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Kyle William Bishop | Zombies and the American Gothic
REDEN vol 3, no 2 (2022)
ISSN 2695-4168 | DOI: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1824
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ZOMBIES AND THE AMERICAN GOTHIC
AN INTERVIEW WITH KYLE WILLIAM BISHOP
Michael Fuchs
University of Oldenburg
Kyle William Bishop is Professor of English at Southern Utah University, where he has been teaching
since 2000. He teaches courses about American literature and culture, fantasy and horror literature, film
studies, and English composition. Kyle is the author of American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall and
Rise of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture (McFarland, 2010) and his second volume on the zombie is
called How Zombies Conquered Popular Culture: The Multifarious Walking Dead in the 21st Century (McFar-
land, 2015). He is also the co-editor of the book The Written Dead: Essays on the Literary Zombie (McFar-
land, 2017).
Keywords: American Gothic, popular culture, zombie, horror, interview.
Michael Fuchs: You have been publishing on zombies for fifteen-plus years. Your first publi-
cation called “Raising the Dead: Unearthing the Non-Literary Origins of Zombie Cinema”
was published in the Journal of Popular Film and Television in 2006. Has it become boring to
study zombies? Or is there something new you continue to discover when looking at new
films, new media, new iterations of the zombie?
Kyle William Bishop: From time to time, I do get a little saturated. If you look at my publica-
tion history, there’s kind of feast and famine. I have to take little breaks now and then because
I feel there come moments—and I think all scholars experience this—where I feel like, “Okay.
I’ve said everything I have to say. I don’t have anything else to add.” Then a year goes by and
somebody makes a new movie or I read a new book or I go to a conference and I go to a session
and I listen to some papers and it sparks some new ideas and gets me kind of excited.
But I think I’m in a position in my career—luckily—where I don’t have to do everything.
I can wait until the right opportunity comes along. I can take little breaks and then, when I
come back to it, it’s something new, it’s something fresh that I want to do. I feel that as a
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scholar who’s entering into the latter half of their career, my obligation is a little bit more on
the mentoring and editing side of scholarship than the writing side—the first line of scholar-
ship, if you will. I have been invested more as a general editor with McFarland in trying to
assist new scholars putting together new works. Just this morning, I received a proposal from
someone who has a book manuscript on The Walking Dead. So, there are still things to say, but
I’m very comfortable with the fact that I don’t have to be the one to say them all. I can just be
involved in the process.
That said, I did write something new for a conference this year. I was a little surprised
because I didn’t know if I had anything new to say, but thanks to some new films, I have a
new idea. It just has to work that way from time to time.
MF: So, what’s that new idea? Do you want to say a few words about your recent work?
KWB: I’m really invested in the portrayal of fatherhood in zombie fiction. For years, parenting
took a bad rap in zombie movies. Parents were often horrible: they killed their children or
their children killed them, and films didn’t explore the underlying issues. As I grow a little bit
older, and being a father myself, I’ve become more interested in fatherhood and issues of pa-
ternity.
In the last few years, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in heroic father figures, not only in
zombie films but post-apocalyptic narratives more generally. My thesis is that more and more
of the creators of these narratives are fathers and that’s what they’re invested in. But I think
there’s a little bit more to it than that. I do like the heroic father in horror films as something
of a counterpoint to the monstrous mother, which has been very thoroughly established over
the decades. So, I’m teasing out what that means and if these zombie films have something to
teach us beyond “shoot him in the head.” It would be nice if this genre that I love so much
had some value beyond entertainment.
MF: You’ve already hinted at the fact that zombies and monstrous mothers are these embod-
iments of horror. This interview is part of the session on gothic bodies—bodies in relation to
Othering and the Gothic. Can you elaborate a little bit on the significance of zombies, or zom-
bified bodies, to the Gothic and horror? Why are they so important as particular gothic bodies
and particularly horrifying bodies?
KWB: Of all the literary and movie monsters that we celebrate, zombies are the most gothic,
even more so than vampires and ghosts. Even though ghosts have the longest pedigree in
terms of the Gothic, zombies are so gothic because they present their antiquation; they don’t
appear as they did in life, they appear as they do in death. Often, ghosts appear in some kind
of idolized or idealized form or they appear as they did the moment of their demise. Vampires
are so idealized, especially recently, where they become almost angelic or god-like. Zombies
are corpses. They remain corpses and in a lot of the narratives, they continue to rot and to
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decay. So, it’s this ever-present, unavoidable reminder of mortality that is at the heart of so
many gothic narratives. The zombie then incorporates the key concerns of the Gothic and
presents them in a way that cannot be mastered. Zombies have this deadness to them.
Of course, that works in Freudian terms—and I use a lot of Freud in my scholarship—
because zombies are literally the return of the repressed: they are the dead that come back.
We don’t want to think about death, so death returns to us. Now, vampires do that, too, but
vampires do it in a way that reminds us of our bestiality, our mortality, our sexuality, but not
so much our corporeality and not so much this the sense of the grotesque, which is often key
to the Gothic. The zombie is grotesque.
I prefer manifestations of the zombie that are visibly dead. Another piece that I’m work-
ing on right now is about zombie passing. Zombie passing is interesting because of the paral-
lels to the racial tradition of passing, but those types of zombies aren’t as gothic. If they can
pass as living humans, they don’t have this tangible quality.
The other key feature is that the zombie becomes so atavistic, so ferocious, so feral. This
is another thing that the Gothic reveals: the fantasy that we as humans are civilized. A lot of
post-apocalyptic narratives—notably Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), any of the Road
Warrior films, etc.—explore this question that when push comes to shove, we are monstrous
creatures: we will tear, rend, and bite and fight for survival just like animals will. Because
zombies, particularly post-Romero zombies, are presented as cannibalistic flesh eaters, it re-
veals this repressed secret. In terms of Jerrold Hogle’s understanding of the Gothic, particu-
larly in terms of Freudian psychoanalytic theory, that’s what the zombie really is: it’s an anti-
quated body that reveals the repressed truths of our mortality and our monstrosity. It puts us
on a stage that reveals anything. Indeed, zombies can be whatever they need to be. The whole
premise of my second book is that they are metaphorical monsters—like all monsters, as Jef-
frey Jerome Cohen reminds us—but they get to do it with a little bit of flexibility that the other
monsters don’t always enjoy. That flexibility is always gothic at its heart.
MF: That’s a very important point—the deadness that’s embodied by the zombie confronts us
with our mortality, more so than other gothic creatures, but zombies are also “flexible,” as
you put it; they reflect their times. These are topics that reverberate through both of your
monographs: your first book focuses more on the history of the zombie up to the twentieth
century, and the second book on the zombie surge that hit us post-9/11. As a matter of fact,
you open your first book by stressing that all cultural production speaks to a given society’s
dreams but also its anxieties and that the Gothic plays a very particular role in this context.
Could you maybe list three key American zombie texts and what they tell us about the cultural
moments that they emerged from?
KWB: I think everybody in zombie studies would agree that The Night of the Living Dead (1968)
is where George Romero shifted everything permanently. Prior to 1968, zombies manifested
in narratives that were true to their origins in Haiti, where they were enslaved. They were
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servants of other, more malevolent powers. They didn’t do a whole lot and so the fear wasn’t
of zombies, the fear was of becoming a zombie. By fusing the zombie with a little bit of vampirism
and a whole lot of Middle Eastern ghoul mythology, Romero came up with his ghoul, which
others retroactively named the zombie. It created this creature which was more than just a
kind of a postcolonial figure of racial enslavement and became the embodiment of unchecked
modern desire; an empty desire, which is key.
Romero was responding to a cultural anxiety that had been brought to the fore because
of the Vietnam War (not exclusively, but primarily). Vietnam was the first war that was tele-
vised. The American people were seeing images of death and destruction on a level that they
never encountered before. Romero drew on existing narratives such as The Birds (1963) and
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), and he created a creature that would remind people of
their mortality, of their fragility, but also play on current social issues and concerns about the
literal assault on the family—the assault on the traditional home—and also to engage in issues
of race and racism and the shifting attitudes towards race in the United States. Romero went
to his grave saying that he never intended it to be a film about race relations, but by casting
his lead as a Black man, he irrevocably did just that: he had a Black hero, but he had a Black
hero who didn’t always act particularly heroic and simultaneously confirmed and overturned
racist assumptions about a Black man. The film became a touchstone moment and a turning
point in horror narratives because it was so raw and so basic; at the same time, it made so
many sophisticated comments about society in 1968—not coincidentally the year the United
States Production Code was retired and filmmakers were allowed to really push the envelope.
Romero had people eaten on camera. It was pretty revolutionary and pretty shocking.
That film changed the zombie for the next 40 years. Most of the zombie films you see in
America and a lot of the ones you see in England and in Italy followed Romero’s lead, with
these infectious-like vampires, cannibalistic-like ghouls, but a new type of zombie that con-
tinued to explore the idea of loss of agency but did so in a much more visceral way.
The next one that we have to really look at is The Walking Dead because The Walking Dead
is a huge phenomenon that has transcended Romero’s humble intentions. The Walking Dead
was a successful comic (2003–2019), but when it became a TV series on AMC (2010–), it just
exploded—it broke records left and right. It was the type of narrative that most would have
doubted would ever succeed in a public forum. Up until that point, the zombie was a B-movie,
VHS-watch-it-in-your-basement, late-time television creature, but with The Walking Dead, it
really went mainstream. It gave birth to video games and spin-off shows. This whole world
of The Walking Dead, this apocalyptic world, is a Romero world. The zombies are Romero zom-
bies. They’re flesh eaters, they’re contagious, they’re slow-moving, and they’re only danger-
ous in large numbers.
What really is important about The Walking Dead in terms of building on Romero is that
the true monsters of that franchise aren’t the zombies. The zombies are helpless victims.
They’re doing what comes naturally; they’re animalistic, they’re atavistic. What’s really scary
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about that gothic landscape are the humans, the humans that will do anything to survive. A
zombie has no sense of morality because a zombie has no agency; humans do. The humans in
The Walking Dead are really terrifying: they’re ferocious, they’re vicious—both the protago-
nists and the antagonists, which is what makes the narrative so compelling. Because what you
would have to do to survive that scenario is you would have to become a monster yourself.
I’ve written about that referencing Nietzsche—this idea that the one thing you want to avoid
when fighting monsters is becoming one yourself. The Walking Dead shows that that’s impos-
sible. True monstrosity can only be confronted by equally severe monstrosity.
Here, it’s important to note that The Walking Dead really took off on the heels of Septem-
ber 11—national trauma, televised violence. It makes sense that we get this first big bubble of
the zombie with Vietnam and the zombie renaissance on the heels of September 11.
Now, you asked for a third, and this is where I want to be a little bit more unexpected.
I’d like to talk about Maggie (2015) because Maggie is a movie that kind of got ignored. It’s an
independent film. What makes the movie so interesting is that it stars Arnold Schwarzeneg-
ger—and he did this film for free. He loved the script so much that he wanted to give it a shot
because it does put him against type he’s supposed to be. He plays a simple small-town farmer
who isn’t a juggernaut like the Terminator; he’s not a highly trained military offensive; he’s
just a dad. He’s a dad who’s trying to survive in a new world in which a zombie plague has
ravaged society. It becomes a movie that is much more about family and it’s much more about
individuals than it is about the apocalypse. It’s a pretty quiet film with a small cast and you
only see a handful of zombies throughout the entire movie. Of course, the point is that the
title character, Maggie, played by Abigail Breslin, is a zombie. The scenario of this film isn’t
so much Romero as kind of a 28 Days Later (2002) situation where zombieism is a plague. It’s
an infection and the zombies spend weeks transforming. It takes about six weeks for someone
to fully die from the infection and to come back as a zombie. So, society has set up a quarantine
system, they’ve set up detention centers, and they’ve come up with a system for euthanizing
the dead before they become a threat for the living.
These issues resonate perhaps more so now than when the film was made because we
do have a plague and we do see the mistreatment of those who are infected and we do see the
incarceration of the innocent. All of that really resonates and perhaps Maggie is a more im-
portant film now than it was when it came out. But at its heart, it’s a film about a dad who
loves his daughter who’s terminally ill and who refuses to accept that. It’s a touching film; it’s
quiet, it’s sensitive, it’s sad, and it’s not an action-adventure horror film like so many of the
other zombie movies. It’s important because it represents the types of narratives that the zom-
bie figure can tell.
MF: You’ve raised two points in your answer that I’d like to continue with: the zombie renais-
sance and the meaning of the zombie in our pandemic times. Let us first focus on the first
couple of years of the twenty-first century. As you indicated, the national trauma caused by
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9/11 definitely had an impact on the proliferation of the zombie figure in the United States;
were there other reasons for this zombie revival? In particular, the zombie spread across the
globe in the early twenty-first century, so what happened in addition to 9/11 to allow the
zombie to become this global phenomenon?
KWB: 9/11 really helped kick off the viability of these narratives. You do get a number of films
right out of the gate and then a lot more to follow and that did expand a little bit more globally
with the War on Terror that the United States perpetuated.
Curiously enough, horror films and zombie films are not only catalyzed by warfare,
they also appear during economic hardship. So, the 1930s—definitely in the United States, but
you get to see it on a global level, as well—were a huge decade for horror. It wasn’t because
of war; it was because of economic depression. The Great Depression did resonate worldwide
and did have a global impact. The United States film industry started making a lot of horror
films because—in super-reductive terms—when times are tough, you want a narrative about
people for whom times are tougher. It kind of makes you feel better; it’s very cathartic. One
of the things that really kicked off the zombie renaissance was the global economic collapse.
Of course, we also have become a much more global world than we were in the 1930s
or in the 1960s and 1970s. That’s one of the reasons why zombies were able to proliferate so
quickly: everybody was kind of struggling in the first few years of the twenty-first century
and because of the internet, because of globalization, it was much easier to share stories. It
was much easier for people to access the films of other countries, to access comic books, and
video games. The video game market is hugely important to the zombie renaissance because
zombies have been flourishing in video games since the 1990s. They make such a great foe
because you can shoot people and not feel guilty about it.
But we also got really nervous about infection because right after 9/11, we had swine
flu, we had cow flu, we had avian flu, we had weaponized anthrax—all that happened in just
a couple of years. We had problems with immigrants, we had problems with refugees, we had
militarized conflicts all over the place, and that level of diverse trauma and anxiety came to-
gether to produce a potent world for a horror revival.
Ignoring zombies for a moment, it’s interesting to me that almost every major horror
film from the 1970s was remade during the first decade of the twenty-first century. The time
was right and it was the parallels to the 1970s: the economic hardship, the warfare—it really
came together again.
What made the zombie particularly essential for this moment was its versatility. Vam-
pires are still around, but vampires had shifted. Vampires are still monsters, but they’re more
often than not romantic heroes, if not superheroes. The zombie is also on that trajectory, but
initially in the twenty-first century, it was the figure we could use for whatever we needed to
use it for. That’s really the thesis of my second monograph—the idea of the zombie as a mul-
tifarious monster. It’s a meaning machine that can mean whatever the filmmaker or author or
video game designer wants it to be.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about zombie films as a genre but the fact that the zombie shows
up in other genres makes me think that maybe it isn’t a genre at all. It’s an element, it’s a
monster, it’s a trope, it’s a thing that can be added to almost any story, genre, or tradition. If
you look at what we’ve gotten over the last twenty years, you still mostly have zombie horror
films, but you see zombie crime dramas, you see zombie action-adventure films, you see zom-
bie superhero comics, you see zombie sitcoms, you see zombies that are mostly political satire,
you see fan films on YouTube that are better than Romero’s first movies were. The zombie
shows up all over the place now and you see really great zombie films outside of the United
States.
As I’ve been trying to survey the key zombie films of the last two or three years, the
majority of them are not from the US, which is really great and really important. Frankly, the
best zombie films right now are coming out of Asia and a number out of Australia for reasons
that I haven’t quite figured out. US zombie production is still going strong but there’s a lot of
recycling and there’s a lot of riding the Walking Dead horse. Internationally, we’re getting more
interesting zombie films and they’re evolving because the zombie is like any other animal—it
has to evolve and adapt or it’s going to die.
I do talk about zombies in terms of Darwin a lot. They need to be able to be more than
they are. The zombie gets to do that easier than other monsters because they don’t have hun-
dreds of years of tradition. They don’t have a gothic literary tradition the way that the vampire
does. To me, “zombie” has become a shorthand. Everybody knows what a zombie is, so any-
body who wants to tell a zombie story can start there. But since zombies aren’t real, they can
go any direction they want to and audiences will buy it. I just finished Santa Clarita Diet (2017–
2019), which I had put off because I didn’t think I’d like it very much. I loved it! It’s not a
particularly gothic version of the zombie, but it’s a great use of that creature to tell a certain
story. That’s why I’m excited that we’re still seeing new original creative works to explore
global issues of anxiety and fear but also catharsis.
MF: You just provided a perfect transition: global issues, global anxieties. We’re experiencing
the first truly global pandemic in a century—a pandemic that was, according to quite a num-
ber of scientists, long overdue. Do you see another zombie boom coming up in the next couple
of years, triggered by Covid?
KWB: Yes. I think we’re going to see a surge in all infection narratives. In so many ways, at
its heart, the zombie story is an apocalyptic story. It’s a viral narrative. I can imagine that
there’s a number of screenwriters and authors who’ve been quarantined who are looking out
their windows, who are looking on the TV, and they’re seeing real-life plot elements and story
devices. I think we’re going to get a Covid version of the zombie. At the very least, people are
going to be more invested in these narratives because they’re going to feel like they’ve been
through it. Now, obviously, we haven’t because the coronavirus isn’t a zombie virus. The
death toll is nowhere near as high as in most post-apocalyptic narratives, like The Stand (novel
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1978; miniseries 1994; miniseries 2020), but it’s enough that people have woken up to our fra-
gility as a society.
It’s a rough time to be a citizen of the United States because we entered this pandemic
with such arrogance and now, we’re the country that has been hit the worst. We’re the country
that has the most fatalities because we botched it. The amount of death people have experi-
enced, maybe not firsthand but definitely second- and thirdhand—pretty much everybody in
the United States knows somebody who died and that’s similar in other countries around the
world—you can’t have that kind of national and global trauma without having art reflect it.
If we saw a surge in horror narratives because of September 11, what are we gonna see from
this, where the death toll is astronomically higher?
Starting in the next year, once productions can start to work again, once people can go
back to work, we’re going to see a ton of these: we’re going to see a post-apocalypse, we’re
going to see infection narratives, we’re going to see exposés, we’re going to see docudramas
that are going to try to reveal what went wrong, and we’re going to see zombies. We’re going
to see lots and lots of zombies, and I’m pretty excited about that. If we can do it differently, if
we can do things that are new and exciting and change the script a little bit. It’s now Ameri-
cans’ turn to take cues from other countries and to do more than just remake foreign films but
to actually make new films with new narratives. I’m feeling pretty optimistic that the zombie
isn’t done. We have a collective global trauma that needs therapy and horror films are the best
therapy out there. Horror narratives are there and so people are going to get to work if they
haven’t already.
MF: And, of course, we will read past horror films and zombie narratives in a different way,
as well. Since you have already been speculating about the future of horror and zombie nar-
ratives: you mentioned that you expect filmmakers to take new paths and do things differently
in the future, but let’s turn to the scholarly side. Especially in your role as editor of the Zombie
Studies series for McFarland, where do you see the field of zombie studies going in the next
few years? Is there something particularly exciting that you see emerging?
KWB: This is such a great question because I wish I had all the answers. I don’t know if I have
another zombie book in me, but I definitely know that zombie books are continuing to be
pitched and promoted and developed. I was an external reader for a zombie monograph last
month and, like I said earlier, I just received a proposal for a manuscript today. As we continue
to get more and more zombie narratives, we’re going to find new ways to approach those. As
literary production increases, so does scholarly interest. Having been a graduate student
twice, I know that grad students are always desperately trying to find something new to do,
something new to say, and they’re going to increasingly look at contemporary trends and
contemporary narratives. So, for example, as you just said, reconsidering existing zombie nar-
ratives through the lens of a post-Covid world is going to afford a host of different readings,
as scholars will ask, “Okay, but what happened when it really took place?”
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People are going to continue to try to explore the zombie from new critical perspectives.
Race has been done substantially in terms of zombies, but not much on gender, not much on
parenting, not much on queer studies or disability studies. In particular, the zombie as a dis-
abled body—that’s going to become increasingly more relevant. But it’s globalization that I
think is key. The Italian zombie tradition is fascinating and very extreme and that hasn’t really
been done. There’s so much happening in Asia that hasn’t been explored thoroughly. The idea
of the zombie surfacing in previous colonial nations like Australia hasn’t been touched too
much. Zombie-like folklore and mythologies hasn’t been developed very much. I’ve written
a little bit about the opti gånger in Norway, but not a lot has been done with the draugr up in
Scandinavia. Not much has been done with some of the Chinese or the Japanese versions of
the zombie. We’re going to see more. There’s more to be said. There’s more to be explored:
globalization, the international exploration, the folkloric origins—there’s still a lot to be said.
People still have things to say about the Walking Dead as a specific text. And I think there’s
still plenty to be said about the zombie as a whole.
Probably the most important thing to me right now is zombies as protagonists, zombies
featuring in comedies, zombies that are more sympathetic and more emotional—these are the
things we haven’t explored as much. I’m fascinated to see what other non-horror zombies are
out there and what they mean because the zomedy can be just as important for cultural study
as the horror zombie—although scholars generally discount comedy, anyway. Zombie come-
dies are saying things that are super-interesting that could be explored in more depth. I don’t
know if I’m going to do it, but hopefully somebody out there listening will. Send me and
McFarland a few manuscripts to check out.
Open Q&A session
Mónica Fernández Jiménez: I’d like to ask you a question, trying to link your talk to my in-
terests. You mentioned the Caribbean origin of the myth and the creature. I was wondering if
you have looked at artworks from the Caribbean, by Caribbean creators.
KWB: That’s a great question. My friend Sarah Lauro’s The Transatlantic Zombie (2015) is the
book on the Caribbean zombie narrative. She is an amazing scholar. She’s quite much smarter
than I am. She travelled to Haiti to do a lot of research firsthand, which I haven’t done, and
she’s been able to explore a literary tradition that’s a little bit richer than I think any of us
initially thought.
With my work, I did touch on it a little bit, but I kind of worked on a kind of secondary
level, through the scholarship of Zora Neale Hurston and some other key Haitian scholars,
where I did look into the origins of the idea of the zombie and Haitian life. The zombie is kind
of a misinterpretation of voodoo culture and voodoo rituals, but I mostly looked at how that
was translated into the cinema of the United States. I have looked at some of those short stories
but there are more and they’re more recent that deal with the Caribbean zombie and the zom-
bie as a victim of a nefarious agent. I don’t feel super-qualified with it and that’s why I’ve
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stepped back a little bit. And then when Sarah published this book and I read it, I kind of said,
“Well, I’m out because I can’t compete with that.” But I don’t think that she’s done all the
scholarship that remains to be done. And there are narratives that could be explored through
the lens of zombie scholarship, such as Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which could be read as a type
of zombie narrative—not a literal zombie narrative. A then other, more overt zombie stories
that have come out of the Caribbean, particularly out of Haiti, but also in places like Florida
and Louisiana that have a strong Creole culture. I am not super-well-versed in it but if you
haven’t read The Transatlantic Zombie, read this and it will give you a launching point for sto-
ries to read, authors to follow, and new scholarship to produce. Since Sarah wrote that, I’m
pretty certain there have been a number of those types of narratives produced and published.
MFJ: I was really thinking about Wide Sargasso Sea—it maybe takes a different form that we
can analyze through zombie scholarship. Thank you very much.
KWB: Awesome. The zombie is used as a metaphor so often that I think zombie scholars need
to embrace that and zombie scholarship can be about more than just zombies. The metaphor
is so widely reaching, it’s a reason why we call things “zombies” that aren’t. I think that the
scholarship can go that direction, as well.
Anna Marta Marini: You talked about different kinds of zombie narratives and I, for one,
really enjoy what I call “incognito” monster narrative. I really like it when monsters need,
want, or can hide their monstrosity and pretend that they are “normal,” which happens more
often with vampires, but it happens with zombies, too. I really liked, for example, The Girl
with All the Gifts (novel 2014; movie 2016). I binge-watch series like iZombie (2015–2019) and
Santa Clarita Diet. I’m thinking maybe The Glitch (2015–2019) and The Returned (2015–) also fall
into this category. So, do you think that there is a change in the zombie or undead narra-
tive/dynamics/messages when the zombie or the undead is, to an extent, passing as human?
KWB: I think that’s a cycle that we get with monsters. It’s all building on the vampire tradition
because even if you go back to Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), the power of the vampire as a
monster is its ability to pass as a human, to walk among us—and that’s what’s so terrifying
about Dracula: the idea that this Eastern European monster would dare invade Europe and
that it could walk the streets with impunity. For a long time, the zombie was so markedly
visually different from the human that there was no mistaking it, but that narrow focus on the
zombie limits the stories that can be told.
You’re absolutely right, in the twentieth century, we didn’t have the passing zombie at
all; in the twenty-first century, we’ve shifted because people love monsters and then they love
monsters so much that they don’t want to Other them; they want to become them. They want
to embrace the monster and they want to be able to love the monster more. the zombie is
following in the footsteps of the vampire, particularly as treated by Anne Rice where we’re
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going to make the zombie a little bit more identifiable, more sympathetic; give it more access
to the human experience.
When I first started my research, I did not like that trend and I really resisted it because
once you give a zombie a voice, once you give a zombie consciousness and agency, that
seemed fundamentally opposed to the origins of the zombie as depicted in Haitian mythol-
ogy. But I’ve changed my mind. All the texts that you just mentioned are really fascinating:
iZombie explores a lot of interesting ideas about what would it take for a monster to be human,
to retain humanity, and to function within society and how do you differentiate between mon-
sters that are monstrous and monsters that are trying to be less monstrous. I really enjoyed
Santa Clarita Diet because the passing in Santa Clarita Diet is easy. It’s probably the easiest of
the narratives because once they arrest the decomposition, they still look and act human. They
just have this kind of secret side to them. The best narrative that has explored this is In the
Flesh (2013–2014), where zombies have the ability to pass but have to confront whether or not
that is right for them. The resistance to passing is perhaps more interesting to me than the
passing itself, but I think that’s where we’re going to get some really interesting stories be-
cause then we have to ask ourselves what is monstrosity.
Human monstrosity can be manifested in zombie narratives by the uninfected humans.
You can get narratives in which the zombies are, in fact, more humane than the humans. And
then you get the narratives where there are different types of zombies. That’s one thing I ha-
ven’t mentioned yet: increasingly, we’re getting stories where there are at least two very dif-
ferent types of monsters. You get it in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011), you get it in Warm
Bodies (2013), you get it in Girl with All the Gifts, which is amazing—it’s a fascinating narrative
where the book is much better than the film; but the film also has a lot of interesting things
happening in it. So, the idea of the monster-monster versus the human-monster versus the
human-human monster, I think that’s super interesting and I think there’s a lot to be said and
I think there’s a lot to be done with the zombie-vampire comparison. You usually don’t get
both in the same story; you do sometimes but you rarely get them together. Crossovers would
be worth investigating.
AMM: You know, that would have been my third question because there are a few crossovers
were you don’t really know if they are zombies or vampires. They act a bit like zombies, a bit
like vampires—is that a trend?
KWB: It’s a trend, but it’s also the origin because Night of the Living Dead is an adaptation of I
Am Legend (1954). Romero was working with vampires conceptually when he started. Romero
accidentally invented the zombie, but he started with the vampire. What he did is he’s like,
“The communicability of the vampire is super-cool and the idea of a monstrous apocalypse is
super-cool,” but drinking blood wasn’t enough for Romero; he wanted them to eat every-
thing—which is the ghoul. The lines are being blurred increasingly. When you look at the
most recent version of I Am Legend (2007), with Will Smith, they’re basically zombies but
they’re photo-sensitive like vampires, which brings us to Minecraft (2011), where the zombies
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don’t act like zombies at all; they act more like vampires. I don’t know why the skeletons are
photo-sensitive, but that’s another issue. We are going to get more crossover.
We’ve had vampire-werewolf crossovers since the Universal days. It would be interest-
ing to see whether zombie-ism is vampirism. How are they similar? How are they different?
In a lot of ways iZombie is a vampire narrative, not a zombie narrative. Those zombies are
vampires. They have to eat to survive, they have to eat to stay young, or to look normal, to
maintain their humanity, but it builds on the John Russo version of the zombie, which is brain-
eating only; vampires are blood-drinking only; in Santa Clarita Diet, she eats everything with
gusto. Are we going to see different variations like that? Absolutely. The more monsters fuse
and cross and meld, the more interesting things get. The taxonomy of monstrosity is going to
become increasingly challenging, but you see the same thing in genre. Genre is increasingly
difficult to identify. Monsters are going to become the same; they’re going to follow the same
trajectory, which is cool for scholars, but it’s even cooler for fans.
AMM: Moving to a rather different question: You mentioned Italian zombies. Why do you
think they’re so extreme? I’ve watched so many and my favorite Italian zombie movie is Cem-
etery Man, Dellamorte Dellamore (1994). It’s so weird and quirky. What do you think about the
Italian zombie tradition?
KWB: Italy had the cannibal film tradition. Italy was not limited by the Production Code re-
strictions the United States was limited by. So, some of those early Italian cannibal films are
just shocking. That was the foundation upon which they built their zombie tradition. And the
second thing is Fulci. He ripped off Dawn of the Dead (1978). He made an unofficial sequel to
it by calling his first zombie film Zombi 2 (1979), which is hilarious. But he was building on an
established Italian cannibalist tradition. Fulci wanted gore that substantially transcended
Romero’s gore. Even after the Production Code, Romero had to make films for a US audience
which was limited by the MPAA rating system. Fulci didn’t, and Fulci had a built-in audience
that expected gallons and gallons of blood and flesh-ripping and all these horrifying moments.
Back in 2006-2007, when I watched all the Italian zombie films I could get my hands on, it was
pretty shocking. There was a learning curve for me to accept that different paradigm. That
would be my short answer: it’s the pre-established cannibal film tradition in Italy followed by
Fulci’s single-handed vision of where the zombie would go. Other filmmakers in other nations
have followed his lead more than Romero’s, as it is this sense of true grotesque barbarism and
an embrace of the atavism that you get from some gothic narratives. The Italian gothic is dif-
ferent from the US gothic in many ways.
Laura Álvarez Trigo: You briefly mentioned the role of zombies in comedy movies. This is
something that we’ve seen for several years, with films like Shaun of the Dead (2004), but also
more recent movies like Anna and the Apocalypse (2017), which is not only a musical but also a
Christmas movie, and also The Dead Don’t Die (2019). I was wondering whether the zombie is
a monster that lends itself to be used in these ways of dealing with fears through comedy,
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through laughing? These movies are not necessarily less scary or less gory. They’re very dire;
many of these comedy zombie movies have very bad endings—everybody’s going to die. The
comedy doesn’t mean that they’re happier in any way.
KWB: I think it’s a great question. I’m glad you mentioned Anna and the Apocalypse, which is
a really great film because it tries to be everything; it’s every genre at the same time. Comedy
and horror are so closely related because fear response and humor response become manifest
similarly. We cry when we’re scared, but we cry when we’re happy. We can laugh when we’re
scared. The zombie comedies, the zomedies, can still say important things and they can still
help us wrestle with anxieties and fears. They can still be gothic. The gothic comedy isn’t new
to zombies. This idea of “we’re going to turn it on its head and we’re going to explore it
through comedy.” What is essential for any comedy is familiarity and that’s why early zombie
films weren’t particularly comedic or early zombie comedies weren’t particularly successful.
In order to parody something, you have to have an audience familiarity with the rules and the
tropes and the conventions that you can turn them on their head. While there were comedies
in the 1980s such as I Was a Teenage Zombie (1987), which is not great, and The Return of the
Living Dead films (1985–1993), and they’re pretty comedic, but they’re still in the Romero tra-
dition. Then you get something like Dead Alive (1992) by Peter Jackson, which is just off-the-
wall, no-holds-barred, and then you get to Shaun of the Dead.
Shaun of the Dead is probably the first really sophisticated zomedie because it plays with
the expectations, it plays with the tropes; it’s able to make jokes because the audience knows
the joke is inside. But the ending of the film is tragic, it’s awful, it’s traumatic, it’s traditional.
Narratives like Anna and the Apocalypse are the same way: the first half is a comedy, a musical
comedy, and it’s funny, and it’s silly, and we make fun of the zombies, and we make fun of
the people surviving, and we may even make fun of the people who get killed. But the second
half of that film is pretty dark and it turns relatively tragic and the music shifts. The musical
quality and the subject matter shifts. Frankly, I was a little surprised because I thought it was
going to be pretty silly up until the end, but it had a bleak ending. To me personally, the final
musical number missed. It’s hard to maintain what it was trying to maintain.
The zombie comedy is really an essential part of the creature’s development. We’re at a
point where enough people are familiar enough with zombies that we can make fun of them
but not in a way that’s dismissive. We can make fun of them in a way that we’ll laugh but also
think about it; and we’ll maybe think about it for a few days later. Comedy has tremendous
power for cultural awareness and cultural therapy and cultural change, but in a lot of ways,
it’s harder. A zombie horror film’s easy. I’ve seen a bunch of them, low-budget ones, unin-
spired ones; they’re still effective; they’re still scary and startling. Zombie comedies are hard
because sophisticated comedy is hard; otherwise it’s just jokes. It’s the satire and the irony
and the sophistication that we need to see more of. Not a lot’s been written about zombie
comedies, so that’s another area where scholars have more work to do.
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Paula Barba Guerrero: I am particularly interested in the role of nostalgia in post-apocalyptic
fiction. I was wondering if you could comment on the relation between the zombie and this
almost mythical return home, which is particularly relevant when thinking of trauma and
memory. Is the nostalgic zombie a thing? Right now, I can only think of Colson Whitehead’s
stragglers in Zone One, but I am sure there are other examples of this type of return to the
familiar home, which in a way humanizes the zombie.
KWB: That is a great question. Nostalgia is essential for gothic narratives. The Gothic is all
based on nostalgia. Walpole was nostalgic to a fault—that’s what gave rise to the Gothic orig-
inally. But there is a nostalgia in zombie films that’s really tragic and it’s really painful. On the
one hand, Romero has always explored the idea of nostalgia among his human survivor char-
acters; the idea that the people trapped in a zombie apocalypse are understandably longing
for the pre-zombie world. Think of Dawn of the Dead, where they so meticulously try to recre-
ate normal life inside that shopping mall, as they make a home; they build a house, essentially.
They have fun, they play, they do all the things they normally would do, but it’s only the men.
Francine gets that it’s not going to go back to that; it’s not going to be normal again. We get
that increasingly in zombie narratives where people try to hang on to normalcy, to hang on to
the past.
But the point you raise, which is so great, is this idea of the zombie as the nostalgic
figure. Colson Whitehead explores it quite a bit; the Girl with All the Gifts film does an inter-
esting play on it, with the zombies going about their business in tragic ways—I’m thinking of
the woman who’s pushing her baby coach. It’s just gut-wrenching and really sad. Some more
recent films have played around with it quite a bit, as zombies talk. In the film Alone (2020),
which is the US version of the South Korean film Alive (2015), the zombies just wander around
and make noises and they repeat phrases from their existence, which I find really disturbing—
this idea that even though they’re dead, they can’t quite let go of the life they once had. Cargo
(2017) is really disturbing, as well, because you have zombies that are infected to the point
where they lose their cognition, but they still kind of go through the motions. It’s an important
thing to explore—the idea where the dead can’t be completely freed from their existence.
We’re seeing more of that.
I Am a Hero (2015) is a great Japanese film that I really like; a lot more than I thought I
would. They speak and they act but they can only do what they had when they died. They
hang on to this last moment of existence. That’s where the zombie becomes such a powerful
metaphor for modernity. How many of us are doing it, particularly with Covid? We just go
through the motions, hoping that things will get back to normal at some point. I find myself
doing that at work—"well, time to grade the papers.” With Zoom and with everything that
we’re coping with, we’re all zombies to a certain extent. We all suffer from substantial nostal-
gia right now. “I just want to go out with my friends.” “I just want to see a movie in a movie
theater.” We miss the simple things that all sufferers of an apocalypse end up missing. The
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goal is to re regain some semblance of that lost life—whether we’re human survivors or
whether we’re zombie victims, we want to reclaim that.
Nostalgia is the motivating factor of zombie movies—you nailed it. The Walking Dead is
about nostalgia: “Let’s rebuild the government,” “Let’s rebuild civilization,” “Let’s rebuild
trade and diplomacy,” “Let’s rewrite the constitution.” What’s interesting to me is the zombie
narratives that say “Let’s return to what was” versus the zombie narratives that say “Now is
our chance to build something new” because too much nostalgia is dangerous. We’re going
to see in our real world that life is not going to return to what it was before the pandemic, nor
should it. Nostalgia also always has to be tempered with pragmatism. The zombie narrative
allows us to explore those risks more safely.
WORKS CITED
Carey, M. R. The Girl with All the Gifts. Orbit, 2014.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, U of Minnesota P, 1996, pp. 3–25.
Hogle, Jerrold E. “Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic
Fiction, edited by Jerrold E. Hogle, Cambridge UP, 2002, pp. 1–20.
Lauro, Sarah Juliet. The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion, and Living Death. Rutgers UP, 2015.
Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. Norton, 1966.
Whitehead, Colson. Zone One. Doubleday, 2011.
Films, TV series, and Video Games
Alone. Directed by Matt Naylor, Lionsgate, 2020.
Anna and the Apocalypse. Directed by John McPhail, Vertigo, 2018.
Cargo. Directed by Ben Howling and Yoland Ramke, Netflix, 2018.
Dawn of the Dead. Directed by George A. Romero, United Film, 1978.
The Dead Don’t Die. Directed by Jim Jarmusch, Focus Features, 2019.
The Girl with All the Gifts. Directed by Colm McCarthy, Warner Bros., 2016.
I Am a Hero. Directed by Shinsuke Satō, Solar Entertainment, 2019.
I Am Legend. Directed by Francis Lawrence, Warner Bros, 2007.
In the Flesh. Created by Dominic Mitchell, BBC Three, 2013–2014.
iZombie. Developed by Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero-Wright, The CW, 2015–2019.
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Maggie. Directed by Henry Hobson, Lionsgate, 2015.
Minecraft. Developed by Mojang Studios, Mojang Studios, 2011.
Night of the Living Dead. Directed by George A. Romero, Continental, 1968.
Santa Clarita Diet. Created by Victor Fresco, Netflix, 2017–2019.
The Walking Dead. Developed by Frank Darabont, AMC, 2010–ongoing.
Warm Bodies. Directed by Jonathan Levine, Summit Entertainment, 2013.