officer tells a pair of characters to return home and “watch the news,” a source of official information that Train suggests is as unreliable as the officer’s report from the cell in this film. And when the unhoused man who escaped from that cell (the same man who denied that the unhoused were on a rampage) climbs up from that crowd onto a police bus, having just proclaimed that he and others have sacrificed and worked themselves “to death” for a country that “doesn’t care about” them (recalling another unhoused man’s comment that he “built 80 percent of the buildings in Seoul”), the military promptly shoots him—his effortful climb and then slow-motion fall a visual encapsulation of the relationship of worker to nation that he has just described—and fires gas canisters into the rest of the crowd. Significantly, these observations are made as a retort to a man who says that he labored for his country, while the rest of them are “useless” “trash”; for him, this means that he is “a good person” and does not “deserve to die” there. Of course, the idea that poverty is a moral failure, that the impoverished “deserve” whatever happens to them, up to and including illness and death, forms part of the neoliberal worldview. As if to emphasize this, the man wears a “Be the Reds” T-shirt, which South Korean audiences would recognize as an artifact from a 2003 trademark controversy around that nation’s World Cup team in which the collectivist messaging of the slogan was derailed by “capitalist individualism” (Austin 2020, 24). The man’s blame of “the commies” for the zombie outbreak can, then, be understood as referring not only to North Korea specifically but also, more abstractly, to collectivism and interdependence as principles of social organization. With the group of unhoused people who flee Seoul Station to seek assistance at the police station is a woman named Hye-sun (Shim Eun-kyung). Hye-sun is not herself currently unhoused, but she is introduced being harangued about overdue payments to the hotel where she is living with her boyfriend, Ki-woong (Lee Joon) and threatened with having her belongings thrown away. In the next scene, a seemingly unhoused sex worker offers herself for three dollars, a juxtaposition that invites the audience to imagine this as a potential future for Hye-sun.13 Sex work, in fact, is already a part of her past. As a runaway, representing, according to Austin (2020), “a class of women who started to arrive in Seoul from the 1970s onwards, called ‘mujakjŏng sanggyŏng sonyŏ,’ which can be translated as ‘a girl who came to the capital without any plans’” (8), her employment at a brothel only “piled up” her debt. She incurred further debt when she borrowed money from her pimp, Suk-gyu (Ryu Seung-ryong), before again running away, and her father fled when Suk-gyu tried to collect her debt from him, abandoning her in an inversion of Seok-woo’s self-sacrifice in Train. Even before she becomes zombified at the film’s conclusion, therefore, she embodies how zombie narratives “imagine the destructiveness of capitalism through debt, indebtedness,

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and forms of indentured servitude,” with the zombies themselves “a form of capitalism’s dead labor . . . so overextended and exploited that it slowly denatures” (Fojas 2017, 61). Like any worker under capitalism, Hye-sun has only the labor of her body to sell; and her chronically under- or unemployed boyfriend wishes to appropriate and control that body as a source of labor. In order to pay the rent and living expenses, Ki-woong places an internet ad offering Hye-sun’s sexual services, even though, as she reminds him, she has said that she will not participate in sex work any longer. As Laurie Penny (2022) observes, “If we understand women’s bodies as a site of work, it is equally important to understand that women are alienated from their bodies in the same way that all workers are alienated from ownership of their labour—and for the same reasons. Every time a woman tries to truly reclaim her body, it should be understood in the same valence as a factory sit-in or an occupation” (166). Sex work merely makes these dynamics more explicit, and Hye-sun’s attempt to reclaim her own body and labor reveals the extent to which Ki-woong conceptualizes her body as a resource and their relationship as conferring the right to use that resource: he strikes her (attempting to discipline her resistant body), asks her what makes her body “so precious” and if sex wears it out (uses up the resource), reminds her that she was unhoused after fleeing the brothel, suggests that she join the unhoused “family” at Seoul Station, and tells her not to return, threatening her with being unhoused once more. Prior to her becoming an animated corpse, then, she experiences other forms of abjection, such as the use of “the body for barter instead of inflaming” passion and the “friend who stabs you” (Kristeva 2020, 98). Despite Ki-woong’s conduct, Hye-sun seems to think almost exclusively of him as a source of help once the outbreak occurs, and she spends much of the film trying to get in touch or back in touch with him on her cell phone. Perhaps we can attribute her behavior to the entrenched naturalization of gendered hierarchies and gendered commodification. The fact that Suk-gyu, who wants to reclaim both Hye-sun’s debt and her body, presents himself as her father—he also says that he’s a father to all of the women whom he pimps out—highlights the oppressive relationship between capitalism and patriarchy. So too does the association of property and sexuality that runs through the film’s conclusion, which takes place in a luxurious model apartment (a living space intended to generate sales rather than to house anyone [Saldarriaga and Manini 2022, 61]). Suk-gyu, who complains that he will never live somewhere so large and opulent, wishes he could have sex there; and only because Hye-sun dies as he is about to rape her does he not fulfill that wish. Suk-gyu has told her in these final scenes that she can neither go “home” nor die before she pays him back, but he is wrong about the latter, and her reanimation as a zombie places her outside of both patriarchy and capitalism and thus outside of his power over her—reflected in the change

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from his being on top of her when she dies to her leaping on top of him after she turns. “Being a zombie is the only method for the most marginalized” in the film to “find a kind of hope” for challenging globalized capitalism and to “become subjects of resistance” (18). In her zombification, Hye-sun both loses and reclaims her body. This paradoxicality carries over into the final images of the film: zombies vaulting over a bus toward soldiers who are firing at them, followed by the sun rising over a smoking Seoul. The latter shot suggests a positive spin on the former, perhaps because while the zombie apocalypse, in a way, makes everyone homeless, it also eliminates legal ownership of property, making access to shelter (and, presumably, other necessities) radically egalitarian. In the same erasure of perceived difference between marginalized populations and zombies that occurs in Seoul Station, the titular zombie in horror comedy Zombie for Sale is called a “hobo” because of his messy hair and dirty clothes by both a group of children and, separately, Park Hae-gul (Lee Soo-kyung), when he wanders on foot into the town of Pungsan, described by the Park family as in “the boonies.” The children also say that if the hobo catches anyone, that person becomes a hobo too, figuring homelessness as an infectious disease. Indeed, this identification of the punningly named zombie Jjong-bi (Jung Ga-ram) may be less erroneous than it appears, since the zombie virus in this film arises from a diabetes medication developed using illegal human trials conducted on unhoused persons and college students who were lured into participating (although Jjong-bi appears college aged, it is never confirmed from which population he came). For-profit biotech research as the origin of the zombie virus recalls Train to Busan, which Hae-gul’s brother Min-gul (Kim Nam-gil) has the Park family watch on a smartphone to show them what he believes Jjong-bi to be.14 When they come across Jjong-bi, the Parks are living a precarious existence. The family gas station has been shuttered for a decade, Min-gul has returned home, having been fired via text message, and his brother Joon-gul (Jeong Jae-yeong) can’t even afford to fix the brakes on his tow truck, which he uses in extralegal entrepreneurship reminiscent of that in Juan of the Dead. In the film’s opening scenes, Joon-gul completes a “rare gig,” overcharging a couple for towing and repairing their car, which was disabled at night during a thunderstorm by caltrops that he himself left on the roadway. In what could be a scene from a slasher or rural horror film, he emerges from his truck wearing a dark hooded raincoat, at first backlit so that we cannot see his face, peremptorily hooking up the couple’s car to a towline and tugging at the driver’s side door handle, and yelling at them through the closed window with a smilingly performative friendliness that comes across as discomfiting before towing them off into the night. The joke lies not only in what can be viewed as parody when subsequently revealed as misapprehension (the real threat is the

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bill he presents them the next day) but also in the fact that he must act like a slasher villain to make ends meet. His father, Man-duk (Park In-hwan), based on his introduction cheating his friends at cards, will also take any edge that gives him an economic advantage. Even the name by which Joon-gul and his wife, Nam-joo (Uhm Ji-won) refer to their unborn child, “Jackpot,” ironically points to their economic struggles. Therefore, when Jjong-bi’s bite is revealed to have rejuvenating effects, the family exploits him for economic gain. One man offering Man-duk money to be bitten (Man-duk of course negotiates a higher price than first offered) becomes many men—and the customers are all men—offering money to regain youthful vitality and virility and creating a new business for the Parks. They, in other words, commodify Jjong-bi, even calling him a “shared asset” when they reprimand Min-gul for trying to profit alone by kidnapping Jjong-bi with the intention of selling him to a friend involved in researching erectile dysfunction drugs. As a source of profit, Jjong-bi’s body, not unlike Hye-sun’s, is “used and abused as an object” (Saldarriaga and Manini 2022, 112), including being fitted with dentures because Nam-joo had pulled out all of his teeth as a precaution. Importantly for the film’s critique, Jjong-bi must be tricked into biting living people, creating a parallel between the actions of the Park family and the biotech company. His first bite, of Man-duk, is an act of self-defense, and he prefers an eco-friendly diet composed entirely of cabbage. Luckily for the Parks, the other foodstuff that he cannot resist is hot sauce, which they apply to the arms of their customers. His forced participation in the market, then—which he, unlike the living, does not depend on for “access to the means of life” (Meiksins Wood 2002, 11)—also forces him to injure and symbolically consume or cannibalize others. The film makes an early visual association of Jjong-bi with a white rabbit, and it returns to this association to underscore that the caravan which the family makes his home is merely his version of the rabbit’s cage. Crucial to thinking about Jjong-bi’s exploitation is that he is an example of what Chera Kee (2017) terms “extra-ordinary zombies,” who “gain some sort of agency over their existence” (loc. 109) and “temper tales of slavery and cannibalism by giving us individuals who refuse to be completely dehumanized” (loc. 340). Kee argues that the temporary zombies of early slave-style narratives are extra-ordinary (loc. 514), while Stacey Abbott (2016) cites Simon Garth in Marvel’s comic Tales of the Zombie (1973) and Bub in Romero’s Day of the Dead (1985) as early appearances of the “individualised zombie,” adding that “sentient zombies and subjective zombie narratives” have increased in cinema since around the turn of the millennium (loc. 3333–75). Jjong-bi develops from extra-ordinary to explicitly sentient over the course of Zombie for Sale. When he first arrives, he shows fear and runs from a dog. Later, having been given a makeover that removes the

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visual signs of his being a zombie rather than a conventionally attractive young man, he seems to understand Hae-gul when she tells him to get in the caravan and makes a conscious decision to stay outside, close its door, and protect her and her mother from other zombies after the infection has begun to spread. And by the film’s climax, he is conscious enough to say Hae-gul’s name and to use a lighter to blow up the gas station and destroy the zombies who have been attacking the Parks. Speech, in fact, marks the dividing line between zombie and human: as soon as he speaks, both the musical score and the other zombies abruptly stop, and then the undead turn on him as if he were one of the living. The significance of Jjong-bi’s extra-ordinary status is hinted at in an exchange between Nam-joo, who asks if zombiedom is like Christian Resurrection, and Min-gul, who, based on his internet research, says no, that zombies have no souls, only instinct, and will viciously bite anything. That Joong-bi disproves everything that Min-gul says underlines how even the exploited, however dehumanized, are sentient individuals, not merely their commodified bodies. Hae-gul is the one who enacts such an understanding: as part of her burgeoning romantic attachment to him, she tries to help him run away, to free him from his imposed role(s) in the market, after overhearing that Min-gul was plotting a second attempt to take Jjong-bi to his friend in Seoul.15 The other zombies in the film do, however, behave as Min-gul expects them to.16 The customers bitten by Jjong-bi eventually become typical, flesh-hungry zombies, commodification leading to a replacement of Jjongbi’s symbolic cannibalism with actual cannibalism, the zombie infection made worse by layering a second exploitation (by the family) on the first (by the lab). The threat to the family and its/the future by traditional zombies remains linked to economics: Nam-joo is almost killed when she goes back to retrieve the family cash box (for Jackpot, she explains), an action that her husband blames for pushing her into labor, and the newborn’s cries only attract the zombies. The solution to these threats comes with abandonment of the profit motive, an exit from the market. The immunity that Man-duk—who, notably, did not pay to be bitten—turns out to possess enables the family to begin a new enterprise: curing zombies with a “Totally Free!” vaccine (via, of course, a bite from Man-duk). The family’s new uniforms of coveralls with a white cartoon zombie inside a circular red “no” symbol on the breast may invoke Ghostbusters, another movie about struggling to run a small business, but the Parks’ work is closer to charity. On the one hand, Jjong-bi’s being cured and helping to cure other zombies seems to play out Kee’s (2017) observation that a negative aspect of extra-ordinary zombies is their suggestion of a “profound fear of losing identity markers, a sense of not wanting to move beyond them into a posthuman state or swarm community” (loc. 2999); but, on the other

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hand, at least the family’s new “business” is caring for the community with no expectation of profit, sharing rather than selling their labor. Filipino film Block Z, directed by Mikhail Red, similarly links its economically struggling protagonists with an ethic of collective care, contrasting them with representatives of a corrupt and self-interested oligarchy as it focuses on characters trying to survive in and escape from a university campus after a zombie outbreak. A quarter of the Philippines’ population “lives below the poverty line” (Pennington 2017), and Block Z highlights economic precarity immediately, opening with a montage of news clips that mention a stock market long “in the red” and soaring prices of “basic goods” and describe the Philippines as “one epidemic away from total collapse.”17 The next few clips in the montage concern dengue fever (and suggest an overwhelmed health care infrastructure), which had been declared a national epidemic the year before the film’s release and a vaccination program for which had been suspended in 2016 due to evidence of potential “unintended consequences in non-infected patients” (Yeung and Faidell 2019). Infection is then linked via clips concerning student walkouts and protests and human rights abuses to education, another focus of the film’s critique of economic inequality and corruption in a nation with some of “the most market-oriented” policies “within the region” (Tuaño and Cruz 2019, 306). The year before the film’s release, Philip Arnold Tuaño and Jerik Cruz (2019) found that despite an “economic resurgence” (304) in the Philippines over the past decade, there was “increasing evidence that wealth inequality has risen, even while the social mobility prospects of most of the population has been hampered by entrenched forms of social and economic insecurity” (305). PJ (Julia Barretto) and her father, Mario (Ian Veneracion), encounter just such obstacles. Mario did not pursue his talent for singing because his own father maintained that Mario could not support a family as a musician, but Mario has ended up as part of the precariat anyway. He has most recently worked construction in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, gesturing both to the tendency for the jobs generated during the economic resurgence “to be precarious, low-skilled and low-wage” (Tuaño and Cruz 2019, 308) and to the “global migrant labor” that zombies themselves can represent (Fojas 2017, 103). Mario’s labor has left him unable to pay the tuition for PJ’s schooling, her path to social mobility, and he fails in his attempt to borrow money from a friend he worked with in Riyadh to cover this month-late bill. Just after his request is rebuffed, a young man walks in front of his car and pretends that Mario struck him. Rather than pay the man as demanded, Mario lifts him bodily into the car and takes him for (mostly) free treatment from medical students at the university hospital, where the man’s later admission that he “just needed some money” emphasizes the similarity in the economic insecurity of both men.

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This hospital is part of the fictional San Lazaro University, where the majority of the film takes place after a bite from an infected patient begins the spread of the zombie virus through the hospital and campus and where PJ is enrolled as a medical student (which means that, even as she struggles to pay for her tuition, she performs some of the same services as a doctor without compensation). The setting of San Lazaro University Hospital (named for St. Lazarus, who was raised from the dead) links the film’s narrative and themes to the real San Lazaro Hospital in Manila, which hosts “a continuous medical training and research program” and provides care “especially for the poor suffering from infectious diseases” (San Lazaro Hospital, n.d.). From the facade of the hospital in Block Z hangs an all-caps banner proclaiming that “Education is a right, not a privilege,” part of a wider, economically driven dissent on campus. Judging from the shouts of “Education is a right” and “Roll back tuition fees” (both in English) at a student protest on campus, PJ is clearly not the only one having problems affording the costs of social mobility in a society with, unsurprisingly, “a direct correlation between education and living conditions” (Pennington 2017). Much like the authorities in Seoul Station accuse the crowd of unlawful assembly rather than providing assistance, the student protesters, whose red armbands perhaps suggest a leftist solidarity, are threatened through a bullhorn with disciplinary action for lacking a permit, and the leader of the protest reappears later as a zombie, her symbolic status literalized. In opposition to these students, Student Council Chairperson Gelo (Yves Flores) embodies the pervasive “corruption in Filipino politics and business [that] prevents social mobility and growth. Power is concentrated among powerful families and closely connected individuals, offering the poor little chance to better themselves” (Pennington 2017), and Gelo, son of a corrupt general, has no interest in sharing that power. His increasingly heated argument with another student, Vanessa (Myrtle Sarrosa), could as easily be a debate about a nation that retains “reportedly one of the highest levels of dynastic concentration among functioning democracies worldwide” (Tuaño and Cruz 2019, 305) as about their specific situation. Vanessa does not understand why Gelo does not want to share that he has been promised a helicopter rescue by his father: “You have the resources. The others don’t. You can help them!” Gelo maintains, “Those resources are only for me. . . . Their problems aren’t my problems.” Vanessa reminds him of his responsibility to the people who elected him and says that he is “just like” his father, a comment that results in Gelo pushing her over a stair railing to her death (for which, of course, he denies responsibility). At other points, Gelo makes such neoliberal arguments as “We can’t save everyone” and “It’s every man for himself. We’re in a state of emergency,” the latter a phrase that evokes the necropolitical state of exception, in which rule of law is suspended under color of the

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public good and “the Other becomes the living dead” (Saldarriaga and Manini 2022, 23). The military, playing out Gelo’s attitudes on a larger scale, does not differentiate between survivors and undead (shades again of Seoul Station) when attempting to enforce a quarantine of the university, firing on both indiscriminately despite repeated orders to cease as the camera cuts back and forth between the shooters and their panicked, crumpling victims. Saldarriaga and Manini (2022) interpret this scene as alluding to the violently repressive presidency of Ferdinand Marcos from 1965 to 1986 (38), one of the many “roots” of the nation’s persistent poverty and inequality, along with the effects of World War II (Pennington 2017) (perhaps alluded to in PJ and Mario’s climactic use of escape tunnels built during the Japanese occupation) and the international debt crisis of the 1980s (Tuaño and Cruz 2019, 304). The helicopter rescue, meanwhile, never arrives. The film’s protagonists, in contrast, espouse an ethic of care. Unlike the military, security guard Bebeth (Dimples Romana), whom Gelo, to her displeasure, calls “Guard” as if she has no identity except her work, commits herself to helping the survivors, even at her own peril.18 At one point, PJ and her friends use signs on stakes from outside the campus church with messages like “Keep Off the Grass” and “Observe Silence” as weapons, undercutting the authority associated with a social order that has failed them both before and after the zombie outbreak. They uproot messages of obedience and silence, which recall the administrator’s attempt to disperse the protest and a clip in the opening montage of Gelo’s father calling for discipline and following orders among the citizenry before being pelted with an egg, and use them in collective defense. PJ’s earlier argument that the group stands a better chance of surviving if they “stick together” finds an echo in an earlier scene in which the coach of the basketball team exhorts his players to watch out for one another and reminds them that they are “in this together”—and when all of them except PJ’s almost-boyfriend Lucas (Joshua Garcia) become zombies, they are no less in it together. Lucas, who feels guilty for running away when his teammate Ivan (Jon Lucas) asked for help, advocates “not leaving anyone behind,” and he and Erika (Maris Racal) both prove willing to sacrifice themselves for others. Pointedly, Lucas survives while Gelo, who behaves selfishly throughout, does not. Having already been bitten, Gelo encounters PJ and Mario in the tunnels through which they make their escape from the campus at the end of the film and is incensed by the realization that he is going to die—becoming, as a zombie, one of the masses—while they survive. Significantly, though, his final utterances are pleas not to be left alone as Mario, having climbed the ladder out of the tunnel with PJ, pulls the manhole cover into place and leaves Gelo, in a symbolic reversal, stuck trying to ascend and prey to the onrushing zombies.

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PJ and her father survive not only because of collective support, however: they are also both immune to the zombie virus. Gelo may be incredulous that they will survive instead of him, given their relative status, but their luck in being born with genetic immunity merely mirrors his own luck of being born into wealth. Upon escaping from the university and seeing the destruction outside, PJ takes up an assault rifle from beside a dead soldier, appropriating a symbol of state power, and the film’s coda, occurring two weeks later, depicts a small armed band deciding to take an injured Lucas with them—to help, in other words, a person unknown to them in a situation in which resources are likely limited. Saldarriaga and Manini (2022) claim that the typhoon that has passed over the archipelago in the meantime has cleansed it of the water-averse zombies (110) (PJ hypothesizes that the zombie virus is a mutated rabies virus), but the armed band of raiders, as they are identified in the credits, renders it questionable that the Philippines is now zombie-free. What seems more certain is that there has been a radical redistribution of power in this oligarchical nation. CONCLUSION Korean horror cinema, according to Iain Robert Smith (2013), derives its distinctive character from a “mutual negotiation of global cultural transfers” (195), but this description applies equally well to all of the zombie films discussed in this chapter, whether the Malaysian zombie helping to think about a particular form of capitalist patriarchy in KL24: Zombies, the Korean zombie’s dramatization of “a politics of fear” at “the site of high capitalism” (A. T.-G. Lee 2022, 4) in Train to Busan, or the Filipino zombie’s disruption of a capitalist oligarchy with specific historical roots in Block Z. With variations arising from their respective specific national, cultural, and historical contexts, all of these films employ the transnational conventions of zombie cinema to “express anxiety about” globalized neoliberal capitalism “in terms of infection” (Tenga and Zimmerman 2013, 82). In most cases, the protagonists, in some cases heroic, are marginalized laborers—delivery drivers, security guards, sex workers, students. Further up the hierarchy, though still subject to exploitation, office workers such as Joe or Seok-woo sometimes find a place among the foregrounded survivors. Some of these survivors are unproductive in the same way if not to the same degree as zombies, placing them in opposition to neoliberal ethics, and some too are rendered possessionless and/or unhoused in the same way that zombies are, a state that both threatens a market society and does not meet its definition of personhood (Saldarriaga and Manini 2022, 62). For the survivors in these films, overcoming the monsters produced by capitalism (who are also its victims) can mean,

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paradoxically, resumption of the neoliberal status quo, as in Kl Zombie and No Other Way!, but the apocalypses of KL24: Zombies, Train to Busan, Seoul Station, Zombie for Sale, and Block Z all, to different extents (and like those of the films discussed in chapter one) leave what comes next unresolved, allowing space for the possibility of alternatives to globalized capitalism. But whether or not the disruptions to this system are ultimately contained, these depictions of zombie outbreaks provide a means to question the inseparability of production and profit, which is inescapably “the ethic of exploitation, poverty, and homelessness” (Meiksins Wood 2002, 189). This correlation holds as true in Malaysia, South Korea, and the Philippines as in Italy, England, or Cuba, allowing the zombie to gnaw away at its underpinnings no matter where it travels. NOTES 1. Among the relatively small Malaysian zombie film corpus, short film Hawa (2016) better accords with Ainslie’s (2016) descriptions: Hawa (Hawa Khadeeja), a Malay girl who has been bitten, tries to pass the time in the single room in a nonurban dwelling in which her parents have locked her up before she gets out after a zombie attack and flees along a wooded road with an ethnic Chinese boy (Vincent Wong) who is her neighbor. Horror comedies Zombies from Banana Village (Zombi kampung pisang; 2007) and Zombie Biscuit Factory (Zombi Kilang Biskut; 2014) foreground village life, even as large portions of the latter take place in a factory. 2. In 2021, director Ray Lee’s Fighting For Life: Zombie Infection (Belaban Hidup: Infeski Zombie) marked a similar milestone as the first zombie film to feature an Indigenous Iban setting and Maylay-Iban dialogue (A. Y. B. Lee 2022, 356; Ferrarese 2021). 3. The film itself is available to view for free on Facebook, presumably as a way to broaden its distribution. 4. Possessed, as indicated by its title, also features a mix of black magic and cannibal-style zombies. 5. Nicholas, Ganapathy, and Mau (2013) note that many Malaysians continue to attribute various individuals’ success to the use of hantu (174). 6. A rock song with rap breaks does play over the closing credits, but none of the lyrics are in English. 7. KL Zombie director Woo Ming Jin, part of the same indie scene as Lee (A. Y. B. Lee 2022, 120), has followed a similar path, including with another zombie film, Zombitopia, filmed in 2016 and released in 2021 (347). 8. In the second segment, David (Pete Teo), father to Farah’s ethnic Chinese boyfriend, Steven, jokes that the zombies look like Bangladeshis, recasting a domestic threat as a foreign Other.

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9. While a soldier tells Farah that the guard knew what he was getting into because he is “one of us,” it seems likely that he merely gestures to a perceived similarity in duties. 10. Gardener (2021) reads the film in part as expressing the lingering scars of the division between North and South Korea. 11. The translation here of the idiom is Kim’s (2019); the English subtitles call him merely a “bloodsucker.” 12. While I see the zombie outbreak as allegorizing the effects of neoliberal capitalism, Woosung Kang (2021) uses a primary lens drawn from the work of Deleuze and Guattari to argue somewhat counterintuitively that Seoul Station “illustrates, with its aesthetics of faciality, the very impossibility of thinking political alterity via the zombie” (81). 13. Before the cut to the woman, there are two brief shots of an unhoused child playing with a toy car, a commodity that represents another, more aspirational commodity. 14. As in Train, the news describes the zombie outbreak as “riots” around the country. 15. Gerry Canavan (2016) makes the case that narratives which assign zombies interiority or “articulate” subjectivity position zombiism as a disability that “can (at least potentially) be managed through love and care” while acknowledging that “talking zombies” do not guarantee any “ethics of care” (25–26). 16. The discussions about how zombie viruses work and zombies behave can also be read as the film commenting on itself and how it plays with and deploys zombie conventions. 17. The quoted phrases are in English in the film. 18. One might see Bebeth as part of a pattern including Surya in No Other Way! and the security guard in KL24: Zombies.

Chapter 6

Gender, Sex, and Family, Take 2 Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines

Anxieties about and around gender and sexuality, including those linked to conceptions of marriage, family, and reproductive labor, have formed a part of zombie cinema since its beginning. The central conflict of White Zombie, for example, is over the possession (and purity) of its White heroine, Madeline; the zombies in Ouanga (1935) are used by a woman in a conflict over a man’s affections; Revolt of the Zombies (1936), from White Zombie director Victor Halperin, heavily features another love triangle, with a character using “his ability to create zombies to force Claire Duval, his former fiancée who jilted him in order to marry his friend, into marriage” (Kordas 2011, loc. 542); and in I Walked with a Zombie (1943), a woman is revealed to have asked for her daughter-in-law to be zombified due to her sexual transgressions (loc. 542). Such concerns prove no less prominent in contemporary Asian zombie films than in Western examples, including the small sampling examined in the second chapter of this volume. As discussed earlier, capitalism produces gender(ed) hierarchies, which in turn produce and maintain normative expectations regarding gender and sexuality; and so, in zombie cinema, treatments of class and capitalism often intermingle with treatments of those norms. In KL Zombie and No Other Way!, for example, the low-wage male protagonists’ fight against the zombie hordes proves their suitability as heterosexual partners (Nipis gets the girl; Surya keeps the girl) and asserts a masculinity previously in danger of being undermined by their low socioeconomic status. Capitalist and sexual accumulation overtly intersect in KL24: Zombies, which also includes frictions over remarriage and inter-ethnic romance, and constructions of fatherhood play important roles in Train to Busan, Seoul Station (which takes male ownership of women as a central theme), and Block Z. Much as these films, discussed in the previous chapter, critique localized manifestations of globalized neoliberalism, the films discussed in this chapter foreground their deployment and adaptation 139

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of zombie conventions to explore ideologies of gender, family, and sexuality in their respective cultural contexts. In Miss Zombie (Misu zonbi; 2013), from Japan, “one of the more significant producers of international zombie films” (Murphy 2015b, 14) since the late 1990s (even if many have been low-budget and/or direct-to-video) (173), the economic exploitation of the titular zombie is both gendered—she is used as unpaid domestic labor and sexually assaulted—and perpetrated by and in the domestic space of the nuclear family. The zombie’s relationships to the family members and to her own past also contribute to a highly ambivalent portrait of the emphasis on motherhood and the conception of the housewife that emerged together in Japan at the end of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries and continues to exert a strong cultural influence. Unlike the (self-)destructive nuclear family of Miss Zombie, the extended family, primarily represented by generations of women, in South Korea’s Peninsula (Bando; 2020) functions as a site of meaning, strength, and perseverance. A sequel set in the Train to Busan universe, Peninsula, similarly to Train, stresses prioritizing family bonds and helping others over self-preservation or material gain, while its setting in postapocalyptic South Korea allows its female protagonists to operate outside of patriarchal gender roles. Both the living and the undead in the Philippines’ zombie comedy Remington and the Curse of the Zombadings (Zombadings 1: Patayin sa shokot si Remington; 2011) similarly challenge, albeit not unproblematically, patriarchal roles, specifically patriarchal heteronormativity. Remington uses its zombie outbreak to make a case for integrating and celebrating queer masculinities and sexuality, which the film links to precolonial Filipino gender categories, in contemporary Filipino society. In all three films, although to varying degrees, the zombie helps to examine the oppressions perpetrated by dominant patriarchal and heteronormative schemas. LET THE BODIES SCRUB THE FLOOR: DOMESTIC AND REPRODUCTIVE LABOR IN MISS ZOMBIE In some zombie narratives, such as Santa Clarita Diet (2017–2019), becoming a zombie affords women “unabashed sexual expression” and “social autonomy” (Amburgy 2021, 296). However, for the mute female zombie who is forced into service in Miss Zombie, directed by Sabu (the professional moniker of Tanaka Hiroyuki), more or less the opposite is true. In the film, which is presented overwhelmingly in black and white, a technique that evokes art films and can make “a film feel more real . . . while making it feel unreal” (Miller 2017), Shara (Komatsu Ayaka) was attacked and infected while pregnant. The attack precipitated a C-section and, based on the sound

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of a baby’s cry, her living child being taken away. Shara, who is never called by name as a zombie, is subsequently captured by a man named Sasaki and caged with a number of other zombies. As the movie begins, Sasaki has shipped her—in a cage inside a crate—to his friend Dr. Teramoto (Tezuka Tôru) for what Sasaki says is only a few days and with the assurance that she is “docile.” What Sasaki does not mention is that he himself has been bitten, perhaps by Shara herself. But whether the bite came from her or another of his zombies, his concealment of it while he passes her on to another man suggests incorporating zombies into patriarchal capitalism to be of paramount importance, no matter the damage it causes or the risk to these men. This incorporation, after all, benefits people like Sasaki and Teramoto, allowing them a new set of bodies to exploit for uncompensated labor, sex and, in Sasaki’s case, profit, via a planned business “making them [zombies] pets.” In the end, however, the cost of this attempted profit will be the destruction of the human nuclear family. The conceit of selling zombies for household labor, as Kayleigh Murphy (2015b) notes, appears in the 2006 Canadian film Fido as well (127). Fido’s undead have been commodified by a corporation and are “widely utilized as servants” (loc. 553), and, in a further parallel to Miss Zombie, one man treats his zombie “as his personal sex slave,” including slapping “her bottom when she is performing household chores” (Basquiat 2017, loc. 609). In contrast to zombie servants’ widespread adoption in Fido, one of the male laborers employed by Teramoto in Miss Zombie remarks that zombies are a rare sight, while the other says that he has never seen one at all before, suggesting that these “pets” are a luxury item in their Japan. Nonetheless, rarity does not translate to humane treatment for Shara. She is not permitted to stay with the family and must commute on foot each day to their home from a storage unit, she must sew up damage to her own body (except when Teramoto does it as part of sexually objectifying her), and Teramoto instructs his wife, Shizuko (Togashi Makato), to give her “whatever’s spoiled” as her daily food ration, an instruction that not only saves the family money but also reinforces her dehumanization. This reinforcement is important because while Japanese film zombies “are seldom soulless” (Vétu 2021, 116) due to the influence of “animism, which requires the presence of a spirit to confer movement to the inanimate” (122), in Shara’s case the border between human and zombie is particularly thin. Teramoto himself says that her low viral load means that she is nearly human, and one of the male workers makes the same observation about “lower level” zombies in general. In response, the other male worker says not to compare him to a zombie, which underlines both the role of dehumanization in justifying economic and sexual exploitation and how gender hierarchies divide the working class from one another: the male laborers do

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not want to admit any similarity to Shara and later assert their dominant position when they rape her. The sexual assaults that Shara endures signify the intersection of (her) economic and sexual subjugation. Laurie Penny (2022) writes that “rape culture is instrumental to the functioning of economies which are run on the exploitation of women’s bodies. And every economy on earth is founded on the invisible labour done mostly by women, mostly for free—on the reproductive, domestic and emotional work without which every modern economy would collapse overnight” (43). Penny’s observation helps to illuminate why the male laborers are inspired to regard the zombie as a sexual object by a photo that they find of her, taken from behind while she scrubbed the paving stones on all fours. The photo was taken and dropped by the family’s young son, Kenichi (Ohnishi Riku), and his photographing his mother and Shara alongside various other “household objects” hints that he is “beginning to objectify the two women” (Saldarriaga and Manini 2022, 89). There is also a metatextual layer to this objectifying photography in that the actor playing Shara was a gravure idol (Murphy 2015b, 152), a young female model photographed in a suggestive manner, often in swimwear or lingerie. With this in mind, Shara’s zombified body might, as in Yummy, resist female beauty standards, even as her sewing up or safety-pinning that body might be seen as a kind of cosmetic surgery (again, we might think of the drive in Yummy to fix or correct bodies [see chapter 2]). Ultimately, though, it seems to be Shara’s position, physically and socioeconomically—her position on her hands and knees emblematizing her position as an exploited female worker— that sexualizes her and exposes her to sexual assault. She is in this same position when Teramoto gazes at her, specifically at her backside, through a window of his home, the camera cutting from a slow zoom in on the object of his gaze to a close-up of his face showing his gaze itself, unwavering and indeed unblinking even as he takes a sip from his teacup. Teramoto has taken his earlier witnessing of the second of the two laborers taking his turn raping Shara as inspiration or permission to initiate sexual contact himself. While he approaches this act as a seduction (one which, cut short by his death, is seemingly not consummated), perhaps to differentiate himself from the men below him in status, because of the power differential involved, it can only be another rape (as well as a reflection of the likely significantly underreported incidence of sexual abuse of domestic workers worldwide [Human Rights Watch 2006]). These assaults also replace human-human sex and so undermine its “powerful” symbolic guarantee in zombie narratives of “future generations of the living,” a heteronormative fantasy of the family resisting external threats and ensuring heterosexual reproduction (Jones and McGlotten 2014, loc. 165). Teramoto’s position as Shara’s owner/employer strikingly highlights what her entire experience conveys: “The real point of

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maintaining hierarchies of gender and race, the hierarchies that scaffold most modern political systems, is not controlling sex, but controlling work” (Penny 2022, 30). Patricia Saldarriaga and Emy Manini (2022) argue that Miss Zombie “follows a tradition of White slavery” in films from White Zombie to 28 Days Later (91)—although the connection of enslavement to racial contamination in the former film is surely absent in Miss Zombie (and White seems a tricky term to employ here)—and that the film alludes to “trafficking of women in Asia” (93). In 2013, when Miss Zombie debuted, the U.S. State Department listed Japan as a “tier 2” nation, “a destination, source, and transit country for men and women subjected to forced labor and sex trafficking,” including Japanese and foreign nationals (United States Department of State 2013). The townspeople’s reactions to Shara certainly evoke the social isolation imposed on trafficked women as well as the xenophobia that might be directed toward a trafficked foreigner (or even a migrant worker, although migrant domestic workers were only legally allowed in Japan as special cases until 2017 [“Japan Opens Door” 2017]). One man comes to complain to Teramoto that he can’t bring a zombie into town, a group of children make a habit of pelting her with rocks on her daily walk home, and a group of teens make a similar habit of stabbing her with a knife or other sharp object and leaving it there as she continues stoically on her way, these penetrations providing a symbolic counterpart to her rapes. However, it is equally important to examine Shara, Teramoto’s family, and the relationship between them in the context of Japan’s intertwined ideas of housewife and mother. Shizuko, as a housewife, occupies what remains “a respectable and desirable role” in Japan, where—although housewives are “expected to do most of the domestic work” and “these expectations tend to go above and beyond those of the average Western woman” (Kamata and Kita 2022, 21)—cleaning (which we see both Shinziko and Shara doing each day) is seen as “virtuous” rather than “demeaning” as in West (20). Rising incomes “in the first several decades of the 20th century” meant that one wage-earner could support a family, creating the conditions for “a modern form of patriarchy” to develop, “with the housewife as a key element” (Sechiyama 2013, 60). This development coincided with the development of an “ideology of the good wife and wise mother,” which was “refracted by ancient restrictions derived from Confucian norms” but emerged alongside “intense nationalism and as Western ideas on women’s education were absorbed” (61) and formed part of a national project to establish a “‘healthy middle class’” that stretched back to the 1890s (81). A “weakness of . . . affection between” spouses, related to marriage for love having long been uncommon (83), in combination with the mother’s “sole responsibility for child-raising,” which remains common practice today, led to “a deep emotional relationship . . . between mother and

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child” (84). Contemporary Japanese patriarchy does not depart too greatly from this model, except for allowances for women “to participate in productive [rather than reproductive] labor” (105). Postwar efforts “to build Japan’s economy after the war established the pattern whereby husbands worked long hours . . . and often commuted long distances . . . while the wife stayed at home and ruled the roost” (Taylor 2006, 2) managing, “usually unaided, demanding sets of interactions,” including “often emotionally remote and unsupportive” spouses (3). Attachments between mothers and children are still often close, attachments between husbands and wives are often less so (Sechiyama 2013, 111–12), and there is little evidence of the “tendency toward the elimination of the role of the housewife that is seen in America” (132). Shizuko does appear to have a better relationship with Kenichi than with her husband, whom she spies embracing and at another time sewing up a topless Shara—although she does not confront him, choosing instead to try to tempt Shara into eating meat, which she is not supposed to consume. And, in keeping with the role of good wife and wise mother, Shizuko devotes her time, other than that dedicated to housework, to caring for her child. It is worth mentioning that as part of spending time with Kenichi, she reads him Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, a story of an abnormal creature who, having been ostracized, ultimately finds acceptance and recognition for the value of his labor: a mirror image, in other words, of Shara’s own story. Shizuko’s relationship to Shara is where she herself is abnormal compared to most housewives. While domestic workers were “considered a necessity” in middle-class households of roughly the 1910s through the 1930s (Sechiyama 2013, 90), they were replaced by “electrical appliances” in the postwar period (100–1), and women who employ domestic help remain greatly in the minority today (Kamata and Kita 2022, 28), emphasizing the family’s privilege in owning a zombie while perhaps hinting that Shizuko has not quite met the highest standard of an ideal housewife by taking on help. The juxtaposition of Shizuko and Shara is also where the film critiques, if ambivalently, the idealization of the intersecting roles of housewife and mother. Shara begins the film as a direct contrast to Shizuko: rather than a good wife and wise mother, Shara is a woman who works outside the home, has lost her partner, and has likely had her child taken away by the authorities. Over the course of the film, however, Shizuko and Shara increasingly come to resemble one another, suggesting an equivalence among housewife, mother, and domestic slave. The beginning of this change comes when Kenichi has an accident playing by a pond and dies. That Shizuko is not present when this happens hints at the “inept, ‘unnatural’ mother” found in films such as Ringu (1998), who cannot “fulfill her role as nurturer and protector” (Goldberg 2004, 376). Kenichi’s death presents a rather problematic failure in a culture with a “veritable cult of motherhood” (373), and a hysterical Shizuko makes

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Shara bite him in order to reanimate him, during which her vampire-like fangs are visible. While infection via bite (or any transmission from something other than the original source of zombification) is far less common in Japanese than in Western zombie films (Murphy 2015b, 158), the vampiric elements do align with Japanese zombie cinema’s tendency to “quote from a global tradition of genre filmmaking” (Rawle 2014, loc. 3892) and to embrace “hybridity” (loc. 3908) and a “nebulous . . . definition” of the zombie itself (Murphy 2015a, 194). More importantly, as vampires are often described as creating or siring those whom they make undead, Shara’s making Kenichi undead positions her as a second or surrogate mother. Dr. Teramoto’s distress at this occurrence manifests anxiety about being displaced from his role as patriarch by a second mother: that he penetrates Shara while she is biting his son, stabbing her in the same place as the teenagers routinely do, can be seen as a display of male dominance. His distress also displays anxiety about sexual and class contamination. As a zombie, Shara “reflects socio-sexual desires and fears” (Jones and McGlotten 2014, loc. 165)—notably, the scene dealing with Kenichi’s death and zombification directly follows a scene in which his father silently recalls observing Shara’s rape while the acousmatic noise of scrubbing, with which she is repeatedly identified, intrudes and steadily overwhelms any other sounds. She is also of a lower class and hopelessly outside “the norms of [a] paternalist culture . . . which defines women in terms of respectability” (Balmain 2008, 123). Later in the film, Teramoto denies Kenichi is a zombie, saying first that he is undergoing an allergic reaction and, contradictorily, that it takes a few years to become a zombie, by which time there will be a treatment available. After he becomes undead, Kenichi shows a predilection for clinging to Shara over his biological mother, and, when Kenichi collapses, Shara cuts Shizuko’s arm in order to, in an image (again vampiric) of the debilitating dedication expected of mothers, feed him with Shizuko’s blood. Shizuko’s wound can also be associated with Shara’s C-section scar and the wounds to her undead body, the scars of motherhood reflected in the scars of zombiehood. The two are further linked by the flower that Shizuko includes with Shara’s daily ration of food, a symbol of beauty and fertility that is also, by virtue of being cut, already dead. When Shara takes to nourishing Kenichi with the blood of the teens who have been harassing her, she, as one animated corpse caring for another, embodies the traditional relegation of “caring . . . to the domain of women, servants or others deemed inferior . . . because they are thought to be more suited to handling ‘abject’ flesh, the sign of our inescapable corporeal existence and hence of our mortality” (The Care Collective 2020, 27; see chapter 2 for further discussion of abjection). She also both further reduces the boundary between mother and zombie and further usurps Shizuko’s role.1 As caring for Kenichi returns some of Shara’s agency and

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humanity (killing one of the teens is the first time we see her run, for example, and when she meets Shizuko’s gaze, itself a change, while Teramoto sews her up, her eyes have regained their clarity), Shizuko’s reduced importance in her son’s life (and in her husband’s) makes her more like a zombie. Thinking of her husband’s sexual behavior toward and her son’s preference for Shara puts her into a trancelike state that causes her to stare into the distance and soak her feet with a hose. She takes to spending a lot of time lying immobile on the couch, falls when she tries to get up, and then briefly walks like a zombie when she manages to stand. She also chops the meat with which she tries to tempt Shara in a slow, mechanical fashion that echoes how the zombie scrubs the pavement. These parallels imply that it is equally dehumanizing both to occupy and lose the roles of housewife (not so different than undead domestic slave) and mother. After Shizuko finds a photograph of Shara and Kinichi together, with the same black zombie eyes, as if they were biological mother and son, enraged, she moves from becoming even more like Shara to becoming an actual zombie. She retrieves from her husband’s desk the pistol that was shipped with the zombie—an unusual item, like Shara herself, in a country with extremely strict gun laws,2 and regarded by the townspeople’s representative as similarly dangerous—appropriating a symbol of power that Teramoto has heretofore kept in his possession. She presumably plans to kill her undead competition with this weapon but unintentionally shoots and kills Teramoto instead, her accidental revenge for his behavior marking the end of both the nuclear family unit (itself already a “breakdown” of the traditional “multigenerational family unit” [Goldberg 2004, 373]) and any status as a ‘good wife.’ She also fatally shoots both of the male laborers, making her similarly dangerous to Shara, if with a slightly lower body count, and she makes inarticulate noises after she kills Teramoto and as she chases Shara, who has fled with Kenichi. At this point, the film cross-cuts between this pursuit and Shara’s memories of being pursued by a crowd of zombies when she was pregnant, creating a clear equivalency. When Shizuko finally catches up to the pair because Shara trips, the film, black and white until now, fades into color, an expression of Shara’s humanization caused by her memories of expecting a child as well as by her becoming a potential substitute mother for Kenichi. But when Shizuko, on the verge of losing both of her approved social roles as a woman as Kenichi helps Shara up and the two resume their flight, shoots herself, cutting off a final wordless wail of grief lasting nearly twenty seconds, Kenichi lets go of Shara’s hand and returns to Shizuko’s side, so Shara decides to reanimate her, causing first Shara’s face and then the whole film to fade again to black and white as the possibility for Shara of a new (un)life with a new (undead) child drains away. Shizuko’s suicide and reanimation brings together two contrasting Japanese cinematic traditions of reinforcing ideal motherhood, one in

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which “saintly mothers are martyred in their undying devotion to their errant [here, literally monstrous] children” and its “flip side,” “the nightmare mother who has a special link to the madness or the supernatural” (Goldberg 2004, 373) (here, arguably both apply).3 Having placed Kenichi’s happiness above her own, and unable ever to be a mother to her own biological child, Shara then kills herself. This second suicide sees Shara choose death over continued exploitation in her multiply dehumanized state (as zombie, as a laborer, and as a woman), but it also underscores that (idealized) motherhood is both liberation and trap—for both Shara and Shizuko, whether living or undead, there is no self without it. HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE WHO AREN’T IN YOUR EXTENDED FAMILY: PENINSULA Being a housewife is not an option in the zombie-ridden South Korea of Peninsula, directed, like Train to Busan and Seoul Station, by Yeon Sang-ho, and set in the same universe. In fact, we see almost no women at all in the city of Incheon, where Peninsula primarily takes place and part of a South Korea that has been quarantined for four years in the film’s present after an outbreak of infection on an evacuation vessel has prompted other nations to stop accepting South Korean refugees. Ironically, North Korea is now the only safe place on the eponymous peninsula, as the South Korean government reportedly lost control of the outbreak after a single day. These circumstances, along with one character’s comment that the city has become an unrecognizable ruin in “just four years,” shortly and ironically juxtaposed with a billboard touting “A Healthy, Carefree Country,” offer a vision of the reversal of South Korea’s twentieth-century experience of what can be referred to as compressed modernity: “full-scale capitalist industrialization, economic growth, urbanization, proletarianization . . . and democratization within unprecedented short periods” (Chang 2014, 39). The “incomparably family-centered lives” typical in South Korea have been “structurally enmeshed” with its compressed modernity, leading the “social primacy of family” to increasingly, if contradictorily, co-exist with “tendencies of defamiliation” such as “marriage deferral, childlessness . . . and divorce” (39). Forces such as globalization and neoliberalism also contribute to an “institutional decline of families” that “cannot but be extremely distressing” (40). As part of an extended family unit, a trio of women who still survive in the film’s Incheon both register and resist these distressing pressures. If the family unit is the site and cause of horror in Miss Zombie, in Peninsula, it withstands attacks from both the undead, with their connotations of globalized neoliberalism and other forces, and the living, another group of survivors in the

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form of Unit 631, a former military unit and so a representative of the South Korean government. Even in such conditions and even incomplete (consisting of a grandfather, mother, and two daughters), the family unit is explicitly stated to provide a worthwhile life in this postapocalyptic city. Additionally, the family’s very incompleteness creates room for the women (as well as an unrelated man who must learn to better appreciate the bonds of family) to act as the film’s action heroes in facing off against both the undead and Unit 631 and fighting their way to rescue by UN troops and their helicopter. This dominant position, perhaps in tension with the film’s valorization of the family, places the women outside of traditional gender roles. Peninsula centers familial bonds (and a moral imperative to protect children) in its opening scenes. Early in the outbreak, soldier Jung-seok (Gang Dong-won) is driving his sister (Jang So-yeon), who is unnamed, leaving her identified only in relation to male characters; her husband, Chul-min (Kim Do-yoon); and their son, Dong-hwan (Moon Woo-jin), to one of the evacuation ships when they encounter Min-jung (Lee Jung-hyun), who is carrying her small daughter and whose husband has been injured, though he desperately insists that it is not a bite. Jung-seok refuses to help this family, leaving them standing in the road as he drives away without speaking even though Min-jung, in an act of sacrificial motherhood, pleads with him just to take her daughter with him. Her attempt to secure her child a future by giving her away shows the extent of the upheaval in a society in which “mothers are expected to carefully watch over their children until they successfully enter college” (Sechiyama 2013, 258). Once on the ship, Dong-hwan’s mother refuses to leave his side after he is bitten, watching over him until the last possible moment, when she is buried in (melo)dramatic slow motion under a zombie pileup. While literally giving her life to her child might represent another, even an ideal enactment of sacrificial motherhood, it can also be viewed as a critique of expectations of maternal devotion. Her sacrifice, firstly, is meaningless: there is nothing to be done for her son once he is infected. Secondly, Dong-hwan is depicted as clinging to her and literally holding her back: Jungseok has begun to succeed in pulling her away when Dong-hwan reaches out and grabs on to her, causing her to change her mind and return his grasp (at this point, Jung-seok is seen only as body parts at the edge of the frame and then ceases to appear in the same frame as her altogether). At the same time, though, while Jung-seok’s sister remains merely tragic, the film assigns guilt to Jung-seok for not doing more. Four years later, his relationship with Chul-min is strained. His brother-in-law has no will to live without his wife and son and says that Jung-seok should have let him die with them. However, it is Chul-min’s rejection of Jung-seok’s claim that he made a “sensible decision” that benefited the most people to which the film returns in its climax, when UN officer Major Jane (Bella Rahim) uses the same phrase (in English),

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causing Jung-seok to recall the earlier conversation and Chul-min’s complaint that he didn’t “even try.” This time around, Jung-seok rescues another mother, Min-jung, in Incheon after refusing to aid her on the road four years before, saving her from another crowd of zombies even though she has already resigned herself to dying for her children. Even if Jung-seok’s decision on the ship had indeed been made for the greatest good, his epiphany here suggests that attempting to preserve the family, whatever the odds and the risks to others, takes precedence (he and Min-jung’s older daughter, Joon-i [Lee Re], endanger the UN squad through their insistence on rescuing Min-jung). Again, however, that the rescue prevents Min-jung from committing suicide after having distracted the zombies from her children injects an ambivalence into the film’s portrayal of the demands of motherhood. Overwhelmingly, however, Peninsula celebrates the extended family as a site of stability, mutual support, and meaning. Jung-seok and Chul-min have been living a life of poverty and discrimination as unrecognized refugees in Hong Kong since the infected evacuation ship was diverted there, and they are persuaded to return to Incheon to help recover a truck full of American money for a criminal organization in what is arguably an instance of gore capitalism. Before they depart, in displays of individualist profit-oriented attitudes similar to those condemned in Train to Busan and Seoul Station (see chapter 5), one of the organizers of the heist tells the four-person team not to try “to save each other,” and the other members tell the brothers-in-law not to let their emotions interfere. Chul-min asserts that he and Jung-seok will part ways after the job, but a lingering shot of the latter’s silent reaction suggests his concealed pain at this assertion, and they of course reestablish their bond over the course of the film, with Jung-seok risking himself to save Chul-min from captivity and Chul-min dying to save Jung-seok while they are escaping. Joon-i earlier tells Jung-seok that he looks like a zombie, and his decision to rescue his brother-in-law forms part of the recovery of his humanity through connection to others. The other family unit in the film has never forgotten what Jung-seok and Chul-min need to relearn. Min-jung has been living in Incheon with her elder daughter, Joon-i, and her younger daughter, Yu-jin (Lee Ye-won), as well as her father, Elder Kim (Kwon Hae-hyo). This multigenerational unit reflects that South Korean society is not made up of “self-contained nuclear families” (Sechiyama, 2013, 166). Children, for example, often “continue living with their parents after they become adults” and believe that “respect for the elderly” means that “children should be expected to take care of aged parents” (168). Care within the family becomes even more important as, since the “beginning of the twenty-first century, South Koreans have found the basic institutions of economic, social, and political life suddenly becoming ineffective and unreliable” (Chang 2014, 47). “The failure of the state,

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industrial economy, corporations, unions, schools, and welfare programs in providing the basic conditions of material livelihood and social status tends to induce individuals to desperately cling to their most loved ones for emergency rescue” (48), and the zombie apocalypse represents a totalizing form of these failures. The state—the corporation that caused the zombie outbreak, the government that quickly lost control of it, and Jung-seok as its individual agent—widowed Min-jung and left her to fend for herself, but where it has failed, her family succeeds. While Min-jung recounts that Jung-seok’s was only one of thirty-one cars that would not stop to help her when the outbreak began, suggesting that, like the state, people who are not family members are not to be relied upon for “emergency rescue,” her own family is stable enough that it can lend assistance to others beyond its bounds. According to Yu-jin, her dying father said to “help the weak,” and so Elder Kim’s description of Yu-jin and Joon-i as “the beacon of hope in this hell” applies both within and beyond their domestic unit. Indeed, the family’s commitment to defending one another is strong enough that Elder Kim, in an echo of Seok-woo’s sacrifice for Su-an in Train, takes a bullet meant for Yu-jin; and Joon-i pulls a gun on Major Jane to prevent the UN squad from leaving without Min-jung. But perhaps the most direct valorization of the family comes in lines from Joon-i, who assures her fatally wounded grandfather, his remaining family gathered around him, that zombie-riddled South Korea couldn’t be “hell” because they were “together all along” and, tightly holding her sedated mother’s hand, responds (in English) to Major Jane’s promise that the UN helicopter they are on is taking her to “a new world,” “The world I knew wasn’t bad either.” For Joon-i, a life with zombies and with her grandfather is equivalent, if not preferable, to a life without either (and none of this, incidentally, particularly departs from the “strong streak of melodrama in Korean horror” [Peirse and Martin 2013, 5]).4 Even as Peninsula emphatically valorizes the family, the particular form that Min-jung’s family takes—with Elder Kim the only male member and seemingly confined to the family’s domestic space before they abandon it to escape the city, and the roles that this configuration permits its female members to take on—undermines what some would argue is the family’s “fundamentally authoritarian” ideology (Penny 2022, 190). South Korean patriarchy incorporates a “firmly-rooted belief that social roles should be based on gender—a way of thinking set against the background of a Confucian tradition” that strongly advocates the separation of genders, with the result that “women are discriminated against and assigned specific roles simply because they are women,” a feature “more pronounced than . . . the special role of the housewife as mother” in Japanese patriarchy (Sechiyama 2013, 161). Although a “rapid change in consciousness has been occurring . . . in recent years” (165), and although to a lesser degree than in Japan, “power is still generally

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held by the husband” and “roles are strictly allocated” by gender, with wives responsible for domestic work and management and even women working outside the home “mainly restricted to auxiliary roles, work assisting men” (164). Min-jung has no capitalist demands, presumably little housework, and no husband, removing what might otherwise be gendered restrictions for her and her daughters. Joon-i and Yu-jin are introduced, for instance, when they save Jung-seok, a trained soldier, from the zombie horde, thanks to Joon-i’s driving skills, which include drifting and squeezing her SUV down an alley so narrow that it scrapes both sides of the vehicle. Yu-jin assists by diverting zombies with a noisy, light-covered radio-controlled toy car (even if South Korean zombie cinema tends to focus “on family and societal hierarchies as opposed to consumption habits” [Austin 2020, 9], it is hard not to see the zombies chasing first this shiny toy commodity and shortly after a billboard truck advertising a nightclub as critiquing the latter). Min-jung takes the lead when she and Jungseok attempt to retrieve the truck with the money and satellite phone from Unit 631, Joon-i decides to disobey Min-jung and “go get Mom” when circumstances seem to be taking a bad turn during this endeavor, and Min-jung saves Jung-seok, similarly to how Joon-i had earlier, by means of some aggressive driving. In the extended car-chase scene that follows—evoking, like the earlier driving sequence, any number of Hollywood action and heist movies—Min-jung and Joon-i are the drivers on the protagonists’ side, and Yu-jin’s RC cars come in handy again in causing Unit 631’s leader, Captain Seo (Koo Kyo-hwan), to let go of her sister, whom he had taken hostage (although Seo does then turn his gun on Yu-jin, precipitating her grandfather’s fatal sacrifice). Rather than a historically characteristic “shared oppression,” the “special tie” (Firestone 2012, loc. 1084) here among women and children is shared heroism, heroism of a type that is often coded as masculine and by means of which the leading male protagonist is saved more than once. Further subverting convention, Min-jung’s family members playfully refer to one another as if they were a military unit. Min-jung at one point refers to her father as “Commander,” though, importantly, this does not signal an authoritarian role—the rest of the family do not even believe him that Major Jane is real until she disembarks from the helicopter. And when the sisters return from having rescued Jung-seok, Elder Kim greets them as Lieutenant and Captain. Imagining this female-majority family as a military unit contrasts the much smaller proportion of women in South Korea’s actual military, which stood at 6.8 percent in the year of Peninsula’s release (“Female Soldiers” 2020); but it also invites comparison with the film’s all-male Unit 631 on the one hand and the female-led UN squad on the other, as well as, less directly, the profit-driven male criminal organization. As an alternative structure, Min-jung’s family (familitary?) unit group has remained functional,

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unlike the pre-outbreak military to which Jung-seok belonged. Unlike the all-male, former military Unit 631, which performs cruelty toward the living “in order to accumulate power” (Saldarriaga and Manini 2022, 69) and distributes resources to its members at the absolutist discretion of Captain Seo (or redistributes them via gambling on zombies fighting survivors in timed events), Min-jung’s family remains committed to, as Yu-jin says, helping the weak. Further, while Min-jung and her daughters take on unconventional gender roles, Unit 631’s Sergeant Hwang views the sport coat–wearing Captain Seo as insufficiently masculine, disparaging him for never having fought. Hwang also clashes with Seo’s assistant, Private Kim (Kim Kyu-baek), who has a physical disability requiring a cane, which no doubt also diverges from Hwang’s normative standards of masculinity. When Seo arrives on the criminals’ ship with the money, they betray and shoot him, but as he is dying, he prevents the ship’s door from closing in order to let the zombies on board, male-enacted gore capitalism and competition resulting in a Pyrrhic victory for all involved. Major Jane and her soldiers, in contrast, both keep their word and perform the rescue, at risk to themselves, because it is the ethical thing to do rather than for profit. Among Peninsula’s various groups, those led by women represent an ethics of care endorsed in Yeon Sang-ho’s other zombie films as well, while the all-male groups implode due to greed and a lack of interpersonal bonds. Meanwhile, the zombies themselves have, of course, moved beyond any hierarchy or organization, gendered or otherwise. TRAVERSING GENDERS AND WORLDS: THE ZOMBIE AND/AS THE BAKLA IN REMINGTON AND THE CURSE OF THE ZOMBADINGS The Philippine film Remington and the Curse of the Zombadings, directed by Jade Castro, uses its zombies to challenge heteronormative hierarchies. Zombies inherently possess a queer potential, lacking the requisite able body “which is linked to heteronormativity” (Saldarriaga and Manini 2022, 89)—like Private Kim in Peninsula, whom Sergeant Hwang at one point mistakenly thinks is a romantic partner of Captain Seo—and reproducing in a nonheterosexual manner. Remington harnesses that potential in order to subvert heteronormative conceptions of gender and sexuality for men and to celebrate a particular form of male queerness by combining the figures of the zombie and the bakla. In the opening scenes of Remington and the Curse of the Zombadings, sixyear-old Remington (Andre Salazar) points and shouts “bakla” at a succession of cross-dressed men, as well as one priest in a confessional, who flees Remington’s apparently accurate pronouncement. Martin F. Manalansan IV

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(2003) calls bakla “a problematic Tagalog term” that, according to “popular etymology,” combines the first syllables of the words for woman and man and that “Tagalog dictionaries define . . . as hermaphrodite” (25). In popular usage, “while bakla conflates the categories of effeminacy, transvestism, and homosexuality and can mean one or all of these in different contexts, the main focus of the term is that of effeminate mannerism, feminine physical characteristics . . . and cross-dressing” (25). The term is thus “no mere Filipino synonym for the English word gay” but rather “messily conflates concepts that are usually kept distinct in transnational LGBTQ (lesbian/gay/bisexual/ transgender/queer) vocabularies” (Lim 2015, 186). Bobby Benedicto (2014) includes “lower-class status” among his list of characteristics conflated by this “slippery term” and notes that some use it as an insult (74). Some of these aspects of the word’s slipperiness are reflected in the English subtitles’ translation of bakla as “homo” when young Remington says it but “gay” when the final man whom he calls bakla in this opening sequence, Pops Ricafuerte (Roderick Paulate), uses it, angrily and proudly claiming the identity as he stands up and advances toward Remington: “Always was, always will be.” When Remington repeatedly calls Pops bakla, the latter is visiting his deceased beloved in a graveyard, circumstances which doubtless contribute to Pops’s decision to curse Remington at that point for his bratty behavior to become bakla when he grows up. As Pops pronounces the curse, his power is suggested by dimming light, rising wind, an ominous score, and the modulation into a typical horror-movie “demon voice” as he concludes. The majority of the film concerns what happens when this curse begins to operate at the same time as someone is murdering baklas in the area and these victims are eventually raised from the dead as zombies. Roderick Paulate, who plays Pops, “built his career in the 1980s by performing classic kabaklaan [being bakla] tropes in cinema” (Inton 2017, 66), and aspects of his character draw on that cinematic history. For instance, in one scene, Pops carries a hand fan (as does one of the men at whom Remington shouts in the opening scenes), which signals femininity in the Philippines and was a “signature” prop for an actor known as Dolphy (1928–2012; born Rodolfo Vera Quizon), who defined the onscreen bakla beginning in the 1950s (39–40). Slapstick also commonly features in “comedic bakla movies,” and Pops and the older Remington (Mart Escudero), by this time well into his curse-imposed transformation, end up in a (questionably stereotypical) fight involving some limp-wristed slapping and rolling around on the floor. Pops’s use of magic—and Remington’s loss of control over his body as a result—links him to another cinematic tradition as well by gesturing to the element of sorcery in slave-style zombie films (although it is his attendant who raises the film’s zombies), while simultaneously pointing to the fact that one sense of bakla when used as a verb

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“suggests that bakla can also be an essence that can be transferred to or can descend upon a person like a trance or a fever” (Manalansan 2003, 43)—or a curse that begins to work on the cusp of one’s twenty-first birthday. Dolphy’s bakla films often included a conversion trope: attempts, sometimes involving slapstick violence (Inton 2017, 43) and almost always unsuccessful, to “teach” a bakla normative masculinity (47–48). While this trope disappeared from mainstream Philippine cinema as the 1990s began, coinciding with the start of LGBTQ rights movements in the nation (74–75), Remington’s curse resurrects it in an at least partially inverted form. After Remington’s heteronormative credentials have been established via his romantic interest in Hannah Montano (Lauren Young)—perhaps a play in the style of the film’s character Janet Jacksonia on Hannah Montana, a show about a girl with a hidden identity which concluded its television run the same year that Remington was released—and his playing basketball, the arrival of Pops’s magical flying pashmina signals the beginning of Remington’s conversion. In a parody of a scene out of a slasher film, complete with a musical allusion to Psycho (1960), Remington, bathing shirtless under a hose, is attacked by a mysterious, muscled, equally shirtless man, later revealed to be a spirit, who emerges from the trees and removes all of Remington’s facial and body hair with a straight razor. When the same man again accosts Remington, he stretches Remington’s tongue to a cartoonish extent and drops him unconscious to the ground; Remington later awakes both dissatisfied with his clothing and having acquired a new way of speaking. Many Filipinos believe that a bakla’s clothes “are external signs of the inner core, of essential qualities of feminine sensibility and emotion” (Manalansan 2003, 28), so Remington’s rejection of his own clothes in favor of a tight purple T-shirt belonging to a bakla named Georgia (Nar Cabico) marks not only his learning a non-heteronormative way of being but also a potential transformation of that inner core. Remington’s newly acquired way of speaking functions similarly. Although he tries to resist it, he begins to use swardspeak, “the vernacular language or code used by Filipino gay men” (Manalansan 2003, 46) and a “crucial marker of ‘being bakla’” (47). The term swardspeak “comes from sward,” a word in Cebuano (another of the languages spoken in the Philippines) “for homosexual and/or sissy,” and this way of speaking, argues Manalansan (2003), “reflect[s] the politico-historical and cultural experiences of multiply marginalized men” in a nation formerly colonized by Spain and the United States as it “appropriates elements from dominant Filipino, American, and Spanish codes, and rearticulates their symbolic meanings” (46) while giving the “upper hand” (51) to the latter two of these codes. In this appropriation, swardspeak plays a part in performing “identities that showcase their abject

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relationship to the nation” (51), a relationship showcased also in the bakla zombies that are raised in Remington; and its inclusion of phonetics that make “one appear more knowledgeable of the glamour of America or things ‘abroad’” (52) bespeaks a transnational orientation not unlike that of zombie cinema itself. At the same time, this speech helps its speakers “to claim a space for themselves as queer citizens” (47), and its rapid change maintains its exclusive, “communal aspect” (50). This aspect can be seen diegetically, when, at different times, Remington’s father, Eduardo (John Regala), his best friend Jigs (Kerbie Zamora), and Hannah’s mother (Eugene Domingo) cannot understand Remington—the latter says “I don’t understand. But I like the sound of it”—but Georgia can. Non-diegetically, the distinctiveness of this speech community is both observable in the subtitling of swardspeak dialogue for Filipino audiences and signified by its purple coloring in the English subtitles. Remington’s transformation also reflects how using swardspeak “involves performance and bodily movement” (51), and a change in his movement is also seen, though not in connection to his speech, in a scene (again perched on a line between stereotype and celebration) that begins with a medium close-up of his jeans-clad buttocks as he walks down the street at night and in which, despite his initial confusion, he cannot help first sashaying and then dancing to a diegetic club music track while his movements generate rainbows and other colorful animations, including both the male and female symbols, while two young men watch and smile in approval. The spirit’s final attack on Remington—for which he appears under Remington’s blankets like the ghost in Ju-On: The Grudge (2002), clad now in only a studded thong, and vomits a suggestively milky liquid onto him— reveals another symbol that is given its own close-up shot: a butterfly tattooed on the spirit’s chest. In addition to its connotation of transformation, the butterfly also alludes to the swardspeak metaphor “paglaladlad ng kapa (unfurling of the cape)” (Inton 2017, 81), a revelation of the true, inner self like “a butterfly unfurling its wings for the first time after its metamorphosis” (7), which is analogous but not equivalent to the American discourse of coming out (6–7). Unfurling reveals “an unapprehended presence” rather than a “secret self” (Manalansan 2003, 28; see also 34), and familial discussions are often seen as unnecessary, although such silence can be ambivalent (30). Although Remington’s mother (Janice De Belen), who is chief of police, asks him after the first attack if there is something he “wants to tell” her and whether he is a bakla, it is not until Remington awakens with his own butterfly tattoo after the final attack—and a smash cut to Jigs sleeping in his bed with him—that he experiences sexual attraction to Jigs and starts to discuss his curse with others. His disclosure to Georgia that the spirit “did something to my heart” registers the “core” of the bakla’s “social construction” as a “male body with

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a female heart,” viewed as having “yearnings and needs . . . similar to women’s” (25). Georgia’s remark that it would be too bad if Remington became a bakla because he is so handsome might seem odd to audiences accustomed to a straight-gay binary, but it reflects the tendency of a bakla’s sexual relationship to be with a masculine (straight or straight-presenting) man rather than another bakla (25).5 When he talks about the curse to Hannah, he puts it in terms that evoke not only the butterfly but also the zombie: “I am changing.” Both Hannah and Remington’s father, though, argue that Remington must fight the curse. Hannah asserts that Remington doesn’t “deserve to be called” bakla because the baklas she knows “know how to put up a fight. Some of them fight all their lives,” and he shouldn’t give up who he is because it is the easy choice. The importance which they place on Remington preserving his straightness might seem to privilege heteronormativity, but it derives from the belief that being bakla is essential to a person. Despite the essential nature of being bakla, a permanent transformation does occur, albeit only because sorcery is involved. The spirit who has been visiting Remington reveals that the only way to remove the curse is for another man to take it on, “a real man [who] agrees to turn gay. A real man who hasn’t tried gay sex.” The second part of the spirit’s proclamation would seem to treat masculinity and same-sex sexual experiences as separate, an impression reinforced by the difficulty that Remington has finding a “real man who hasn’t tried gay sex.” Jigs has had multiple sexual encounters with baklas (and is perfectly willing to hook up with Remington), and when Hannah asks who among the people assembled for Remington’s twenty-first birthday party hasn’t had a gay experience, amidst a number of averted gazes, only two young men and one young woman raise their hands. In addition to making a normalizing claim for queer ubiquity, this prevalence of nonheterosexual sex can be related to a culturally specific way of conceptualizing gender: “Unlike binary gender categories in the English language, gender operates in the Philippines on a four-level hierarchy that combines ideas of the sexed body, gendered performance, and sexual orientation”: “Girl, Boy, Bakla, Tomboy,” the first two considered normative genders and the second two non-normative (Inton 2017, 12). According to Manalansan (2003), “gender performance (acting masculine or feminine) and/or one’s role in the sex act” determines whether one is viewed or identifies as “gay” (23), and Michael Nuñez Inton (2017) explains that “the bakla’s interiorized femininity” (24) permits desire between a bakla and a “lalake (cisgender, heterosexual man)” (12) to be viewed “as heterosexual” (24). Ultimately, it is Remington’s father who takes on the curse. His response to Remington asking whether he would “rather be gay than have a gay son” could be interpreted as self-sacrificial (he says that he has already, unlike Remington, had his “swing at life”), but, again, it also draws on the idea

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of bakla as an essential identity (he says that Remington should be happy as he is, meaning in his inborn gender identity). Bliss Cua Lim (2015), discussing one film in the post-2008 trend in Philippine cinema of queering the folkloric “supernatural creature” (182) known as the aswang, describes straight characters’ impermanent detours “into queer monstrosity” (201) as “nababakla (to be temporarily possessed by bakla-ness as an exterior force that ‘happens’ or ‘descends’ on someone)” (200). This “nabakla, queerness as an unbidden and uninvited force that takes hold of the straight subject from the outside,” becomes, Lim maintains, “a mode of containment” when it is temporary (201), which Remington’s certainly is. However, the permanence of his father’s substitute transformation mitigates this potential containment. Remington’s father adds that he can still be a father when he is gay and that his wife will understand. He proves correct on both counts, as they are later shown happily together in the family home, with Eduardo cross-dressed, admiring a man removing his shirt in the rain, and receiving a high five from his wife, who has nudged him to look at the man. Their new, harmonious status quo is attested to both by this mutual gaze and by the symbolism of their sharing and presumably enjoying the same plate of food to end the scene. Their situation echoes that of Hannah’s parents: her deceased father was one of the people whom Remington called bakla as a child, but this does not appear to have affected her mother’s feelings for her spouse: when Hannah laughs at a cross-dressed man dancing in mud on TV, her mother looks nostalgic, and later, she has started to learn and understand Remington’s swardspeak. Remington himself ends the film in a more ambiguous place than the lifting of the curse might suggest. Joel David (2019) categorizes Remington as an example of a character who evinces “playful bisexuality,” a male-dominated category in Philippine cinema (447) in which most of the examples “operate on fantastic” devices (a potion, a meteorite, a solar eclipse, vampires) (448) and in which “the character wields her or his charm to signal her or his availability” (447). While it is unclear from David’s brief mention of the film if he is arguing that Remington is actually bisexual or displays a symbolic bisexuality in his shifting sexual desire as the curse descends and lifts, it is noteworthy that a scene in the film’s final minutes shows Remington secured between Hannah and Jigs, both of whom have an arm around him, all three of them smiling. Remington’s partial and his father’s permanent transformation into baklas take place against the backdrop of serial killings of baklas. These killings are the most dramatic way in which the film dramatizes the discrimination that Jay Jomar Quintos (2012) writes, in the year following Remington’s release, is still endemic to the media and the state (166). More mundane instances are included as well, such as Eduardo laughingly calling the baklas in beauty

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pageants—an aspect of the cinematic archetype that Inton (2017) credits Dolphy with helping to create (38)—“ugly” and telling Georgia that “this conversation is only for humans” (a remark that both dehumanizes Georgia and anticipates the film’s zombified baklas), as well as a man named Isko (Reicon Condes) not wishing it to be known that he was on his way to meet Tonya (Ram de Leon), one of the serial killer’s victims. Tonya works in a beauty salon, and so, even as a sympathetic victim, fits into stock images of the bakla “as a parlorista” (Quintos 2012, 167), a low-income beauty salon worker, or “getting murdered and chasing after love” (168). This class-linked image of baklas as “tacky beauticians” (Manalansan 2003, 39) is reinforced by the mayor’s (Odette Khan) complaint that the murders are affecting the economy and have caused five beauty salons to close. She does continue, however, less stereotypically, that their “gay townmates” are “kind” and (in English) “they only bring joy, beauty, and laughter wherever they go.” Even if bringing laughter potentially curves back toward stereotype, the murdered baklas are accorded value as members of the community. A similar function is performed by Remington’s mother’s dismissal as ridiculous of the possibility that the murder victims are in hell. The murder weapon is a colorful ray gun that was invented as a thesis project to be a “gaydar” intended to determine if “a goat is gay and will not mate” but which had fatal results when tested. The gun’s inventor, Ernesto (Nicco Manalo), in another claim for the ubiquity of queerness, asserts that bakla-ness “exists in all animal species” and that gay livestock could be put into roles better suited to them, such “as pets or commercial models,” this latter a case for adapting an individual being’s role to its essence rather than its essence to its assigned role. Notably, the gun does not work on Remington, perhaps because he has not fully completed his transformation at the time or perhaps because he does not truly possess the requisite “female heart.” When Remington’s father first finds out about the gaydar gun, which is in the possession of his friend Suarez Suarez (Daniel Fernando), he agrees not to say anything as long as Georgia is left alone, displaying a commonplace conservative limiting of compassion and care to queer people whom one personally knows and (perhaps) likes. The film intentionally makes inaudible much of Suarez’s explanation of why he hates baklas and his justification of the killings, cheekily drowning him out with a passing marching band, but we do hear him end with another common reactionary position: “protecting our country and the future of our families and youth.” However, Suarez later reveals himself to be in love with another man, Serge (Leandro Baldemor), weeping and cradling Serge’s body when Serge is killed by zombies. The gaydar gun (yes, the gun itself) tells Suarez that he has “turned,” a description reminiscent of zombification, after he has “kept it hidden far too long” and advises him to “let go” and “give in” as it kills him with a beam that cycles

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through rainbow colors. While the gun concludes (in English), “Welcome to the club” before Eduardo smashes it, Suarez’s repression of his desires means that he does not get to enjoy his membership: he is buried together with Serge under a grave marker that says “BEST FRIENDS” (one last bit of repression or a bit of snark on the part of whoever buried him?) while, in contrast, the baklas whom he killed get to remain above ground as zombies. While the zombie always has queer potential, the baklas who are raised from the dead in Remington are explicitly queer zombies, which here challenge the hierarchy among the four genders of cis female, cis male, bakla, and tomboy. The zombie, contend Steve Jones and Shaka McGlotten (2014), with its unrestricted “cravings,” can open “up a sexual world that is distinctly utopian” (loc. 282): it “is the leveler of desires,” erasing the line that cordons off supposedly “aberrant” human desires as it does the line between life and death (loc. 276). More specifically, as Darren Elliot-Smith (2014) writes, “The zombie, with its own alternative methods of reproduction, rejects heterosexistly enforced identity and is thus a means of embracing difference. In this sense, gay zombie representation can also be used counterculturally, as a figure through which the queer subject can celebrate his marginalisation and simultaneously reject his ‘monstrousness’” (loc. 2744). When Suarez kills Pops, Pops’s young page boy (Daniel Medrana) performs a ritual to raise all of the victims of the gaydar gun—even the gay goat—as zombies in a montage that enacts a queer parody of such scenes, featuring not only one hand coming out of a grassy grave but a second hand pushing out from underground holding a high-heeled, peep-toe bootie and a trio of zombies striking a Charlie’s Angels–style pose in silhouette. These victims are resurrected so that they can take “sweet revenge,” an event possessed of wider sociocultural and historical resonance regarding the treatment of and violence toward non-heteronormative people. These zombies are the “zombadings” of the film’s title, bading being a “more polite term for bakla” (Manalansan 2003, 29), and they reproduce the bakla’s categorical in-betweenness in their own in-betweenness as partly Afro-Caribbean-style zombies (they are made undead through sorcery) and partly cannibal-style zombies (they are not controlled by the person who zombified them and they bite people). Alessandro Grilli (2014) points out that the gay zombie can parody homosexuality as compulsive and contagious (54). However, the zombadings’ bites are never clearly shown to create more zombies, leaving them to embody instead a “functional-symbolic equivalent of otherness” (56). This is not to say that moments such as the zombadings comedically posing after being resurrected don’t, counter to the film’s goal of celebrating the bakla, risk provoking “uneasy laughter” that perpetuates stereotypes (Reyes 2014, 6). Connor Jackson (2017) posits that “flamboyant zombie flicks” may produce “ridicule, rather than reinforcement” of stereotypes (loc. 2502), but while

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Remington seems more interested in reveling in rather than deconstructing the bakla archetype, it does open the door to ridicule of stereotypically normative masculinity. It contrasts the zombadings, for example—formerly “kind” people who brought “joy” to their community—to a heterosexual pageant host (Bayani Agbayani) who sexually harasses the contestants, including a zombading who ends up onstage, which implies both indiscriminate masculine sexuality and a masculine inability to tell the difference between a cis woman and a bakla. The host’s disrespect for the contestants also echoes Remington’s earlier chastisement of Jigs to have some respect for Hannah when Jigs says that Remington must almost be inside her pants. Lim (2015) describes monstrosity’s effectiveness in embodying “queer survival,” in contesting both the “devaluation of bakla subjectivities by upwardly mobile, ‘global gay’ subjectivities” (187) and heteronormative historico-cultural narratives (188). It is extremely significant that the zombadings do, literally, survive, and not only survive but prosper: they are last seen working on fashionable handcrafted hats for their business, Zombreros, Inc., which is successful enough to be receiving orders from Germany. These zombies are performing artisanal labor in a congenial parklike outdoor space rather than slave labor, and they, like the film in which they appear, are exporting cultural artifacts. This is not the queer zombie achieving an “eternally queer” zombie future through the disappearance of humans (Saldarriaga and Manini 2022, 88) but the queer zombie creating a future shared among everyone along the spectrums of (un)life and queerness. Comedy may, as some argue, make the figure of the bakla less threatening (Inton 2017, 68), but when it comes to the existing social order, zombification gives it back its bite. The ability of the zombadings to straddle life and death also reflects what a lengthy voice-over by Angelina Kanapi, who plays policewoman Mimi, during Remington’s end credits describes as the pre-Spanish-colonial belief in the bakla’s “power to traverse worlds, from the real to the unknown.” This voice-over, a sort of history lesson-cum-thesis statement, positions the bakla as the direct descendent of “pre-Spanish religious shamans called babaylan who cross-dressed and reputedly indulged in same-sex practice” and who “occupied honored positions in the community” (Manalansan 2003, 36). Quintos (2012), who notes that asog, bayoguin, and binabayi have similar definitions (156)—the film admits that the word bakla did not exist in this period—contends that male-male marriage was “accepted . . . as part of life” (159) in indigenous culture but the colonial Spanish saw babaylans as “possessed by demons and spirits” (161) and a bakla as having a devil in him (160). Remington’s curse acknowledges but recuperates these notions of possession, as does, less directly, the monstrosity of the zombadings. Rather than being killed or cured of their monstrosity, the zombadings find their place

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(perhaps an honored position, depending how strongly one feels about hats), and the magic that curses Remington and raises the dead (which can also be taken as a return of the repressed past) situates Pops and his page boy as the heirs of the pre-colonial shamans. The voice-over tells us that in precolonial times, baklas were “stars” and “goddesses,” held “in high esteem” and “Consulted by Chieftains,” but it also points out that the word bakla originally denoted cowardice, a type of deficit in masculinity (“As if,” it comments, “straight people don’t get scared!”). It then continues, “It’s better in English. ‘Gay.’ Happy! But in our country, the former superstars became synonyms for fear.” The invocation here of “gay” as preferable is ironic because, somewhat contradictorily, even as the film argues for a return to the time of stars and goddesses—a small boy ends the film proper by saying “She’s beautiful” of a cross-dressed man, rather than yelling bakla like young Remington—Remington confirms that he will be heading to Manila, where practices such as swardspeak and cross-dressing have waned (Benedicto 2014, 78) while “global and metrocentric” ideas of being gay dominate (79) and there is a “denigration of femininity” similar to that in Western gay male spaces (85). So while planning to go to Manila from the smaller Lucban is meant to represent Remington conquering his fears of the big city, it also invokes the site of “a desire to imagine the bakla’s obsolescence” (83). Lim (2015) criticizes the “genealogical continuity between ancient asog and present-day bakla” proposed by Quintos as “at once promising and risky” for potentially if unintentionally reproducing this same “dichotomy between bakla as a . . . throwback versus a contemporary cosmopolitan gay subjectivity” (203). However, as Benedicto (2014) contends, even if some want to treat kabaklaan as “anachronistic,” it is nevertheless “lodged in cultural memory” and “inextricably tied to the production of ‘modern’ gay subjectivity” (75)—it is a past that refuses, like the zombading, to remain buried. CONCLUSION If in Remington and the Curse of the Zombadings, it is the onset of colonial subjugation that ushers in the constructions of gender and gendered roles that the film seeks to challenge, in Miss Zombie and Peninsula, the roles at issue arrived alongside capitalist modernity, an earlier transformation for Japan than for South Korea, but one with no-less-tenacious gendered legacies. While Remington looks to the precolonial past—and to the zombie—for a path to progress beyond heteronorms, in Miss Zombie, the past, in its particular individual form for Shara and in the form of the roles of housewife and sacrificial motherhood for both Shizuko and, to a lesser degree, Shara, leads

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to exploitation and monstrosity; and in Peninsula, the nation’s having fallen to zombies leaves the structure of the extended family in place but makes room to substitute its past form, and the behaviors of the women within it, for one less patriarchally determined and dominated. The zombies in Peninsula represent the by-products of patriarchal capitalism, while in Miss Zombie they are projected to be its commodities, and in both cases, they are its victims. Remington, in contrast, assimilates its zombies into the capitalist system in a vision of inclusivity and belonging that most likely overestimates the possibility of decoupling heteronormativity from capitalism or queering its hierarchies. Penny (2022) writes that “a horror of female flesh . . . encourages women and girls and queer people to be as small as possible, to take up as little space as possible. The aesthetic that is morally, socially, and financially rewarded is an aesthetic of hunger. Of lack” (117). The zombie, which in Miss Zombie is explicitly female and in Remington explicitly queer, literalizes this hunger and lack and turns their violence back on the culture and society that produced it. The zombie in Peninsula may lack such overt gendering or queerness, but it nonetheless helps the film’s living women to push back, if to a limited degree, against the family’s “division of labour by sex, and thus the traditional dependencies and resulting power relations, extended over generations” (Firestone 2012, loc. 3434), even as it conceives of the family as the site of safety, stability, meaning, and care in the absences of all other social institutions. It also, though, represents the family as female-led (like Shizuko’s husband-less, undying family will be), and all three films discussed in this chapter, like Ever After, imagine the future as distinctly feminine, an alternative to an oppressive, destructive normative masculinity. The culturally specific manifestations of gender and sexual structures and schemas that inform these films—the Japanese and Korean conceptions of the family, mother, and housewife and the Filipino conception of the bakla and its antecedents—also throw into relief how the heteronorms engaged and critiqued by Western zombie films such as Yummy, Ever After, and Me and My Mates vs. the Zombie Apocalypse (see chapter 2) are just as historically and culturally situated. NOTES 1. Murphy (2015b) connects Shara with the yūrei, the vengeful spirit of someone, often a woman, who died suddenly or violently; such spirits have a significant presence in Japanese horror (125, 163). 2. See also the discussion of I Am a Hero in the following chapter.

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3. See also Balmain (2008), 129–31 on representations of the demonic mother as a response to the cult of motherhood. 4. Peirse and Martin (2013) trace this streak to the colonial occupation of Korea by Japan, which lasted from 1910 until World War II (5, 3). 5. A masculine bakla is assumed to be faking a “masculine facade” (Manalansan 2003, 25–26).

Chapter 7

Race and Nation, Take 2 China, South Korea, and Japan

In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin (1993) speculates, “Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have” (91). In the East Asian films discussed in this chapter, death crashes up against those bulwarks of “races, armies, flags, [and] nations” in the form of the zombie, an incarnation of death’s inevitability that is much harder to deny or ignore in the rotting flesh than as an abstract concept. Benedict Anderson (2016) argues that the imagined community of the modern nation-state provides a “secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning” that was once the province of religion or dynasty (11). On a large enough scale, a zombie outbreak, an irruption of repressed awareness of death, threatens the very cohesion and continued existence of the nation. Consider, for example, the South Korea of Peninsula, discussed in the previous chapter. With most of its citizens redistributed, perhaps permanently, among various other nations as refugees and with the few survivors who remain living with no government and no way to carry on the sorts of social and cultural practices that help to maintain a national identity, to what would “South Korea” actually refer? Identity has often been “instrumentalize[d]” by “modern states,” which “have designed education and family policies to produce not just ‘people’ but (for example) ‘Germans,’ ‘Italians,’ or ‘Americans’”—or Chinese, Japanese, or Koreans—“who can be called on to sacrifice for the nation when needed” (Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser 2019, 23). The zombie disrupts such projects. Even in narratives that do not depict a full-scale national collapse, however, the zombie can act as a vehicle for anxieties about the dissolution of or attacks upon the nation or the collective identity that it helps to produce. 165

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The films examined in this chapter use zombies to figure threats to the nation and/or a national-cultural identity that are rooted, to varying degrees, in that nation’s history. In contrast to the Indigenous immunity imagined in The Dead Can’t Dance and Blood Quantum (see chapter 3), the ethno-national groups centered in China’s Zombie Island (2018) and South Korea’s Rampant (Chang-gwol; 2018) prove susceptible to foreign infection, which must then be purged. In Zombie Island, the zombie virus is produced and deliberately introduced by the continuation of Japan’s 1930s and 1940s-era program of human experimentation and biological warfare, the most extensive arm of which was based in the Chinese provinces of Manchuria and which has been a thorny subject of the negotiation of collective memory for both nations. The zombie infection in the film is paralleled by the conversion of the film’s central Chinese villain to this Japanese cause through adoption by a Japanese man. In Rampant, the zombie infection arrives in the Joseon kingdom via European ships as part of a weapons deal aimed at helping to expel the Chinese Qing in the seventeenth century. The narrative of destroying the resultant zombies functions simultaneously as a narrative defining good governance, which includes prioritizing the common people and reorienting the government away from China, both of which assert a proto-national identity. While Japan’s I Am a Hero (Ai amu a hîrô; 2016) evokes the atomic bombing of Japan by the United States in 1945, it is primarily concerned with cultural rather than military conflict, although the US-led occupation of Japan after World War II, which induced “a frantic quest for . . . what it now meant to call oneself Japanese” (Blake 2008, 19), certainly links the two. The film uses its protagonist, who works in a manga industry in which he takes great nationalist pride, to repudiate the typical firearms-loving American action-horror film protagonist and to represent resistance to a cultural infection distinct from but reflected in the zombie infection. In all three films, the zombie outbreak provides the setting for defining or working through, in the face of death, some aspect of national identity in contradistinction to the foreign, even if the zombie infection itself is not of foreign origin. WAR IS THE GREATEST DEMON: THE SECOND SINO-JAPANESE WAR, UNIT 731, AND ZOMBIE ISLAND Zombie Island, directed by Gabriel Leung, sees a group of tourists, researchers, and hospitality employees trapped during a zombie outbreak inside an inn on the fictional Payi Island, which is affiliated with an unspecified Southeast Asian nation that, based on the coordinates provided in the film, is probably Indonesia. The living characters who barricade themselves inside participate in the infighting common to zombie siege narratives until the

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undead eventually break in, and the remaining survivors ultimately discover the hidden lab where the secretly Japanese owner of the inn and his adopted Chinese daughter have been continuing experiments begun by the Japanese in World War II, which have led to this latest, though not first, zombie outbreak on the island. While set outside of mainland China, Zombie Island ties its undead directly to historical Japanese atrocities that were centered in China but spread through Southeast Asia as well—the zombies in horror comedy Izla (2021), from the Philippines, which was occupied by Japan between 1942 and 1945, similarly come from a World War II–era Japanese lab on a now-forbidden island—and it makes these ties available for contextualization both in the period of the Japanese invasion of China as a whole and in the postwar navigation of national accountability. The film’s processing and memorialization of national trauma includes both a strong assertion of historical victimization and victory over a Japanese Other imagined as insidiously omnipresent, incontrovertibly amoral, and unflaggingly hostile. The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), often known in China as the War of Resistance (Mitter and Aaron William Moore 2011, 235), is arguably “the single most devastating event in China’s modern history” (226).1 Japan invaded the Chinese provinces of Manchuria in 1931, using a bombing near a Japanese-owned railroad as a pretext, and began a brutal occupation (“Japanese Invasion of China” n.d., 321, 323). The occupation expanded to “full-scale war” with China in 1937, which saw the Japanese invasion of Nanjing (also spelled Nanking), the seat of the Chinese Nationalist government (321), an event that was “notorious for the level of violence and brutality committed by the Japanese,” including organized rape of civilians (324). The Second Sino-Japanese War ended with the Japanese defeat in World War II but left a legacy of continued suspicion and hostility between China and Japan, including Chinese anger over “Japan’s denial of responsibility for the aggression” (325). A further source of tensions has been the revelations that throughout this entire period, including during the initial occupation of Manchuria, designated units of the Japanese forces carried out war crimes in the name of research. As summarized by Arthur Kleinman, Jing-Bao Nie, and Mark Selden (2010), From the early 1930s to the end of the Second World War, Japanese military doctors and scientists conducted a wide range of experiments with infectious disease agents and the vivisection of thousands of human guinea pigs in a quest to develop effective biological weapons. These horrific medical atrocities were carried out mainly in the biological warfare (BW) programs that the Japanese Imperial Army established throughout occupied China and Southeast Asia, among which those of Unit 731 were the most extensive and the best documented. Japanese researchers also actively participated in employing

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bacteriological and chemical weapons not only in military battles but in bombing entire city and village populations. (1)

Zombie Island registers the persistent national trauma of these atrocities by imagining that they never actually ended. In the film, two guests disappear after arriving at the island’s inn a couple of days before the rest of their group, and one, Lao Gui (Mo Yong-Hui), is shown in a brief early scene bound and gagged on a table while filmed by two people in biohazard suits and masks, one of whom forcibly injects him with an unspecified substance as he struggles. The darkness and rapid edits in this scene externalize for the audience the victim’s sense of disorientation while also disrupting the “scientific” (and, we come to understand later, national) viewpoint of the experimenters’ diegetic camcorder, flashes of which are included. The other missing guest, Mao Huang (Guang Guang), shows up, collapses to his knees, and dies shortly after (to reanimate several minutes later as zombie, of course). During his collapse, we see a brief, black-and-white flashback of the zombie on a beach who infected him, intercut with Mao Huang in pain on the floor to suggest that it is his memory. Zombie Island conceals until its climactic scenes the relationship between what happens to each of these two guests, and between them and what a police radio broadcast (in English) calls an island-wide “attack” “by an unprecedented virus” just before the outpost is overrun. But the virus, or a version of it, is not in fact unprecedented, and characters offer two versions of the island’s troubled past before the film’s climactic revelations, which include a third, presumably most accurate version. “Collective remembrance is . . . a deeply political process,” writes James Reilly (2011, 466), and the multiple iterations of the truth behind the previous zombie outbreak parallel the permutations of and conflict over the truth about the activities of Unit 7312 and the network in which it was embedded. The long and contentious process of disclosing and disseminating that latter truth was marked in its beginnings by “a secret deal” made by the United States “with the perpetrators immediately after the war, accepting ‘precious’ scientific data in exchange for a cover-up and cash payments, and shielding the scientists from prosecution” (Kleinman, Nie, and Selden 2010, 2). Echoing such concealment, the first version of the previous zombie outbreak treats all of its elements as occurring without any human agency. An employee of the inn, Miss Ping (Wang Yi), says that a “terrible plague” swept the island, with the infected indiscriminately biting others, before “an unexpected fire” eventually killed everyone on the island. While she does view this new “plague” as “payback,” it is in the supernatural sense, a “curse” from those killed by the fire, a way of thinking that acknowledges the tendency of past trauma to recur but avoids assigning responsibility for either the trauma’s origin or its return.

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For various political and economic reasons, the Chinese government itself downplayed “the horrors of the Japanese invasion” until the 1980s, when shifts in geopolitics made public acknowledgment of said horrors seem advantageous in stirring up patriotic support for the ruling party (Reilly 2011, 471). By the mid-1990s, the government had succeeded perhaps too well, with populist “history activism” (474) coming into conflict with its “pragmatic diplomatic and domestic objectives” (473) and, helped by the internet in the early 2000s, bolstering anti-Japanese sentiment, including huge protests in 2005 against “Japan’s efforts to obtain a permanent seat at the UN Security Council” (475). The film’s second account of the island’s past outbreak comes, significantly, from a historian, Lin Yu (Xu Dan), who directly attributes it to Japan’s biological warfare program. She explains that she, along with her historian husband (now a zombie), has been studying the “Japanese invasion period” and asserts that the remnants of Japan’s “bacterial army” escaped to points across the globe, including this island, following the Japanese surrender. Her dialogue is accompanied by a montage of footage from World War II, as she goes on to explain that the members of the Japanese army who ended up on the island continued to perform “experiments on human bodies” in the pursuit of realizing “Japanese militarism,” causing the “severe plague” sixty years before the film’s present. Lin Yu’s and Miss Ping’s discussions of plague bring to mind both the Orwellian official name of Unit 731, “the Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Department” (Keiichi 2010, 23), and the unit’s attempt to weaponize, among other pathogens, the plague, using infected fleas (27). Lin Yu identifies those responsible for the island’s prior outbreak as having claimed to be businessmen there to open a mine, and the locals whom they hired as workers all ended up contracting and spreading the plague. This connection to capitalism, though a facade, nonetheless evokes “the far-reaching scope” of the historical biowarfare program, “which included not only units within Japan’s BW [biological warfare] program and medical universities/hospitals, but pharmaceutical companies as well,” which stood to profit from the program’s research (Wang 2010, 45). The head of Unit 731 “involved the medical community within Japan as a source of financial and technical support,” exchanging community members’ “silence about the atrocities” for concealment of their own “tacit participation in experiments which allowed them to obtain and use materials gathered through inhumane means” (45). While the film never makes clear whether the scattered remains of Japan’s biowarfare program are networked in any way, Lin Yu interprets the new zombie outbreak, an irruption that mimics the periodic returns of collective trauma (perhaps especially unresolved trauma), as evidence that someone is still carrying on the program’s research. She also claims that the government burned the island in order to eradicate the previous outbreak, creating a historical narrative that contrasts Miss

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Ping’s in assigning an agent associated with a particular nation-state both to the “plague” and to its containment. Also in contrast to Miss Ping’s narrative, Lin Yu’s invocation of the supernatural is metaphorical: she refers to the past infected as demons but propounds, “War is the greatest demon, because it turns people into demons.” Despite this maxim, however, although sometimes-violent conflict occurs among the Chinese characters—almost entirely as a result of the circumstances created by the zombie infection—based on Lin Yu’s narrative, it seems more accurate to say that war turns Japanese people into figurative demons who then turn others into demons in a somewhat more literal sense. The facts of her story, she says, came from an elderly man who managed to escape the island, making this information analogous to the testimony of a war survivor, while Lin Yu herself, who had brought a group of now-undead scholars to the island to do more research and who remarks, “So many years have passed, few people know the facts,” represents an analogue to China’s history activists. After 2005, the Chinese government made a concerted effort to tamp down this activism and the associated anti-Japanese feeling (Reilly 2011, 476), including efforts “to redirect attention away from Japanese wartime atrocities in favour of a heroic narrative of the wartime past” (480) even as some popular commercial outlets still looked “to provide sensationalist, negative coverage of Japan” (485). Zombie Island itself aligns with such coverage, obliquely contributing to the collective remembrance of those atrocities, especially in its climactic section. Xiao Hong (Zhong Tao), whose father owns the inn, takes the three remaining survivors to a bomb shelter that turns out to have been turned into a laboratory for the purpose of continuing Japan’s human experimentation and biowarfare program. Xiao Hong reveals that she and her father, Cai Shu (Tang Xin-Hua), have been conducting “bacterial experiments” and confirms the retrenchment of the remains of Japan’s biowarfare division in various places throughout the globe. She also discloses that her grandfather recruited the would-be miners in order to have subjects for “live experiments” but corrects Lin Yi’s narrative, saying that the islanders themselves burned the island when they figured out that something was wrong. She then explains how she and her father came to carry out her grandfather’s wishes following his death shortly after the fire. The differences between Xiao Hong’s and Lin Yi’s narratives foreground a disjunction between official histories and popular or concealed histories similar to that in Chinese discourse concerning the Japanese invasion period and Unit 731. Xiao Hong’s dehumanizing attitude toward her experimental subjects also reflects the part of the discourse that draws attention to Japanese atrocities in the invasion period. She views the tourists merely as providing a medium for further research on the virus, the zombies having proved too difficult

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to capture for experimentation. And following the confession of her true purpose, she injects one of the bound survivors with the zombie virus and takes notes as he painfully turns, complaining about her wasted time when it appears that he has died. Visibly and audibly distressed, Lin Yi calls her cruel, and she calmly responds that dying is “no big deal.” Xiao Hong’s perspective replicates how “Japanese doctors did not see the . . . subjects of their gruesome experiments,” who were primarily Chinese, but some of whom were also Korean and Russian, “as human beings, but rather as ‘experimental materials.’ Those who tortured and murdered referred to their victims simply as maruta, a Japanese term for ‘logs of wood’ or ‘lumber’” (Kleinman, Nie, and Selden 2010, 5). The use of this term constitutes, according to Boris G. Yudi (2010), “a striking example of social construction” of a new entity: “While those designated by the term did share some properties intrinsic to humans, they were not perceived as human in the true sense; rather they were seen as not-quite-human” (76). This conception of a person as animated but not alive, as human but not human, is almost indistinguishable from the conception of a zombie. As Xiao Hong’s seeing people as experimental materials is already seeing them as equivalent to zombies, transforming people into actual zombies—or run-of-the-mill corpses, as the case may be—becomes much easier and more justifiable. In much zombie cinema, experimentation tends to be limited to the zombies themselves (as in Day of the Dead and The Girl with All the Gifts [2016]), and the illegal or irresponsible biological or human experimentation that gives rise to zombie viruses (as in Train to Busan, Zombie for Sale, and The Neighbor Zombie) does so accidentally, making Xiao Hong and her family’s deliberate viral experiments on living people, especially given their connection to historical atrocities, arguably more horrifying in comparison. Such purposeful scientific creation also locates the family in the mad scientist tradition, carrying a moral warning similar to the activities of Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein or H. P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West and their various film incarnations, despite those corpse-reanimating characters’ differing aims. Yudi (2010) observes that grounds for creating the dehumanizing us-and-them dichotomy that facilitates the commission of atrocities can include race and cites the “Japanese theory of a racial hierarchy prevalent at the time of the war,” which disposed Japan as the superior race, “‘kindred races such as China and Korea’” as secondary, and “‘island people’” on a third tier” (75). As most of the invasion-period test subjects were “kindred” Chinese, their being “national enemies, whether actual or potential” provided another criterion (75). Once Xiao Hong captures the survivors in her secret lab, she asserts her Japanese identity in over-the-top fashion, emerging from the shadows having donned bright red lipstick, hair sticks, and a kimono, identifiable by its wide obi belt. That she describes her father as inheriting

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the “wishes” of her grandfather, which she herself inherits through her father, allows this familial immorality to be read as an ethno-national characteristic. However, importantly, Xiao Hong was not born Japanese: Cai Shu adopted her and made her his assistant in his experiments, suggesting a kind of racial pollution. Cai Shu himself concealed his Japanese identity by learning Chinese before opening the inn and adopting Xiao Hong. The Japanese, then, act here as a foreign menace who extend historical national trauma (Lin Yi asks Xiao Hong if she thinks “we are still at war”), continuing to ‘invade’ by pretending to be Chinese and by converting and corrupting future generations—just as anyone can be converted to a zombie.3 So when survivor Liu Chong (Bai Yun-Feng) tries to dissuade Xiao Hong by arguing that he knows that she isn’t “one of them,” his appeal sounds distinctly ethno-nationalist. A flashback also establishes that Cai Shu has sex with Xiao Hong, who appears in the scene with braided pigtails and a white T-shirt suggestive of youthful innocence (at the same time, white is also associated in China with death and mourning). In addition to adding incest to the crimes of the Japanese characters, because Xiao Hong is ethnically Chinese, in the context of his direct ties to the Japanese invasion period, Cai Shu’s having sex with her (without, in the flashback, enthusiastic consent) conjures another atrocity committed by the Japanese Imperial forces: the systematic sexual enslavement between 1931 and 1945 of around 200,000 women (Koslovsky 2013, 105). Known as comfort women, they were primarily “from Korea (which was ruled by Japan),” though some were also from other nations including China, and “were shipped to front lines as well as other war zones, often arriving with shipments of munitions and food” (105). Such treatment suggests a process of dehumanization similar to that applied to test subjects for the biowarfare program. Lao Gui’s attempt to sexually assault Xiao Hong in the film’s present reinforces, albeit indirectly, her association with comfort women. Because he is Chinese and she has been made Japanese, his sexual advances, which land him on the experimentation table, relocate while they mirror the use of comfort women. The sexual enslavement of the comfort women was not prosecuted at the trials for war crimes which took place in Tokyo in 1946, and survivors “kept silent until 1991,” when they began to sue the Japanese government, which “has admitted complicity but, to date, has issued no formal apology or monetary compensation” (Koslovsky 2013, 105). This lengthy, contested movement from concealment into public acknowledgment strikingly resembles that of Japan’s invasion-period medical atrocities, discussed above. Most involved in the atrocities of Unit 731 and the rest of the Japanese biowarfare program also never faced consequences (Kleinman, Nie, and Selden 2010, 5); and of the few involved personnel convicted of war crimes by the Soviets, all “had been repatriated by 1956,” except for one man who had

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already committed suicide (Keiichi 2010, 30). In Zombie Island, Cai Shu is shot to death, albeit accidentally, mistaken for one of the zombies which he is responsible for creating; and Xiao Hong is killed by the zombified survivor whom she injects in her lab, murdered by her own experiment. Both face the justice that their historical counterparts escaped, while the pregnant Lin Yi survives, is rescued, and will presumably go on to tell the story of what she has discovered and to perpetuate the nation by giving birth. While Zombie Island (re)presents national trauma, then, it ultimately refracts that trauma through a fantasy of accountability and even poetic justice. CONTAINING THE FOREIGN AND REFORMING THE DOMESTIC IN RAMPANT While less overtly xenophobic than Zombie Island, Rampant, directed by Kin Sung-hoom, also assigns its zombie outbreak a foreign origin. Rampant takes place during the Joseon, or Chosŏn, period of Korean history, named for the dynasty that ruled the kingdom from 1392 to 1910.4 The crown prince in the film wishes, against his father’s policy, to drive out the Chinese from the kingdom. Though his plot is prevented and he commits suicide, the ship carrying weapons which he was to buy is also carrying a zombie virus, and his younger brother, raised in China, returns to be drawn reluctantly into struggles not only against the zombies but also with internal enemies, his own loyalties, and his future role in the kingdom. Although it may be “the first film to feature zombies in a historical Korean movie” (Elidrissi 2021, 278), Rampant can also be seen as part of the Korean cinematic trend dubbed “heritage horror” by Yun Mi Hwang (2013), which combines horror and costume drama, two genres that have performed well with the nation’s audiences—and as exports—in the new millennium (77–78). On the historical side, the film specifically evokes the long-established “royal court sageuk” subgenre, which concentrates on “conspiracy and intrigue inside the palace” and “power struggles amongst royalty, faithful servants and rebellious retainers” (79)—an almost perfect description of Rampant, lacking only the undead.5 While Rampant does not specify the particular year in which its power struggles unfold, its depiction of Joseon paying tribute to the Chinese Qing dynasty places it after 1637. In 1636, “Abahai, Emperor Taizong, renamed his state of Later Jin to Qing” and demanded that Joseon “acknowledge the sovereign-subject relationship between the two states” (Kim 2012, 238). The emperor responded to Jonseon’s refusal with an invasion of 100,000 men in 1637, and Jonseon’s terms of surrender included cutting ties with the Ming, acknowledging “the suzerainty of Qing,” and sending its Crown Prince and his younger brother to

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the Qing as hostages (238). In Rampant, Prince Ganglim (Hyun Bin)6 calls out “See you in Beijing” to a departing Qing ship, suggesting a date after 1644, when the Qing captured the city (Rossabi 2014, 264) as part of conquering the Ming, after which “Manchus reigned as the masters of China until 1911,” the Qing dynasty ending just after the Joseon dynasty (Kim 2012, 211). And if the comment by Joseon’s King Lee Jo (Kim Eui-sung) that only he should decide if “we submit to Ming or Qing” alludes to resistance by “remnants of the [Ming] imperial family, along with Chinese patriots in south China” (rather than merely recalling the period before 1644), it points to a date not later than 1660 (Rossabi 2014, 266). What is certain is that Rampant uses its period setting to address ideas of good governance and national identity and sovereignty in ways that resonate beyond its precise setting. The Joseon period included a number of developments that helped to shape modern Korea. In the first half of the period, the new dynasty attacked Buddhism and installed (Neo-)Confucianism “as a state philosophy” (Kim 2012, 186), moved the kingdom’s capital to Hanyang (Seoul) (187), and, in the 1400s, annexed territory so that the kingdom occupied all of what is now North and South Korea (209). Jinwung Kim (2012) credits the fifteenth-century ruler King Sejong—who also introduced the “Korean written alphabet, han’gŭl” (189), though Chinese remained the “official written language” (211)—with engendering “a modern national consciousness in the minds of the people” (190). During this time, Joseon was subject to the Ming dynasty, but treated with “benign neglect” and carried out trade and diplomacy with Ming China (208). When the Qing vanquished the Ming in the seventeenth century, this new dynasty similarly made Joseon “a tributary state” but otherwise “respected the Korean kingdom’s political independence and territorial integrity” (239). Eventually, in the 1880s, China “reasserted its suzerainty” (293) until the end of the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) established Jeoson’s independence from China (304), a shift which enabled greater Japanese influence, eventually resulting in Japan, with the acquiescence of the United States, Russia, and Great Britain (314), making Joseon “a protectorate, with a semi-colonial government” in 1905 (315) and officially annexing it as a colony in 1910, marking the end of the Joseon dynasty (320). Rampant’s concern with domestic governance in relation to the Qing and to a foreign infection reflects not only its seventeenth-century setting but also the centuries of external influence and interference that characterized the Joseon period as whole and ended in a total loss of sovereignty. The zombie infection arrives in Joseon on a Dutch ship from which Joseon’s crown prince Lee Young (Kim Tae-woo), Ganglim’s older brother, intends to buy gunpowder and six hundred arquebuses in order to “wipe out the Qing soldiers stationed here and move in.”7 After this plot is discovered, the crown prince

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defends those accused of being traitors by maintaining, respectfully—kneeling with gaze fixed straight ahead and not on the king—but firmly, “Their only desire was to remove the vile Qing army and rebuild Joseon.” The perceived need to wipe out the Qing for the good of the kingdom figures the Qing themselves as not unlike an infection, and the attempt to rid Joseon of one foreign infection results in the spread of another, echoing Korea’s history of subordination or attempted subordination by a succession of external powers. Extending this echo, when Ganglim reaches the now deserted and debris-strewn town that was the epicenter of the zombie outbreak, he wonders if there was a war, and his companion Hak-su (Jeong Man-sik) in turn wonders if the “Japs” attacked, tying the plague to yet another source of foreign threat.8 The arrival of a European infection which must be fought off also looks forward to the later, historical repulsion of attempts to force the kingdom into trade relationships by Western nations, such that “by the mid-nineteenth century Westerners had come to refer to Chosŏn [Joseon] as the ‘Hermit Kingdom’” for maintaining diplomatic relationships with China and Japan exclusively and trading almost exclusively with China (Kim 2012, 281).9 Presenting a symbolic counterpart to these later struggles, Rampant allows Joseon to preserve itself (at least temporarily) from encroachment by the West: Minister of War Kim Ja-joon (Jang Dong-gun), having exposed the crown prince’s plan, burns the Dutch ship and takes the guns and gunpowder by force, and the end of the film strongly implies that the zombie infection will be successfully eradicated. When Minister Kim seizes the ship’s cargo, he also brings back a Joseon soldier who has been bitten by a zombie on the ship. At home when he turns, this man first eats his baby, a symbol of the social future, and then kills his wife before going outside to attack others in the town and spread the zombie plague, the camera’s pulling back and rotating for a wider shot after he bursts out through his own door suggesting the widening scope of the infection. This attack on child, wife, and then the larger community, driven by a foreign virus, represents an assault on Confucianism, which “called for special bonds between sovereign and subject, father and son, and husband and wife” (Kim 2012, 187). It also “generalized the family model and relationships of subjects to the state and to an international system” (187). Per this generalization, “a village followed the leadership of venerated elders,” and the king “was thought of as the father of the state. Generalized to international relations, the Chinese emperor was the big brother of the Chosŏn king. . . . In the international context, it envisioned a China-centered world order” (187). The zombie infection progresses through this same hierarchy, moving from the family and the village to the palace and infecting the king, as well as then resulting in the deaths of a Qing diplomatic delegation sent to demand a replacement for Joseon’s last, “insultingly poor” tribute.

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While it is not clear that the Qing actually are in any meaningful way expelled from Joseon like the crown prince—and the film’s antagonist, Minister Kim—desire, the zombie outbreak does lead to both a symbolic expulsion in the destruction of the Qing delegation and to Prince Ganglim coming to choose Joseon and its people over Qing China. After the by-now-infected king turns and kills a Qing dancer during a lavish night of entertainments put on by the delegation, and before a zombie horde—a dirty and disheveled contrast to the brightly dressed elite celebrants—arrives and kills the rest of the Qing, Minister Kim runs the king through from behind and announces, “The new Joseon that I’ll erect will not be the slave to Qing!” That both the heroic, self-sacrificing crown prince and the villainous, self-interested Minister Kim express the same sentiment about Joseon’s subordination to the Qing underscores the importance that the film places on imagining a historical Korean sovereignty. Prince Ganglim, however, never explicitly expresses this desire for independence, even as he ultimately assumes the leadership role that he spends much of the film rejecting. Perhaps the desire for sovereignty is circumscribed in this way because, historically, China would continue to exercise power over Joseon for quite some time, making the desire’s expression here also a mourning for the never-was; perhaps such circumscription also signifies that good domestic governance, embodied in Ganglim by the end of the film, must come first. Ganglim was born in Joseon but raised in Qing China (possibly gesturing to the Qing taking Joseon’s crown prince as a hostage in 1837 [Kim 2012, 238]). When he arrives in Joseon, then, having received a letter from his brother criticizing the king’s rule and asking Ganglim to escort the pregnant crown princess to Qing for safety, Ganglim views China as far superior to Joseon. He wishes to convince a woman named Deok-hee (Lee Sun-bin) to return with him to Qing, which he says has “more than enough food and clothes for all.” Of Joseon, in contrast, he asks if it “is a country” and why she would want to live somewhere cold, with too little food, and with lots of demons (i.e., zombies). In response, Deok-hee asks why he brings up Qing when her “home is in chaos” and whether he is a Qing native. Ganglim answers that he is “as good as” Qing and speaks better in Mandarin, a response that places him in a liminal category—neither Korean nor Chinese—similar to that of the zombies, who are twice referred to as not clearly occupying the category of either “man or beast” and who, as a consequence of the foreign infection, lose their national identity along with their personhood. Deok-hee pauses while walking away from Ganglim, who, not yet deterred, is following, to assert that his preference for Qing makes him unworthy of the title that he may choose to assume with his brother now dead, but both she and the film posit that just as important for a good ruler is commitment to caring for the mass of people. For example, she remarks that she hopes

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that Ganglim will send soldiers to help contain the plague and not “shun the peasants that die before you,” demonstrating her own commitment to the people by agreeing, after a hesitant pause, to go to Qing with him if he helps. The crown prince’s letter had also spoken of the sorrow of the people and the intractability of the king, and the crown princess argues that she is not asking Ganglim to become king but only to “save the innocent people,” which is his “duty.” Park Eul-ryong (Jo Woo-jin), who fights alongside Ganglim, also invokes “the duty of a king,” telling the prince that he hopes that Ganglim will come back from Qing and help rebuild Joseon because he is the only one who has helped them or “heard” their “cries.” The suffering visited on the people by both their own rulers and the zombie plague, as well as the possibility of its redress, reflects the turmoil of seventeenth-century Joseon. From the mid-seventeenth century on, the elite status of the yangban, “a privileged minority group” who “served as civil or military officials,” weakened (Kim 2012, 191), and the kingdom’s system of slavery collapsed (259). Beginning at the same time, peasant resistance increased, driven by poverty, famine, and bureaucratic abuse and corruption; this popular resistance primarily took the form of “brigandage” (272) in the middle of the century, becoming major uprisings in the early 19th century, with further rebellions in the middle and end of the century (272–73), the last of which set the stage for the First Sino-Japanese War due to the presence of both Chinese and Japanese forces in Joseon (301–2). By the end of the film, Ganglim accepts his responsibility to the peasants, freeing those imprisoned by Minister Kim; putting the Dutch guns to use in killing the remaining zombies at the palace, a battle in which all ranks fight together, displaying the “‘we’ consciousness” of Confucianism (Elidrissi 2021, 285); avowing that the people come before the king; and riding at the head of a column, in the film’s last scene and accompanied by a rousing musical cue, toward the next town to eliminate the zombies there, strongly implying that he will remain in Joseon as its leader. His acceptance that the people come before the king is what distinguishes Ganglim from Minister Kim, while demonstrating the “contrast between pro-self and prosocial behavior” that represents “a core thematic element of South Korean zombie film” (Lee 2019, 153). Minister Kim, as noted, wishes to free Joseon from being a subject nation to the Qing, and he also speaks of moving beyond “a dead dynasty” and the need to remove the existing ruling lineage in order to create “a new world.” What disqualifies Kim, then, from being an acceptable leader despite what could be interpreted as reformist speech? His disrespect of lineage, a mode of succession which Rampant seems to endorse,10 may contribute, but his lack of concern for the masses is paramount. Once he is bitten and kills the other ministers in order to prevent them taking power, there can be no question that he only cares about taking the throne and not about improving the kingdom.

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Ganglim had earlier asked Kim how he is “any different from demons,” a comparison that points to harming his own people, and the prince later learns that Kim knowingly allowed the zombie plague to spread to facilitate his seizing power, certainly not a peasant-friendly policy. Once the minister himself is in the process of becoming a zombie, his infection makes him stronger and difficult to kill, but, as a symbol of corrupt governance, he must be defeated alongside the zombies in order for Joseon to flourish: merely containing the kingdom’s infection will not, as one of the crown prince’s coconspirators puts it, “right the course of the country” unless they also reform its leadership.11 The zombie infection becomes both a catalyst for regime change, a version of the crown prince’s aborted uprising (one which Sung-Ae Lee [2019] argues makes “obvious reference to the impeachment of President Park Guen-Hye in 2016,” particularly in the “torch-light gathering of citizens” near the film’s end [163]), and a means of teaching the kingdom’s new leader to prioritize Joseon over Qing and the people over the elites. In doing so, Rampant’s zombies, like those of Zombie Island, enable a national(ist) fantasy, in this case of self-reform and self-governance during a period that “left a deep impression on the national attitudes and behavior of modern Koreans” and “became the foundation upon which modern Korea has been built” (Kim 2012, 320) but was also heavily impacted by China, Russia, Japan, and the West. THE REJECTION OF GUN(SLINGER) CULTURE IN I AM A HERO I Am a Hero, directed by Sato Shinsuke, also considers foreign impacts, primarily cultural and aesthetic, on the country in which it was made. I Am a Hero deals with Japanese national identity by evoking, in order to deliberately diverge from, the American cinematic template of the firearm-wielding hero, a recurring archetype in action and horror films which has strong ties to the traditional Western. In doing so, it diverges also from the binary “conflict between traditional Japanese characteristics and [modern] Western influences” that characterizes much of Japanese horror cinema, including its zombie films (Murphy and Ryan 2016, 195–96). I Am a Hero’s protagonist, Suzuki Hideo (Ôizumi Yô), who is linked both with Japan’s (modern) culture industry and its (modern) culture of strict gun control, discovers that the reality of being a gun-toting hero does not match the fantasy. Hideo, who works at a manga publisher, flees his Tokyo apartment after a fight to the death with his zombified live-in girlfriend, bringing his sporting shotgun along. In the chaos of the spreading zombie apocalypse, he meets a traveling companion in a partly zombified young woman named Hiromi (Arimura Kasumi), and

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the pair must ultimately overcome danger not only from the undead but from within the shopping mall–based community of survivors with whom they briefly stay, after which they set off with one of those survivors, Tsugumi (Nagasawa Masami), toward Mount Fuji because of a claim that the virus cannot survive there. Hideo’s discovery about the reality of being a hero, in combination with the film’s reimagining of the Romero-esque elements of its zombie apocalypse, helps to argue for the value and distinctiveness, defined especially against American (cinematic) culture, of its localized contribution to the transnational conversation that is the zombie myth. The first reported zombie attack in the film, relayed on the television news, involves a woman and an unemployed man being bitten by the man’s dog. The newscast corrects its initial report that the dog bit the woman, when in fact she bit the dog, highlighting both the inaccuracy of assumptions and the reversal of dog-bites-woman to woman-bites-dog in what can be seen as the film making a meta-cinematic comment on itself and taking a different perspective on the typical zombie narrative (after all, a dog biting a man is not news, the adage goes, but a man biting a dog is). The event is reported to have occurred in Hiroshima, and locating the possible beginning of the zombie apocalypse in this particular city raises the specter of a historical national trauma, one caused by the United States.12 While this association might seem tenuous, it is reinforced by the later spectacle of carbonized kneeling bodies, which, although implied to have been burned by their fellow survivors, nonetheless bring to mind images of atomic destruction. The film does not do much to explore its zombies as an allegory for this particular trauma—as was done, for instance, in Godzilla (1954; Gojira), which introduced in its monster one of the most impactful metaphors for national trauma in horror cinema history—but it is noteworthy both that the Japanese Left regarded the bombing as a sort of divinely punitive consequence of Japanese militarism, one which left Japan the moral obligation to judge the United States (and other nations) for future violations of the struggle for peace (Blake 2008, 20), and that the tight control over guns which I Am a Hero foregrounds is rooted in America’s postwar impact on Japan even as it contrasts America’s own firearm obsession. Under Japanese law, “the only guns permitted are shotguns, air guns, guns with specific research or industrial purposes, or those used for competitions” (Masters 2022). Access to any of these guns requires formal training along with “a battery of written, mental, and drug tests and a rigorous background check,” and “owners must inform the authorities of how their weapons and ammunition are stored” and submit their guns to “annual inspection” (Masters 2022). In addition, owners can only purchase ammunition with “explicit police authorization” (“Japan Has Almost” 2022). These laws result in an extremely low rate of firearms ownership, in contrast to the gun-saturated

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United States, and they can be traced largely to the US disarmament of Japan during its occupation of the nation after World War II, when it “shaped the legislation that took firearms out of the hands of Japanese civilians” (“Japan Has Almost” 2022). Although Hideo’s shotgun does protect the survivors in the film’s climax, I Am a Hero ultimately suggests that these laws, and the cultural attitude(s) that they represent, constitute a valuable part of national identity, one which is set against an association of the United States with guns. Hideo owns that shotgun, the film’s sole “real” firearm—a couple of air guns that shoot BBs also appear—for skeet shooting and possesses the requisite license. Hideo’s girlfriend, Tekko (Katase Nana), regards the gun merely as a hobby that unnecessarily costs them money—there is none of the talk of self-defense, for example, that permeates American discourse. Hideo repeatedly shows himself to be conscientious and law-abiding when it comes to his gun. When, during a heated argument, Tekko proposes selling the gun in order to make their rent, for example, he points out that selling it to anyone is illegal; and when she then throws him out (literally shoving him out the door), having already lugged the gun in its locker outside, he asks through the closed door for his license because it would be illegal not to have it on him. At the same time, Hideo, who notes that his name is spelled using the characters for “hero,” is not invulnerable to fantasies of masculine power in connection to his gun. At home after work, he draws himself holding the shotgun in a firing position, with a few sketches of a female character’s head and shoulders, a juxtaposition that implies “the gunman as defender . . . of the meek,” a common trope of cowboy films (Young 2014, loc. 1174) that has been imported into other genres as well. He also takes his gun out of its locker and poses with it in front of a mirror in the same stance in which he draws his manga avatar, and he adopts the same pose (though only pretending to hold the gun) when he tries on a leather biker jacket that catches his eye in an abandoned store. These imaginings of himself as a heroic gunman resonate with Tekko’s criticism that his dream of becoming a successful artist is what one set of English subtitles translates as a “delusion” but another translates as “fantasies.” Despite these fantasies, Hideo continues to follow the gun control rules well into the zombie apocalypse. When Hiromi first asks if his gun is real and then ventures that he should have used it, he reminds her that it is “illegal to get it out in public.” Other survivors whom they meet similarly assume that his gun is not real or, in one case, that he must be a hunter (he is not); and he again cites a law against lending the gun to anyone when some from the group try to get him to hand it over. While these moments have an element of comic relief, they also subvert the stereotype of the violent, individualist (often male) hero who “plays by his own rules,” much as recurrent criticisms of Hideo as average simultaneously establish him as a representative everyman.

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Meanwhile, the film explicitly links the United States with the availability of firearms and with the frontier mythology that informs the Western genre and its descendants. In a moment of sLaughter (defined in this book’s introduction), Hideo’s coworker Mr. Mitani (Tsukaji Muga), having learned from the internet that one must destroy a zombie’s brain to kill it, complains while strenuously smashing his zombified boss’s head with a bat until he is out of breath that if he were in the United States, he could just kill him with one shot from a handgun, a firearm completely unavailable to Japanese civilians. Later, a survivor named Iura (Yoshizawa Hisashi) says that he recognizes Hideo’s gun as real because of experience going shooting while a student in Los Angeles. Iura, the man with firsthand experience of American gun culture, significantly, becomes the villain of the survivor group, deliberately causing the deaths of a large number of the other survivors and threatening Tsugumi with rape just as he is turning. The United States and its guns, along with Hideo’s heroic fantasies, are also connected to America’s frontier mythology and the figure of the cowboy by Hideo singing “Home on the Range” to himself (in English) and the song’s reappearance (again in English) over the end credits. I Am a Hero establishes this nexus of America-gunscowboys-heroism in order to interrogate and offer an alternative to it via Hideo and the cultural perspective that he represents. Importantly in the contexts of these invocations of American culture, Hideo’s job as an assistant at a manga company makes him part of an important Japanese culture industry and export. According to Frederick L. Schodt (2015), “Japan is today one of the only countries in the world where ‘comic books’ have become a full-fledged medium of expression, on par with novels and films, and read by what often seems to be everyone” (vii). In the year of I Am a Hero’s release, the manga industry approached $4 billion in sales (Pineda 2017). Kinko Ito (2015) describes manga as “closely connected to Japanese history and culture” (26) and dates the first story manga (as distinct from the Japanese comic strips that came before and absorbed influences from the “Western media culture” that penetrated Japan in the late 1800s) to 1947 (35), part of a postwar period which made a pressing question not only of what Japanese identity entailed but also how “Japanese cultural identity might be expressed artistically or transmitted through popular culture” (Blake 2008, 46). Following that development, manga was viewed as a serious “art form to be enjoyed not only by children but also by adults” (Ito 2015, 36), and the divisions of labor within the “production system” in which Hideo works began in the 1960s (38). An assistant such as Hideo performs various aspects of “the background work of the manga”—layouts, shading, background details, clean-up, and so on—“everything except character drawings” (Wilson 2021). Mr. Mitani teases Hideo that being an assistant is basically the same as being without a job, the same as being a nobody. In response, Hideo

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calls manga “the peak attainment of Japanese culture.” To the sound of an electric guitar chord, he straightens up at his desk and continues: “Language and cultural barriers prevent our movies from leading the world. Our bands won’t create huge hits. But when it comes to manga, we set the world standard. It’s a proud aspect of our national culture.” Hideo stands at this point and asserts that an assistant can be proud too, since “From this very office, we’re at the cutting edges . . . leading the world.” The small group of coworkers then share a moment of this pride, repeating together, like a sports team at the end of a huddle, “Manga’s the best!” (any comic edge to the scene adheres more to the delivery of these sentiments than to the sentiments themselves). Rather than the framework of individual success, Hideo appeals to a sense of contributing to the collective good of the nation; and his boast of leading the world is grounded in manga’s “influence” (Wong 2010, 333) and “visibility” in Asia, Southeast Asia, and the West (342). Manga has also been part of efforts by the Japanese government to promote its cultural “brand.” In 2003, the government wanted to promote its content-creating industries in order to “improve the image of the country” and boost its economic effects, deciding in 2004 to capitalize on “popular culture products that were already widespread overseas,” including manga (Mandujano 2013, 32). In 2010, amid worries that the culture industry was underperforming, the branding of “Cool Japan” was created (35–36), and a more focused approach was taken following the 2011 earthquake which precipitated the Fukushima disaster, an approach which attempted to “reinforce Japanese people’s identity and self-image and then show it to the world” and to combine an inviting tourism campaign with the generation of “a soft national pride focused on the culture for the Japanese” (37; emphasis in original). Even if, as some argue, Cool Japan failed (Brienza 2014, 387), not least in its goals to deliver “soft power” (395), the effort underscores the connection of manga to Japanese national identity and pride, as well as to the form’s global dissemination of aspects of that identity. As Taku Tamaki (2019) writes, “The international popularity of manga and anime is a contemporary phenomenon, but the official narratives [of Cool Japan] reveal that the alleged ‘coolness’ of these products is framed within the older constructions of Japanese Self that can trace their pedigree back to the nineteenth century” and provides a new version “of the longstanding myth of Japanese uniqueness” that imagines Japan as “distinct from both the West and Asia” (109). (In another continuity, in the eighteenth-century incarnation of this myth, one thing represented by the West was “violence” [112].) I Am a Hero is itself based on a manga of the same name, which allows the film’s claims about the cultural importance of manga and manga’s connection to issues of Japanese identity to attach themselves to the film as well.

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In its reworking of the tropes of cinematic zombie narratives, I Am a Hero also mirrors the hybridity of the manga genre from which it derives and which it celebrates. In manga, “distinctive Japanese aesthetics and Western cultural forms and values coexist and are appreciated by both Japanese and Western audiences,” and this hybridity “may be recuperated as part of a global approach to the indigenization of foreign culture” (Bainbridge and Norris 2010, 243). Incorporating aesthetic influences from China, Europe, the United States, and more, including cinema and “American superhero comics,” that which “is globally known today as ‘manga style’ is, in fact, the result of intercultural exchange” (Berndt 2015, 299)—just as is zombie cinema. In addition to putting itself into dialogue with any number of films, zombie and otherwise, featuring heroic gunmen, I Am a Hero more directly recalls and riffs on films such as George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Land of the Dead, an “intercultural exchange” indirectly valorized by I Am a Hero’s praise of manga.13 I Am a Hero, for instance, echoes Dawn of the Dead’s mall setting in having Hideo and Hiromi encounter a group of survivors living on the roof of the Fuji Royal Outlet Park, where a large portion of the film then takes place. Like in Romero’s film, the group of survivors implodes, most die, zombies take over the survival space, and the last few survivors leave in a vehicle for an uncertain future. Also like in Romero’s film, the “trope of zombies at the mall” foregrounds “the meaninglessness of the pursuit of accumulation of goods” (Saldarriaga and Manini 2022, 57), as do moments such as Hideo being saved from a bite because he has covered his entire forearm in now-easy-to-possess Rolex watches. The zombies themselves, recalling those in Land of the Dead, repeat snippets from their work lives—a security guard announces that people aren’t allowed here, a businessman speaks into his cell phone, a retail worker greets nonexistent customers, a college athlete continues to high-jump—or fixate on (generally material) desires—one seeks the woman with whom he was having an affair; one wants to resume shopping; one, seemingly a politician, says that he wants steak; one merely repeats “melons.” These behavioral loops present “capitalist acts of daily life, which are at the same time a bewitching zombification of neoliberalism” (Kim 2019, 441). Tsugumi, contemplating the zombies below from the wrong side of an elevated walkway railing (a deliberately assumed position that puts her in danger of falling and, so, closer to death as well as to the undead), posits that they “are stuck living in the past. Maybe that’s a happier way to be.” However, for a film that gestures to historical national trauma on the one hand and identifies the genre from which it comes as cutting edge on the other, the worth of the past seems ambivalent at best. The zombies’ behavior also aligns with a common Japanese depiction of zombies, many of whom “are animated by their own mind, retained from their prior living state or newly acquired through zombiehood” (Vétu 2021,

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122). What one might call the film’s repetition with revision of zombie cinema includes other culturally hybridizing elements. When Tekko becomes a zombie, the flexibility and unnatural contortions of her movement bring to mind common depictions of ghosts in Japanese horror; Mr. Mitani telling Hideo that he can keep his shoes on inside serves as a gauge of just how serious the zombie apocalypse has become, with a close-up shot of Hideo’s feet as he steps past the point where he would normally have removed his shoes; and Hideo later says that things can’t be that bad if the television is still showing anime (which is almost immediately interrupted by a newscast). Hiromi, infected by a baby, partially turns, becoming stronger but also retaining the ability to think and speak, making her similar to the “still-living and/ or still-thinking” zombies common in Japanese films (122) as well as to the extra-ordinary and/or curable zombies of films such as Zombie for Sale and The Cured. Additionally, the potential cure for her infection is to visit national symbol Mount Fuji, since the virus is reported to die at high altitude. Even the Hysteric Glamour New York hat which Hideo wears throughout the film represents cultural and aesthetic hybridity, since Hysteric Glamour is a Japanese brand that assimilated strong influences from American pop culture (and did for a time have a store in New York City) (Deleon 2017). But, to return to another of Hideo’s accessories, his shotgun, I Am a Hero does not, like some of the Japanese zombie films discussed by Colette Balmain (2008), borrow “American forms” as a vehicle for “resistance to traditional Japanese structures and cultural forms” (127) but instead performs with its hybridity something closer to the inverse, claiming space for certain cultural norms within the cinematic zombie myth. Hideo’s personal journey, as stated previously, provides a rejection of the hyper-violent, firearm-glorifying Hollywood-style movie hero. There are innumerable examples of such characters across genres, and within zombie cinema, Zombieland (2009) and its sequel, Zombieland: Double Tap (2019)—the very title of which refers to firearm use—as well as the Resident Evil series (2022–2016) furnish examples of the approach to gunplay as fetishized spectacle. If we look to television, Black Summer (2019–present) features no shortage of civilians shooting zombies and one another, and The Walking Dead (2010–2022), like Zombieland: Double Tap, suggests that the mere fact of the apocalypse transforms ordinary people into expert marksmen—The Walking Dead’s cowboy-hat-wearing, horse-riding, revolver-carrying lawman Rick Grimes also could not connect his ancestry to the Western gunman any more clearly. Unlike Rick, who shoots a zombie child shortly into the first episode of the series, Hideo spends most of I Am a Hero not firing his shotgun. He cannot even bring himself to follow through on his threats to pull the trigger in order to prevent Iura from shooting Hiromi in the forehead with a crossbow (luckily, being partly zombified, she survives), one of multiple moments that

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undercut his hero fantasies. Tsugumi, further pointing out such fantasies as fantasies, tells him that he made the correct choice. After failing to shoot, he has his gun forcibly taken from him, so it is another survivor who first uses it (responsibly wearing ear protectors, in another departure from the archetypal cool gunman). Firing the shotgun the first time knocks this survivor over (he is nevertheless gleefully impressed by the splattery effect it has on what he aimed at), and he entirely misses his target the next two times he fires, after which he decides to use the gun as a club. Rather than becoming an action hero just by picking up a firearm, as seems to happen in a lot of Hollywood output, the man’s lack of training makes the gun, as he grouses, “useless”— although his saying that it “won’t work” suggests that he doesn’t blame himself, perhaps due to the same archetypes against which I Am a Hero reacts. When Hideo, alone, subsequently finds the abandoned shotgun, he whispers criticism to himself of the man’s handling of the ammunition, once again, and in the midst of a zombie attack, prioritizing well-regulated and responsible behavior. The use of air guns also reflects on Hideo’s shotgun, even as the shotgun is distinguished from their positioning guns as closer to toys, enablers of fantasy. One survivor who uses an air gun against the zombies is immediately eaten, and when Hideo uses one later in an action movie-style strafing maneuver, he uses the same description that was used by the survivor who fired the real gun: “useless.” This description associates the two kinds of gun, and Hideo finds it more useful to spill the air gun ammunition on the floor so that the zombies slip on it, again suggesting a correct choice other than pulling a trigger. Hideo does finally pull the trigger, many times. With a little more than fifteen minutes remaining in a slightly more than two-hour film, Hideo shoots zombie-Iura, who is pursuing Tsugumi and Hiromi, exploding his head with a single shot in the way that Mr. Mitani had envisioned. As a horde of zombies attack the remaining survivors, he uses up the remainder of his ninety-six shells—also wearing ear protection, again departing from or perhaps even satirizing the Hollywood version of such a scene (while still delivering copious gore). While there is no question that his firearm saves the day here, Hideo, having run out of shells, must dispatch the final zombie by swinging the gun like a bat (and it is this moment that the film accentuates with slow motion). Jaecheol Kim (2019) argues that this scene puts Tsugumi and Hiromi under “male guardianship by gun, which allegorizes Hideo’s abandoned masculinity and the nation’s lost militarism” in a fantasy of performing “the role of the powerful patriarch” (442). However, it is important to note the effect of these killings on Hideo: the experience itself leaves him visibly exhausted rather than triumphant, and in the aftermath, he is pensive and unsettled. In the film’s final scene, he gazes at his bloody hands, cut to in a close-up, and disassociates his name from the word hero (which Hiromi does use to refer to

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him at the end of the zombie massacre scene): “Just ordinary Hideo,” he says, in one subtitle translation (another renders it “‘Hero’ in name only”). He does this from the backseat of a car driven by Tsugumi, with Hiromi in the other front seat, leaving the women in control. Any fantasies of violent masculine heroism or militarism have been punctured rather than realized or reinforced by the reality of using his gun on others, even semi-living others. In the end, I Am a Hero rejects American (cinematic) gun culture and corresponds with Romero films such as Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Survival of the Dead (2009), in which masculine posturing and guns cause more problems than they solve. Little surprise, then, that survivors at the end of I Am a Hero are headed away from a scene of gun violence—a site of the type of “murder without justification” enabled by “a virtual shooting gallery of the undead” that can destabilize the heroic identification of the symbolic cowboy (Young 2014, loc. 1167)—and toward Mount Fuji and a potential cure for a violent plague. CONCLUSION The films discussed in this chapter manifest some of the same concerns over political and cultural sovereignty and identity as films such as The Dead Can’t Dance, Blood Quantum, and Cargo. Zombie Island worries that Japanese insurgents might co-opt or infect Chinese people, transforming or stripping them of their Chinese identity and turning them against their fellow citizens. In Rampant, both the heroic crown prince and his enemy wish to rid Joseon of the Qing, while the crown prince’s younger brother is at risk of identifying more as Chinese than Korean. Furthermore, as in Zombie Island, the zombie virus, a type of infection which itself renders a victim “no longer a member of . . . [the] nation” (Lee 2019, 153), is of foreign origin. And the protagonist of I Am a Hero ultimately abandons the figure of the heroic gunman which the film associates with American culture, while the film draws attention to the specifically Japanese aspects of its contribution to the hybrid form of transnational zombie cinema. Each of these films links its anxieties over national sovereignty and identity to collective historical trauma. I Am a Hero makes the most tenuous link, its evocation of the bombing of Hiroshima seeming to serve as much to point to a time of intense, US-influenced change in cultural and artistic output as to establish any analogy with the film’s zombie apocalypse. In contrast, the trauma of Japanese medical atrocities during World War II is fundamental to Zombie Island, as is Joseon’s long history of suzerainty and imperialism imposed by outside powers, especially China, to Rampant.

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In contrast to the abovementioned Western films, Zombie Island, Rampant, and I Am a Hero engage with sovereignty and identity outside of the framework of the White-Other binary that dominates such engagements in Western zombie cinema. This difference spotlights the flexibility of the zombie myth to address the particularities of race and nationality in contexts far removed from its cinematic roots in the legacy of Black enslavement, even as these localized variations continue to draw some of their power and dynamics from that legacy. Even when these films express a desire to set or reinforce identitarian boundaries, in doing so via zombie cinema, they unavoidably do so by means of transnational interchange within an inherently hybrid form and tradition. NOTES 1. The first Sino-Japanese War took place in 1894–1895. 2. Peninsula’s Unit 631 may be an allusion to Unit 731, although the former’s executions and zombie-human fight club seem comparatively benign—perhaps the reason for the lower number. 3. Miss Ping specifies that the Chinese people who now live on the island are second-generation immigrants, a strange, perhaps mitigating mirroring of Japanese invasion and occupation. 4. This setting puts Rampant in the minority category of period zombie cinema, alongside films such as Exit Humanity (2011), set during the US Civil War, and Overlord (2018), set during World War II. Zombie films have long tended to be set in their present day even if the zombies themselves hail from the past, like the Nazi zombies of Dead Snow and its sequel (2009 and 2014) or, to include television for a moment, the colonial East India Company zombies of the Indian series Betaal (2020) and those of the South Korean television heritage horror series Kingdom (2019–present). 5. Lee (2019) identifies an element of “contemporary satire” in Rampant’s mix as well (162). Kingdom (2019–present) is extremely similar to Rampant in its mixture of zombies and Joseon-era political intrigue, including, although with a different cause, the zombies’ dormancy during the daytime. 6. As the character is most often referred to in the film as Ganglim rather than as Lee Chung, I employ the former in this discussion. 7. Although the zombie virus comes from the West, the zombies are described not only as tearing flesh but also as drinking blood, and they burn in the sunlight, both of which are closer to the typical vampire than to the typical cannibal zombie in Western cinema. 8. His belief that the first zombie he encounters is a ghost emphasizes that these monsters are not native to Korea (or, presumably, wherever he has spent time in China) and have no place in his ontology.

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9. This isolationism would be moderated beginning in 1873 (Kim 2012, 285); Joseon was less effective during this time at preventing the spread of Catholicism (281–84). 10. The film unquestionably shares with “traditional royal court dramas” a focus on “the obsession with powers and the succession of a royal heir” (Hwang 2013, 81). 11. One might draw an analogy between the corruption of the government and the corruption of the zombies, which is destroyed if brought into the (sun)light. 12. The report also mentions “a road in Fukushima city, Showa town,” which, as noted by Jaecheol Kim (2019), links the bombing of Hiroshima with the 2011 nuclear power plant disaster in Fukushima (441), although the power plant was located in the town of Okuma Fukushima prefecture, not in Fukushima city. Additionally, the subtitles on the version of the film sold on Amazon Prime Video lack the reference to Fukushima. I have consulted both this version and the version available on the website BiliBili, which appears to have more literal and detailed subtitle translations. 13. This exchange extends the preference identified by Leung Wing-fai (2011) in earlier Japanese zombie comedies for transnational borrowings in contrast to other Japanese horror’s borrowing from Japanese folklore (110).

Chapter 8

Self, Society, and State, Take 2 China, South Korea, and India

While the consideration of national identity is important to I Am a Hero (see chapter 7), one might leave those elements aside to trace a narrative of a disempowered everyman (Hideo) who learns to value an ethic of caring for the Other (most emphatically Hiromi) over economic success or masculine-coded power. The films examined in this chapter concentrate on similar questions of self-definition and relationality. They employ the zombie apocalypse as a means to consider the psychology and role of the individual subject in relation to (or abstracted from) other individuals and/or the larger society. In each film, the individual’s relationship to media and/or technology plays some part in these roles and relations, and although media and technology are often sources of dread and anxiety in horror cinema, they largely feature in these narratives ambivalently or even positively. These explorations, with their varied points of focus and cultural inflections, are enacted variously through characters not only fighting but also defending or becoming zombies. The zombies in Zombiology: Enjoy Yourself Tonight (Gam man da song si; 2017), made and set in Hong Kong, arise by means of a chicken mascot that the protagonist at one point imagines as his opponent in an anime-style interlude. Zombiology’s references to both domestic and transnational examples of entertainment serve both as commentary on the film itself as innovating within the cinematic zombie tradition and as a vehicle, in combination with the zombie outbreak, for the protagonist’s self-(re)definition. South Korea’s #Alive (#Saraitda; 2020) presents a more traditional zombie outbreak and isolates its protagonist similarly to The Night Eats the World, raising some of the same questions about bare life (see chapter 4) and the self and/in the absence of the Other. However, unlike the French film, not only does #Alive permit its protagonist to form a relationship with another living person, but it positions the same technology that is often criticized as isolating as integral to their connection and survival. The Neighbor Zombie (Yieutjib jombi; 189

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2010), also from South Korea, comprises several short narratives, during the course of which it parodies and critiques genre film and fandom. Through the inclusion of characters whose former zombiism is now medically managed, The Neighbor Zombie also raises some similar questions to The Cured about intra-community violence and the reintegration of individuals in its aftermath (see chapter 4), though, unlike the Irish film, it abstracts such questions from association with any particular violent national trauma.1 India’s Rise of the Zombie (2013) puts the focus on the individual’s experience of committing violent acts, as it tracks the extended process of one man becoming a zombie. Although an insect causes his infection, it would be difficult to view him as an eco-zombie, since the danger in the film is a solitary, isolating closeness to nature rather than nature’s exploitation. The uncertain line between human and zombie reflects the similarly unstable boundary drawn between humanity and nonhuman nature and betrays an anxiety (latent in numerous zombie narratives) that an individual human divorced from social context is naturally a violent, appetite-driven creature. POP CULTURE FOR FUN AND SURVIVAL: MEDIA CONSUMPTION AND HEROISM IN ZOMBIOLOGY AND #ALIVE The subtitle of horror-comedy Zombiology: Enjoy Yourself Tonight, directed by Lo Wai-Lun (also referred to as Alan Lo), recalls an actual television show that ran for decades and was produced in Hong Kong. Although the show does not directly appear in the film, it aligns with Zombiology’s concern with cultural transmission in a way that suggests a deliberate allusion. Television in Hong Kong “was initially associated with the English language,” but the channel TVB, one of “two stations . . . instrumental in popularizing Chinese television culture in Hong Kong and the region as well as the Chinese diaspora worldwide,” gained popularity with Enjoy Yourself Tonight, a nightly variety show broadcast nightly between 1967 and 1994 (Khiun 2015, 200). Glennis Byron (2013) notes the amount of attention paid by Hong Kong cinema since the 1990s to “identity politics” centered on “familiar categories of East and West, tradition and modernity” (133), categories which have been impacted by both the 1997 handover of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to China specifically and globalization more broadly (134). Hong Kong has often figured itself as a cosmopolitan “combination of East and West,” the latter standing for “the modern world,” and China as representing “tradition” and “the past” (136). These categories and oppositions appear in Zombiology through its characters’ relationships to arts and media, both Eastern and Western, traditional and modern. The film uses these relationships, which are

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bound up with constructions of self, to advocate, self-reflexively, for innovation and evolution on both generic and personal levels. In Zombiology, young men Lone (Michael Ning) and Yeung (Louis Cheung) live at the Cantonese Opera Society with Shan (Carrie Ng), who has raised them since Lone’s father, Wing (Alex Man), went to prison more than ten years earlier. Wing returns from prison at the same time that a zombie outbreak of unusual origin is spreading through Hong Kong; this forces the family, including Shan’s niece Yit (Cherry Ngan)—along with Shuen (Venus Wong), a martial artist whom Lone and Yeung encounter and bring home with them—to deal with their emotional and relationship issues while they try to survive and puts Lone and Yeung’s preferred image of themselves as anime or manga superheroes to the test in the real world. While Lone and Yeung have been living with Shan, she has taught them to make props for the Cantonese opera, the film’s most prominent symbol of tradition and the past. Cantonese opera, one of many “regional genres” of traditional Chinese opera which differ in respect to music and dialect, is the “dominant operatic genre in Hong Kong” (Yung 2005, 27), and for the film’s central characters, it is the family business. The acting company was supposed to have been taken over by Shan’s brother, father to Yit, but he was killed in an accident with Lone’s father that also left Shan unable to perform due to a leg injury. The broken line of familial inheritance is simultaneously a disruption of cultural transmission. While Cantonese opera enjoyed widespread popularity in 1950s and 1960s Hong Kong, that popularity saw a “sharp decline” in the 1970s due to the ascendency of pop music (Lo 2017, 239)—a genre included on Enjoy Yourself Tonight. Today, contends Wai Han Lo (2017), while “traditional art and music” retain a presence in Hong Kong, they have lost much of their audience among young residents (241). This diminished popularity is reflected in a scene in which Shan gives a presentation on Cantonese opera to bored schoolchildren, as well as, more complexly, in the relationships of Lone, Yeung, and Yit to the form. For most of the film, Shan is a strict traditionalist. She enjoys the traditional Cantonese music playing on a bus radio, which one member of a young couple has impatiently asked to be changed. In the presentation scene, she declares, “We have a saying in Cantonese opera history: ‘Wearing a broken costume is better than wearing the wrong one.’ There are rules that must not be broken.”2 Shan invokes one of those rules when she catches Yit practicing some movements and reminds her that she is not permitted to perform the role of Wu Song, a “fearless warrior, but also a drunk” who “has been portrayed in Chinese operas for centuries” (Kwan 2017). The contrast between Shan’s slow, cane-assisted walk here and Yit’s physical fluidity reflects the hobbling restrictiveness of Shan’s artistic conservatism in juxtaposition to Yit’s energetic innovation. Traditionally, men played both male and female opera

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roles, although after the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, roles were increasingly assigned by biological sex (Guy 2003). As a woman, then, Yit, according to Shan, must be excluded from a male role. Notably, Yeung says that the recently returned Yit’s having studied abroad for years has “really changed her,” a comment that aligns her—and her desire to do something different within the opera form—with the cosmopolitan hybridity of Hong Kong. Shan, in contrast to Yit’s change-inducing transnational mobility, does not go outside since her accident, making the Cantonese Opera Society a sort of prison for her, a place of personal and artistic stasis. One of the men to whom Shan is selling the building housing her struggling Opera Society (to be replaced with a shopping mall) sums up the risks of artistic stagnation: “I have an admiration for artists. But society is changing rapidly. We have to keep up with the times. We have to adapt to new environments. Otherwise, society will leave us behind.”3 Like Yit, Lone and Yeung desire to innovate. Lone says of the opera props that they are “supposed to make them according to tradition, but . . . ,” leaving Yeung to conclude, “After a while, we thought it is time for a breakthrough,” after which the pair show off an extendable spear and a weapon with a saw blade on the end which they have created. Shan, needless to say, regards these new props as “trash” to be thrown away when the family moves out. Eventually, Shan comes to accept the need for change, leaving the Demon Fighting Wand prop, a family heirloom, to Yit, an indication, Yeung says, that Shan will no longer hold Yit to the traditional rules and expects her to achieve “greatness.” Despite this alteration in her outlook, Shan is killed (while singing the traditional Cantonese song heard on the bus), as is Wing, marking a clear end to the older generation and a passing of the torch to the next. This younger generation is characterized by a relationship to transnational media that contributes as much as or more to their individual identities than does their relationship to Cantonese opera. In Yit’s case, her identification with a transnational media property comes from Yeung. She was, apparently, a student with a supernatural studies major in her years abroad and is currently a member of the Special Abnormal Activities Squad (which she names in English). In reaction to this latter fact and to her negative-energy-detecting gadget, Yeung quips, “Like Mulder from X-Files. That’s all you had to say.” It is worth noting that Yeung not only understands Yit via an American program but also identifies her with the male rather than female protagonist in that program, mirroring her desire to play the male hero in Cantonese opera. Later, her negative energy detector turns out also to function as an energy gun, a modern, sci-fi complement to the Demon Fighting Wand that shows Yit’s proficiency in both traditional and contemporary modes of heroism. This latter mode is underscored in the style of sci-fi/action films by the close-up shot of her steely expression as she aims the weapon and the orchestral rock

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score that kicks in when she fires it. A mid-credits scene at the end of the film finds Yit carrying out her mission for the X-Files–esque Special Abnormal Activities Squad, exploring a dark chamber by flashlight and locating a coffin that is battered from within by something unseen: with the possibility that it is a jiāngshīi inside the coffin, the scene reinforces Yit’s hybridization of Eastern and Western and traditional and modern influences. Lone and Yeung more overtly define themselves in relation to transnational media. They see Hong Kong tae kwon do martial artist Shuen as an idol, although six-pack-abs-obsessed Yeung is the only one to exercise, and Shuen’s role as a media personality is emphasized when Lone brandishes a magazine with her on the cover while he convinces her not to endanger herself for the sake of her loving fans. Lone and Yeung are also aware of what zombies are, believing that an infected child is merely wearing zombie makeup for his birthday party (an idea Yeung finds impressive) and deciding that the zombie is too complicated to explain to Lone’s father, who seems unfamiliar with the creature, suggesting that Lone and Yeung’s knowledge comes from media consumed by the younger, more hybridized and hybridizing generation. Most important to their ideas of self, however, especially to Lone’s, are manga and anime. As Hideo sometimes imagines himself in and through his own manga projects in I Am a Hero, and with a similar gap between that imagined self and its mundane reality, Zombiology informs us via voice-over that Lone “always imagines himself to be a superhero in manga.” The opening credits sequence presents this fantasy in the style of anime, depicting Lone and Yeung in an animated world in which they can transform into their imagined heroic alter egos, the Double Dragons of Heaven and Earth. This type of transformation recalls those in anime series such as Sailor Moon, the favorite show of the infected child, who was one of the children earlier bored by Shan’s presentation on Cantonese opera. (This boy, perhaps, has not noticed that warrior heroes, monsters, spirits, and demons can be found in both anime and Chinese opera.) The live Lone and Yeung appear on a television in the beginning of the animated sequence, making, as at least Lone would no doubt desire, their real selves the media fantasy and the anime world the “real” world. In addition to providing a venue for imaging other versions of the self, being part of a fandom, as for anime—or horror—provides an opportunity for belonging, much like the Opera Society or the Special Abnormal Activities Squad. Seeing their anime selves on a television immediately precedes Lone and Yeung’s decision to be “the Lethal Dragons” in the real world and kill zombies using some of their improved or invented prop weapons. In the spirit of adaptation that attaches to their props, when Yeung kills his first zombie, he uses his saw-bladed weapon as a club rather than how it was intended.

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Again, unlike the children who have no interest Cantonese opera or Shan when she insists on its ossification, Lone, Yeung, and Yit take the more nuanced position of wanting to expand, evolve, and hybridize the form, and their attitude can be read as a commentary on Zombiology itself and its own innovations. In its mixing of influences, Zombiology echoes “the interactions between Hollywood films, Cantonese opera, and the Cantonese film industry” that were already taking place in the 1920s and 1930s (Yung 2005, 23). One might trace a line, for example, from the opera’s influence on Hong Kong action films in centering the actor’s body as “spectacle” (29) to the fluid bodily movements of Yit and Shuen in Zombiology—but also to Zombiology’s highlighting of the zombie as a contrasting, distinctly ungraceful bodily spectacle (reducing, perhaps, the distance between the two types of body). Zombiology is based on a novel, but director Lo also mentions as influences the Resident Evil video game (1996; a Japanese game in turn influenced by Western zombie cinema and that introduced Lo to zombies) and his own short film Zombie Guillotines (2012), which combined “the Western idea of zombies and the idea of ancient Chinese weaponry and martial arts” (David 2017). According to Zombie Guillotines, the flying guillotine (a bladed weapon on a chain that can be thrown over someone’s head to decapitate him or her) comes from “Ancient Chinese history” and was based on a “Maoshan Taoists’ tool for vampire [jiāngshīi] extermination.” In this film, the characters make improvised versions of this “classic Hong Kong film weapon” (David 2017), with which they clear the zombies from the surrounding area. The improvised flying guillotine reappears in Zombiology, a new version of an old weapon originally designed for an Eastern monster and newly applied to a Western one. The origin of the zombie infection also stands out as an innovation, drawing on several of the film’s sci-fi, martial arts, and anime-inspired elements. The zombie plague stems from spirits shot from the mouth of a square-bodied chicken mascot, which also lays or modifies eggs that autonomously murder people and which appears in an enormous, at least partly mechanized form in the animated sequences. This monstrous chicken also serves as a symbol of Lone’s self. As discussed, Lone’s relationship to media is bound up with his imagining of himself, and the importance placed on change within the cultural form of the opera parallels not only the film’s own innovations to the conventions of zombie cinema but also Lone’s confrontation with his monstrously embodied fears and insecurities. In a twist near the end of the film that makes more symbolic than narrative sense, Lone watches the chicken mascot take off part of its costume to reveal Lone inside. Patricia Saldarriaga and Emy Manini (2022) write that this revelation represents “an opportunity to achieve self-knowledge” in “giving the self over to the other” and to confront the monsters that “live inside of our own minds” (127)—in Lone’s case, fear and

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self-doubt. Pointedly, Lone is unable to transform into his hero form in the opening animation sequence, and near the end of the film, the chicken tells a battered Lone (or Lone tells himself) that he is back in a location from his past because he “is scared” and reminds him of his failure to protect his loved ones and his being “useless in the world” despite wanting to save it. In discussing the mascot, Alan Lo points to the “tragic life of chickens,” and notes the mascot’s chipped beak (Sichrovsky 2017) and square shape as effects of the battery cage farming system (David 2017), fitting images for Lone’s view of his own, heretofore tragically unheroic life. Lone’s father, who twice leading up to his self-sacrificial death urges Lone to go be a hero, represents another monster that Lone must confront. A voice-over states that Lone will “encounter his monster today” as his father is shown returning from prison and later, as Lone puts on the head of another mascot costume (a panda), says that Lone lacks the courage to fight the monster and chooses instead to hide. Ultimately, Lone works through his issues with his father and clips to his clothing a stuffed panda which his father left him before going to prison, signaling that he, like Shan, has accepted the need to move on from the past. From a symbolic perspective, leaving aside what “really” happened, if the chicken is Lone, his fears and self-recriminations, then as the creator of the zombies and as itself a monster to be fought, it represents Lone giving himself the chance to act heroically. This zombie, chicken, and egg apocalypse, like the media of which Lone is a fan, and like Zombiology itself, acts as a venue that allows one to imaginatively engage with (and even enact) alternate ways of being. It is important to note, then, that after Lone catches chicken-Lone’s last attempted slap, the film returns to animation, to how Lone wants to and maybe now does see himself, and after he defeats the now-giant chicken in an almost three-minute-long battle sequence, he says in voice-over as the film transitions back to live action for brief final shots suggesting that he will continue the fight in the real world, “I don’t know which world is real, but if I have the courage to face myself, then I can be a superhero too.” His remark speaks both to the blurred boundaries of art and media traditions within the film and to the similarly blurred boundaries between those traditions and the individual self. Oh Jun-u (Yoo Ah-in), one of the two protagonists of #Alive, directed by Cho Il-hyeong, is heavily invested in media himself, particularly online gaming and social media. Like Lone’s anime fandom, both online gaming and social media provide ways to inhabit or construct alternative versions of the self, and for Jun-u, facility with both these and other technologies enables both survival and human connection. Reflecting “Korea’s social enthusiasm for technological progress” (Ju 2009, 202), Jun-u’s immersion in gaming, social media, and technology, rather than rendering him unfit for the zombie apocalypse that unfolds, repeatedly helps him and fellow survivor Kim

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Yu-bin (Park Shin-hye) to improvise strategies which preserve their lives and, more importantly, their humanity, in the near total absence of any other living people in their neighboring high-rise apartment buildings, until they are successfully rescued. The first shot in the film pulls back from a close-up of one piece of consumer electronics to reveal Jun-u sleeping, in the glow of various devices, in a bed right behind a desk with a tricked-out dual-monitor computer setup. When he wakes up (at 10 a.m.), the first thing that he does, even before sitting up, is to check his smartphone. From the very first, then, Jun-u embodies the “extensive and intensive integration of ubiquitous digital media into Koreans’ everyday lives” (Yoon 2018, 283); and he is shortly shown to be a regular online gamer (and gaming streamer) as well, immediately recognized by his fellow MMO players when he logs on. South Korea boasts a “vibrant digital gaming culture” with a thriving esports scene, and Stephen C. Rea (2018) views this culture as “an index, product, and engine” of the nation’s rapid modernization, showing the capacities of Korea’s “world-renowned information society” and manifesting the ppalli ppalli (hurry, hurry) culture (501) discussed earlier in relation to Train to Busan. Online gaming is so popular, in fact, that the government passed a controversial “shutdown law” in 2011 intended to prevent gamers younger than sixteen from accessing online games between midnight and 6 a.m. to stop them from playing “excessively” and from getting inadequate sleep (Lee, Kim, and Hong 2017, 1598). Two years later, a government study found that time playing online games had increased, and a scholarly analysis in 2017 found no measurable effect from the law but did find an increase in juvenile internet time (1599). While Jun-u is older than sixteen (the character’s age is indeterminate, but Yoo Ah-in was in his early thirties when the film was made), he appears to be a good target for anxieties over excessive use of digital technologies: he lives with his parents (even in his fantasy of their return, they say he is “probably in his room playing that game again”), sleeps late, does not seem to have a “regular” job (although he might monetize his social media account[s]), and Yu-bin calls him an “idiot” and chastises him for eating too fast, demonstrating a lack of control over himself and his resources. After twenty days of isolation, having not yet met Yu-bin, the loss of electricity precipitated by jets bombing the city acts as a final straw, prompting him to make a short video in which he says only “Hello” and “Bye” and to set about hanging himself. In other words, if Jun-u were a character on The Walking Dead, someone would probably condemn him for being too “soft,” too disconnected from the “real world,” to survive in the harsh new reality of the zombie apocalypse (the type of view which is also bound up with certain patriarchal ideas of hypermasculinity). After all, many zombie narratives espouse the view summarized by Dalia Schweitzer (2018): “Twenty-first century culture depends

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on technology so much that it turns us into metaphorical zombies” (168). The zombies of #Alive indeed share characteristics with the stereotype of individuals who spend excessive time immersed in digital media: apparently together but actually isolated, acting only as individuals pursuing individual appetites. As Shaka McGlotten (2011) puts it, “Their solitude is assured even when they clump together in their hungry search of living flesh. In this way, zombies epitomize the unnatural or terrorized solitude that attends loneliness” (loc. 3969). However, not only does Jun-u not become a metaphorical zombie because of technology but he also subverts that stereotype to avoid becoming a literal one. Instead of evidence for a Black Mirror–style indictment of the always-logged-on lifestyle, technology use in #Alive offers practical solutions to navigating the apocalypse. Jun-u’s gamer lifestyle, sleeping in after the rest of his family has left, helps him to survive the onset of the zombie outbreak in the first place, and he initially hears about it from the other players in his MMO. In a shot that positions the camera as if it were looking out from Jun-u’s monitor and which includes the players’ live chat along the left side of the screen, they encourage him to turn on the television and compare what they are seeing to computer graphics or a movie, gesturing (like Lone at the end of Zombiology) to the porous boundary between real and virtual or media worlds, a boundary which some of Jun-u’s skills cross. Rea (2018) observes, “Games researchers have long been interested in games and play for what they demonstrate about the human capacity to innovate in uncertain contexts” (508); and Jun-u displays such capacity by, for instance, attaching his smartphone to a drone to conduct reconnaissance and turning his phone into an FM radio receiver with an app and an antenna which he makes from scavenged wired headphones. He also uses a drone, where Yu-bin’s analog method fails, to help secure a rope between their buildings—in a sequence that includes shots presented as if from the drone’s camera, collapsing its point of view, Jun-u’s, and ours—so that they can exchange items and to harass a zombie climbing to her apartment long enough for her to sever the zombie’s arm.4 Yu-bin herself employs a laser pointer to interrupt Jun-u’s suicide, and then creatively communicates by pointing to words and characters on things hung on the walls of his apartment (including the characters that form the aforementioned “idiot”). At first, the pair use the displays on his smartphone and her tablet to communicate across the gap between their buildings, and he calls a neighboring apartment at one point to lure zombies away from her unit, again demonstrating how “thinking with play as a disposition reveals ways of being and acting in quickly shifting, unsettled circumstances” (Rea 2018, 501) as well as reflecting the South Korean perception of technology as “friend, helper, supporter, and guardian” (Ju 2009, 217).

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It is no coincidence that many of the technologies mentioned so far have to do with communication. Like Sam in The Night Eats the World, Jun-u spends a significant amount of time (here twenty days) completely alone,5 and like that film, #Alive suggests that a human self requires a human Other. Although Yu-bin denies saving Jun-u from suicide and argues that he is alive because he wants to live, he counters that he would be dead if hadn’t met her, and a shot of a cut noose reveals that she too was going to commit suicide, implying that, in both cases, like in The Night Eats the World, mere survival or bare life is not sufficient: a human without another human is no longer human. And in place of “numbing technology that robs people of their humanity, and consequently turns them into zombies” (Kamerling 2020, 153), a common “real villain” in post-Romero zombie cinema (152), we find in #Alive that technology enables this necessary human interconnection.6 In addition to the examples mentioned above, Jun-u sends Yu-bin, via the rope which the drone helped them put up, one of a pair of walkie-talkies that he scavenges, allowing them to prepare and eat a meal “together” while in separate apartments and to get to know one another better. Jun-u’s determination that they “survive together” brings him outside of his building for the first time in the film to help Yu-bin cross between buildings, eliminating the need for technological mediation between the two. After this crossing, Jun-u and Yu-bin encounter a third survivor who demonstrates the very loss of humanity which the pair have avoided. A man (Jeon Bae-soo) lets them into his apartment to escape some zombies, and while Jun-u happily believes their group is now three strong (the more human relationality, the better), the man intends to feed both of the others to his zombified wife. Earlier in the film, Yu-bin has asserted that the zombies “are not human,” and the man’s choice of zombie over human interrelation marks him as inhuman too; he is furthermore visually linked with the zombies in a shot of him dragging Yu-bin away just like the zombies earlier dragged away a different woman. Bereft of a human Other, unlike Yu-bin, the man can no longer distinguish between human and not-human, as highlighted when he asks Jun-u to leave and permit him and his zombie wife to “live.” This togetherness of man and zombie is the dark inverse of the togetherness that allows Yu-bin to ask Jun-u to kill her when she believes that they will unavoidably be eaten or, worse, turned, by saying, “We’re still human, you know. And we’re together. It’s okay now.” If, as Colette Balmain (2013) writes, “it is the spectacle of the present that is gothicised in Korean horror cinema” (121), it is the apartment as a symbol of Korea’s modernization and “modern values” (Lee 2013, 102)—however accurate that symbolism may or may not be (102–3, 106)—rather than technology that takes on that gothic force. While the space of the apartment is isolating and presents dangers from zombies, humans, starvation, and despair,

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technology, as we have seen, supports survival, interpersonal connection, and humanity, and the film’s conclusion positions technology as central to personal and social futurity. Jun-u and Yu-bin’s last-second extrication by a government rescue team in a helicopter7 is revealed to have been made possible by the team tracing messages on social media, which valorizes Jun-u’s continuing to post throughout his isolation. Social media provides a means for users to “respond to increasingly uncertain social environments and seek ontological security” (Yoon 2018, 286), which here becomes physical security.8 A broadcast, which mentions that areas with apartment complexes were hardest hit by the infection, reports, “Thankfully, each region’s internet and wireless networks are being restored,” adding that the government’s disaster response in each region “will be pushing a campaign that encourages all survivors to post their current locations on social media,” making internet access and social media participation literally life-giving. The film’s final shot, over which part of this broadcast is heard, superimposes individuals’ social media posts above various buildings in the cityscape, emphasizing the equivalence between actual and virtual selves as well as between posting on social media and staying alive. And following this shot, we are reminded a final time that mere survival is not the same as being alive, as #I_Must_Survive, a hashtag adopted by Jun-u in reference to a message from his father, changes to #Alive, underscoring both the gap between survival and humanity and the role of digital media in making each possible. LIVING WITH AND AS ZOMBIES IN THE NEIGHBOR ZOMBIE AND RISE OF THE ZOMBIE The Neighbor Zombie, directed by Oh Young-doo, Ryu Hoon, Hong Seo-baek, and Jang Youn-jung, places less emphasis on its characters’ involvement with media than the films discussed above, its opening and closing segments excepted. But The Neighbor Zombie, structured as a series of six vignettes, does consistently draw on genre media influences in its recurring engagement with the relationship of zombified individuals to the family, the community (as suggested by the title), and the state. These relationships raise questions about the individual’s relationship and responsibility to others/the Other, including ethics of care and forgiveness. The first of the film’s short narratives, the comedic “Crack,” centers on a transnational media fan, the bespectacled Hong Young-guen (Hong Seo-baek), who largely conforms to the stereotypes of dedicated fandom that #Alive’s Jun-u ends up subverting. The segment begins with a close-up pan across some of Young-guen’s collection of Marvel, DC, and anime action figures, and a later, wider shot shows boxes, some of them visibly containing

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toys, stacked floor to ceiling along the walls of his living space. While fandom can provide venues for connecting with others, Young-guen only appears isolated by and within his piles of objects. For instance, he is interrupted during the delicate and time-intensive work of customizing an action figure by a phone call reminding him that he has not paid his phone bill for three months. This juxtaposition demonstrates the relative importance of plastic compared to living people for Young-geun, as well as aligning him further with the stereotype of the “deukhu,” an appellation derived “from the Japanese otaku” and signifying someone “who pursue[s] obsessive interests” while possessing “few social skills and a fetish for some aspect of popular culture” (“Zero to Hero” 2016). Although it has undergone a reappropriation similar to words such as “geek,” deukhu was long an insult and even equated “with a dangerously unpatriotic indulgence in Japanese cultural exports,” as well as with “lead[ing] idle, unproductive lives, shut away in dingy flats” (“Zero to Hero” 2016). In a further comment on this lifestyle, Young-geun’s customization work leads directly to his infection with the zombie virus. He cuts himself with the scalpel which he is using to modify the action figure and drips blood onto it, an image that marks his deukhu lifestyle as harmful. When he reaches under the bed to retrieve the scalpel from where it fell, something bites him (he is later bitten a second time through a hole in a wall of what one might well call his dingy flat). As Young-geun sprays bug killer under the bed, he imagines himself as the superhero character Ultraman, who originated in a Japanese television show. Here, his fandom, as it does for Zombiology’s Lone and I Am a Hero’s Hideo, provides Young-geun a means to imagine other versions of himself, although, unlike Lone and Hideo, he has no opportunity to reevaluate or improve himself in relation to those imaginings. Instead, his zombiism—itself symbolizing mindless but unswerving consumption, in this case of pop culture media—exaggerates his stereotypical deukhu attributes. As the infection progresses, Young-geun tries to leave his apartment but appears to be thrown back inside by contact with sunlight, a literalization of stereotypes about deukhu never going outside which is notably not characteristic of any other zombies in the film. Confined in this way, he is reduced to eating his own foot until a delivery person arrives at his door with a package (another collectible, perhaps), becoming a human meal that plays on the image of a deukhu surviving on takeout. The delivery person is played by director Ryu Hoon, who also plays the screenwriter of The Neighbor Zombie in the closing segment, “Painkiller,” casting which draws attention to the resonance between the two segments. Bookending the film with a recentering of media creation and consumption, and more specifically, “the power and consequences of creating the metaphor of a zombie” (Saldarriaga and Manini 2022, 129), “Painkiller” depicts the screenwriter laboring under the pressure of a countdown clock as he

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composes scenes we have seen earlier in the film. Much like Young-geun’s consumption of pop culture, the writer’s creation of it is represented as isolating and unhealthy, with the overtaxed man taking pills and urinating in bottles in order to keep working. By the end, still at his desk, he has become a zombie himself, and, as the countdown has almost reached zero, a police officer from an earlier segment shoots him. Aside from a possible joke about deadlines, being killed by his own creation posits harmful effects for someone on the creative side of the media similar to those experienced by Young-geun, suggesting that both creators and consumers can become zombies—dehumanized, lacking intersubjective relationality, focused only on one thing— through (too much) participation in the media ecosystem. At the same time, however, being killed by one’s own screenplay character does assign a great deal of power to filmmaking and its capacity to bring ideas to life.9 One might also view Young-geun’s creative pursuit of customizing action figures as an analogy for what The Neighbor Zombie itself, like all the films discussed in this volume, is doing: customizing the zombie myth. While the opening and closing segments present individuals in isolation, the second and third segments focus on relation to the Other within the small units of the couple and the family. The second, “Runaway,” does so as a kind of parodic romance narrative that humorously appropriates some of the tropes of the genre in an instance of “the exploration of the self and humanity” that Ashley Szanter and Jessica K. Richards (2017) argue is enacted when combining “the agentic zombie” and “romantic love” (loc. 235). This appropriation may additionally parody the presence of “sex and love” as “driving forces in so many zombie narratives” (Jones and McGlotten 2014, loc, 188). When “Runaway” begins, the man in the couple (Bae Yong-geun) is infected but not yet fully a zombie, a state which is indicated by his having one normal and one “zombie” eye and which is revealed only after the couple are shown kissing. Eyes in this segment function not only as markers of identity but also as symbols of empathetic capacity. Eventually, after the man has expressed that he “can’t bear this anymore” and that he is unsure if his angry outburst (which literally blows the woman’s hair back) is caused by the virus changing or merely exposing his “real” self, the woman (Ha Eun-jung) bites him so that she too will be infected and he can’t leave her behind. Her gesture elides the boundary between heterosexuality and the “violent, interpersonal and contagious contact” that gives zombies their “fundamentally reproductive . . . power” (Jones and McGlotten 2014, loc. 165). At this point, she holds one of his eyes, which has popped out and is dangling for a second time in the segment, in her hand and asks him if he can’t see that nothing can divide them now. Her turning it in her hand both literally and symbolically changes the way that he sees her and himself, as well as the liminal state of being infected but not completely turned. She adds that he has “been in” her from

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the moment they met, which is also now true literally as well as symbolically, as she has ingested his blood and his virus, altering her self by mixing it with his. No doubt further viral exchange occurs when they then kiss to romantic music. Through her infection, she comes to better understand the man (as the Other), saying, for example, that she didn’t know the process was so painful and echoing his earlier feelings that living this way is unbearable. Their earlier roles are now reversed, with him comforting her and telling her that he has heard that treatment is available in the south. In the next scene, the woman now also has one normal and one “zombie” eye, signaling her ability, through the shared experience of infection, to see things from the perspective of her significant other (an Other who is now part of her), of both human and zombie, subject positions that each of them occupies simultaneously. With this change, the man says that she is more beautiful than ever, and the pair, following a comedic, movie makeover-style montage set to accordion music in which they try on disguises, agree to marry when they reach the south. Having agreed to be together until death do part them, they are gunned down offscreen as soon as they step outside, it having been established earlier in the segment that government policy is to shoot the infected on sight. This final twist parodies the romance trope in which lovers “miraculously” overcome “an insurmountable obstacle” and “achieve a happily ever after,” not infrequently signified by marriage (Szanter and Richards, 2017 loc. 173). In doing so, however, the ending also contrasts the ethic of care displayed by the infected with the ethic of violence practiced by the uninfected. This contrast acts as a critique of governmental mistreatment of vulnerable populations and failure to recognize “the right of every inhabitant of the state to care and be cared for in all care’s various meanings and manifestations” (The Care Collective 2020, 69). State violence figures in the third segment, “Mother I Love You,” as well, in the person of a police officer (Kim Hyun-tae) who discovers that a woman (Im Jung-sun) is keeping her zombie mother (Kim Yeo-jin) chained up in her apartment. The daughter is sustaining her mother using her own body—following a few establishing shots, the first scene depicts the daughter methodically cutting off a second one of her own fingers, as she bites down on a folded washcloth and tears slip from her eye, and then squeezing blood from the stump into a teapot. She has also swathed her mother in plastic wrap, presumably for both control and cleanliness, and sews up a tear in the mother’s flesh. Rather than the self-sacrificing mother of a film such as Peninsula, then, the segment presents the self-sacrificing child, the other side of these normative familial obligations. Saldarriaga and Manini (2022) read this “familial sacrifice” in the context of Christian imagery (84), but we might also view this exaggerated form of filial obligation as a commentary on South Korean social norms within which, as was still true several years after the

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movie’s release, “a large majority of children consider old-age care their sole responsibility, and the responsibility of the state and society is only gradually being recognized” (Chang 2014, 56). On the one hand, the daughter’s feeding her mother with her own body conjures the image of the devouring mother, “the cannibalizing black hole from which all life comes and to which all life returns” and who “threatens to obliterate the subject” (Creed 1993, 25). With the devouring mother as a zombie, this threat to the subject gains additional dimensions in the danger not only of literal death but also of the overriding of subjectivity by the zombie virus. On the other hand, the daughter’s willing reincorporation of (parts of) herself into the mother inverts the expression of “fear of the Other” through “images of being literally and metaphorically consumed by that Other” (Brown 2013, 4). Rather than an expression of fear, the acts of maternal cannibalism constitute an expression of attachment, duty, and care. The daughter’s prioritization of duty to and care for family, however, causes her to dehumanize others outside of the family even as she humanizes her zombie mother, to see the uninfected (including herself) as resources rather than as subjects for whom she is also obligated to care. She ties up the officer both to protect her mother—the daughter has earlier observed from her window armed agents of the state chase down and shoot zombies in the street—and to feed her. Although she cries and apologizes, she nonetheless severs (and renders abject, a concept discussed in chapter 2) one of the officer’s fingers as she has been doing to her own. Judith Butler (2020) describes (in order to critique) the logic that props up the sort of ethical decisions that the daughter makes in harming the officer in order to benefit her mother and, by extension, herself: “If I defend myself and those who are considered part of myself (or proximate enough so that I know and love them), then this self that I am is relational, yes; but such relations, considered as belonging to the region of the self, are limited to those who are proximate and similar. One is justified in using violence to defend those who belong to the region or regime of the self” (52). The daughter and the officer disagree on how to measure such proximity: he sees the mother as neither human nor alive, categorizations with which the daughter disagrees, but more importantly, he judges the acceptability of violent action based on that categorization while she judges it based on relational proximity to the self rather than on similarity in infection status. The distance between her self and her mother diminishes even further when her mother, after a pause of recognition, bites and infects her. The officer frees himself and kills both mother and then daughter. These killings might seem more justified than the state violence against the couple in the previous segment, since the mother, unlike the couple, had completed her transition into cannibalistic zombiehood and since the daughter had

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committed violence against the officer first and was herself becoming a zombie. At the same time, such justification is complicated by the daughter’s still-partial transformation—when she is killed, to a sorrowful score, she has, like the couple, one infected eye and has just cried over her dead mother—as well as by the existence of a cure in the next segment, which means that all of the zombies legally or extralegally killed by the uninfected can be viewed as persons with an illness and not nonhuman monsters (although the notion that slaughtering the nonhuman needs no justification has its own set of problems). The end of the segment reveals the officer now to have one infected eye as well, repositioning his own self in proximity to the daughter whom he has killed (and so, at somewhat greater distance, to her mother as well) and offering an image of violence itself as an infection. As Butler (2020) writes, committing violence, even in self-defense, is not just a matter of personal conscience but an act that imperils “certain ‘ties’ required for social life” (14). The film’s next two segments take a wider view of such social ties. In its opening, The Neighbor Zombie establishes that the zombie virus originated from the development of an AIDS vaccine by a Dr. David Park (Park Young-seo) at a global pharmaceutical company, Brindel. As in Zombie for Sale, illegal experiments on members of the public lead to the spread of a zombie virus. The fourth segment, “Age of Vaccine,” sees Dr. Park trying to make up for Brindel’s wrongs, which the company has covered up while hugely profiting from its dangerously flawed product. The company is also profiting off of the outbreak that its own vaccine caused by producing a drug, “Zombie High,” from the “body fluid” of zombies and selling it to international terrorists. The Neighbor Zombie was released close on the heels of an H1N1 pandemic, the government’s inadequate response to which was compounded by the interference of globalized capitalism (Kim 2019, 444). It is significant, then, that “Age of Vaccine” borrows some of the trappings of the superhero genre to frame Dr. Park’s quest, as this genre often presents a fantasy of an individual with the power—and lack of restraints—to single-handedly solve large-scale or systemic problems.10 Park has permanently altered his body by experimenting on himself but has succeeded in creating a vaccine for the zombie virus. One side effect is that Park now exhales toxic gases, so he wears a gas mask and hood that make him resemble DC’s 1930s Sandman. After Brindel agents murder the members of Doctors Without Borders with whom he was going to share his new vaccine, Park, whose “only normal” head is his weakness, battles some zombies and a henchman (Lee Han-sol) who gains strength by injecting himself with Zombie High; saves the girl (Lee Joo-yeon), who refuses to talk about him to the authorities; and returns to his clandestine existence. While he admittedly does so violently, Park (as [super]hero) stops corporate exploitation and succeeds where the government (a squad, including the aforementioned woman, dispatched by what is

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referred to as the CDC) fails. Notably, the woman whom he saves refused a proposition from her squad mate to take the new vaccine for themselves in order to save his children and her mother. Her rejoinder that the vaccine is government property marks her as committed, like Park, to the wider collective good and not only the good of those in proximal relation to the self. Pointedly, she survives the segment; her squad mate does not. In the following segment, “After That . . . I’m Sorry,” Park’s new vaccine has gone into widespread use, so there are now a number of former zombies in the community. Recalling, though not entirely seriously, revenge films such as those comprising Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance [Boksuneun Naui Geot; 2002]; Oldboy [Oldeuboi; 2003]; and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance [Chinjeolhan geumjassi; 2005]), this segment, much as The Cured does, uses the existence of a cure for the zombie infection to consider living as and with violent offenders. As in The Cured, the formerly infected are discriminated against, perceived in both films as “an eternal Other” (Saldarriaga and Manini 2022, 108). Bae Yong-geun (sharing a name with the actor who portrays him), who held a white-collar position at Brindel before the outbreak, fails to secure a job as a dishwasher, the handwritten ad for which specifies that the applicant must be “healthy.” The interviewer feels that it is his prerogative to know not only whether there are any continuing effects from having been a zombie (Bae Yong-guen says that there aren’t and that he became a vegetarian after his “disease” was cured) but also whether Bae Yong-guen has ever eaten people and whether he still has those memories. His silence is confirmed as a “yes” by his dreams of eating bloody meat, and the scars on his face symbolize the guilt that he carries. When he meets some others cured in the same ward as him for a picnic in a scene shot with an intimate, handheld, documentary feel, they complain about being able to find only tough, low-wage work, about not being able to pay rent and having to move, and about being afraid to stop taking medicine with adverse effects for fear of a relapse into a zombie state. Also as in The Cured, the formerly infected are subject to surveillance, expected to submit to regular checkups with the CDC, which monitors their compliance. A temporary apocalypse in a city may, as Henry Kamerling (2020) argues of some progressively inclined zombie films, suggest that the urban world, its institutions, and the modernity that they represent are not irremediably corrupt (147, 152), but neither does the rescue of the urban space from the zombie threat mitigate that corruption. In fact, here it actually introduces increased inequities in the relationship of the individual to the community and of groups within the community to one another. One complaint at the picnic is that the formerly infected are human like everyone else, but as in the different ways that the police officer and daughter see the zombie mother, not everyone agrees on where that boundary lies and how the human subject is defined.

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As mentioned above, the existence of a cure for zombiism intensifies the ethical problems of violence against the infected by the uninfected, but it also raises moral questions about the violence of zombies against the uninfected. A woman (Seo Yoon-ah), after confirming Bae Yong-guen’s identity, wounds him on two separate occasions in order to draw out his suffering and uncertainty before explaining at their third encounter that she is going to kill him in revenge for his role in her parents’ deaths. At that point, another former zombie (Ha Sung-kwang) comes upon them while intending to burglarize Bae Yong-guen’s apartment—which, nearly bare, offers little to steal. The confrontation among the three points to questions of justice and intentionality. Bae Yong-guen denies that he is a murderer and asks for forgiveness, describing his own suffering and repentance. Bae Yong-guen’s brain retains memories of his actions as a zombie, which suggests continuity of the self in some way, but his will was also subject to the controlling impulses of the zombie virus. Aside from highlighting the continuous self as a construction (and a function of the body), the woman’s justification for revenge runs into the problem of whether Bae Yong-guen’s self can be construed as continuous enough to hold “him” responsible. The burglar, in contrast, believes that Bae Yong-guen has done nothing to feel guilty over and that the uninfected are, or are also, murderers, having killed many zombies, including his friends, his brother, and the woman’s parents, who were beaten to death after being savaged and infected by Bae Yong-guen. This dynamic between the burglar, who is unapologetic for having been a zombie and would like revenge on the uninfected, and Bae Yong-guen, who wishes to atone for his time as a zombie and reintegrate himself into his community, closely echoes that between Conor and Senan in The Cured (see chapter 4). The burglar, also similarly to Conor, tries, with authentic emotion, to recruit Bae Yong-guen to join him in his violent lifestyle, reprimanding him for living a pathetic life and trying to convince him to kill the woman. Bae Yong-guen, however, like Senan, chooses nonviolence and coexistence, fatally stepping in front of the burglar’s bullets to save the woman (and accidentally shooting the burglar in the process). The woman, marked with a splash of Bae Yong-guen’s blood, cries after their deaths, saying that she was supposed to kill Bae Yong-guen but also saying excuse me: perhaps she has gained some awareness that, as Butler (2020) writes, being “willing to hurt or murder, in the name of those with whom I share a social identity or whom I love in some way that is essential to who I am” manufactures “a moral justification for violence that emerges precisely on a demographic basis” (55). The avenging woman’s earlier claim that Bae Yong-guen and the burglar are the same, like the discrimination practiced by other uninfected in Seoul against the ex-infected, groups quite different subjects into a monolithic demographic of the kind which enables structural and physical violence. With the woman’s regret over violent events echoing

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Bae Yong-guen’s, she ends up, like the police officer in “Mother I Love You,” resembling the Other whom she had so recently been willing to kill based on what she viewed as clear boundaries. Rise of the Zombie, directed by Devaki Singh and Luke Kenny, equates the boundary between human and zombie with the boundary between human and nonhuman nature.11 Unlike in The Neighbor Zombie, there is no cure for the zombie infection, so this double boundary can be crossed only in one direction. As nature photographer Neil (Luke Kenny) slowly becomes the titular zombie after being bitten by an insect while camping alone, the film reveals an anxiety about a degeneration from which there is no return, an irreversible descent into wildness. Neil’s degeneration occurs in association with his predilection for disconnecting himself from his family, friends, and girlfriend in Mumbai and disappearing for his work. Nature becomes the location for a dangerous loss of the relationality that the urban provides to Neil, which in turn leads to a loss of self. Neil’s extended transition into zombiehood, a variation on the postmillennial trend of the sympathetic zombie as “focalising perspective” (Abbott 2016, loc. 3354), allows him the time (and sufficient consciousness) to register this loss, his expressions of regret for killing and eating other humans marking his movement into rather than, as in The Zombie Neighbor, out of the state of zombie Otherness. According to Amit R. Baishya (2016), “the only direct appearance of the zombie in Indian cinema” before 2013 occurs in a Thriller-inspired dance segment in 1985’s Donga (115). Mithuraaj Dhusiya (2018) places this first appearance earlier, crediting Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche (1972), directed by Tulsi and Shyam Ramsay, with introducing the zombie to Hindi horror cinema, even if said zombie turns out to be “a fake” (69; see also 121). Whichever one accepts as the “true” first appearance of this “alien concept for Indian cinema” (121), the first Indian zombie films did not debut until decades later, and Rise of the Zombie remains one of a small number of such films.12 Meheli Sen (2017) argues that in the new millennium, supernatural Indian cinema has transformed itself “to inhabit multiple globally legible formats” (133) and discusses the attempted avoidance by recent supernatural Hindi, or “Bollywood,” films (135), including Rise of the Zombie (which invites the short form ROTZ), of the “formal mélange” considered typical of Hindi film (14). Such films eliminate, for example, song sequences in favor of soundtracks and narrow the “breadth and scale” (143) for which Hindi cinema is known, alterations that Sen terms a “formal disassembly in order to make room for the zombie” (142). Neil and his circle in ROTZ also speak in a mix of Hindi and English known as ‘“Hinglish,’ the lingua franca of urban, middle-class youth in India” and another increasingly common marker of millennial Hindi supernatural cinema (135). As the product of a film industry that had shifted its focus toward not only transnational legibility but also

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bourgeois audiences in urban multiplexes (19), Rise of the Zombie’s zombie tellingly rises in the absence of urban modernity. The first images in the film are of nonhuman nature from the point of view of Neil’s camera, along with some shots of Neil taking such photographs and a medium close-up of Neil allowing a bug to walk across his hand, emphasizing his proximal relation to nonhuman nature. When Neil returns to his living space in Mumbai, he returns to his cellular service, laptop, and internet. Sen (2017) interprets the zombie’s “sudden appearance” in supernatural Bollywood cinema as an instance of a “new regime of present-ness” that contrasts films which reckoned with the past and is connected to the rise of “digital media cultures” (139). Neil demonstrates his involvement in such cultures by streaming hard rock music from his laptop shortly after arriving home. He also finds a number of missed calls on his cell phone from his girlfriend, Vinny (Kirti Kulhari). Vinny dislikes that Neil travels a lot and drops out of contact for extended periods; she complains, for example, that he disappears for weeks in the “jungles of Sikkim,” the least populated of India’s states. Dhusiya (2018) views Neil’s trips as comparable to the Western-derived practice of recreational camping, an activity that signifies “privilege and luxury” in an Indian context, and so identifies Neil’s zombiehood with a predatory “modern capitalist world” (127). More specifically, Dhusiya views Neil as unquestionably White and so as a kind of “imperial map-maker” whose introduction of “Western otherness” (128) into natural spaces presages their consumption and who himself consumes “the subalterns of the ecological heritage region” (129). Neil’s status as White may be more complex, however. While the character’s heritage is not discussed in the film, Kenny himself was born in India, as was his (White) father, and Kenny has said that he deliberately avoided roles in which he would have played “a foreigner,” speaking dismissively of an offer “to play a musician, and a white one too!” (Noorani 2013). Therefore, Neil’s relationship to nature may not be an uncomplicatedly clear projection of a “Western lifestyle” (Dhusiya 2018, 128), and while Neil is no doubt well-off enough, he and his circle always talk about his photography as his work (the ballad that plays over the opening sequence of the film even features lyrics about ambition and setting and achieving goals), which also complicates viewing his trips as (White, Western) recreational camping. Sen (2017) may be correct that the regret articulated by Neil’s father (Benjamin Gilani), a doctor in a cancer research center, that he was too busy with his work to spend adequate time with his son when Neil’s mother died is, while one of the film’s few engagements with the past, “of little narrative consequence” (143), but it does suggest that Neil inherited or copies a damaging obsession with work from his father—even if that work

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involves being enjoyably alone in nature, it remains work, and zombies have long been used to critique the dehumanization of capitalist labor. Zombies also “embody that uncontrollable element that evokes horror in nature” even as they are themselves unnatural (Saldarriaga and Manini 2022, 105). In contrast to viewing Neil as an imperialist threat to a “Third World” space that in turn presents a “danger to the white man” (Dhusiya 2018, 129), one might more broadly read Rise of the Zombie as signaling the danger of too close a relationship with nature (perhaps especially for those urban dwellers removed from it), which, for Neil, both results from and exacerbates too little social and interpersonal connection. If we put aside the argument that Neil is not truly “Indian” in some important way, then the film’s emphasis falls not on the threat of the privileged subject transforming the wilderness but on the threat of the wilderness transforming the modern urban subject. If, as Sen (2017) asserts, ROTZ makes no “meaningful” attempt to “situate the zombie within the Indian context” (144), it does situate itself in the wider, transnational context of the nature/humanity binary, which here intersects to a degree with an urban/rural binary. Jason W. Moore (2016b) conceptualizes this constructed division as an “audacious separation” (loc. 1703) characteristic of the Capitalocene period and critiques the notion that the “separation of humans from the rest of nature” is a “self-evident reality” (loc. 1775). Neil’s transformation into a being that resembles a nonhuman animal more than a human subject highlights the flimsiness of that separation. As Elizabeth Parker (2020) reminds us, “our fears of Nature encompass fears of human nature” (214; emphasis in original). His zombie infection comes from the bite of a flying insect that he tries to shoo away while he is taking more nature photographs. The insect’s bite penetrates the boundary between Nature and Humanity that the interposition of Neil’s camera between him and his environment represents. Angela Tenga and Elizabeth Zimmerman (2013) observe that the zombie’s deindividualization reflects “the fear of degeneration to a swarm,” the anxiety “that humanity cannot be meaningfully distinguished from the insect kingdom” (80). While Neil does not end up as part of a zombie swarm, these fears about the self are expressed instead in the origin of his zombification. Its association with the insect world is reinforced by three separate close-up shots of what Neil is photographing when he is bitten: a spider eating an ant. The juxtaposition of the images of Neil and the ant being bitten suggest an analogy between human and ant, with the spider standing in for a dangerous “nature.” Later, when his zombiism has advanced, he wakes up and starts eating ants himself, symbolically becoming the spider, identified more with nature than humanity.13 There is something of the spider, or other nonhuman animals, in the way that Neil ambushes his human prey, a behavioral departure from the majority of Western zombies.14 For example, when he becomes aware that Lata (Pinky Negi), the niece of a villager named

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Thapa (Prem Thapa) is arriving at his campsite, he hides under a blanket in his tent and kills her when she enters. Similarly, when a friend of his arrives, Neil watches him from cover in the trees before he attacks, his animalistic growls audible every time the film cuts back to a shot from his point of view. This sequence would not be out of place in a werewolf film, and an earlier scene in which Neil is shown in silhouette sitting in a tree and roaring like a wolf howling at the moon reinforces the identification of zombie and nonhuman animal (or even human and nonhuman animal hybrid) states. Neil’s body is increasingly abject, and the “abject confronts us . . . with those fragile states when man strays on the territories of animal,” territories associated with “sex and murder” (Kristeva 2020, 104; emphasis in original). The metamorphosis of zombies into “bodies that look human but function as animal” disrupts the naturalization “of hierarchized levels of being” (Och 2014, 197). By the end of the film, Neil’s tent contains his own scattered belongings, a spider, and a caterpillar, marking the dissolution of the boundaries between wilderness and human habitation, as well as between Neil and the other creatures of the wild. In the final half minute, before focusing on Neil eating a corpse and raising his face to the camera, the cinematography becomes frenzied and disorienting, as if the film itself had gone wild as well. Neil’s gradual loss of human subjectivity implies an equivalency between isolation in nature—and from the interpersonal connection offered by urban modernity—and zombification. Early in the film, when Vinny is complaining about Neil’s uncommunicative absences, she says that he is fine with being alone and exactly where he wants to be in terms of his lifestyle. Neil tells one villager that he enjoys coming to small places to escape the urban crowds, and becoming a zombie both intensifies and figures Neil’s existing predilection for isolation, pursued through his rural tourism and nature photography. The film positions its natural and rural locations as spaces of damaging disconnection for the urban subject. Characters repeatedly remark on the absence of a cellular network in these spaces: Neil points it out twice in relation to the place that he goes in general, and he and Thapa both mention it in relation to the specific area where most of the film takes place. The fact of there being “no network” in these areas thus takes on a symbolic dimension, indicating Neil’s removal from relationality to his friends, family, and girlfriend. In much millennial Hindi horror cinema, “Communication technologies that keep protagonists continuously connected often become conduits for the horrific” (Sen 2017, 139), but in Rise of the Zombie, as in #Alive, it is the breaking of this continuous connection, which helps maintain the human self as human, that invites the horrific. Because of the lack of network, Neil must travel into the closest village in order to attempt to make calls. The village has often been exalted “as the locus of national life” in India, in contrast to a view of the city as a space merely of “government, . . . industry and

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commerce” (Prakash 2015, 507), and although the village gathering that Neil attends, among other details, suggests that the villagers have a strong communal ethic, the rural nevertheless offers insufficient connection (in the form of technological connectedness) for Neil himself: none of the calls that he makes from the village are picked up, leaving Vinny, his father, and others in Mumbai with no idea where he is and so no ability to help him once he is infected. Vinny ultimately puzzles out Neil’s approximate location based on one of those incomplete calls, but the film ends before she arrives there. In Neil’s zombifying disconnection from his social relations, Rise of the Zombie presents a reversal of the common association of urbanity with alienation and rurality with community. While Sen (2017) declares that the film has no “political energy” (153), one can see it as making an argument in favor of the sort of modernized middle class urban life that created the conditions for its production in the first place. CONCLUSION Zombie cinema is always in some way about probing the boundaries—or the lack thereof—of the human, and this remains true whether the zombie is a resurrected or an infected being. The zombie provides a figure against which the human subject can be defined, however contingently. Films such as #Alive, though, further posit a need for a human Other in order for an individual to define and maintain a human self. Beyond these foundational relations and any ontological triangulation among zombies and humans which they might involve, individual zombie films highlight particular, localized relations of the subject that contribute to self-identity: relation, for example, to social units including the couple, family, and community, as in The Neighbor Zombie and Rise of the Zombie; to work and/as art, as in Zombiology and Rise of the Zombie; and to media, media cultures, and technology, as in Zombiology, #Alive, The Neighbor Zombie, and Rise of the Zombie. Zombiology and Rise of the Zombie also consider the construction of the individual subject in relation to boundaries between the past and present and, in the case of the latter, among the urban, rural, and wilderness. Interestingly, three of the four films discussed in this chapter (with The Neighbor Zombie as the exception)—unlike both other types of horror cinema and strains of zombie cinema in which modern life makes one weak and unsuited to survival, like the deukhu in The Neighbor Zombie—valorize (urban, digital) modernity, gesturing to a resonance between aesthetic and technological evolution and the continual mutation of the zombie myth in which these films participate. In their considerations of various dimensions of individual relationality, the films in this chapter demonstrate continuities not only with films such as The

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Night Eats the World, Ravenous, and The Cured, but, viewed more broadly, with all of the films discussed in this book and their examinations of individuals embedded within national instantiations of globalized capitalism and its attendant hierarchies of gender, sexuality, and race. NOTES 1. One could argue that the concept of neighbors violently turning on one another might evoke the Korean War, but there is little beyond that commonplace of zombie cinema to suggest any strong subtext in that direction. 2. There are two sets of subtitles that can be seen when streaming this film on Amazon Prime Video: the other set substitutes “offended” for “broken” here, which gives a sense of the disrespect involved in breaking with tradition. 3. While Zombiology does not foreground issues of housing in the way that Cockneys vs Zombies does, it does satirize the greed of the real estate market: these men are revealed to have been prepared to torture Shan, except she has already signed the deal. In another scene, a mob of real estate agents resemble zombies as they surround Yit; and Yeung says of another pack of real estate agents that they “are crazier than zombies these days.” 4. The zombies in #Alive, like those in I Am a Hero, retain some behaviors from before infection, and this one was a member of emergency services. South Korean television series All of Us Are Dead also features survivors using a camera-equipped drone, and in episode 5, a fleet of drones are successfully employed to lure zombies away using a certain frequency of sound. 5. The American version of the film, released in the same year, takes Alone as its title. 6. It is worth noting as well that #Alive was released during the COVID-19 pandemic, a period in which the psychological impact of isolation came front and center and technology and digital media did keep many people, some completely isolated, connected to one another and to the outside world. 7. This military rescue is similar to the UN rescue at the end of Peninsula, hinting perhaps at a more positive portrayal of such organizations in South Korean zombie films than in many of their Western counterparts. 8. Yoon (2018) also remarks on the contribution of “KakaoTalk, which has often been referred to as ‘a national messaging app’” and helps “to negotiate urban life and peer networks,” to “the growth of mobile gaming practices among Korean youth” (287). 9. Saldarriaga and Manini (2022) write that the nerd in “Crack” brings his action figure to life with his blood, and the action figure bites and infects him, but I cannot see explicit evidence of this: the last time the figure is seen, it is laying on the work surface—without feet—and we never see either what bites the man or, more importantly, something like a shot of the empty work surface to imply that the figure has come to life. They also argue that zombies come into the writer’s space as he is

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working, but I interpret these appearances as the writer visualizing the scenes as he works (84). 10. Martial arts films unquestionably provide influences as well. 11. The currently available streaming version of this film that is cited in the Filmography has, oddly, had about four minutes cut, including Neil’s visit to a village gathering (described in Dhusiya [2018], 129–30), his post-infection conversation with a food vendor who asks if he wants vegetarian food, and some footage of Neil’s final victim hiking and taking pictures. Also excised is a coda teasing Land of the Zombie, a never-made sequel that would have expanded the scope of the zombie infection. As of this writing, several copies of the uncut film can be found on YouTube, but none have English subtitles available. 12. I count seven other examples released to date: Go Goa Gone (dir. Raj Nidimoru and Krishna D. K., 2013, Hindi), Miruthan (dir. Shakti Soundar Rajan, 2016, Tamil), Zombie (dir. Bhuvan Nullan, 2019, Tamil), the third segment in Ghost Stories (dir. Dibakar Banerjee, 2020, Hindi), Trip (dir. Dennis Manjunath, 2021, Tamil), G-Zombie (dir. Aryan Gowra and Deepu, 2021, Telugu), and Zombie Reddy (dir. Prasanth Varma, 2021, Telugu). 13. Neil’s diet once he is infected roughly moves up the food chain—ants, lizard, bird, dog, humans—but he eats one human before any of these and eats a spider between his avian and canine meals. The real marker of his irreversible break with his human self is when he is unable any longer to eat bread. 14. Dana Och (2014) reads the paralleling of zombie transformation and “the animal” in films from postcolonial nations as engaging with histories of “dehumanizing colonial rhetoric” (193). Och focuses on zombie comedies, but her lens might productively be applied to ROTZ.

Conclusion

As the zombie film has continued to increase its footprint in transnational cinema following the Great Recession and the diminishing centrality to zombie cinema of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that served as primary sources of anxiety in the initial millennial zombie renaissance, many of the genre’s long-standing concerns, including with gender, class, race, and the relationship of the individual to social or sociopolitical groups, have persisted even as they manifest in updated, varyingly localized forms. Variations in how these zombies are created, behave, and, sometimes, are cured, as well as in their effects on the living and their modes and structures of being, enable and effect transnational zombie cinema’s flexibility in engagement with a range of social and cultural anxieties in a range of nations. As Dahlia Schweitzer (2018) writes, outbreak narratives, of which zombie narratives comprise a subset, speak to such anxieties in relation to “three types of increasingly ineffective boundaries: first, between the personal body and the body politic; second, between individual nations; and third, between ‘ordinary people’ and potentially dangerous disenfranchised groups” (2). These types of anxiety can be found in different combinations across the films examined in this volume, with some manifesting all three: in Juan of the Dead, for example, Juan and his associates have an ambivalent relationship to an ineffective, propagandizing government; capitalist America infects (incompletely) socialist Cuba; and many of Havana’s economically disenfranchised citizens transform into a rampaging zombie horde. In addition to the economically exploited, disenfranchised groups in these zombie narratives include, as we have seen, women, both human, as in Yummy, and zombified, as in Miss Zombie; insufficiently masculine men, as in Me and My Mates vs the Zombie Apocalypse; and queers, as in Remington and the Curse of the Zombadings. The potential danger attached to such groups is sometimes literalized through zombification and sometimes remains a threatened or enacted destabilization of various normativities. These anxieties can also be related to particular national traumas: for instance, not only is the zombie virus in Zombie Island a direct continuation of Japan’s World War II–era biological warfare program, but the people experimenting with it are able to do so by blurring the lines between 215

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Chinese and Japanese identities. In The Cured, the knotty, ongoing aftermath of the Northern Ireland Conflict is imagined through the troubled reintegration into Dublin of former zombies, who have killed fellow citizens, friends, and family members. And while the zombie (narrative) may pose a danger to boundaries, their dissolution, whether the cultural boundaries in Cargo or the human/nonhuman boundaries in Ever After, not infrequently offers an avenue, actual or potential, for progress. In borrowing from and refashioning a shared set of tropes, transnational zombie cinema provides an endlessly adaptable vehicle for thinking through and critiquing the (de)human(izing) experience in the form of vivid, visceral imagery. All of the films discussed in detail to this point have featured cannibal-style zombies, which have more or less entirely replaced their Haitian ancestors on screen, so it is fitting to say a few words here about a recent film which recenters that most direct source of the cinematic zombie myth. The French film Zombi Child (2019) neatly encapsulates the flexibility of the ever-mutating cinematic zombie tradition, foregrounding a version of the vodou zombi while positioning it in relation to other transnationally circulating versions of the zombie, as well as to other forms of narrative and media that cross national borders. Zombi Child juxtaposes the contemporary experiences of a young Haitian woman named Mélissa (Wislanda Louimat) at a prestigious all-girls French school founded by Napoleon with those of Clairvius Narcisse (Mackenson Bijou), whose story of being zombified was popularized by anthropologist Wade Davis and whom the film makes Mélissa’s grandfather, in 1960s Haiti. In the first scene at the school, a teacher—played by real-life historian Patrick Boucheron, giving an “impromptu lecture” (Truscello and Watchman 2022, 7)—discusses the French Revolution as a global touchstone (the Haitian Revolution, by implication, is not considered in this way) and the difficulties of writing the historical narratives of liberty. Repeated pans across the classroom showing Mélissa to be the only Black student emphasize the question of who creates and controls such narratives. Later, Mélissa’s aunt Katy (Katiana Milfort), who is a mambo (sometimes written manbo), or vodou priestess, tutors a White child in the subject of the Roman Empire at its height, abetting in the promulgation of dominant, official, Eurocentric histories. Patricia Saldarriaga and Emy Manini (2022) describe such moments as displaying the “toxic effects of the nation-building style of education that represses the production of meaning of the colonized group while imposing and reinforcing the tenets of the dominant culture” (46). Significantly, when another student asks Mélissa what a mambo is, she answers only, “A mambo . . . is a mambo,” refusing to (re)define Haitian tradition for her White audience.

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At the same time, the film presents history as only one among a number of modes of storytelling. Another student, Fanny (Louise Labeque), says that she and Mélissa enjoy the same horror movies and books (Zombi Child itself is telling both a historical and a horror story), and the students’ next class is on realist literature, yet another way of organizing and processing experience(s). When Mélissa must tell some of the other girls something deeply personal in order to join their sorority, she recites not French realist literature but Haitian poet René Depestre’s 1967 poem “Cap’tain Zombi,” which addresses itself to the “monde blanc” (“White world”) to speak of labor, slavery, and Black bodies and blood. Her recitation is given weight by intercutting static medium close-ups of her speaking with medium close-ups that pan across her rapt White audience, held in silence by her words. But if Mélissa can use Depestre’s art to meaningfully express her lived experience, the sensational online videos and Wikipedia entries from which the other young women take their information about vodou doubtless construct it differently than Katy’s explanations to Fanny of vodou as source of community and inner strength or Mélissa’s definition of it as something beautiful and powerful that demonstrates the inseparability of life and death. An English rendition of “Silent Night” by the school’s students is followed about twenty seconds later by a cut to a close-up shot of a statuette owned by Katy of Erzulie, a vodou loa, or spirit, sometimes identified with the Christian Madonna, holding a child. This moment points to a transnational circulation (and syncretization) of religious mythologies that is analogous to that of the zombie myth, and the film presents popular music as one more such analogy. In one scene, Mélissa and the other young (White, French) women in the sorority sing along together to a song by Damso, a Black, Belgian-Congolese hip-hop artist; and in another scene, Mélissa is doing a presentation in an English language class on Rihanna, a Barbadian musical artist who first gained fame in the United States. When the teacher asks Mélissa, “What does Rihanna represent to you?,” the film quickly cuts to a close-up of Clairvius Narcisse, suggesting further axes of affinity across national and historical borders. Both Narcisse and Rihanna, for instance, represent Caribbean figures packaged in North America for global distribution, just like the Afro-Caribbean zombie. More broadly, all of the modes of narrative and storytelling depicted or referred to in the film can be associated both with one another and with the zombie cinema of which Zombi Child is an instance.1 The students explicitly invoke the history of zombie cinema in a scene in which they discuss whether zombies are “cool” or “gross” and their evolution from slow-moving to fast-moving, which one woman explains as an effect of “everything” moving faster now. Notably, however, Mélissa does not contribute, and the only moment in which cannibal-style zombiism actually appears

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is when Mélissa imagines, while lying in bed, biting the face of one of the other young women. The film’s diegetically true vodou zombie story, meanwhile, mixes, or perhaps remixes would be the more precise term, the supernatural with the ethnobotanical explanation propounded by Wade Davis in his book The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985). In Zombi Child, a powder is made from puffer fish and other ingredients and placed into Narcisse’s shoes. He appears to die, is buried, and is subsequently put to work on a sugar plantation with a number of other zombis and is given “zombie powder” every day. Eventually, he eats a piece of meat (perhaps salted), which restores his self-awareness and memory, and he leaves the plantation. (Mélissa notes that he is atypical in not becoming angry and seeking out his grave, although he does later see it.) He must then wait until the 1980 death of his brother—who had enlisted a hougan (sometimes written ougan), a vodou priest, to zombify him over a piece of inherited land—to reunite with his wife and tell her that he is no longer a slave and never will be again, the last lines spoken in the film, after which husband and wife embrace in the sunny street, closing their eyes to anything but one another. The movie depicts much of this story, but some of the details come from a version which Mélissa tells three of the other students, enacting a circulation of this narrative (by a Haitian storyteller to a White, European audience) within the film’s own circulation of the same narrative (by a White, European director to a transnational audience). Following Narcisse’s closing lines, while the American song “You’ll Never Walk Alone” plays in another instance of transnational intertextuality (and perhaps a nod to vodou zombie film I Walked with a Zombie), title cards claim that he enjoyed his second life, that one thousand zombifications still occurred each year by the time of his (second) death, and that nobody “knows how many zombies still roam the Haitian countryside today.” Suspending the question of how these last two claims arguably imagine Haiti as a place of unchanging, oppressive pastness, they do make a case for the continued relevance of the vodou zombi. More importantly, they function as part of how the film as a whole presents that version of the zombie as true, as historical fact, and the US-originated, currently cinematically dominant cannibal zombie as a secondary, passing fantasy. However, even as Zombi Child recenters a Haitian version of the zombie, its particular zombi exists in its best-known form in an account written by a White Canadian academic. Perhaps because of the influence of Davis’s account, the film’s overtly supernatural elements are largely confined to Katy’s storyline, in which she capitulates to Fanny’s request to use vodou to intercede in Fanny’s love life. Perhaps too Katy’s death in the wake of Fanny’s possession by Baron Samedi, who rebukes Katy—Samedi’s Black male voice at this point issuing incongruously from a White female body—for disrespectfully trying to “please little bitches” on a day when

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she should be concerned with marking the anniversary of Narcisse’s death, expresses some self-directed anxiety on the part of the film about its role in these tangled lines of transmission. Nevertheless, in its treatment of “actual” Haitian zombi Narcisse through a focus on his daughter and granddaughter as immigrants to France, Zombi Child not only “revisits the Haitian origins of the zombie mythos to interrogate French colonialism” (Truscello and Watchman 2022, 5) but also points simultaneously to the (colonial) roots of zombie film and to the many potential roles that remain for the zombi(e) to play in transnational cinema. It remains to speak briefly of some areas of transnational zombie cinema that fall within the parameters of this book but did not find a place in its pages. While it was noted at the outset that this book is not intended to be in any way exhaustive, it still bears remarking that Latin American zombie cinema is underrepresented among the selected films. In the Caracas-set Venezuelan film Infection (Infección; 2019), for instance, a zombifying rabies virus mutated by mixing with morphine spreads first through needle-sharing by construction workers, leaving Dr. Adam Vargas (Rubén Guevara) and his neighbor, Johnny (Leonidas Urbina), to try to reach the quarantine zone and locate Vargas’s son. The film, banned for “a scene in which chavismo [referring to the socialist political ideology associated with multiple-term Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez] denies that a zombie plague is happening” (Cuotto 2019), could be put into fruitful conversation with Juan of the Dead, and the documentary-style coda during its end credits, which address the discrimination against those cured by a serum developed thanks to the immunity of children under ten years old, places Infection into dialogue with films such as The Cured and The Neighbor Zombie. More significantly, this book discusses no examples of African cinema. While there are relatively fewer examples to draw on, and some of these are less accessible by the likely audience of this book, African zombie cinema represents an important area of inquiry, and one that raises complex questions about, for instance, the circulation and mutation of the zombie myth as it refracts through the globalized grammar, syntax, and tropes of transnational zombie cinema. The South African film Last Ones Out (2015) billed itself as Africa’s first zombie film, but, perhaps with an eye toward global audiences, features as its lead character an insensitive White American man, Henry (Greg Kriek), and specifies its setting only as “Southern Africa.” As Henry makes his journey of personal improvement over the course of the film, he survives an improvised appendectomy with little trouble and trades his White fiancée for a White doctor, who chooses to come back and die with him in the film’s climax. Despite the film’s making an American its desirable, masculine protagonist, Saldarriaga and Manini (2022) do credit Last Ones Out with “a

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subtle but clear critique of U.S. influence” and “exploitation” in Africa, as well as of “the failures of international aid organizations” (116). Of arguably greater interest are films such as those that have come from the Nigerian film industry, nicknamed Nollywood. Ojuju (2014), for example, employs “several traditional tropes” of zombie cinema to critique pollution, impoverishment, “the sexualization of women and the view of women as monstrous” in a specifically Nigerian context (Saldarriaga and Manini 2022, 115). In Outbreak 2020, released in the same year, the titular outbreak arises from a “capitalist scheme” (Endong 2022, 743) by a company to sell an antidote to a virus of its own making, a critique, made using Western-style zombies, “of a capitalist system which has no place for . . . African communalism” (744). Such an origin for the zombie infection comments not only on the effects of domestic neoliberal practices but also on those of pharmaceutical imperialism. Among the proliferation of micro-budget and indie zombie content on platforms such as YouTube can also be found works such as the short UmKhovu (2020), from South Africa. The Zulu word umKhovu refers to “a corpse” that a sorcerer exhumes and revises, cutting off part of its tongue, in order for it to act as a “mindless servant” (Schutte 1991, 131). In the film, a young woman, Lindokuhle,2 is being pursued by the henchman of a local chief because she has a video on a memory card that proves that he made her brother, Mduduzi, into a zombie. Mduduzi saves her from said henchmen, working against his own master—perhaps suggesting strength and primacy of family ties—before running off, and the film ends with another zombie being summoned and dispatched to track down and kill Lindokuhle and anyone with her. Films such as UmKhovu, wherever they originate, which eschew established industrial systems of production and distribution, represent another area of transnational zombie cinema that invites further scrutiny. A trailer for a Tanzanian film called African Zombi (2022; dir. Bellonika Athanas) depicts zombies that bite and eat flesh but also use tools and weapons and, in one moment, cheer celebratorily (“Neisha Films” 2022). Zombies to come, we see, will continue to remix and reimagine ninety years of cinematic history in order to adapt to localized contexts and concerns. Some of the correspondences and continuities among the different groupings of films in this book come from their (sometimes overt) situating of themselves within an acutely transnational, typically self-aware tradition of zombie cinema. But many of these cohesions also come from the broad similarities of experience imposed by hierarchizing systems shaped and reshaped in an era of globalized neoliberalization. At the same time that zombie films adapt the zombie myth to numerous particularities of nation, culture, history, and so on, one clear throughline remains in that zombies, generally as a leveling force and an undifferentiated mass (though sometimes, as in Miss Zombie, on a much

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smaller scale), allow for thinking through or critiquing hierarchical structures, as well as the place of the individual subject in their apocalyptic unsettling or absence, at least in institutionalized form. Whether engaging with the way that capitalism impacts workers, families, or neighborhoods; the intersection of gender roles with labor exploitation or reshaping the body; the enduring wounds of national traumas, from settler colonialism to wartime atrocities; or the basic constitution of the human subject, the zombie, poised between human and nonhuman, life and death, and victim and perpetrator, helps to embody the many horrors of the second decade of the new millennium. And if the past few years are any indication, the cinematic zombie will have as much, if not more, such work to do in the next decade as it continues to defy boundaries and borders alike. NOTES 1. Tim Palmer (2021) puts Zombi Child in the same “frontier poetry” category as he does The Night Eats the World and views the former’s representation of its zombis as evoking the idea that to stay alive requires the contemplation of “fleetingly exalted or altered states,” an “approach [to] the sublime,” and the pursuit of “artistic highs” (13). 2. Actors are credited at the end of the short film, but their roles are not indicated.

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Filmography

#Alive. 2020. Directed by Cho Il-hyeong. Seoul: Zip Cinema and Perspective Pictures. Netflix. Accessed August 21, 2022. All of Us Are Dead. 2022. Directed by Lee Jae-kyoo and Kim Nam-su. Seoul: JTBC Studios and Kim Jong-hak Production. Netflix. Accessed March 1, 2022. Block Z. 2020. Directed by Mikhail Red. Quezon City, Philippines: ABS-CBN Films and Keep Filming. Amazon Prime Video. Accessed July 7, 2022. Blood Quantum. 2020. Directed by Jeff Barnaby. Montreal: Prospector Films. Shudder. Accessed January 7, 2022. Cargo. 2013. Directed by Ben Howling and Yolanda Ramke. Sydney: Dreaming Tree Productions. Accessed April 19, 2019. https:​//​youtu​.be​/gyfmwgOV6uo. Cargo. 2017. Directed by Ben Howling and Yolanda Ramke. Kew, Australia: Umbrella Entertainment. Netflix. Accessed January 7, 2022. A Classic Horror Story. 2021. Directed by Roberto De Feo and Paolo Strippoli. Rome/Milan: Colorado Film. Netflix. Accessed July 21, 2021. Cockneys vs Zombies. 2012. Directed by Matthias Hoene. London: Limelight; Molinare; Tea Shop & Film Company. Amazon Prime Video. Accessed July 22, 2021. The Cured. 2017. Directed by David Freyne. Dublin: Tilted Pictures; Savage Productions; BAC Films. Amazon Prime Video. Accessed May 24, 2022. Dawn of the Dead. 1978. Directed by George A. Romero. Pittsburgh: Laurel Entertainment, 2004. DVD. Day of the Dead. 1985. Directed by George A. Romero. Pittsburgh: Laurel Entertainment. Amazon Prime Video. Accessed December 23, 2021. The Dead Can’t Dance. 2010. Directed by Rodrick Pocowatchit. Wichita: Rawdzilla Studios. Amazon Prime Video. Accessed December 23, 2021. Deadgirl. 2008. Directed by Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel. Los Angeles: Hollywoodmade, 2009. DVD. The End?. 2017. Directed by Daniele Misischia. Rome: Mompracem; Rai Cinema. Amazon Prime Video. Accessed July 10, 2021. Ever After. 2018. Directed by Carolina Hellsgård. Erfurt: Grown UP Films; Das Klein Fernsehspiel (ZDF); ARTE. Shudder. Accessed November 25, 2021.

247

248

Filmography

Grindhouse: Planet Terror. 2007. Directed by Robert Rodriguez. New York: Dimension Films. Amazon Prime Video. Accessed May 31, 2023. Hawa. 2016. Directed by Tan Ce Ding. Malaysia: 24 Wonder Pictures. YouTube, https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=y6I0gqwkxHI. Accessed June 22, 2022. I Am a Hero. 2016. Directed by Sato Shinsuke. Tokyo: Avex Pictures, Dentsu, and East Japan Marketing and Communications Inc. Amazon Prime Video and BiliBili.https:​//​www​.bilibili​.tv​/en​/video​/2006245240. Accessed August 10, 2022. Infection. 2019. Directed by Flavio Pedota. Mexico City: Luz Creativa, Desenlace Films, Rema Films. FreeVee. Accessed July 7, 2023. Izla. 2021. Directed by Barry Gonzalez. Quezon City: OctoArts Films; Mavx Productions; Manila: ALV Films. Netflix. Accessed July 3, 2023. Juan of the Dead. 2011. Directed by Alejandro Brugués. Havana, Cuba: Producciones de la 5ta Avenida; Seville, Spain: La Zanfoña Producciones. Amazon Prime Video. Accessed August 11, 2021. KL Zombie. 2013. Directed by Ming Jin Woo. Selangor, Malaysia: Grand Brilliance; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: Imaginex Studios. Netflix. Accessed May 1, 2020. KL24: Zombies. 2017. Directed by James Lee, Shamaine Othman, and Gavin Yap. Petaling Jaya, Malaysia: Doghouse 73 Pictures. YouTube, https:​//​youtu​.be​/ fkKb7F7MOBo. Accessed June 21, 2022. Land of the Dead: Unrated Director’s Cut. 2005. Directed by George A. Romero. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios, 2017. Blu-ray Disc. Last Ones Out. 2015. Directed by Howard James Fyvie. Cape Town: A Fyvie/Kriek Production. Amazon Prime Video. Accessed September 5, 2022. Me and My Mates vs. the Zombie Apocalypse. 2015. Directed by Declan Shrubb. Canberra: Sanguineti Media; ScreenACT; Silversun Pictures. Amazon Prime Video. Accessed October 26, 2021. Miss Zombie. 2013. Directed by Sabu. Tokyo: Amuse Soft Entertainment and dub, 2018. Blu-ray Disc. The Neighbor Zombie. 2010. Directed by Oh Young-doo, Ryu Hoon, Hong Seo-baek, and Jang Youn-jung. Seoul: Kino Mangosteen. Asian Crush, https:​//​www​.asiancrush​ .com​/video​/001992v​/the​-neighbor​-zombie. Accessed August 27, 2022. The Night Eats the World. 2018. Directed by Dominique Rocher. Paris: Haut et Court; Canal+; Cine+. Amazon Prime Video. Accessed April 10, 2022. Night of the Living Dead. 1968. Directed by George A. Romero. Pittsburgh: Image Ten, 2008. DVD. No Other Way! 2015. Directed by M. S. Prem Nath. Sungai Buloh, Malaysia: Veedu Production Sdn. Bhd. Facebook, https:​//​www​.facebook​.com​/PenangTamilanBlog​ /videos ​ / vere ​ - vazhi ​ - ille ​ - malaysian ​ - first ​ - zombie ​ - movie​ - ​ / 1474139092613529​ / . Accessed June 17, 2022. One Cut of the Dead. 2017. Directed by Ueda Shin’ichirô. Tokyo: ENBU Seminar, Panpokopina, and Zombie a Go-Go Films. Amazon Prime Video. Accessed September 17, 2022. Patient Zero. 2016. Directed by Lars Damoiseaux. Brussels: A Team Productions. Vimeo, https:​//​vimeo​.com​/211331847. Accessed September 28, 2021.

Filmography

249

Peninsula. 2020. Directed by Yeon Sang-ho. Seoul: Next Entertainment World and RedPeter Films. Amazon Prime Video. Accessed July 18, 2022. Rampant. 2018. Directed by Kim Sung-hoon. Seoul: VAST Entertainment and Media and Leeyang Film. Amazon Prime Video. Accessed August 4, 2022. Ravenous. 2017. Directed by Robin Aubert. Montréal: La Maison de Prod. Netflix. Accessed April 23, 2022. Remington and the Curse of the Zombadings. 2011. Directed by Jade Castro. San Juan City, Philippines: Origin8 Media and Manila: Reality Entertainment and SQ Film Laboratories. Tubi. Accessed July 23, 2022. Rise of the Zombie. 2010. Directed by Devaki Singh and Luke Kenny. Mumbai: Kenny Media and Luminosity Pictures. Amazon Prime Video. Accessed September 2, 2022. Seoul Station. 2016. Directed by Yeon Sang-ho. Seoul: Finecut, Next Entertainment World, and Studio Dadashow. FreeVee. Accessed July 4, 2022. Train to Busan. 2016. Directed by Yeon Sang-ho. Seoul: Next Entertainment World and RedPeter Films. Amazon Prime Video. Accessed July 2, 2022. 28 Weeks Later. 2007. Directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. Los Angeles: Fox Atomic; London: DNA Films, Figment Films, UK Film Council; Madrid: Sogecine, Koan Films. Amazon Prime Video. Accessed July 25, 2023. UmKhovu. 2020. Directed by Sibusiso Masephola. Gauteng, South Africa: ublYnd. YouTube, https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=s​_Qe8dKZSf4. Accessed September 9, 2022. White Zombie. 1932. Directed by Victor Halperin. Los Angeles: Halperin Productions. Amazon Prime Video. Accessed August 20, 2021. Yummy. 2019. Directed by Lars Damoiseaux. Brussels: 10.Films; A Team Productions; and Everstory Productions. Shudder. Accessed September 26, 2021. Zombi Child. 2019. Directed by Bertand Bonello. Paris: My New Pictures and Les Films du Bal. Shudder. Accessed September 5, 2022. Zombie for Sale (a.k.a. The Odd Family: Zombie on Sale). 2019. Directed by Lee Min-jae. Seoul: Cinezoo and Oscar 10 Studio. Amazon Prime Video. Accessed July 5, 2022. Zombie Guillotines. 2012. Directed by Alan Lo. Hong Kong: Crossfade Creative Ltd.. YouTube, https:​//​youtu​.be​/0IbOGW0c​_Co. Accessed August 16, 2022. Zombie Island. 2018. Directed by Gabriel Leung. Beijing: Shao Studio Media Production Co.. Amazon Prime Video. Accessed July 30, 2022. Zombieland. 2009. Directed by Ruben Fleischer. Culver City, CA: Columbia Pictures and Pariah; Beverly Hills, CA: Relativity Media. Amazon Prime Video. Accessed March 14, 2022. Zombiology: Enjoy Yourself Tonight. 2017. Directed by Lo Wai-Lun. Hong Kong: Creation Cabin, Entertaining Power, and KD Multimedia. Amazon Prime Video. Accessed August 17, 2022.

Index

9/11 terrorist attack. See September 11, 2001, attacks 28 Days Later (2002), xii, 94, 104n10; plague themes in, 13; segregation regimes in, 104n5; White slavery themes in, 143 28 Weeks Later (2007), 100 Abbott, Stacey, 69, 130 Abdullah, Siti Farrah, 120 abledness, xvi aboriginal narratives, in Australia, 54, 70–76; sacredness of rituals in, 69 Africa, zombie cinema in. See Nigeria; Tanzania African Zombi (2022), 220–21 Afro-Caribbean zombie cinema: disempowerment themes in, 53; racism narratives in, 53; resistance themes in, 53; White Zombie, xi–xii, 3, 29–30. See also Haiti Agamben, Giorgio, 82 Ahmad, Aalya, 70 Aishah, Izara, 110 Alasri, Ali, 120 #Alive (2020), 189, 195, 197, 199, 211, 212n4, 212n6; modernization of

South Korea in, 198; video gaming culture in, 196 All of Us Are Dead (TV series), 121, 212n4 Amani, Sharifah, 119 Anderson, Benedict, 59, 165 Anderson, Paul W. S., xii Ang, Amanda, 119–20 Anthony, David, 115 anti-colonialism, in The Dead Can’t Dance, 58 Arroyo, Jossiana, 21 Asian cinema, zombie narratives in, xi; death themes in, 165. See also China; India; Malaysia; Philippines; South Korea The A-Team (TV series), 27n29 Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies (2016), 52n18 Aubert, Robin, 86. See also Ravenous Audenaert, Tom, 31 Australia, zombie cinema in: Aboriginal cosmology in, 72–73; Braindead, xii; Cargo, 54, 69–77, 78n22, 78n24, 104n3, 216; Indigenous narratives in, 54, 69–76. See also Me and My Mates vs. the Zombie Apocalypse Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 75 251

252

Aviks, Randall, 60 Axen, Euridice, 6 Ayaka, Komatsu, 140 Badley, Linda, xvi Bae Yong-geun, 201 Baishya, Amit R., 207 Bakar, Fatimah Abu, 120 bakla gender tropes, in Filipino zombie cinema, 153–54, 156–58, 160–61, 163n5 Baldwin, James, 165 Ballina, Bjanka, 19, 23. See also Juan of the Dead Balmain, Colette, 198 Barnaby, Jeff, 63. See also Blood Quantum; Incident at Restigouche Barretto, Julia, 132 Barton, J. Scott, 90 Belfast Agreement, in Northern Ireland, 94–95, 97 Belgium, zombie cinema in: cosmetic surgery tourism economy as influence on, 35–36; Yummy, 30–37, 49, 142 Bell, David, 31 Bellamy, Madge, 29 Belleau, William, 67 Benedicto, Bobby, 153 Benji, Lim, 117 Bentham, Jeremy, 9 Ben Yadir, Nabil, 33–34 Berlusconi, Silvio, 7 Betaal (2020), 187n4 Bey-Rozet, Maxime, 80 Bijou, Mackenson, 216 Bishop, Kyle William, xii, 29–30, 79, 82, 108 Blackness, colonialism and, 53 Black Summer (TV series), 184 Blake, Linnie, xvii, 76 Block Z (2020), 109, 133–34, 136, 139; economic issues in, 132; nature as cleansing element in, 135

Index

Blood Quantum (2020), 54, 67, 69, 76–77, 78n13; eternal Black slavery trope, 66; hybridization through blood in, 70; Indigenous ancestry in, 66; Indigenous identity conflicts in, 68; land conflicts in, 68; U.S. film references in, 63–64; white displacement in, 65; zombie imperialism in, 65 body horror, xv Boluk, Stephanie, 13 Boomer generation, anxiety among, 17 Boon, Kevin Alexander, 94 Botting, Fred, 67 Bouaziz, Sigrid, 81 Boucheron, Patrick, 216 Boyle, Danny, 94. See also 28 Days Later Braindead (1992), xii Brooks, Max, xiii Brouilette, Robert, 89 Brown, Steven T., xiv–xv Browning, John Edgar, 9 Buñuel, Luis, 93 Butler, Judith, 82–83, 204, 206 Byrd, Jodi A., 65 Byron, Glennis, 190 Cabico, Nar, 154 Camilli, Claudio, 10 Campion, Peter, 94 Canada, zombie cinema in: Blood Quantum, 54, 63–70, 76–77, 78n13; Fido, 141; New Weird Nova Scotia movement, 86; Ravenous, 79, 86–93, 103–4, 107. See also Québec Province Canavan, Gerry, 17, 82, 137n15 cannibalism, zombies and, xii; in The Cured, 103; in Night Eats the World, 103; Whiteness and, 53–54 capitalism, as theme, xv; in Cockneys vs Zombies, 12–18; confinement and entrapment and, 8–9; Cuban economic history with, 21–22;

Index

dehumanization as result of, 9; in The End, 6–7; gentrification of neighborhoods and, 12–16, 26n14; gore, 21; guerrilla, 19; heteropatriarchal, 9; in Italian zombie cinema, 4–12; in Juan of the Dead, 21–22; Marx and, 11; in Night Eats the World, 79; as plague, 13; in Seoul Station, 127–28; in Train to Busan, 123–24. See also consumers Capitalocene era, in Ever After, 45, 47, 49 “Cap’tain Zombi” (Depestre), 217 Care Collective, 124–27, 145, 202 Cargo (2017), 54, 69, 76–77, 104n3, 216; Aboriginal cosmology in, 72–73; adoption of Aboriginal infants, 75; colonial themes in, 70–71; family structures in, 70; ghosts through zombification, 72; Indigenous concept of death in, 71; Indigenous relationship to land in, 73; racist narratives in, 74–75; resource extraction in, 70–71; as short film, 78n22; zombies as dispossessed souls, 72–73 Caribbean region. See Afro-Caribbean zombie cinema; Cuba Carpenter, John, 91 Carroll, Nöel, xvi Castillo, David R., xv Castro, Fidel, 22 Castro, Jade, 152. See also Remington and the Curse of the Zombadings Catholicism, in Italian zombie cinema, 25n12 Charles II (King), 12 Chatzidakis, Andreas, 125 Cheung, Louis, 191 China, zombie cinema in: collective remembrance as theme in, 168; First Sino-Japanese War and, 174, 177; Second Sino-Japanese War and, 167; Zombie Island, 166–73, 186–87. See also Hong Kong

253

Choi Gwi-hwa, 124 Chokri, Monia, 88 Christiaens, Annick, 30 Christian chromonormativity, xv Christie, Deborah, 46 A Classic Horror Story (2021), 25n1 Clemente, Bill, 20, 27n26 Cockneys vs Zombies (2012), 24, 107; capitalism themes in, 12–16, 26n14; Cockney as historical comic figure, 16–17; EastEnders and, 16; elderly resistance in, 17–18; family bonds in, 16; gentrification of East End neighborhoods in, 12–16, 26n14; London gangster films as influence on, 26n16; plague themes in, 13–14; in youths and lad horror genre, 16 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, xiv colonialism, colonialist themes and: Blackness and, 53; in Cargo, 70–71; in The Dead Can’t Dance, 55, 61; Haiti and, 3 comedic horror, as genre: clowns and, xvi; narrative power of, xvi; sLaughter and, xvii commodity fetishism, 92 confinement: capitalism and, 8–9; in The End, 8 consumers, consumption and, as metaphor: capitalism and, xv; in Dawn of the Dead (1978), 3–4; in Juan of the Dead, 21; in zombie cinema, xv contagion themes, in Juan of the Dead, 22 Cornich, Ian, xii–xiii Correia, David, 11 cosmetic surgery tourism: in Belgium, 35–36; economic class and, 31; gender roles in, 31, 50n2; males and, 50n2; in Yummy, 31–37 Coupe, Alexander, 100 Coupez!. See Final Cut Crescentini, Carolina, 7 Croatia, 77n11

254

Index

Cronenberg, David, 87 Crosson, Seán, 80 Cruz, Jerik, 132 Cuarón, Alfonso, 78n12 Cuba, zombie cinema in: capitalism and, 21–22; economic adversity as influence in, 20; Juan of the Dead, 19–24, 27n29; Special Period and, 20 The Cured (2017), 79, 104, 184, 205–6, 216; Belfast Agreement in, 94–95, 97; cannibal zombies in, 103; geopolitical context for, 102; Northern Ireland Conflict in, 94–97, 99–100; re-integration into society as narrative in, 80; traumatic memory as theme in, 96–97 Dalton, David S., 22 Damoiseaux, Lars, 30, 51n8. See also Yummy Dark Forest (2006), 121 David, Joel, 157 Davis, Wade, 216, 218 Dawn of the Dead (1978), xii, 64, 186; I Am a Hero influenced by, 183; Italian zombie cinema influenced by, 5; Juan of the Dead influenced by, 23, 27n29; new social order in, 24; as satire of consumerism, 3–4 Dawn of the Dead (2004), War on Terror as metaphor for, xiii Dawson, Graham, 96–98 Day of the Dead (1985), xii, 62, 130, 171 The Dead Can’t Dance (2010), 51n14, 59, 64, 68, 76–77, 77n4, 166; anti-colonialism themes in, 58; colonial themes in, 55, 61; displacement themes in, 60; hybridization through blood in, 70; Indigenous sovereignty issues in, 55; Indigenous stereotypes in, 60; mysticism tropes in, 61; selfidentification and representation in, 54–56; settler surveillance in, 56–57;

Shaun of the Dead as influence on, 62; survival of Indigenous peoples in, 54, 58; zombie myths in, 117 Deadgirl (2008), 38 Dead Man (1995), 64 Dead Meat (2012), 80 Dead Snow (2009), 187n4 Dead Snow 2 (2014), 187n4 De Belen, Janice, 155 dehumanization: through capitalism, 9; in Zombie Island, 170–71 Denis, Claire, 80 Depestre, René, 217 Díaz de Villegas, Alexis, 19 Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche (1972), 207 Dolphy. See Quizon, Rodolpho Vera Domingo, Eugene, 155 Donga (1985), 207 Do the Right Thing (1989), 62 Dowell, John A., xvii Doyle, Sady, 44 Duval, Claire, 139 Dyer, Richard, 53–54, 69 Dyrholm, Trine, 45 Dyson, Emma, xv EastEnders (TV series), 16 economic class, economic surgery tourism and, 31 Eickelkamp, Ute, 72 Elai, Faezah, 110 the elderly, in Cockneys vs Zombies, 17–18 Eljaick-Rodriguez, Gabriel, 21 Elliot-Smith, Darren, 159 The End (2017), 4, 12, 24, 107–9; capitalist themes in, 6–7; confinement themes in, 8; heteropatriarchy in, 6–7, 9; neoliberalist reform fears in, 5–7, 18; panopticon references in, 9–10; postGreat Recession setting for, 11 England, zombie cinema in: 28 Days Later, xii, 13; animal epidemics and, xii; Cockneys vs Zombies, 12–18, 24,

Index

26n14, 26n16, 107; London gangster films as influence on, 26n16. See also Shaun of the Dead Enjoy Yourself Tonight (TV series), 191 entrapment, capitalism and, 8–9 environmentalism, as theme, in Italian zombie cinema, 5 Ever After (2018), 30, 216; apocalyptic elements in, 45; Biblical imagery in, 45, 52n19; Capitalocene era and, 45, 47, 49; female point of view in, 44–48; as feminist text, 47; plant horror and, 46–47; reproduction themes in, 47–48; trans-corporeality themes in, 46; viral infection narratives in, 47–48 Exit Humanity (2011), 187n4 family, as theme: in Cargo, 70; in Cockneys vs Zombies, 16; in KL Zombie, 111–12; in The Neighbor Zombie, 202–3; in Night of the Living Dead, 50; in Peninsula, 148–52 Farahani, Goldshifteh, 84 Farmer, Gary, 64 fast zombies, symbolism of, 10 Fay, Hilda, 101 femininity, ideals of, 32, 36–37, 142 feminism, Ever After as text for, 47 Fernando, Daniel, 158 Fido (2006), 141 Fighting for Life (2021), 136n2 Final Cut (Coupez!) (2022), as One Cut of the Dead remake, xi The Fire Next Time (Baldwin), 165 flamboyant zombie films, 159–60 Fleet, Greg, 38 Fletcher, Dexter, 26n16 Flight of Zombeavers (2014), 23 Flores, Yves, 133 Fojas, Camilla, xiii–xiv, 9, 11, 53, 74 Force, Ken, 64 Ford, Alan, 15

255

France, zombie cinema in, 25n7; French New Extremity movement and, 80; frontier horror poetry and, 80–81; Night Eats the World, 79–86, 103–4, 198; Zombi Child, 216–19, 221n1 Fraser, Nancy, 29 Frazer, Robert W., 29 Freeman, Martin, 70 French New Extremity movement, 80 Freyne, David, 94. See also The Cured Friscelli, Bianca, 5 frontier horror poetry, 80–81, 221n1 Fulci, Lucio, xii Gang Dong-won, 148 gangster films, English zombie cinema influenced by, 26n16 García, Enrique, 20–21, 26n23 Garcia, Joshua, 134 Gardener, Ryan, 122 Gardner, Tony, 17 Gaynor, Stella Marie, xiv Gelder, Ken, 69 gender, gender politics and: cosmetic surgery tourism and, 31, 50n2; German zombie cinema influenced by, 49; in Me and My Mates vs. the Zombie Apocalypse, 37–38; in Remington and the Curse of the Zombadings, 152–61; in Yummy, 36–37; in Zombiology, 192. See also women gentrification, as theme: in Cockneys vs Zombies, 12–16, 26n14; Vampires vs. the Bronx, 23 Germani, Joseph, 119 Germany, zombie cinema in: Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies, 52n18; Ever After, 30, 44–49, 52n19, 216; gender politics as influence on, 49; Rammbock, 25n7; Urban Scumbags vs. Countryside Zombies, 23 Ghostbusters (1984), 27n29, 131 Ghost Dog (1999), 64

256

ghost narratives, in South Korean zombie cinema, 121–22 Ghost Stories (2013), 213n12 The Girl with All the Gifts (2016), 171 Giuliani, Gaia, 98–99, 104n5 globalgothic movement, xv globalization, as theme: in South Korean zombie cinema, 147–48; in zombie cinema, xiv Global North: in zombie cinema, 20. See also United States; specific countries Global South: in zombie cinema, 20. See also Latin America; specific countries Godzilla (1954), 179 Goeman, Stonehorse Lone, 63 Go Goa Gone (2013), 213n12 Gong Yoo, 122 Good Friday Agreement, in Northern Ireland, 94–95 Goodluck, Forrest, 63 Gordon, Kiowa, 63 gore capitalism, 21 Grahame-Smith, Seth, xiii Great Depression, 3 Great Recession: in The End, 11; zombie cinema influenced by, xiii–xiv Greyeyes, Michael, 65 Grilli, Alessandro, 159 Grindhouse (2007), xiii Grondin, Marc-André, 87 Guang Guang, 168 Guay, Marie-Ginette, 90 guerrilla capitalism, 19 G-Zombie (2013), 213n12 Ha Eun-jung, 201 Haiti: colonial history of, 3; Revolution in, 53; U.S. occupation of, xii; in Zombi Child, 216 Hakim, Jamie, 125 Halperin, Victor, xi, 139. See also White Zombie

Index

Hamid, Zain, 110 Hanim, Farah, 117 hantu traditions, 116–17 Haraway, Donna, 45, 53 Ha Sung-kwang, 206 Hawa (2016), 136n1 Hazanavicius, Michel, xi Hellsgard, Carolina, 44 Héroux, Martin, 89 heteropatriarchal capitalism, 9 heteropatriarchy, xv; capitalism and, 9; in The End, 6–7, 9 Hickey-Moody, Anna, 39 Hill, Walter, 62 Hiroyuki, Tanaka. See Sabu Hisashi, Yoshizawa, 181 Hoene, Matthias, 12. See also Cockneys vs Zombies Hollanders, Bart, 30 Holliday, Ruth, 31 homosexuality, in Me and My Mates vs. the Zombie Apocalypse, 39, 41, 43–44 Hong Kong, zombie cinema in, 189– 200, 211, 212n3 Hong Seo-back, 199. See also The Neighbor Zombie La Horde (2009), 25n7 horror, as genre: body as site of, xv; French New Extremity movement, 80; identification of, xiv; in Japan, 23; in Malaysian cinema, 109; plant horror, 46–47, 52n20; sLaughter, xvii; in South Korea, 135; transnational elements of, xiv. See also comedic horror House of the Dead (video game), xiii Howling, Ben, 69. See also Cargo Hunter, Russ, 5 Hutchings, Peter, xvii Hyun Bin, 174 I Am a Hero (2016), 166, 178, 184–85, 187, 200, 212n4; Dawn of the Dead (1978) as influence on, 183; Japan

Index

gun control laws in, 179–81; Manga references in, 182–83, 193; national identity themes in, 189; rejection of U.S. gun culture, 186; sLaughter and, 181; Western cowboy film references in, 180–81 I Am Legend (Matheson), 9, 83 Iman, Fahad, 119 imperialism, in Blood Quantum, 65 Incident at Restigouche (1984), 63, 68–69 India, zombie cinema in, 213n12; Betaal, 187n4; Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche, 207; Donga, 207; Rise of the Zombie, 190, 207–11 Indigenous people, in zombie cinema: ancestry issues for, 66; in Australia, 54, 69–76; Blood Quantum, 54, 63–70, 76–77, 78n13, 166; Cargo, 54, 69–77, 78n22, 78n24; concept of death for, 71; displacement themes, 60; relationship to land, 73; self-identification and representation in, 54–56, 68; settler culture and, 69; sovereignty themes in, 55; status of Whiteness and, 54; stereotypes of, 60; survival narratives for, 54, 58; in U.S., 54–62. See also aboriginal narratives; The Dead Can’t Dance Infection (2019), 219 In the Flesh (TV series), 98–99 Inton, Michael Nuñez, 156 Ireland, zombie cinema in: The Cured, 79, 94–104, 184, 205–6, 216; Dead Meat, 80; Northern Ireland Conflict as reference for, 94–97, 99–100 Irish War for Independence, 95 isolation narratives, in Night Eats the World, 81–82 Italy, zombie cinema in: capitalist themes in, 4–12; Catholicism and, 25n12; A Classic Horror Story, 25n1; Dawn of the Dead (1978) as influence on, 5; The End, 4–12, 18,

257

24, 107–9; environmentalism themes, 5; neoliberalist policies reflected in, 5–7, 18; social unrest as influence on, 5; symbols of masculinity in, 25; Zombi, xii; Zombi 2, 5 Ito, Kinko, 181 I Walked with a Zombie (1943), 139, 218 Izla (2021), 167 Izzudin, Afiq, 110 Jackson, Connor, 159 Jackson, Peter, xii Jacobs, Jane M., 69 Jaecheol Kim, 125, 185, 188n12 Jaeggi, Rahel, xv, 29 Jang Dong-gun, 175 Jang So-yeon, 148 Japan, zombie cinema from: “Cool Japan” branding and, 182; First Sino-Japanese War and, 174, 177; in horror film genre, 23; I Am a Hero, 166, 178–87, 189, 200, 212n4; Manga aesthetics and, 182–83; Miss Zombie, 140–47, 161–62, 215; monster film genre and, 23, 179; national folklore as influence on, 188n13; One Cut of the Dead, xi; Second Sino-Japanese War and, 167 Jarmusch, Jim, 64 Jaws (1975), 27n29 Jeffries, Jim, 39 Jeon Bae-soo, 198 Jeong Jac-yeong, 129 Jing-Bao Nie, 167 Johnson, Wayne, xiv, 92, 124 Jolly, Margaret, 40 Jones, Meredith, 31 Jones, Steve, 51n14, 159 Jo Woo-jin, 177 Juan of the Dead (2017), 20, 24, 113–14, 129, 215; capitalist themes in, 21–22; contagion themes in, 22; critique of consumerism in, 21; Dawn of the Dead (1978) as

258

Index

influence on, 23, 27n29; Havana as setting, 19, 22; Lauro on, 18, 23; neoliberalist themes in, 21–22; private funding for, 19; Shaun of the Dead (1978) as influence on, 23, 27n29; socialism in, 22; transnational pop culture allusions in, 27n29 Jung Ga-ram, 129 Jung Yu-mi, 123 Ju-On (2002), 155

Knapp, Jonathan L., xvi Knopf, Kerstin, 58, 77n1 Kohlhof, Gro Swantje, 44 Koo, Luisa, 124 Koo Kyo-hwan, 151 Krick, Greg, 219 Kristeva, Julia, 35, 128 Kulhari, Kirti, 208 Kumar, Denes, 112 Kwon Hae-hyo, 149

Kamerling, Henry, 205 Kanapi, Angelina, 160 Kanehsatake (2022), 78n16 Kasumi, Arimura, 178–79 Kearney, Alia, 120 Kee, Chera, 6, 53–54, 130–31 Keeley, Sam, 94 Keetley, Dawn, 46–47 Kenny, Luke, 207. See also Rise of the Zombie Kerner, Aaron Michael, xvi, 35 Kim Do-yoon, 148 Kim Eui-sung, 123, 174 Kim Kyu-back, 152 Kim Nam-gil, 129 Kim Su-an, 122 Kim Tae-woo, 174–75 King, Georgia, 17 Kingdom (TV series), 187nn4–5 King Kong vs. Godzilla (1963), 23 Kin Sung-hoom, 173. See also Rampant Kirkman, Robert, xiii KL24: Zombie (2017), 108, 120–21, 135–36, 139; English language in, 119; transculturalism as theme in, 117–18; Western zombie traditions in, 117 Kleinman, Arthur, 167 KL Zombie (2013), 108, 117, 135–36, 136n7, 139; as adaptation, 110; Anglocentrism in, 112; family relationships in, 111–12; Land of the Dead as influence on, 110–11; Shaun of the Dead as influence on, 110

Labeque, Louise, 217 labor exploitation, in White Zombie, 3 Landers, Simone, 70 Land of the Dead (2005), xiii, 111, 183 Landy, Marcia, 93 Last Ones Out (2015), 219–20 Last Serb in Croatia (2019), 77n11 Latin America, zombie cinema in, 107. See also Venezuela Laurie, Timothy, 39 Lauro, Sarah Juliet, 53; on Juan of the Dead, 18, 23; on zombie myth, xi Lavant, Denis, 81 Lawak, Zizan Raja, 110 Laymon, Richard, 94 Lee, A. Y. B., 118, 136n7 Lee, Chelsea, 56 Lee, Christopher, 15 Lee, James, 108, 118. See also KL24: Zombie Lee, Ray, 136n2 Lee, Spike, 62 Lee Han-sol, 204 Lee Joon, 127 Lee Joo-yeon, 204 Lee Jung-hyun, 148 Lee Min-jae, 122. See also Zombie for Sale Lee Soo-kyung, 129 Lee Sun-bin, 176 Lee Ye-won, 149 Lehrer, Maja, 45 Lenz, Wylie, 13

Index

Leung, Gabriel, 166. See also Zombie Island Leung Wing-fai, 188n13 LGBTQ+ populations, in Filipino zombie cinema, 153–54, 156–58, 160–61 Liconti, Natalie, 68 Lie, Anders Danielsen, 81 Lim, Bliss Cua, 157 Littler, Jo, 125 Lo, Alan. See Lo Wai-lun Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), 26n16 Loh, Alfred, 119 Louimat, Wislanda, 216 Lovecraft, H. P., 171 Lo Wai-lun (Alan Lo), 190. See also Zombiology Lowenstein, Adam, 87 Lucas, Jon, 134 Lucien, Didier, 87 Luckhurst, Roger, 29 MacLeod, George, 87 Ma Dong-seok, 123 The Magic Island (Seabrook), xii Maguire, Emily, 19 Malaysia, zombie cinema in: colonialist history as reference in, 111; economic context for, 110; ethnic preferential politics in, 110; Fighting for Life, 136n2; in horror genre, 109; KL24: Zombie, 108, 117–21, 135–36, 139; KL Zombie, 108, 110–12, 117, 135–36, 136n7, 139; No Other Way!, 108, 112–18, 121, 135–36; Possessed, 108, 136n4; Zombitopia, 136n7 Malcomson, Paula, 100 male body issues: cosmetic surgery tourism for, 50n2; in Yummy, 37 males, in zombie cinema: homoeroticism and, 44; homosexual panic among, 39, 41, 43–44; homosocial bonding among,

259

40–42. See also masculinity; youth and lad genre Man, Alex, 191 Manalansan, Martin F., IV, 152–53, 156 Manga aesthetics, in Japanese zombie cinema, 182–83, 193 Manini, Emy, 21, 52n19, 90, 92, 107, 126; on Japanese zombie cinema, 143; on Last Ones Out, 219–20; on Malaysian zombie cinema, 114–15; on The Neighbor Zombie, 202–3, 212n9; on South Korean zombie cinema, 126; on Zombi Child, 216; on Zombiology, 194–95 Marcel, Gabriel, 84–85, 91 Marin-Lamellet, Anne-Lise, 16 Marriott, John, 26n14 Martin, Alvin, 114 Marx, Karl, 11 Masami, Nagasawa, 179 masculinity: in Italian zombie cinema, 25; in Me and My Mates vs. the Zombie Apocalypse, 39, 43, 49–50; sports and, 41 Matheson, Richard, 9, 83 McBride, Eimear, 49 McDonald, Keith, xiv, 92, 124 McGlotten, Shaka, 36, 51n14, 159, 197 McGurl, Mark, xiii McKenzie, Ashley, 86 McKeown, Will, 123 McQuade, Kris, 73 Me and My Mates vs. the Zombie Apocalypse (2015), 23, 30, 88, 215; gender politics in, 37–38; homoeroticism in, 44; homosexuality in, 39, 41, 43–44; homosocial bonding in, 40–42; intelligence of zombies in, 52n16; masculinity themes in, 39, 43, 49–50, 215; misogyny in, 42; objectification of female zombies in, 42–43, 50, 51n14; sports as symbol of masculinity, 41 Medrana, Daniel, 159

260

Index

Merkel, Angela, 49 Mexico, zombie cinema in, 23 Michael, Jasmine, 113 Miller, Cynthia J., xvi–xvii Miller, J. R., 78n13 Miner, Joshua, 56 Ming Jin Woo, 110. See also KL Zombie Miruthan (2013), 213n12 Misischia, Daniele, 4–5. See also The End misogyny, 30; in Me and My Mates vs. the Zombie Apocalypse, 42 Miss Zombie (2013), 140, 143, 161–62, 215; border between human and zombie in, 141–42; motherhood ideals in, 144–47; vampiric elements in, 145; zombies as domestic labor in, 141–47 Molé, Noelle J., 9–10 Molina, Jorge, 19 Monnet, Agnieszka Soltysik, 10, 25n7, 52n19 monsters, as film genre: in Japan, 23, 179; zombies as, xi A Monstrous Corpse (1981), 121 Mooney, Wendy, 95 Moon Woo-jin, 148 Moore, Jason W., 209 Mo Yong-Hui, 168 Muga, Tsukaji, 181 Murad, Na’a, 119–20 Murphy, Cillian, 104n10 Murphy, Kayleigh, 74, 78n20, 141, 162n1 Murphy, Patrick D., 16 Musharbash, Yasmine, 73 Nath, M. S. Prem, 112. See also No Other Way! national identity themes: in I Am a Hero, 189; in South Korean zombie cinema, 165–66; in Zombiology, 190–91

nature, in cinema: in Block Z, 135; plant horror, 46–47, 52n20; in Rise of the Zombie, 209 Negi, Pinky, 209 The Neighbor Zombie (2019), 171, 189–90, 199, 205–7, 211, 212n9; familial sacrifice in, 202–3; narrative structure of, 200–204 neoliberalism, xv; in The End, 5–7, 18; Italian zombie cinema influenced by, 5–7, 18; in Juan of the Dead, 21–22; in Peninsula, 147–48; in South Korean zombie cinema, 121–31, 137n12, 147–48 Neuville, Maaike, 30 Neville, Robert, 83 Newland, Paul, 14 new social order, in Dawn of the Dead, 24 New Weird Nova Scotia movement, 86 Ngan, Cherry, 191 Nicolaï, Tacke, 31 Nigeria, zombie cinema in, 220 Night Eats the World (2018), 84, 103–4, 198; capitalist themes in, 79; isolation narrative in, 81–82; loss of self in, 83; role of music in, 85–86; rugged individualist trope in, 80 Night of the Living Dead (1968), 186; family structure in, 50; historical legacy of, xii, 29–30; I Am Legend as inspiration for, 83; survivalist fantasies in, 79–80 Ning, Michael, 191 Noé, Gaspar, 80 Nolan, Oscar, 101 No Other Way! (2015), 108, 112–14, 118, 121, 135–36; hantu traditions in, 116–17; zombification as possession, 115 Nornes, Abé Mark, xxiii Northern Ireland Conflict, 94–97, 99–100 O’Bannon, Dan, xii

Index

Obomsawin, Alanis, 78n16 O’Brien, Brad, 5 Oceania. See Australia Och, Dana, 213n14 Oh Young-doo, 199. See also The Neighbor Zombie Ojuju (2014), 220 Olson, Robert G., 82, 88 One Cut of the Dead (2017), xi, xxivn1 One Rainy Night (Laymon), 94 Ouanga (1935), 139 Outbreak 2020 (2014), 220 Overlord (2011), 187n4 Owang, Lydia, 86, 88, 92–93 Page, Elliot, 94 Palmer, Tim, 80, 221n1 panopticon design, 9–10 Park Chan-wook, 205 Parker, Elizabeth, 46–47, 209 Park Guen-Hye, 178 Park In-hwan, 129–30 Park Myung-sin, 124 Park Shin-hye, 196 Park Young-seo, 204 Patient Zero (2016), 51n8 patriarchal structures: heteropatriarchy, xv, 6–7, 9; in Peninsula, 150– 51; white, 30 Paulate, Roderick, 153 Peninsula (2020), 140, 161–62, 165, 187n2; family bonds in, 148–52; government role in zombie outbreak, 150; neoliberalism in, 147–48; patriarchal themes in, 150–51 Penny, Laurie, 128, 142, 162 Perugorría, Andros, 22 Philipp, Barbara, 45 Philippines, zombie cinema in: bakla gender tropes in, 153–54, 156–58, 160–61, 163n5; Block Z, 109, 132–36, 139; economic context for, 132; Izla, 167; LGBTQ narratives in, 157; political corruption references in, 133; Remington and the Curse

261

of the Zombadings, 140, 152–62, 163n5, 215 plague themes: in 28 Days Later, 13; capitalism and, 13; in Cockneys vs Zombies, 13–14; in Shaun of the Dead, 13; in Zombie Island, 168–69 Planet of the Apes (1968), 62 Planet Terror (2007), xiii plant horror, 46–47, 52n20 Pocowatchit, Guy Ray, 54 Pocowatchit, Rodrick, 54 political metaphors, zombie myth as, xi Popp, Matthew, 40 Porter, Susie, 70 Possessed (2022), 108, 136n4 Potter, Sara A., 22, 27n27 Poupart, Brigitte, 90 Ppalli-Ppalli culture, in South Korea, 122–25 Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Grahame-Smith), xiii Proulx, Luc, 91–92 Psycho (1960), 154 Pulp Fiction (1994), 63 Putra, Iedil, 110 Québec Province, film tradition in, 86, 88–93; social fracture as theme in, 87 Quintos, Jay Jomar, 157–58, 160 Quizon, Rodolpho Vera (Dolphy), 153–54 Racal, Maris, 134 racism: in Afro-Caribbean zombie cinema, 53; in Cargo, 74–75; colonialism and, 53 Rahim, Bella, 148–49 Raman, Magendran, 114 Ramke, Yolanda, 69, 78n24. See also Cargo Rammbock (2010), 25n7 Ramon, Benjamin, 33 Rampant (2018), 166, 176, 178, 186, 187nn4–5; domestic governance themes in, 174; First Sino-Japanese

262

Index

War and, 174, 177; as heritage horror, 173; Japanese invasion in, 175; Joseon Period as setting for, 173–74; zombification from foreign origins, 173 Ramsay, Shyam, 207 Ramsay, Tulsi, 207 Rani, Azhan, 112 Raphael, Raphael, xiv Ravenous (2017), 79, 86, 89–91, 93, 104, 107; cannibal zombies in, 103; commodity fetishism in, 92; social fracture within Québec as narrative in, 87 Rea, Stephen C., 196–97 REC (2007), 25n7 Red, Mikhail, 132. See also Block Z Regala, John, 155 Reilly, James, 168 religion: Catholicism in Italian zombie cinema, 25n12; in Ever After, 45, 52n19 Remington and the Curse of the Zombadings (2011), 140, 162, 215; bakla gender tropes in, 153–54, 156– 58, 160–61, 163n5; gender hierarchy narratives in, 152–61; LGBTQ representation in, 153–54, 160–61; swardspeak in, 154–55 Renzi, Matteo, 5–6 Reservoir Dogs (1992), 62 Resident Evil (film) (2002), xii; sequels for, xiii, 184 Resident Evil (video game), xii, 194 resistance, as theme: in Afro-Caribbean zombie cinema, 53; in Cockneys vs Zombies, 17–18 Return of the Living Dead (1985), xii, 62 Revolt of the Zombies (1935), 139 Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013), 63 Richards, Jessica K., 201 Riku, Ohnishi, 142 Rise of the Zombie (ROTZ) (2013), 190, 210–11; music sequences in, 207–8;

role of nature in, 209; Western influences in, 208 Ritchie, Guy, 26n16, 62, 111 Rocher, Dominique, 80. See also Night Eats the World Rodriguez, Robert, xiii Roja, Alessandro, 5 Romana, Dimples, 134 Romero, George: Day of the Dead, xii, 62, 130, 171; Land of the Dead, xiii, 111, 183; Survival of the Dead, 186. See also Dawn of the Dead (1978); Night of the Living Dead Rottenberg, Catherine, 125 ROTZ. See Rise of the Zombie rugged individualist trope, 80 Rumsfeld, Donald, xiii Ryan, Michelle, 14 Ryu Hoon, 199–200. See also The Neighbor Zombie Ryu Seung-ryong, 127 Sabu, 140. See also Miss Zombie Sailor Moon (TV series), 193 Salazar, Andre, 152 Saldarriaga, Patricia, 21, 52n19, 90, 92, 107; on Japanese zombie cinema, 143; on Last Ones Out, 219–20; on Malaysian zombie cinema, 114–15; on The Neighbor Zombie, 202–3, 212n9; on South Korean zombie cinema, 126; on Zombi Child, 216; on Zombiology, 194–95 Saleha, Siti, 110 Santa Clarita Diet (TV series), 140 Santo vs. the Zombies (1962), 23 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 87 Schodt, Frederick L., 181 Schuk, Amy, 45 Schweitzer, Dalia, 196–97, 215 Schweninger, Lee, 54, 76. See also The Dead Can’t Dance Seabrook, William, xii Segal, Lynne, 125 Sekar, Jiven, 119

Index

Selby, Tony, 15 Selden, Mark, 167–68 Sen, Meheli, 207–8 Seoul Station (2016), 122, 125–26, 129–30, 133, 135–36, 137n12, 139; capitalist themes in, 127–28 Seo Yoon-ah, 206 September 11, 2001, attacks (9/11 terrorist attack), zombie cinema influenced by, xii Seriven, Olivia, 63 The Serpent and the Rainbow (Davis), 216, 218 sexual harassment, in Yummy, 32–33 Shaun of the Dead (2004), xiii; The Dead Can’t Dance influenced by, 62; Juan of the Dead influenced by, 23, 27n29; KL Zombie influenced by, 110; plague themes in, 13; as slacker zombie film, xvii Shelley, Mary, 171 Sherlock Holmes (2009), 111 Shim Eun-kyung, 127 Shinsuke, Sato, 178. See also I Am a Hero Shrubb, Declan, 37. See also Me and My Mates vs. the Zombie Apocalypse Shusiya, Mithuraaj, 207 Siddique, Sophia, xiv Singh, Devaki, 207. See also Rise of the Zombie slacker zombie films, xvi–xvii sLaughter: definition of, xvii; I Am a Hero and, 181; in Yummy, 35 slavery: in Blood Quantum, 66; White slavery themes, 143; in White Zombie, 3, 29 Słotwińska, Karolina, xi slow zombies, 10 Smith, Iain Robert, xiv Snatch (2000), 26n16 Snyder, Zack, xiii socialism, in Juan of the Dead, 22 South Africa, zombie cinema in, 219–20

263

South Korea, zombie cinema in: #Alive, 189, 195–99, 211, 212n4, 212n6; Care Collective on, 124–27, 145, 202; early history of, 121–22; ghost narratives in, 121–22; globalisation themes in, 147–48; horror genre and, 135; Ju-On, 155; Kingdom, 187nn4– 5; A Monstrous Corpse, 121; national identity issues and, 165–66; The Neighbor Zombie, 171, 189–90, 199– 207, 211, 212n9; neoliberalism and, 121–31, 137n12, 147–48; Peninsula, 140, 147–52, 165, 187n2; PpalliPpalli culture in, 122–25; Rampant, 166, 173–78, 186–87, 187nn4–5; Seoul Station, 122, 125–30, 133, 135–36, 137n12, 139; Train to Busan, 108–9, 118, 122–25, 135–36, 139, 171, 196; video gaming culture and, 196; Zombie for Sale, 109, 122, 130–31, 135–36, 171, 204 Spain, zombie cinema in: Juan of the Dead, 19–24, 27n29, 113–14, 129, 215; REC, 25n7 St-Martin, Charlotte, 86 Stolen Generation, 75 Stratton, Jon, 82 survivalist narratives, xiv; in Night of the Living Dead, 79–80 Survival of the Dead (2009), 186 Syafiqah, Nur, 111 Szanter, Ashley, 201 Tailfeathers, Elle-Máijá, 68 Tales of the Zombie (comic book), 130 Tamaki, Taku, 182 Tang Xin-Hua, 170 Tanzania, zombie cinema in, 220–21 Tarantino, Quentin, 62, 78n12 Tenga, Angela, 104n2, 209 The Terminator (1984), 27n29 Thapa, Prem, 210 They Live (1988), 91 Tomb Raider (video game), 27n29 Tonkinson, Myrna, 73

264

Tôru, Tezuka, 140 Train to Busan (2016), 108, 118, 135–36, 139; capitalist themes in, 123–24; economic class systems in, 122–23; news media in, 124; Ppalli-Ppalli culture in, 122–25; video gaming culture and, 196; viral infection narrative in, 171. See also Seoul Station transculturalism, 117–18 Tremblay-Grenier, Édouard, 90 Trieu, Andy, 38 Trip (2013), 213n12 Truscello, Michael, 63, 65, 78n12 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, 48 Tuaño, Philip Arnold, 132 UmKhovu (2020), 220 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, 76 United States (U.S.), zombie cinema in: early history of, xi–xii; Indigenous narratives in, 54–62; occupation of Haiti and, xii; September 11, 2001, attacks as influence on, xii; travel narratives as influence on, xii; War on Terror as metaphor for, xiii. See also specific films Urban Scumbags vs. Countryside Zombies (1992), 23 U.S. See United States Vampires vs. the Bronx (2020), 23 Varga, Darrell, 78n16 Vaughan-Lawlor, Tom, 94 Veneracion, Ian, 132 Venezuela, zombie cinema in, 219 Vétu, Guillaume, xi, xxivn1 Vieweg, Olivia, 44 viral infections, zombification through: in Ever After, 47–48; in Train to Busan, 171; in Zombie for Sale, 171; as zombie myth, xi Vizenor, Gerald, 54

Index

Vuko, Adele, 38 Wai Han Lo, 191 The Walking Dead (graphic novel series) (Kirkman), xiii The Walking Dead (TV series), xiii– xiv, 118, 184 Wall, Tyler, 11 Wang Yi, 168–69 War on Terror, as zombie metaphor, xiii The Warriors (1979), 62 Watchman, Renae, 63, 65, 78n12 Weismann, Brad, xvi Werewolf (2016), 86 Werner, Axel, 44 Whiteness, xvi; cannibalism and, 53–54; contamination of, 59. See also Blackness; racism; white women white patriarchy, 30. See also heteropatriarchy White slavery, as theme, 143 white women, violation of, in White Zombie, 29, 51n12, 139 White Zombie (1932): contamination of Whiteness in, 59; critique of slavery in, 3, 29; female submission through zombification, 38–39; historical legacy of, xi–xii, 29; labor exploitation metaphors in, 3; violation of white women as theme in, 29, 51n12, 139; White slavery themes in, 143 Wilcha, Usop, 112 Williams, T. J., 54 Williamson, Alex, 38 women, in zombie cinema: Ever After and, 44–48; liberation movement references, 30; objectification of female zombie bodies, 42–43, 50, 51n14; submission through zombification, 38–39. See also femininity; misogyny; white women Wood, Robin, 3, 30 Woo Ming Jin, 136n7 Woosun Kang, 137n12

Index

Working-Class Heroes to Zombie Housewives (Ainslie), 109 World War Z (2013), 118 World War Z (Brooks), xiii Xu Dan, 169 Yeon Sang-ho, 121–22, 147. See also Peninsula; Seoul Station; Train to Busan Yô, Ôizumi, 178 Yoo Ah-in, 195 Young, Lauren, 154 youth and lad genre, in zombie cinema, 16 Yudi, Boris G., 171 Yummy (2019), 30, 49; abjection as theme in, 35; cosmetic surgery tourism themes, 31–37; femininity ideals in, 32, 36–37, 142; gender paradigms in, 36–37; globalization of health care and, 31; male body issues in, 37; physical infirmity in, 35; sexual harassment issues in, 32–33; sLaughter in, 35; zombification as bodily change, 35–36 Yun Mi Hwang, 173 Zaini, Adib, 108, 110 Zamora, Kerbie, 155 Zhong Tao, 170 Zimmerman, Elizabeth, 209 Zombi (1978), xii Zombi 2 (1979), 5 Zombi Child (2019), 217, 219; frontier horror poetry genre and, 221n1; Haitian voudou references in, 216, 218 Zombie (2013), 213n12 Zombie Biscuit Factory (2007), 136n1 zombie cinema: Boomer generation anxiety and, 17; consumption metaphors in, xv; flamboyant zombie films, 159–60; geopolitical events as influence on, xii; in globalgothic

265

movement, xv; globalisation of, xiv; global microflows of, xiv–xv; Global North in, 20; Great Recession as influence on, xiii–xiv; Indigenous people in, 54; liminal space in, xvii; methodological approach to, xviii–xxiii; renaissance in, xii–xiii; resurgence of after 2000, 17; September 11, 2001 attacks as influence on, xii; survivalist narratives in, xiv. See also zombie myth; specific countries; specific films; specific genres zombie comedies: Izla, 167; Zombieland, xvii, 104n4, 184; Zombieland: Double Tap, 184. See also Shaun of the Dead Zombie for Sale (2019), 109, 122, 130–31, 135–36, 204; viral infection narrative in, 171 Zombie Guillotines (2012), 194 Zombie Island (2018), 166, 186–87; anti-Japanese sentiment, 170; comfort women in, 172–73; dehumanization themes in, 170–71; Japanese invasion as reference in, 167, 169; plague narrative in, 168–69 Zombieland (2009), xvii, 104n4, 184 Zombieland: Double Tap (2019), 184 zombie myths: bodily change as element of, 35–36; cannibalistic zombies, xii; in The Dead Can’t Dance, 117; as dispossessed souls, 72–73; as geopolitical metaphor, xi; globalisation of, 24; history of, xi–xvii; Lauro on, xi; post-Romero mythology, 94; slow zombies, 10; symbolism of fast zombies, 10; viral infection in, xi; zombification as possession, 115; zombification from foreign origins, 173 Zombie Reddy (2013), 213n12 zombies as monsters, zombiness as state compared to, xi

266

Zombies from Banana Village (2007), 136n1 The Zombie Survival Guide (book) (Brooks), xiii Zombies vs. Strippers (2012), 23 Zombijaya (Zaini), 110 zombiness, as state, zombie monsters compared to, xi

Index

Zombiology (2017), 189, 193, 195–200, 211, 212n3; Cantonese opera as symbol in, 191–92, 194; gender roles in, 192; national identity issues in, 190–91 Zombitopia (2021), 136n7

About the Author

John R. Ziegler is professor of English at Bronx Community College, CUNY. He is the author of Queering the Family in The Walking Dead (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), coauthor of Not of the Living Dead: The Non-Zombie Films of George A. Romero (McFarland, 2023), and the coeditor of Representation in Steven Universe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Additionally, he has published articles and chapters on subjects including early modern literature, ghosts, and zombies and serves as coeditor of the peer-reviewed open-access journal Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture.

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