And the dead shall walk the earth: Zombies and the politics of death

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Content AND THE DEAD SHALL WALK THE EARTH:
ZOMBIES AND THE POLITICS OF DEATH
by
Chera Dezarae Kee
_________________________________________________________________
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CRITICAL STUDIES)
May 2011
Copyright 2011 Chera Dezarae Kee
Dedication
To Glenda: you are a part of everything I do.
ii
Acknowledgments
This project would not have been possible without the most supportive
community of colleagues, mentors, friends and family I could have ever hoped for—
there are not enough words to begin to thank all of the people who have given me
guidance, encouragement, and yes, even the occasional zombie-themed toy, over the past
several years. I couldn’t have done this without them.
I would first like to thank my dissertation committee, professors Curtis Marez,
Marsha Kinder, and Janet Hoskins. Each of them has left his or her mark on my work as
a scholar, and I will be eternally grateful for the time and resources they dedicated to
fostering my research and writing. Janet Hoskins seemed to know exactly what books to
put in my hands when I was first starting out: her early recommendations opened my eyes
to the directions in which I could take this project. Furthermore, Janet’s patience and
kindness in mentoring me provided a great example that I hope to emulate in my future
career. Upon entering the Critical Studies program at USC, I was told that Marsha
Kinder was an intimidating teacher, and while that may be true, what I found was a
devoted sponsor, a brilliant scholar, and a true friend. I can only say that if I am half as
fiercely supportive of my future students as she was of me, I will consider myself a
success. Finally, Curtis Marez was the professor who first encouraged this project and
who got me into the archives hunting for anything and everything related to voodoo-style
iii
zombies. Curtis has known when to push and when to praise, and I see the influence of
his astute intellect and inspired suggestions in every chapter of this project.
Special thanks should be given to Priya Jaikumar, Tara McPherson, Vanessa
Schwartz, Philippa Levine, Sarah Gualtieri, and Akira Lippit, who all provided
suggestions and encouragement during the earliest phases of this project. Thanks is also
due to Kim Greene, Alicia Cornish, and Linda Overholt, who furnished invaluable
technical and administrative assistance during my research and writing, as well as to the
stellar librarians of the USC Cinematic Arts Library, the Glendale California Public
Library system, and the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences.
I also wish to thank the members of the USC Visual Studies Graduate Certificate
Dissertation Reading Group, who read rough drafts of several chapters and provided
priceless feedback. I am also deeply indebted to Thomas Fisher, who ran through a
parking lot chasing zombie walkers with me, taking photos, shooting video, and
reminding me just how much fun dissertation research can be. I must also recognize
Jennifer Black, Kate Fortmueller, Courtney White, Ioana Uricaru, Benjamin Min Han,
and Dawn Fratini, who have all been supportive listeners, first-class colleagues, and
above all else, great friends.
Financial support for this project was provided in part by the Oakley Fellowship
and the Irvine Predoctoral Diversity Fellowship from the University of Southern
California, the Gary Cooper Scholarship and the Harold C. Lloyd Foundation Scholarship
iv
from the School of Cinematic Arts at USC, and a Visual Studies Graduate Certificate
Research Grant at USC.
Finally, this dissertation only exists because of the two most important men in my
life. My father has always been taking me to the movies, but on one fateful day in 2004,
he took me to see a zombie movie and started this whole thing. I am eternally grateful
that he has always been an unwavering source of encouragement and my biggest fan. I
would never have made it to (let alone, through) graduate school without him. My
brilliant, kind, wonderful husband, José Guzman, tirelessly and enthusiastically attended
Zombie Walks, read drafts, watched films, played video games, and otherwise made sure
that I never gave up on this project or myself. José has lived this project as much as I
have, and it is as much his as it is mine. He brings out the best in me and the best in my
work, and I couldn’t do what I do without him.
v
Table of Contents
Dedication ii
Acknowledgments iii
List of Figures vii
Abstract ix
Chapter One: Introduction: Our Zombies, Ourselves: The 1
Zombie in U.S. Popular Culture

Chapter Two: “They are not Men...They are Dead Bodies!” 73
From Cannibal to Zombie and Back Again
Chapter Three: What Greater Destiny? The Zombie, Gender 143
and Race

Chapter Four: You Ever Get the Feeling You’re Expendable? 222
Seeing Death, Beating Death, and Containing
Zombie Power

Chapter Five: Carnivals of the Undead: Performing the Zombie 292

Conclusion: “I Walked.” 372
Bibliography 383
vi
List of Figures
Figure 2.1 “Native” Costumes, King of the Zombies (1941) 112
Figure 2.2 “Native” Costumes, King of the Zombies (1941) 112
Figure 2.3 Victorian England? The Opening Scene of 113
Plague of the Zombies (1966)
Figure 2.4 Zombie Workers in the Sugar Mill, White Zombie (1932) 114
Figure 2.5 Zombie Workers as Legs Passing by the Camera, 115
White Zombie (1932)
Figure 2.6 Zombie Workers as Faceless Hordes, White Zombie (1932) 115
Figure 3.1 Smart and Skeptical: Lorena at the Beginning 211
of The House on Skull Mountain (1974)
Figure 3.2 The Virginal Victim: Lorena Later, Falling Under the 211
V oodoo Priest’s Spell, The House on Skull Mountain (1974)
Figure 3.3 Slaves Rising from the Grave, Sugar Hill (1974) 215
Figure 3.4 Black Femininity as Attractive and Destructive: Sugar 217
Facing Valentine in the Film’s Climax, Sugar Hill (1974)
Figure 3.5 White Male Power in Retreat: Valentine Facing Sugar 217
in the Film’s Climax, Sugar Hill (1974)
Figure 5.1 Waiting for the Zombie Walk, Newhall, CA 293
Figure 5.2 Boy Scouts (on the Right) Wait to Lead the Zombies 294
on the Walk; in the Background, Organizers Collect Food
for a Canned Food Drive
Figure 5.3 Preparing Zombie Walkers: Behind the Girls (to the Left), 294
the Make-Up Tent
vii
Figure 5.4 The Make-Up Tent 295
Figure 5.5 “Hey Zombies Get Your Free Brain Snack,” Sign at the 309
Way Station Coffee Shop Along the Zombie Walk Route
in Newhall, CA
Figure 5.6 Period Zombie Walker, Costa Mesa, CA 314
Figure 5.7 Zombie Priest, Costa Mesa, CA 315
Figure 5.8 Zombie Mad Scientist Makes up Zombie Convict, 315
Costa Mesa, CA
Figure 5.9 Zombie Policewoman and Friend, Newhall, CA 316
Figure 5.10 Zombie Dad with Zombified Toy Baby in Stroller, 358
Newhall, CA
Figure 5.11 Zombie Alice in Wonderland, Costa Mesa, CA 358
Figure 5.12 Young Woman with a “Brain” Hat, Newhall, CA 359
viii
Abstract
In October 2009, five pale, blood-stained teenagers sat on a curb in Newhall,
California. They were not crime victims nor movie extras. Rather, these teens were
“zombies,” waiting to participate in a Zombie Walk. These events, where groups of
people dressed as zombies lumber through the streets, have been happening globally
since 2001 and entice up to several thousand participants for each walk. Zombies are
familiar characters in comic books, video games, television and film, but with thousands
of people dressing as zombies and taking to the streets, it becomes clear that the kinds of
work zombies do in U.S. culture provides insight into how we approach death, try to
diffuse its potency, and use it to make political interventions into everyday life. Zombies
are critical repositories of social fears and desires related to capitalist wage slavery, race,
gender, and the political power of the masses, and as such, they demonstrate how
representations and performances of death, in widely different forms, have served
remarkably consistent functions in the United States throughout the past two centuries.
This project seeks to show that the zombie, as a creature of both/and—both slave
and master, both living and dead, both black and white—is often positioned as that which
invades the normative space of the living, a space that is generally conceived of in terms
of whiteness, patriarchy, and heterosexuality. In forcing those who exist in this space to
face a being who can encompasses both their ideals and that which their society rejects,
ix
the zombie can be used to try to support heteronormative ideals and the status quo while
also undercutting those same ideals—often within the same text.
Chapter one provides a survey of zombie scholarship and describes the history of
the figure in U.S. popular culture. Chapter two places zombies in their historical context,
considering their ties to V odou belief and U.S-Haitian relations. Examining travelogues,
magazine articles, and official documents about Haiti circulating in the United States in
the late 19
th
and early 20
th
centuries, the zombie is identified as one in a long line of
figures used in debates surrounding dependent territories, self-rule, and the limits of U.S.
democracy. Early film zombies thus come to symbolize the paradoxes of capitalist
democracy in the United States and as such, offer a potentially liberating imaginative
escape from dominant systems. However, this idealistic feature of zombies is restricted
by racism in early zombie films.
Chapter three considers how the zombie state in film is marked by race and
gender, arguing that while the zombie can be terrifying, it also presents a fantasy of
escape from white, heteronormative patriarchy. This fantasy state is often racialized,
positioning blackness as more attractive than normative whiteness, and female characters
frequently offer a point of identification with it. Many zombie films are therefore sites
for staging conflicts over non-heteronormative desires, both promoting and punishing the
transgressive and non-normative, often within the same text.
The fourth chapter considers the connection between the spectator’s relationship
to images of death in 19
th
century presentations, like phantasmagoria shows and séances,
x
to that same relationship in contemporary zombie video games. Arguing that certain
visual technologies can encourage a sort of doubling of consciousness that empowers
spectators/players, this chapter maintains that this empowerment, when placed in the
context of representations of the dead-come-back-to life, allows spectators/players to
enact desires that show death not as final, but as something that can be transcended,
which ultimately robs the zombie of some of its inherent political potential.
The fifth chapter examines Zombie Walks. These events present a contemporary
example of death being introduced into the world of the living to unsettle assumptions of
how public space should be used. Public performances of zombiness disrupt the
normative capitalist expectations of the spaces in which “zombies” walk while
simultaneously allowing walkers to reject Western beauty ideals by dressing up as rotting,
ugly corpses. In this way, zombie walkers offer an important example of the
contemporary carnivalesque.
The final chapter of this project illustrates that while the zombie can stand as
something that is both comforting and threatening, in either guise, it carries with it the
potential of another way of imagining human society, and as such, it can represent the
aspirations of any who feel that they are made over as slaves, cannibals, the infected, or
the abject by their society’s standards. Thus, often, in the form of the zombie, death is
not only made attractive in U.S. popular culture, it is made politically useful as well.
xi
1

Chapter One: Introduction
Our Zombies, Ourselves: The Zombie in U.S. Popular Culture

“Unlike Oxen, zombies never sleep, so the greedy skin-wearers put our brothers and sisters
to work plowing the fields. The live man’s military used our people to sweep for mines.
By replacing crash test dummies with zombies, the auto industry made millions
on the rotting backs of the undead.”
— Zombie Randall Skeffington explains “Zombie History”
1

On August 18, 2009, the headline to one of the stories on the Wall Street
Journal’s Health Blog asked: “What’s the Best Way to Fight Zombies? Someone did the
Math.”
2
Just over a week later, a headline in London’s Daily Mail read: “Forget Swine
Flu—Could we cope with a Plague of the Undead? Scientists Ponder the Threat of a
Zombie Attack.”
3
Two months later, in October 2009, a tongue-in-cheek “Zombie
Attack Plan” was published on the University of Florida’s disaster preparedness website,
causing a sensation with the local media before it was quickly taken down.
4
The zombie,
it seems, was on everyone’s minds.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
Ugly Americans, episode no. 8, first broadcast October 6, 2010 by Comedy Central, directed by Devin
Clark and written by Jeff Poliquin.
2
Jacob Goldstein, “What’s the Best Way to Fight Zombies? Someone did the Math,” Wall Street Journal
Health Blog (August 18, 2009), accessed on August 21, 2010, http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2009/08/18/
whats-the-best-way-to-fight-zombies-someone-did-the-math/.
3
Michael Hanlon, “Forget Swine Flu—Could we cope with a Plague of the Undead? Scientists Ponder the
Threat of a Zombie Attack,” The Daily Mail (August 26, 2009), accessed on August 21, 2010,
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1209052/Forget-swine-flu--cope-plague-Undead-Scientists-
ponder-threat-zombie-attack.html.
4
University of Florida, “ZOMBIE ATTACK Disaster Preparedness Simulation Exercise #5 (DR5),” PDF,
n.d., accessed on October 1, 2009, https://lss.at.ufl.edu/services/reports/cms/zbsd_exercise.pdf; see also
Todd Wright, “UF Emergency Plan Includes Zombie Attack,” NBC Miami Online (October 2, 2009),
accessed on October 26, 2009, http://www.nbcmiami.com/news/weird/UF-Emergency-Plan-Includes-
Zombie-Attack-63141182.html.
2

Yet, it wasn’t just the possibility that a zombie attack could really happen; the
zombie also seemed to be the most appropriate metaphor for the moment. In May 2009,
Gendy Alimurung opened an article on the recent upswing in zombie media observing:
“We are in a time of the walking undead. A time of global economic recession, global
pandemic and hand-sanitizer frenzy. A time when hordes of the foreclosed, the fired and
the flu-ridden wander among us.”
5
A year later, Anne Bilson noted,
Take a look at the footage of the G20 demos in London, which shows
crowds of people herded, clubbed and beaten back by heavily armoured
police. The establishment is treating people like the zombies in Romero’s
films—as a faceless mass, less than human, a tide of contagion to be
stemmed at all cost… We are all zombies now.
6

The zombie as potential threat from without and threat from within: what is feared
one might become and what one fears one already is. While this might seem a
particularly contemporary anxiety, the zombie, in almost any of its incarnations, has been
inspiring similar fears for nearly a century. And this forces the question: what is it about
the zombie that makes it a convenient metaphor both for the abject Other ready to attack
and the dejected self, abused by the system?
7
Furthermore, given its associations with
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
5
Gendy Alimurung, “This Zombie Moment: Hunting for What Lies Beneath the Undead Zeitgeist,” The LA
Weekly (May 14, 2009), accessed on May 20, 2009,
http://www.laweekly.com/content/printVersion/583554.
6
Anne Bilson, “March of the Zombie,” The Guardian (June 1, 2009), accessed on July 17, 2010,
http://www.guardian.co.uk.
7
There are many different ways to approach the concept of “the Other.” It has been understood as other
peoples, other cultures, those people within a culture that deviate from its ideological norms, or even other
genders (typically, the female is Other to the male). In any incarnation, though, a binary is set up
contrasting the Other with an assumed norm: the Other represents that which any given group believes is its
3

slavery, decomposition, infection, and contamination, why would zombies ever be
considered powerful or attractive? Yet, they are.
Today, people dress up as zombies and take to the streets in Zombie Walks; they
can play as a zombie in video games like Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse
(2005) or Left 4 Dead (2008). One can buy a stuffed “Zombie Bunny” or see a film
where the zombie boy gets the girl. There is often a certain empowerment to be had in
taking up with or becoming a zombie. So, how did a creature that in its earliest
incarnations represented Haitian slavery and potential miscegenation and in its later
incarnations became a contagious cannibal also become a representative for those seeking
power outside of dominant systems? That is what this project sets out to explore.
To best comprehend the zombie in U.S. culture, one must first recognize where it
comes from, and this means traveling to Haiti to explore the nation’s history and one of
its national religions, Vodou.
8
Anthropologists writing on the zombi, as it is known when
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
opposite (“us” versus “them,” with the Other being “them”). Thus, while on the most basic level, the Other
can be understood as that which is external to the self or the group, as Robin Wood observes, “it functions
not simply as something external to the culture or to the self, but also as what is repressed (though never
destroyed) in the self and projected outward in order to be hated and disowned… It is repression, in other
words, that makes impossible the healthy alternative—the full recognition and acceptance of the Other’s
autonomy and right to exist” (Robin Wood, Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan …and Beyond, rev. ed.
(New York: Columbia UP, 2003), 66). Thus, for any given group, the Other represents another group onto
which the first can project its most deep-seated fears and insecurities. The first group can then use these
hated characteristics as a justification for repressing, dismissing, or destroying the second group.
8
The term “voodoo,” as opposed to Vodou, became popularized in the west during the early 19
th
century
and most likely entered the United States via French variations (voudou) on the Fon word vodu, meaning
spirit or divine creature. The term was not in wide use until the 1880s, and it most likely rose in usage then
because of an upswing in interest in the religion in the United States. The rising prominence of Vodou
Queen Marie Laveau in New Orleans (d.1881) and the publication of Spencer St. John’s Hayti, or the Black
4

discussing it in its Vodou incarnations, offer up several different kinds of zombi, and
each of these has played a role in how the creature has been understood within the United
States.
9
Therefore, a description of the academic, news and fictional writing about the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Republic in 1886 present two possible reasons for new interest in the religion. There are several different
variations of the word in use today, including Vodou and Vodun. For the purposes of this project, I will use
the term Vodou in reference to Haitian (and other) religious beliefs and will use the more popular
Americanized term “voodoo” in reference to media presentations within the United States. I will, however,
remain true to spellings used by individual authors when referencing them. See also Peter Dendle, The
Zombie Movie Encyclopedia (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co, 2001), 13 for his description of using
voodoo vs. vodou. For a discussion on the many pitfalls of choosing a spelling of Vodou/voodoo, see
Henrietta B. Cosentino, “The Sacred Arts of What? A Note on Orthography,” Sacred Arts of Haitian
Vodou, ed. Donald J. Cosentino (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995): xiii-xiv.
Finally, for a discussion of the use of the term “voodoo” in the African-American Conjuring Tradition, see
Yvonne P. Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003), 7 & 77.
9
The two primary variations on the word are zombi (the term preferred in academic discourses on Haitian
Vodou and Vodou belief around the world) and zombie, the popular Americanized version of the term.
However, the variation zonbi is sometimes used as well. For the purposes of this project, I will use the
more popular U.S. variation zombie in reference to the Americanized concept within popular culture and
will use the term zombi in reference to the being as it is understood in Vodou belief and anthropological
writings. However, when quoting texts and other materials, I will stay true to the variation used by the
original author(s). As to the etymology of the word zombi, there are many opinions. It has been linked to a
snake deity, Haitian Revolutionary hero Jean Zombi, and a species of bird, among other things. See
Newbell Niles Puckett, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro (1926; reprint, New York: Negro Universities
Press, 1968), 179 & 186, for its use as a snake deity; see Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), for its ties to Jean Zombi and a discussion of Moreau de
Saint-Méry’s definition of the word as a “Creole word that means spirit, revenant,” (37); see Shawn
McIntosh for its ties to 18
th
century mentions of the zambi in Brazil in “The Evolution of the Zombie: The
Monster That Keeps Coming Back,” Zombie Culture: Autopsies of the Living Dead, eds. Shawn McIntosh
and Marc Leverette (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2008), 4. Perhaps the best discussion of various
etymologies of zombi comes from Hans-W. Ackermann and Jeanine Gauthier in “The Ways and Nature of
the Zombi.” In the article, they explore possible French (les ombres), Amerindian (zemi) and West Indian
(jumbie/duppy) origins alongside African ones. The list of African words, including the Mitsogho (Gabon)
word ndzombi, meaning “corpse” and the Kongo (Congo) word nzambi, meaning “spirit of a dead person”
seem the two most convincing to me; see Hans-W. Ackermann and Jeanine Gauthier, “The Ways and
Nature of the Zombi,” The Journal of American Folklore 104.414 (Autumn 1991), accessed on October 9,
2005, JSTOR: 466-494. Finally, while many etymologies of the specific word zombie date its appearance
in the English-speaking world to the 1810s and 1820s (Jamie Russell dates its first appearance to 1819; see
Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema (Surrey: Fab Press, 2005), 9), this seems to be
in relation to other uses of the term zombi (deity, spirit, snake, etc.) and could simply be considered the
Anglophone version of the word zombi. The word zombie, used in the modern sense!as a living dead
5

zombi throughout the 20
th
century is a key to understanding why the creature can mean so
many different things to different people.
However, academics and news reporters have never been the only ones writing
about Haiti, Vodou, or the zombi, and by 1929, the Haitian concept of the living dead had
been sensationalized and sold to U.S. audiences as the “zombie.” This fictional monster
has undergone tremendous changes since the 1920s, and the myriad uses to which the
zombie has been put, both academically and popularly, point to its fluidity and flexibility
as a concept. Yet, the majority of work produced about the zombie tries to associate it
with a single idea: the zombie as economic figure, as social barometer, or as colonial
metaphor. However, this project argues that the zombie cannot be tied to one single
symbolic meaning and that it has, at times, stood on either side of a number of intriguing
binaries—good and evil, black and white, slave and master, cultural dupe and cunning
consumer—and its power as a symbol resides largely in its ability to represent both/and,
often at the same time. Historically, the zombie has been a site for thinking about not
only forms of subordination to dominant state institutions but also resistance to these
institutions, and despite all of the differences between various kinds of zombies, the
zombie, in each of its incarnations, has come to anchor fears and desires about
domination and difference between and within cultures. Therefore, tracing the uses to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
person without will!seems to have entered the U.S. vocabulary via William Seabrook’s book The Magic
Island. See W.B. Seabrook, The Magic Island (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1929).
6

which the zombie has been put in U.S. popular culture reveals that the dead have a
tremendous amount of political power within the world of the living, and as the zombie
shows, that power may support dominant institutions, serve to question them, or both,
often within the same text.

THAT VOODOO THAT YOU DO
In 1937 Anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits observed,
More than any other single term, the word ‘voodoo’ is called to mind
whenever mention is made of Haiti… Not only has emphasis been placed
on its frenzied rites and the cannibalism supposed on occasion to
accompany them, but its dark mysteries of magic and ‘zombis’ have been
so stressed that it has become customary to think of the Haitians as living
in a universe of psychological terror.
10

Herskovits’s quip about the American proclivity to think of Haiti only in terms of
“voodoo,” and at that, a voodoo imagined as the harbor of every sort of boogeyman, is a
potent reminder that the Haiti of the American imagination is a construct far removed
from Haitian reality. At the same time, Herskovits’s comment underlines how Haiti,
voodoo, and the zombie, were (and are) interrelated in U.S. popular culture: to many,
Haiti was (and is) a land of voodoo, and voodoo is a superstition that produces zombies.
Moreover, the zombie, as it entered the United States—both in popular culture and
academic works—was intimately tied to Haiti and voodoo, and as I will argue in Chapter
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
10
Melville J. Herskovits, Life in a Haitian Valley (1937; reprint, Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers,
2007), 139.
7

Two, these ties, at least in the popular understanding of the zombie, were not severed
when zombies were moved out of Haiti and turned into diseased, cannibalistic creatures.
The three ideas—of “Haiti,” “zombies,” and “voodoo”—cannot be cleanly divorced from
one another in a discussion of the zombie’s cultural history in the United States.
Haiti occupies the western third of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola in the
Greater Antilles. Christopher Columbus landed on the island in December 1492,
claiming it for Spain, and there were Spanish settlements there up until the Treaty of
Ryswick in 1697, which ceded the western third of the island—the land which is today
Haiti—to the French.
11
The French colony of Saint-Domingue quickly became their
most profitable New World colony, due in large part to its sugar, coffee and indigo
exports. While the Spanish had imported African slaves to the island as early as the 16
th

century, as the economy grew in the French colony, so too did the importation of African
slaves—at one point Saint-Domingue was the largest single market for slaves in the
region.
12
In 1791, spurred on in part by the French Revolution, slaves in Saint-Domingue
revolted, and in 1804, the independent nation of Haiti was formed.
Haiti represented (and in many ways, continues to represent) something of an
anomaly in the world: it stood for a successful slave revolt and a post-colonial space in a
world where most people hadn’t even become colonized yet, and it was a black-ruled
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
11
Spain kept the other two-thirds of the island, which is today the Dominican Republic.
12
See Chapter Two, n. 18.
8

nation in a white-dominated world that largely proclaimed the savagery of all non-white
peoples. Within the ideological spaces of the 19
th
century, especially those that clung to
ideas of white superiority, the need for colonial enlightenment, and the necessity of the
slave trade, Haiti represented everything that could possibly go wrong in the world. As
such, Haiti piqued much curiosity. How had these slaves done it? What was their secret?
One of the earliest answers to that question was Vodou.
While many Vodou beliefs are similar to Judeo-Christian ones, most consumers
of U.S. popular culture today don’t see Vodou as anything other than “voodoo,” or in
other words, as code for something nefarious or sinister. As Sidney Mintz and Michel-
Rolph Trouillot point out,
Most Americans and Europeans think they know what ‘voodoo’ means.
The meaning of the phrase ‘voodoo economics,’ for example…appears
to be understood and is clearly recognized as pejorative, even though it
has never been defined. The apparent collective assurance that the
meaning of such words and phrases is already known makes it unusually
difficult to write informatively about the history of Vodou and about
problems connected with the label.
13

Some of this has to do with the history of Vodou’s representation in the United States.
As Mintz and Trouillot note, “Since its beginnings in the New World, Vodou has always
stood in some counterposed dialectical relationship to other (European) religions…”
14

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13
Sidney Mintz and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “The Social History of Haitian Vodou,” Sacred Arts of
Haitian Vodou, ed. Donald J. Cosentino (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995),
123.
14
Mintz and Trouillot, 124.
9

As a belief system associated with the racial Other, Vodou has always been an easy target
for racist stereotyping, and Joan Dayan warns of trying to interpret Vodou life, especially
as it was lived before and just after the Revolution, from early sources: “Colonists,
missionaries, and the first chroniclers of Saint-Domingue… speak of any faith or
inspiration associated with blacks as ‘magic,’ ‘sorcery,’ or ‘superstition.’”
15
These
interpretations still color readings of Vodou in the United States.
To explain Vodou belief as it has operated and continues to operate in Haiti could
fill volumes. Besides, there is no one typical or representative Vodou—it means different
things to different sets of believers and is practiced in different ways in different places.
In fact, as Donald J. Cosentino remarks, “Much of the terror ‘voodoo’ inspires among
foreign and domestic outsiders stems from its polyvocality.”
16
This is because Vodou did
not simply appear in Haiti as an unique indigenous belief system, but was born of the
syncretic mixing of African, European and local Amerindian beliefs that converged and
clashed on the island of Hispaniola, and as with any religious belief system, it has
continued to change and evolve and incorporate various cultural influences over time.
17

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
15
Dayan, 242; Dayan’s book provides one of the best explanations of Vodou belief in general but also one
of the best historiographical descriptions of writings on Saint-Domingue, Haiti and Vodou available in
English.
16
Donald J. Cosentino, “Imagine Heaven,” Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, ed. Donald J. Cosentino (Los
Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995), 53.
17
Although a detailed description of Vodou practice is outside the purview of this chapter, most generally
speaking, in most Vodou belief, the supreme god, Bondyè, does not interfere in human affairs. As such, an
adherent must rely on the Loa (Lwa), who are intermediates willing to intercede in the world of the living.
Believers therefore serve the Loa, and each of the dozens of Loa (often associated with Catholic saints)
10

The first detailed attempt to explain the Haitian slaves’ religious beliefs actually
predated the Haitian Revolution and was in Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Description
topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’Islae
Saint-Domingue (1797), and while Saint-Méry’s book does not attempt to demonize slave
beliefs in the ways later books would, Joan Dayan is quick to point out that his
understanding of Vodou was limited.
18
However, his book is an excellent starting place
because it points to the back-and-forth of writing on Vodou, Haiti, and especially zombis
that occurred during the 19
th
and 20
th
centuries: while attempts by Saint-Méry and other
historians and anthropologists have tried, to varying degrees of success, to present Haiti
and Vodou at least neutrally, if not sympathetically, they have often been
counterbalanced and overshadowed by sensationalist stories of human sacrifice,
bloodlust, and the walking dead.
As will be discussed at length in Chapter Two, most writing on Vodou in the
United States during the 19
th
century tended to be negative. A typical example would be
from Mrs. Mary Ella Mossell’s report “Catholicism and Voudouism” for Philadelphia’s
Christian Recorder in 1887; in it, she not only links Vodou to cannibalism, but she
describes a Vodou ceremony she witnessed while traveling in Haiti: “…what I saw I am
not able to describe. It was terrible, it was abominable, it was degrading; it could not but
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
have their own particular rituals and songs and require specific kinds of service. During certain rituals,
many believe that the Loa may possess or “ride” their adherents.
18
Dayan, 243-44, 288 n. 7.
11

strike all right-minded people with horror, filling their souls with sadness and sorrow.”
19

To many in the United States of the 19
th
century, Vodou was something to be feared, and
this, in part, helped the United States convince its citizens of the need to occupy Haiti in
1915. As Laënnec Hurbon reports,
At the historical moment when Americans were to be in direct contact
with Haiti, there was nothing to encourage a critical judgment of the
prejudices accumulated since slavery about Vodou… In short, from the
moment that the United States becomes interested in the military and
political domination of Haiti, it already holds a ready-made ideology
toward Vodou, which it interprets as an expression of a state of barbarism
from which the Haitians must be delivered.
20

Not only were reports from the 19
th
century used to justify an American presence in
Haiti, but once there, reports from U.S. Marines and other visitors began to reinforce
earlier stereotypes, like the Haitians practiced human sacrifice.
21
There were even reports
of Marines being cannibalized by local Vodouisants in response to the Occupation.
22

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
19
Mrs. Mary Ella Mossell, “Catholicism and Voudouism,” The Christian Recorder (May 5, 1887),
accessed on May 26, 2009, The African American Newspaper Collection through the Accessible Archives
at USC.
20
Laënnec Hurbon, “American Fantasy and Haitian Vodou,” Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, ed. Donald J.
Cosentino (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995), 183; Later, Hurbon goes on to
show how U.S. views of Vodou—as a superstition full of sorcery and zombification—played a part in how
Haitian elites dealt with the religion after the Occupation and may have been partially responsible for their
campaigns to try and eradicate it from the countryside (see especially pages 190-191).
21
Perhaps the most detailed account of U.S. writing on Haiti at the time (and how this contributed to an
imperialistic culture within the United States) is Mary Renda’s Taking Haiti, which chronicles the images
of Haiti being created by politicians, government officials and culture-makers, like Eugene O’Neill and
Langston Hughes. See Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S.
Imperialism, 1915-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
22
Jennifer Fay, “Dead Subjectivity: White Zombie, Black Baghdad,” The New Centennial Review 8.1
(2008), 88-89. While I will be delving into the charges of cannibalism leveled at Haiti throughout the 19
th

12

It was actually during the Occupation that the zombie first entered U.S. popular
culture, and Haiti’s turbulent history and the Vodou religion played a huge part in how
the zombie entered the U.S. imaginary. By associating the zombie with Haiti and Vodou,
it necessarily became associated with all of the charges of racial instability, barbarity, and
cannibalism that were leveled at Haiti and Vodou as well. Therefore, when the zombie
entered the U.S. cultural consciousness, it could be immediately recognized as something
Other to white heteronormative U.S. civilization. Because of its relationship to Haiti and
Vodou, the zombie could easily be read as everything that the ideal U.S. citizen was not.

RISE OF THE ZOMBIE
Several books on Haiti and Vodou came out in the United States during and
immediately after the Occupation. J. Dryden Kuser’s Haiti, Its Dawn of Progress after
Years in a Night of Revolution (1921) claimed that Vodou was the root cause of all of
Haiti’s problems, as did Faustin Wirkus’s popular 1931 book The White King of La
Gonave.
23
But perhaps no book on Haiti produced at this time was as influential as
William Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929). Seabrook was an explorer who had spent
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
and 20
th
centuries, I think it is sufficient to say here that cannibalism was most often a behavioral substitute
for race and that there was rarely (if ever) any substantiated proof of cannibalism in Haiti (see Chapter
Two).
23
See J. Dryden Kuser, Haiti, Its Dawn of Progress after Years in a Night of Revolution (Boston: Richard
G. Badger, The Gorham Press, 1921); and Faustin Wirkus, The White King of La Gonave (New York:
Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1931).
13

time in Haiti and returned to the United States with stories of Vodou—and zombies.
While there may have been reports of the walking dead before The Magic Island came to
U.S. bookstores,
24
it was here that the zombie truly entered the American popular
imagination, and as Hurbon is quick to point out, the zombie and “voodoo” became
forever linked in U.S. minds ever since.
25

The zombie, as Seabrook defines it, “is a soulless human corpse, still dead, but
taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life!it is
a dead body which is made to walk and act and move as if it were alive.”
26
While this
version of the zombie—the seemingly dead body animated without a will of its own and
put to work for another—was the version that first entered U.S. popular culture, it is by
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
24
At least in the reports of contemporary authors writing on the era; the word “zombie” may have been in
use in the English-speaking world before 1929, but it is doubtful, according to current evidence, that it was
widely linked to the concept of the living dead. There are some mentions of the concept in French texts—
Joan Dayan references an 1802 work that references raising a “zomby” and making it do work (249), but
Peter Dendle notes, “…even as late as 1928 folklorist Elsie Parsons mentioned that the ‘zombi’ was
virtually unknown outside of Haiti” (The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia, 2). Jamie Russell claims that
Lafcadio Hearn’s “The Country of the Comers-Back,” which appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 1889 is the
first appearance of the word “zombi” in an English language source (see Russell, 9); this is a bit
misleading. While Hern does use the term “zombi,” he is technically talking about Martinique and the
creature he describes is something of an all-purpose boogeyman and not necessarily a dead body returned
from the grave—the zombis he describes are more like spirits that are able to change form than anything
else (see Lafcadio Hearn, “The Country of the Comers-Back” (1889), Stories of the Walking Dead, ed.
Peter Haining (London: Severn House, 1986): 54-70). Reanimated corpses were largely absent from 19
th
-
century English-language stories of Haitian Vodou. And while, by at least 1912, there was some mention
of Vodou rites that allowed one to revive the dead in English-language sources (see Judge Henry Austin,
“The Worship of the Snake: Voodooism in Haiti To-Day,” The New England Magazine 47.4 (June 1912),
170, where he makes a brief reference to Vodouisants “exhuming and reviving supposedly dead
bodies…”), according to my research, Seabrook’s The Magic Island seems to be the first English-language
source in wide circulation to put the two concepts together (“zombie” = living dead).
25
Hurbon, 188.
26
Seabrook, 93. See Chapter Two for a longer description of The Magic Island.
14

no means the only kind of zombie. First of all, there is a difference between the zombi of
Vodou belief and its American cousin, the zombie.
As Hans-W. Ackermann and Jeanine Gauthier acknowledge, some authors
writing on Haitian Vodou discuss two kinds of zombi, a zombi of the soul and a zombi of
the body, while others only talk about the latter; however, even with these two
designations, there are some discrepancies: “…the zombi of the body and the zombi of
the soul include many sub-types classified either according to their origin or to the mode
of zombification…”
27
Moreover, when using traditional stories as sources, Ackermann
and Gauthier warn that “…folktales do not always make clear distinctions between the
two main types of zombi…”
28
However, generally speaking, the two kinds of zombi can
be described as follows: the zombi of the body, the kind much more familiar to American
audiences, is a body believed dead that is buried and when resurrected will be made to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
27
Ackermann and Gauthier, 473. Ackermann and Gauthier provide, in my opinion, the best available
chronicle of the different kinds of zombi mentioned in different anthropological accounts. Maya Deren
also gives a brief description of types of zombis in Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1953;
reprint, New York: McPherson and Co, 2004), 42; for a list of the different forms of dead/undead in Haitian
folklore, see George Eaton Simpson, “Haitian Magic,” Social Forces 19.1 (October 1940), accessed on
June 7, 2008, JSTOR, 97 n. 3.
28
Ackermann and Gauthier, 473; Ackermann and Gauthier also note that during their own fieldwork and
research in Haiti, “The subject of zombis came up constantly. These zombis were nearly always
immaterial. Flesh-and-blood zombis were mentioned only briefly… By contrast, information on zombis of
the soul was abundant and varied…” (485-86). They go on to mention that much of the information
presented by other anthropologists as zombi fact was never mentioned by the local houngans they
interviewed. It seems clear that the presentation of the zombi as it exists in Haitian belief within the United
States, even in academic circles, may be colored by expectations of finding zombis of the body, or more to
the point, zombis that correlate better to the popular American understanding of “zombie.”
15

work for another.
29
The zombi of the spirit is a little harder to define, but typically, it is a
soul that has been separated from its body. As Ackermann and Gauthier note, “…this
type of zombi is heterogeneous. It may be either an apparently normal soul unaffected by
magic or a soul that has been magically captured and enslaved.”
30
The apparently normal
souls they mention may be, for instance, the souls of those who have died in accidents or
who have died before their time. The magically enslaved souls are those that have been
sought out by a houngan, manbo or bokor
31
and placed in a bottle, so that the power of
the soul may be directed to work on someone’s behalf.
32

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
29
Ackermann and Gauthier point out that zombis of the body are by no means exclusive to Haiti, making
reference to similar creatures in Africa, the Caribbean, and South America (478-9). Also, Katherine
Dunham subdivides zombis of the body as follows: those bodies that have truly died and been resurrected
to work and those that have been drugged so as to appear dead and have been kidnapped to work. She
claims that if the truly dead zombi should ever eat salt, it would fall down dead right there (this is
corroborated in a number of other accounts) and that if the drugged zombi should eat salt, that person
would come back to life “as a normal human being” (Katherine Dunham, Island Possessed (Garden City,
NY: Doubleday & Co, 1969), 184-85).
30
Ackermann and Gauthier, 482.
31
A houngan is a male Vodou priest, a manbo is a female Vodou priest, and bokors are sorcerers.
Typically speaking, houngans and manbos are associated with positive or neutral works and bokors are
associated with more malevolent practices. Zora Neale Hurston is quick to point out that for many, zombis
are typically only the province of bokors—true houngans and manbos would have nothing to do with
creating or enslaving them (Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica
(1938; reprint, New York: Harper & Row 1990), 189). Edna Taft also makes this assertion (Edna Taft, A
Puritan in Voodoo-land (Philadelphia: Penn Publishing Co, 1938), 257). Alfred Métraux, on the other
hand, makes no differentiation between bokors and houngans, and in fact, associates zombi-making with
houngans (Alfred Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti, trans. Hugo Charteris (1959; reprint, New York: Schocken
Books, 1972), 281). Finally, Elizabeth McAlister, in her discussion of zombis of the spirit, which she
refers to as zonbi, notes that “Capturing zonbi in order to perform mystical work can be an act of sorcery,
but it is also a practice that can be morally benign” (Elizabeth McAlister, Rara! Vodou, Power, and
Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 105).
32
For discussions of zombis of the spirit, see Bryan Senn, Drums O’ Terror: Voodoo in the Cinema
(Baltimore, MD: Luminary Press, 1998), 16; Elizabeth McAlister, “A Sorcerer’s Bottle: The Visual Art of
16

In the Haitian context, the concept of the zombi is intertwined with the concept of
slavery, both as it was understood under French colonizers and as it was experienced in
its neo-colonial form during the American Occupation, and the connection between
zombis and slavery has not been lost on commentators writing on the subject.
33
In his
1959 book Voodoo in Haiti, Alfred Métraux observed, “A zombi’s life is seen in terms
which echo the harsh existence of a slave in the old colony of Santo Domingo.”
34
Over
thirty years later, Elizabeth McAlister frets over the two zonbi she has inadvertently
purchased and who now reside in a bottle in her living room; she observes of the man
who captured them for her: “This man, a descendant of African slaves who fought for
their independence, is now a slavemaster of the dead.”
35

As these remarks show, while one could point to a sense of empowerment
attached to the ability to capture and control zombis, either of the body or of the spirit,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Magic in Haiti,” Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, ed. Donald J. Cosentino (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler
Museum of Cultural History, 1995): 305-321; or McAlister, Rara!
33
It is worth noting, though, that in their examination of zombi lore, Ackermann and Gauthier come to
question the popular notion that zombis are made to provide cheap labor; as they relate: “An obvious
motive for zombification is profit through exploitation of slave labor, but this appears improbable because
of the low cost of normal labor in Haiti…” (475). Likewise, in a story on Harvard ethnobotonist Wade
Davis and supposed real-life zombi, Clairvius Narcisse, it is mentioned that “Narcisse, who spent several
years as a slave on a sugar plantation, reports that zombies do not make very good workers. Says he, ‘The
slightest chore required great effort’” (Bernard Diederich and Claudia Wallis, “Zombies: Do They Exist?”
Time (October 17, 1983), accessed on June 15, 2009, http://www.time.com/time/). While this article does
purport to prove the existence of real-world zombis, the testimony of Narcisse also serves to undercut the
real-world logic in creating and maintaining a zombi workforce.
34
Métraux, 242.
35
McAlister, “A Sorcerer’s Bottle,” 314; McAlister refers to zombi of the spirit as zonbi.
17

this is often seen in a negative light—as something only the most malevolent of people
would do. Thus, any empowering aspect of zombi-creation in Haiti is almost always
overshadowed by reports that center on its ties to a history of slavery.
36
This habit of
focusing nearly exclusively on slavery and the negative aspects of zombification mirrors
a similar tendency in assuming that zombies are likewise always positioned as negative
creatures and zombification as something to be avoided. However, as this project will
show, in many ways because of the zombie’s ties to slavery, it has become a potent
symbol and attractive alternative identity for those who feel exploited by dominant
systems of power.
Some of the issues of slavery that haunt the zombi were clear in Seabrook’s
depictions, but by the time Seabrook’s “zombies” became popularized in the United
States, the connections to a colonial past, a century of demonization, diplomatic isolation,
embargoes, and the Occupation were largely hidden under the spectacle of most zombie
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
36
I do not want to digress into an argument over whether authors from outside of Haiti choosing to read
zombis only as slaves reinscribes conventional stereotypes of Haiti and the Haitian people. I don’t think
that is the intention of any of the authors I have thus far mentioned, and there are several authors—
particularly Dayan and Ackermann and Gauthier—who do discuss the possibilities of seeing the zombi as
something more than only a slave. However, it is worth noting that discussing the zombi in terms of
Haitian fears/memories of slavery is perhaps the most frequently-used means of discussing the concept,
either in anthropological studies or in scholarly writings about the zombie in U.S. culture, at least in my
limited experience. Francis Huxley, writing on Haiti and Vodou in the 1960s, does not discount the
connection between slavery and zombiism; however, she notes that the zombi is also deeply connected to
complex Vodou beliefs, many of which involve the idea that the soul can outlive the body and can, under
certain circumstances, be forcibly stolen from a body (see Francis Huxley, The Invisibles: Voodoo Gods in
Haiti (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 86).
18

films.
37
In fact, it was hard to escape the spectacular when discussing zombies, even
though there were numerous attempts to do so.
Several non-fiction accounts of zombis/zombies were published in the immediate
years following the release of The Magic Island. These included Inez Wallace’s 1942
series of articles for The American Weekly, entitled “I Walked with a Zombie,”
38
and
Zora Neale Hurston’s 1938 book Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica.
In that book, Hurston describes her travels in Haiti in the 1930s and her experiences as a
Vodou initiate.
39
Hurston acknowledges: “No one can stay in Haiti long without hearing
Zombies mentioned in one way or another, and the fear of this thing and all that it means
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
37
There were, of course, charges that Seabrook’s work itself was highly spectacularized. In his
“Recollections of Haiti in the 1930s and ‘40s,” Harold Courlander observes of a trip to Haiti: “Down in the
city I had heard a number of times that Seabrook had obtained much of his information at his hotel bar.”
He continues that at the bars, “It was commonplace for some Haitians to say that ‘voodoo’ and witchcraft
really didn’t exist, but before long they would be telling of a personal encounter with a zombie.” Still
Courlander concedes, “…I now believe that though The Magic Island was a personal adventure story
geared to a popular audience, and though its facts often were manipulated for dramatic, eerie effect, in
certain respects it was better researched than some of the books that came in its wake” (Harold Courlander,
“Recollections of Haiti in the 1930s and ‘40s,” African Arts 23.3 (April 1990), 62).
38
These would become the basis for the 1943 Val Lewton film of the same title; Wallace, like so many
other writers, did not report on first-hand experience, as Seabrook claimed he did, but rather repeated
stories heard on her travels through Haiti. As she remarks, “I believe because I know from indisputable
sources that these things have happened, and are happening today—not many miles from our highly
civilized United States, down in the mysterious magic island of Haiti” (Inez Wallace, “I Walked with a
Zombie” (1942), Stories of the Walking Dead, ed. Peter Haining (London: Severn House, 1986), 96).
39
Although throughout this chapter, I make reference to U.S. popular culture in the singular, there are, of
course, many different popular cultures operating in the United States. Moreover, there is no singular way
to read or react to any of these cultures, and any number of variables—race, age, sexuality, gender,
religious belief, and the like—would play a part in how one read and interacted with popular culture
characters like the zombie. It is outside of the purview of this project, but it should be noted that African-
American and/or African diasporic readings of the zombie, like those produced by Hurston or Katherine
Dunham, may have been colored by their identities as black women and may have significantly differed
from those of other groups writing on zombies.
19

seeps over the country like a ground current of cold air. This fear is real and deep.”
40

Hurston believes that zombis are real; indeed, beyond reporting on stories of real-world
zombis circulating in Haiti, Hurston describes a zombi she met in a hospital in Gaonaïves
and even provides a photograph of the woman in her book.
Katherine Dunham, who traveled in Haiti in the late 1930s, wrote about her time
there in Island Possessed, and she also relates that the zombi was ever-present:
Favorite stories beyond those already discussed were of people believed
dead but buried alive, which led to the dead coming to life, which
inevitably led to the word which never fails to interest tourists in Haiti,
zombies. Something about the persistence of my storytellers, and the
sincerity with which they told of the long history of recorded cases since
colonial times in Haiti, made me put the zombie stories out of the category
of tall tales and take a real interest in the macabre subject.
41

In the mid-1930s, Dunham’s mentor, Northwestern University Anthropologist
Melville J. Herskovits and his wife, Frances, went to Haiti to conduct ethnographic
fieldwork in the rural countryside. Upon their return to the United States, he wrote Life
in a Haitian Valley (1937), and to many, the book marks one of the first sympathetic
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
40
Hurston, 179.
41
Dunham, 184; in particular, Dunham mentions the story of Ti Couzin, a houngan who supposedly kept
seven zombified wives. This same man is mentioned in Hurston’s Tell My Horse, and she identifies him as
as a powerful houngan as well (Hurston, 177). Against the advice of local friends, Dunham was able to
arrange a meeting at Ti Couzin’s home, where she was struck by strange goings on (his wives didn’t seem
aware of her presence; they acted in concert; she felt herself being drawn under the power of Ti Couzin at
one point, etc.). Eventually, Dunham decided that it was a combination of Ti Couzin’s magnetic
personality and his possible use of hypnotism and drugs that perpetuated the zombi stories connected to
him; unlike Hurston, she remained unconvinced that zombis truly existed.
20

readings of Vodou in the West.
42
The book also, as Michael D. Largey reveals,
“challenged the ways in which culture had been viewed in Haiti until that time.”
43
Rather
than assuming that everything of cultural value came from the French, according to
Largey, in Life in a Haitian Valley, Herskovits “assumed the primacy of African culture”
in Haiti.
44

This link to Africa would become part of the zombi concept as well.
45
Dunham
observes that in one of Herskovits’s later works Dahomey: An Ancient West African
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
42
In 1933, Joseph Williams’s Voodoos, and Obeahs: Phases of West Indian Witchcraft was published, and
while Williams’s grasp on Vodou might not have been as complete as many of the scholars that would
follow, his book does provide a rather comprehensive literature review on Vodou for the time, see Joseph J.
Williams, Voodoos, and Obeahs: Phases of West Indian Witchcraft (1933; reprint, Charleston, SC:
BiblioBazaar, 2008); after Herskovits, writers of note on Haiti and Vodou would include James Leyburn,
whose 1941 book The Haitian People does make brief mention of zombis, and Harold Courlander, whose
essays included 1944’s “Gods of the Haitian Mountains” (see James Leyburn, The Haitian People, rev. ed.
(1941; reprint, New Haven: Yale UP, 1966); and Harold Courlander, “Gods of the Haitian Mountains,” The
Journal of Negro History 29.3 (July 1944): 339-372).
43
Michael D. Largey, Vodou Nation: Haitian Art, Music and Cultural Nationalism (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2006), 205; see also Herskovits, Life in a Haitian Valley.
44
Largey, 206. Although the connection between Haiti an Africa might seem rather obvious now, it wasn’t
always so, and while the impact of African cultural beliefs should in no way overshadow other influences
on Haitian belief or how Haiti and Vodou have developed independent of Africa, the relationship between
Haiti and Africa should not be forgotten (especially as it certainly influenced 19
th
century understandings of
Haitian culture and promoted certain racist assumptions about the new nation). For a discussion of the
African influences on Vodou, see Suzanne Preston Blier, “Vodun: West African Roots of Vodou,” Sacred
Arts of Haitian Vodou, ed. Donald J. Cosentino (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History,
1995): 61-87.
45
Interestingly enough, only one feature zombie film in the United States before 1968’s Night of the Living
Dead was set in Africa—this was 1957’s Zombies of Mora Tau. The pressbook for the film makes several
references to “the voodoo coast of Africa” and “Africa’s Voodoo Waters!” (Zombies of Mora-Tau
Pressbook. Columbia Pictures, 1957. The Cinema-Television Archives, University of Southern California,
1, 3). A significant return of zombies to Africa in the post-1968 years would be the video game Resident
Evil 5 (2009), which takes place in Africa and which is discussed in Chapter Four.
21

Kingdom,
46
he makes a clear connection between zombis and Africa: “Melville
Herskovits…writes of the zombi: ‘They were soulless beings, whose death was not real,
but resulted from the machinations of sorcerers who made them appear as dead, and then,
when buried, removed them from their graves and sold them into servitude in some far-
away land.”
47
The zombi, in this understanding, is therefore a link to African culture, and
as Dunham understands, a comment upon slavery that in some ways predates the
experience of the Middle Passage.
48

Yet, the cultural underpinnings of Vodou and the zombi, African or otherwise,
were not what most of the American public was exposed to—much of what was reported
about Haiti in the last half of the 20
th
century mirrored the rhetoric used to describe Haiti
in the 19
th
century or seemed to sensationalize Vodou practice. For instance, by the mid-
1980s reports of real-world zombis in Haiti were beginning to surface in the United
States, and at the center of these reports was news that a Harvard-trained ethnobotanist
working on his Ph.D., Wade Davis, had not only met some of these supposed zombis but
had confirmed that, in fact, real-world zombification and zombis existed.
49

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
46
Melville J. Herskovits, Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom, vols. 1 & 2 (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern UP, 1967).
47
Dunham, 185.
48
As Dayan reminds of Vodou, it “must be viewed as ritual reenactments of Haiti’s colonial past, even
more than as retentions from Africa” (xvii).
49
Perhaps the most famous story of real-world zombification is Clairvius Narcisse, who had been
pronounced dead by an American doctor in 1962 and yet reappeared in his home village eighteen years
later, claiming to have been zombified.
22

In 1985, Davis’s book The Serpent and the Rainbow, became a media sensation.
50

Davis had travelled to Haiti, in the words of one article, to seek “a cultural answer, an
explanation rooted in the structure and beliefs of Haitian society. Was zombification
simply a random criminal activity?”
51
Davis came back with not only an answer to that
question but also with the chemical composition of the powder supposedly used to create
zombis. In The Serpent and the Rainbow and his 1988 follow-up Passage of Darkness:
The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie, Davis claimed that certain Vodouisants used
powders containing tetrodotoxin to produce a deathlike state in their victims, who after
burial were dug up, drugged with a hallucinogen, and forced to work. Davis explained
that certain Bizango societies
52
used zombification as a social sanctioning device—a way
to keep community members in line by threatening them with servitude. However, there
was much criticism leveled at Davis’s theories—in particular, inaccuracies in his work
and his use of questionable methodologies.
53

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
50
It was made into a film in 1988 and while the premise does involve an ethnobotonist traveling to Haiti in
search of pharmaceutical remedies, the film quickly moves into more standard horror territory.
51
Gino Del Guerico, “The Secrets of Haiti’s Living Dead,” The Harvard Magazine (January/February
1986), accessed on March 31, 2010, http://windward.hawaii.edu/facstaff/dagrossa-
p/articles/SecretesofHaitisLivingDead.pdf.
52
Secret societies of Vodouisants who, depending on who is doing the defining, either serve to further
community maintenance by serving as social supervisors or are malicious sorcerers out to terrify and
threaten non-Bizango members.
53
For an example of the criticisms Davis faced, see William Booth’s “Voodoo Science,” Science (April 15,
1988): 274-277. Philip Horne, in particular, wonders why the Bizango societies that Davis claims
administer zombification potions and act “just like a normal government” would give a relative newcomer
like Davis five samples of the zombi potion without going through a “complex judicial process” like the
ones Davis claims take place before the potion is administered (see Philip Horne, “I Shopped with a
23

Still, Davis’s claims about zombification’s role as a means of social control have
been taken up by many others writing on the subject outside of anthropology. For
example, Bryan Senn, following Davis’s assertions, states, “Unlike cinematic zombies,
who are generally portrayed as the innocent victims of greedy sorcerers eager for slaves
or as mindless instruments of revenge, the Haitian zombie is a convicted criminal serving
out a sentence for his crimes against the community.”
54
Likewise, Shawn McIntosh in
“The Evolution of the Zombie: The Monster That Keeps Coming Back,” notes that one
can infer from Davis’s assertions that “…Haitian peasants greatly fear being removed
from ‘the many’ and becoming ‘the one.’ This is the exact opposite of what causes fear
among modern audiences in industrialized society, who are afraid of losing their
individuality and becoming one among ‘the many.”
55
Ignoring the particular binary set
up here between “modern audiences” and Haitians, relying on Davis’s assertions alone
seems to go against what other anthropologists and academics have found in studying
zombis in Haiti.
Going back to Alfred Métraux’s work on Haiti in the 1950s, Métraux had also
heard of the powerful potions and drugs that could induce a zombi state, but he ultimately
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Zombie,” Critical Quarterly 34.4 (Winter 1992), 106). For an interesting comparison of Davis, Hurston
and Métraux, see Kette Thomas, “Haitian Zombie, Myth, and Modern Identity,” Comparative Literature
and Culture 12.2 (June 2010), accessed on June 20, 2010, http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol12/iss2/12/.
54
Senn, 16.
55
McIntosh, 3.
24

decided that real-world zombis were nothing more than mentally challenged people being
conveniently called by another name.
56
Yet, even if Métraux’s theory was incorrect and
there are real-world zombis produced by drugs, Davis’s claims about social sanctioning
seem to go against the wealth of folklore and stories gathered by other scholars.
57
The
folk stories Katherine Dunham collected on zombis for Island Possessed, for instance,
rather than being warnings about following community standards, are generally
cautionary tales about being wary of certain people and places.
58
In Tell My Horse, Zora
Neale Hurston discusses how certain bokors will find God and decide to free their
zombis; as she relates, “They are not freed publicly, you understand, as that would bring
down the vengeance of the community upon [the bokor’s] head.”
59
Inez Wallace’s
stories of zombis in her collection “I Walked with a Zombie” likewise mention a
community that kills a zombie-maker once they realize she has been making zombis.
60
If
zombis were created via community maintenance—to get rid of troublemakers—then
why would communities seek revenge on zombi makers?
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
56
Métraux, 281-82.
57
It might be worth noting, as well, that before he traveled to Haiti to search for the “zombie powder,”
Davis had never studied the nation or its culture.
58
See Dunham.
59
Hurston, 197.
60
See Wallace.
25

If zombis are conceived of in the Wade Davis manner—as victims of community
social control—then zombification is little more than an indigenous form of slavery and
the process carries no real positive meaning nor sense of empowerment for most
Vodouisants. It is something that might happen to them, operated in secret by the
powerful, but not something over which they can exercise any kind of control. However,
if the zombi is conceived of not necessarily as a punished/banished body but as one that
might provide Vodouisants with some sense of power over their lives/deaths, then it can
be taken out of a strictly colonial reading that paints most Vodouisants as victims.
In her review of versions of a supposed real-world zombi tale involving the
zombification of a young lady in Haiti, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert comes to the
conclusion that these stories, which consist of the young woman being made into a zombi
by a man who could otherwise never attain her, “posit sexual desire—the erotic—as a
fundamental component of the zombified woman’s tale, hinting at…the urge to transcend
or subvert race and class barriers…”
61
As she observes, the young woman’s “social
inaccessibility lies at the heart of her heinous zombification.”
62
While the stories
Paravisini-Gebert are dealing with are folkloric in nature, they do seem to suggest that
zombification might be viewed not as much as a means of keeping a community in line
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
61
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, “Women Possessed: Eroticism and Exoticism in the Representation of
Woman as Zombie,” Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah and the Caribbean, eds. Margarite
Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1997), 42; Paravisini-Gebert
sees these issues at work in the films White Zombie (1932) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943) as well.
62
Paravisini-Gebert, 42.
26

but rather, as the only means some community members have to transcend their social
positions.
Ackermann and Gauthier also wonder about the logic of zombi-making as social
sanctioning. They remark, “Zombification of the socially undesirable seems to us to be
an extremely harsh punishment, out of proportion with the rather vague crimes
committed by Davis’s zombis. It may even be pure invention, as are so many fantastic
tales about the supernatural powers of the Bizango society…”
63
Finally, Elizabeth
McAlister, in her interviews with supposed zonbi makers, learned that zonbi were viewed
as members of a mutually-supportive community; as she describes: “Spirits of the
recently dead, if they were Vodouists when they were alive, are obliged to work for their
fellow living Vodouists.”
64
In an interview with one particular Vodouisant, McAlister
asked if he would be upset if someone took his zonbi and made it work after he died; the
man replied, “I wouldn’t be mad. On the contrary, there are people who are lazy and
people who are not. If you take the zonbi of someone who liked to work, they feel happy
because they didn’t like to sit around doing nothing.”
65
This view, then, posits zombi-
making and zombis as essential parts of community maintenance.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
63
Ackermann and Gauthier, 475.
64
McAlister, Rara!, 98.
65
McAlister, “A Sorcerer’s Bottle,” 317.
27

Yet, this more empowering view of zombis and zombi-making is not what
traditionally makes headlines in the United States. For instance, a June 2000 article in
The Augusta Chronicle noted “In Haiti, voodoo rituals to conjure up the deceased are so
common in some areas that graveyards are off limits after dark. Sorcerers who break the
law to steal bodies face harsh fines, imprisonment and even execution. Still, resurrected
corpses are frequently reported wandering about.”
66
The story goes on to report that
zombi-making potions are readily available in Haiti’s “back streets” but then notes that
“The zombie tradition also is strong in some parts of the Gulf Coast of the United States,
especially Louisiana and Mississippi…”
67
A 1993 article in the New Orleans Times-
Picayune reported on the celebrity status granted a newly escaped zombi named Andrew
Ville Jean-Paul, who recounted his story of enslavement and eventual release to crowds
throughout Haiti. While the article treats the zombi phenomenon with some skepticism,
it does observe, “Even some Haitian scientists believe zombies exists…”
68

Even more prevalent are the stories that rely on centuries-old rhetoric to paint
Vodou as a malicious superstition and the reason Haiti is economically and politically
unstable. During the turbulent years following the ouster of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc”
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
66
Randall Floyd, “‘Zombie’ Attacks are Part of Caribbean Tradition,” The Augusta Chronicle (June 4,
2000), F2.
67
Floyd, F2.
68
Anne-Marie O’Connor, “Self-Proclaimed Zombie Entrances Crowds in Haiti,” Times-Picayune (May 23,
1993), accessed on July 21, 2010, Lexis-Nexis, A28.
28

Duvalier, for instance, Karen McCarthy Brown notes that “U.S. news reporters and
television commentators…frequently referred, albeit obliquely, to Vodou as the
dimension of Haitian culture that encapsulated, and perhaps even explained, the country’s
violence.”
69
It should be no surprise, then, that a front-page Wall Street Journal story
from the era opened, “In Haiti these days, some problems can be solved with magic, and
some cannot.”
70
Telling the story of a former mayor of Port-au-Prince who supposedly
escaped mob violence by using magic, the reporter notes, “Western notions of progress
and development fade in the smoke of a voodoo priest’s flaming magic stones.”
71
This
coalesces with what Amy E. Potter found in an analysis of over 700 articles on Haiti in
six major U.S. newspapers during 2004: U.S. news reports tended to paint “Haiti as a
failed state, unable to properly govern itself, done in by itself and acts of nature…”
72
In
other words, she found that coverage of the nation had not greatly changed, at least in
tone, since the 19
th
century.
73

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
69
Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola: A Voodoo Priestess in Brooklyn (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2001), xiv.
70
Charles McCoy, “Black Magic Casts a Deepening Spell over Troubled Haiti—Natives Seek Solace in
Spirits, Gods and Bizarre Rituals…” Wall Street Journal (October 20, 1988), accessed on August 7, 2010,
ProQuest, 1.
71
McCoy, 1.
72
Amy E. Potter, “Voodoo, Zombies, and Mermaids: U.S. Newspaper Coverage of Haiti,” The
Geographical Review 99.2 (April 2009), 208.
73
One of the best analyses of the press coverage of Haiti since the time of the Occupation is Robert
Lawless, Haiti’s Bad Press (Rochester, VT: Schenkman Books, 1992).
29

But it isn’t only Haiti that is created as one part of a binary lauding Western
rationality in the face of continued superstition in the rest of the world. As recently as
2006, Vodou practice in New Orleans was linked to that city’s problems in the wake of
the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. After describing Vodou as “what its followers
consider a religion,” Shawn Calebs, a reporter for CNN, asked Vodou believers: if Vodou
was so powerful, why didn’t it protect the region from Katrina?
74
Similarly, after the
devastating January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Pat Robertson blamed the earthquake on
Vodou. Stating that Haiti’s slaves had sworn a pact with the devil in order to achieve
independence, Robertson said the nation was “cursed” and implied that the earthquake
was divine judgment on an evil people.
75
Hence, the binary so prevalent from the 19
th

century—pitting Western (implicitly white) rationality against Other (implicitly non-
white) superstition—continues to operate, both in terms of Haiti and of Vodou.
76

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
74
Shawn Calebs, “Voodoo Hexed in New Orleans,” CNN.com Video Clip (January 14, 2006), accessed on
January 15, 2006, http://www.cnn.com.
75
Strangely enough, New York Times reporter Samuel G. Freedman noted that many reports about Haiti in
the wake of the 2010 earthquake tended to focus on the nation’s Catholic beliefs rather than its Vodou ones.
In those articles, broadcasts, and blogs that did mention Vodou (besides commenting on Robertson’s
statements, of course), Freedman noticed the same refrains that had been plaguing reporting on Vodou in
Haiti for years: the religion was to blame for the country’s ills. Freedman notes that images of Vodou as
malevolent have “amazingly enough, survived into the present multicultural age” and that the use of the
term “voodoo” as synonymous with “fraudulent” has caused him to wonder, “…Would any public figure
dare use ‘Baptist’ or ‘Hindu’ or ‘Hasidic’ in the same way?” See Samuel G. Freedman, “Myths Obscure
Voodoo, Source of Comfort in Haiti,” The New York Times (February 20, 2010), accessed on August 7,
2010, The New York Times online archive.
76
Of course, there are those who operate outside of this binary—those who do not paint Haiti and Vodou as
monstrous Other to U.S. civilization and Christianity (Hurston, C.L.R. James, Dayan, and Herskovits, for
instance), but in popular presentations of Haiti and Vodou, the binary largely remains intact.
30

And this binary even operates, to a degree, in how the zombie is taken up in U.S.
popular culture. Today, the term “zombie” can refer to a host of negatives: zombie
computers (computers compromised by viruses and hackers to perform under remote
direction) or zombie banks and zombie companies (those banks and companies with a
zero net worth that continue to operate because of government subsidies), for instance.
Paul Krugman, in a 2009 article discussing the fact that many in the United States still
feel that any government intervention in the economy is a bad thing, asks “why won’t
these zombie ideas die?”
77
The irony of the comment aside, it becomes clear that the
zombie operates as a fluid concept within U.S. popular thought: it can be the real-world
zombis of Haiti, used to demonize and demean, it can be the negative term used to tag
something as useless or nefarious, or it can be a media creature, populating films,
television series and video games world-wide.
78

NOT ALIVE…NOR DEAD
While the zombie entered the U.S. imaginary as a purely Haitian creature, it did
not enter a culture totally unprepared for the notion of slaves-without-will or the dead
rising from their graves, and in fact, James B. Twitchell and Peter Dendle see zombie
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
77
Paul Krugman, “All the President’s Zombies,” The International Herald Tribune (August 25, 2009), 7.
78
While the zombie is certainly a transmedia creature that has taken hold across the globe, the focus of this
study is how it has been taken up and adapted within the United States. Of course, while the focus of this
project is on the zombie within the United States, I will occasionally make reference to texts produced
outside of the United States.
31

analogues in films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and J’Accuse (1919)
respectively.
79
However, the zombie itself did not truly enter U.S. film screens until
1932’s White Zombie.
80
The film, about a young American woman zombified while in
Haiti, followed Seabrook’s descriptions of zombies fairly faithfully and inaugurated what
I call the voodoo-style zombie.
Every scholar working on zombies has different criteria for evaluating what kind
of zombie is present in a film or even if it is a zombie film. I break zombies into three
major categories.
81
Voodoo-style zombies are the first of these categories, and they were
at their most popular on U.S. film screens from 1932 to 1968. These zombies may or
may not be dead bodies resurrected from the grave—often, they are simply people who
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
79
See Dendle, The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia and James B. Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy
of Modern Horror (New York: Oxford UP, 1985). I would agree with their characterizations of these two
films.
80
At least in feature-length form.
81
These categories roughly correspond to certain dates; however the dates are most useful as signposts of
when these kinds of zombies were at their most popular and not strict parameters of existence, as no
category of zombie every completely disappears from the cultural consciousness. Thus, voodoo-style
zombies were at their most popular between 1932 and 1968; Romero-style zombies have been popular from
1968 to the present day, and video game-style zombies started gaining prominence in the late 1990s and
continue to be influential today. Furthermore, I do have two other categories of zombies that I use in my
personal cataloging: proto-zombies and quasi-zombies. Proto-zombies are those zombie-like creatures that
appeared before Seabrook and White Zombie (1932): Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and the
returning soldiers from J’Accuse (1919) would fall into this category. In the quasi-zombie category, I
include A) film and media examples that others classify as zombies but I do not (perhaps the best example
of this would be the pod people from 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and B) those media examples
that I believe display qualities of zombihood without technically being zombies; for instance, the robotic
wives of The Stepford Wives (1975) would be a better fit into a Frankenstein’s monster category, but I must
admit the similarities in taking over a person’s body against her will and voodoo-style zombie tales.
Likewise, while Jaws (1975) is certainly not a zombie movie, the shark and Romero-style zombies do share
the drive to eat and the seemingly unstoppable need to feed on human flesh.
32

had been drugged or hypnotized so as to appear dead. However, there is always an
identifiable cause for zombification in voodoo-style texts. Be this a magic spell, a potion,
a hypnotizing machine or some other form of mind control, one can always identify how
zombies are produced.
To this end, these zombies are under the command of a zombie master.
Originally, this master had ties to some form of “voodoo.” As the voodoo-style films
moved further and further from their Haitian origins, though, the master changed. He (or
sometimes, she) might be a mad scientist, an alien, or even a communist. What matters
in these films is that zombification is traceable back to a source, because in these films, a
person can be rescued from zombification.
82
Without fail, the zombies of these films are
somehow freed from their master’s control as the zombie masters of these films are
always beaten in the end.
While this gives one an idea of what voodoo-style zombies were like, it is
important to remember that there was great room for experimentation within the genre,
which meant that the zombie could be molded and manipulated as filmmakers saw fit.
As several scholars have pointed out,
83
because zombies did not come to U.S. popular
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
82
And this would actually seem to parallel some of the anecdotal evidence concerning zombis in Haiti.
Several sources mention that when given salt, zombies will wake from their trance and return to their
graves. For examples of these stories, see: Wallace, Métraux, and G.W. Hutter, “Salt is not for Slaves”
(1931), Stories of the Walking Dead, ed. Peter Haining (London: Severn House, 1986): 39-53.
83
Peter Dendle, The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia; Jamie Russell; and Peter Haining, Introduction, Stories
of the Walking Dead, ed. Peter Haining (London: Severn House, 1986) among others, all bring up this fact.
33

culture via an already-established literary tradition, like Dracula or Frankenstein’s
monster did, nor did it have a long history in Western folklore,
84
U.S. audiences did not
have firm expectations when it came to the zombie. As Peter Haining noted in 1986
when discussing the lack of anthologies of zombie stories in the United States up to that
time, “Part of the reason for this scarcity of tales about the Walking Undead is no doubt
due to the fact that the subject has no great novels to its credit or even famous zombie
characters…”
85
Because audiences didn’t know what to expect from zombie narratives,
zombies could easily be transplanted to a variety of spaces and situations.
Therefore, by the second major zombie film,
86
1936’s Revolt of the Zombies,
cinematic zombies had already been moved out of Haiti and were undergoing a series of
changes. Zombie films responded to World War II, for instance, with Nazi zombie
masters in King of the Zombies (1941) and Revenge of the Zombies (1943) and to the
technological fears of the 1950s with zombies produced via mechanical devices working
off brain waves in Creature with the Atom Brain (1955) and via alien mind control in
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
84
Although the argument could certainly be made (and has) that the zombie does share characteristics with
revenants, ghosts, and later, ghouls.
85
Haining, 11.
86
There was a 1935 film, Ouanga, which will be discussed in both Chapters Two and Three, but it did not
see the wide release that either White Zombie or Revolt of the Zombies (1936) did.
34

Invisible Invaders (1959).
87
Moreover, by the 1940s and ‘50s, more and more zombie
films were being set in the United States.
The earliest voodoo-style films imagined zombiism as something created in exotic
spaces and wielded by foreign hands, and as zombie films entered the 1940s and ‘50s,
zombiism managed to retain its exotic Otherness while being utilized on American soil.
88

Often, this meant the importation of “native” experts, or it meant the potions and spells
used in zombification were divorced from “voodoo” per se and linked instead to mad
science or gypsy magic. Yet, for the most part, zombie masters remained tied to the
“foreign,” be they invaders from outer space or those marked as outsiders to normative
society.
89
By the 1960s, though, zombies were undergoing an even more startling
transformation.
This transformation fit with changes that were remaking U.S. horror films at the
time. As Joseph Maddrey explains, “By the 1960s, screen horrors were no longer being
imported or falling from the skies—they were being bred in our back yards…”
90
Films
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
87
Even when these films don’t use “voodoo,” per se, I still see them as voodoo-style films: in these films,
science (or alien intelligence) is positioned as a threatening belief system, not completely understood by
most people, that can be turned against U.S. bodies. In this sense, it inhabits the same ideological space as
voodoo and operates in the same capacity.
88
While some might cite 1936’s The Walking Dead as the first zombie film set on American soil, I classify
that film as quasi-zombie and more in the tradition of Frankenstein’s monster films. That would make
1942’s Bowery at Midnight the first zombie film set on U.S. soil in my estimation.
89
See Chapter Three.
90
Joseph Maddrey, Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004), 6.
35

like Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963), and Rosemary’s Baby (1968) ushered in this new
kind of horror, and soon, they were accompanied by a new kind of zombie film, 1968’s
Night of the Living Dead. The film, set in the Pennsylvania countryside, centered on an
inexplicable phenomenon whereby the dead were rising from their graves to attack and
eat the living. The story follows the fates of a group of people stranded at a farmhouse
trying to keep these flesh-eating zombies out while social relations within the house
break down. While the narrative sounds simple enough, George A. Romero’s low-budget
film dramatically altered the zombie genre and introduced a new kind of zombie to the
American public: the Romero-style zombie.
This type of zombie is a resurrected corpse, and unlike its voodoo-style cousin,
there is no rescue or cure from this kind of zombiism because it is now a virus: once
bitten, a person becomes infected, dies, and is regenerated as a zombie. The only way to
stop these zombies is to destroy their brains. Furthermore, Romero-style texts take away
the zombie master; there is little or no explanation as to what has caused the zombie virus
and thus, no real way to stop it. Therefore, these texts are apocalyptic in nature, and in
almost every one, the zombies are going to win.
While Night of the Living Dead did represent a dramatic change in the genre, the
seeds for this change were sown well before 1968. For instance, the visibly-rotting
corpses of Romero’s films had actually been seen in zombie films prior to Night of the
Living Dead, and comics like Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror had likewise
36

been presenting rotting re-animated corpses for years.
91
Of course, advances in makeup,
color filmmaking, and special effects helped spur on the presentation of gory decaying
bodies, but a weakening censorship system also helped. As the Production Code
Authority’s power diminished, exploitation films were on the rise. Helped in part by a
growing teenage audience yearning for sensational images, exploitation films, in many
ways, paved the way for Night of the Living Dead. One of the most important of these
films was the cannibal-themed Blood Feast (1963), and two of Night of the Living Dead’s
producers, Russ Steiner and Karl Hardman, remember Blood Feast as an influence, along
with similar gore films being made in Mexico and other foreign countries.
92
Therefore,
while Night of the Living Dead’s gore was revolutionary within the zombie genre itself,
within horror films more generally, it was simply following prevailing trends.
Social influences also played a part in the changes wrought by Night of the Living
Dead. The zombie genre, as one born of stereotypical and racist depictions of non-white
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
91
The 1959 film Invisible Invaders contained corpses brought back from the grave by alien control and the
Hammer Studio’s Plague of the Zombies introduced decomposing corpses in 1966. Moreover, Peter
Dendle notes of the visibly rotting corpse, “This trend actually took root in Mexico in advance of other
countries…” with examples like The Aztec Mummy series of films that started in 1957 (The Zombie Movie
Encyclopedia, 5). As for the influence of comics on Night of the Living Dead, George Romero even admits
the film “has a nostalgic quality which recalls the horror films and E.C. Comic books of the fifties”
(George Romero, Preface, John Russo, The Complete Night of the Living Dead Filmbook (New York:
Harmony Books, 1985), 7). For an extended discussion of the influence of E.C. comics on Night of the
Living Dead, see J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, “George Romero and the Return of the
Repressed,” Midnight Movies (New York: Harper & Row, 1983): 110-135. For a discussion of the
influence of comics on The Return of the Living Dead (1985), see: Ron Magid, “The Return of the Living
Dead, a Comic Strip,” American Cinematographer (March 1986): 26-33.
92
John Russo, The Complete Night of the Living Dead Filmbook (New York: Harmony Books, 1985), 74.
37

peoples and non-American cultures, was due to change in an era where many filmmakers
were deliberately attempting to move away from such representations. Additionally,
social upheaval in the United States, spurred on, in part, by the Vietnam War and the
counter-culture movement, could have also lent to a storyline where the center is attacked
by its own periphery.
93
In fact, several authors have noted the influences of similar kinds
of invasion stories on Night of the Living Dead. Robin Wood, Kyle William Bishop, and
R.H.W. Dillard all mention The Birds as a likely predecessor, and Bishop and Wood,
among others, also note the influence of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).
94

Romero himself has described the influence that Richard Matheson’s novella I am
Legend (1954) had on Night of the Living Dead. Matheson’s story of the sole survivor of
a vampiric epidemic that has taken over the world served as an inspiration for the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
93
For a reading of Night of the Living Dead in light of the Vietnam war, see Sumiko Higashi, “Night of the
Living Dead: A Horror Film about the Horrors of the Vietnam Era,” From Hanoi to Hollywood: The
Vietnam War in American Film, eds. Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP,
1990). Although a close reading of Night of the Living Dead is outside the purview of this project, in part
because so many other writers have already done so, it is worth mentioning that Night of the Living Dead
does mark a moment when the zombie’s origins in slavery and anti-colonial struggle seem most obfuscated
and yet, the zombie entered the U.S. imaginary at a time when U.S. forces were supposedly importing
democracy to the Haitians under the Occupation while systemic racism ran rampant at home; Night of the
Living Dead was likewise produced in an era of real-world Jim Crow racism while U.S. forces were
supposedly importing democracy to the Vietnamese. For more on the push-and-pull between U.S. racial
reality and U.S. attempts to promote democracy, see Chapter Two.
94
R.H.W. Dillard, “Night of the Living Dead: It’s Not Like Just a Wind That’s Passing Through,”
American Horrors, ed. Gregory A. Waller (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 26; Wood, 102;
Kyle William Bishop, “Raising the Dead,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 33.4 (Winter 2006),
199, and Kyle William Bishop, American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking
Dead in Popular Culture (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010).
38

vampiric elements Romero introduced into the zombie genre.
95
Not only do the
apocalyptic themes of the novella mirror the end-of-the world scenario of Night of the
Living Dead, but while Romero chose ghouls instead of vampires for his returning dead,
the vampiric notion of an infectious disease did become a part of the film and hence, the
zombie genre as a whole.
Yet, although the zombie genre seemed to be undergoing tremendous upheaval
and there were significant changes, there were also remarkable continuities. The voodoo-
style zombie before 1968 was born out of a context in which issues of slavery and the
possibility of anti-colonial uprising were at the fore: the zombie was a formerly free body
made to work for another but who, at any moment, might be made free and hence able to
turn on its former master. The zombie entered the United States as a creature produced
by a neo-colonial possession that U.S. forces were trying to civilize and save. It was a
seemingly monstrous figure that was meant to inspire fear and promote the idea of
containment. During the Vietnam war, while the United States was trying to civilize and
save another part of the world, the zombie was once again tied to ideas of a monstrous
Other and the necessity of containment. In both cases, systemic inequalities within the
United States, especially those stemming from racism, were overshadowed by a
perceived threat from without.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
95
The novella itself has been made into a film three times: 1964’s Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price as
sole survivor Robert Neville, The Omega Man (1971) with Charleton Heston in the Neville role, and I am
Legend (2007) with Will Smith as Neville.
39

While voodoo-style zombies did not completely disappear from screens with the
ascent of Romero-style films, the cannibalistic Romero-style zombie very quickly came
to be the predominate kind of zombie in all media. Yet, just as their voodoo-style
predecessors changed with the times, so too did these new zombies. In the 1970s, there
were films that mixed the voodoo-style premise with Romero-style zombies (Children
Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, 1972), Romero-style films that dealt with the
repercussions of the Vietnam War (Deathdream, 1974), and even blaxploitation zombie
films (Sugar Hill, 1974). George Romero even came back to the genre in 1978 with
Dawn of the Dead, which set its main action in a shopping mall in a critique of the
mindless consumption of both the living and the living dead.
While serious zombie films, like Romero’s next film Day of the Dead (1985)
continued to be made, the 1980s is marked by a gradually-evolving spoof cycle within
the genre. In 1982, zombies were used to mock film noir conventions in I Was a Zombie
for the FBI; valley girls battled zombies in 1984’s Night of the Comet, and in 1985 a pair
of films, Re-Animator and The Return of the Living Dead,
96
mixed gore and camp to
create a new zombie aesthetic. While there was at least one zombie comedy during the
pre-1968 period (1945’s Zombies on Broadway) and there were comedic elements in
other early zombie films, the horror of earlier voodoo- and Romero-style films gave way
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
96
The Return of the Living Dead has spawned a number of sequels, but is noteworthy in that it is an early
example of a Romero-style zombie film which presents a very clear cause for the zombie virus. The film is
also significant in that it is the genesis of zombies who are specifically hungry for human brains.
40

to films that imagined zombie invasions as carnivalesque farces with less-than-heroic
protagonists and presented a gore that, unlike the relatively understated gore of films like
Night of the Living Dead, celebrated bodily decay and cannibalized body parts—it was no
longer necessarily the horrors of decomposition that framed these narratives but rather the
comic excesses of bodies being bitten or falling apart that filled the screen.
Moreover, the 1980s cycle also brought forth a drastic change in depictions of the
zombie. While voodoo-style zombie films were often predicated on the notion of
somewhat sympathetic zombies—those white bodies that needed rescuing from
zombification—the Romero-style zombie, as it was initially conceived, was not
necessarily intended to be read as sympathetic. Yet, almost from the beginning, there
were those zombies that seemed set apart from the cannibalistic hordes of zombie
infected, and by the 1980s, the phenomenon of sympathetic zombies was becoming more
and more prevalent. Serious films like Romero’s Day of the Dead contained zombies
like this, but they were generally secondary characters. However, films of the comic
cycle began featuring sympathetic zombie more centrally so that by the late 1980s and
early 1990s, films with zombie protagonists, like 1988’s Dead Heat and 1993’s My
Boyfriend’s Back, were possible. To be sure, horrific zombies hungry for living humans
were still around but more and more zombies were being conceived of as figures not only
to be pitied but also to be envied and even looked up to. However, by the mid-1990s,
41

while zombies occasionally popped up on television
97
and in a growing direct-to-video
market, mainstream film zombies were largely becoming a thing of the past.
Zombies were becoming hot in another media, though. Film zombies had largely
become comic creatures, but with appearances as adversaries in Wolfenstein 3-D (1992),
Area 51 (1995) and the ever-popular Resident Evil series (1996-present), among others,
zombies started making a resurgence as serious fare in video games.
98
The huggable,
lovable zombie born in the 1980s spoof cycle was being replaced with a bloodthirsty
antagonist that needed to be destroyed, and while in most games, zombies followed the
Romero-style blueprint, subtle changes to that formula were also taking place. Hence,
while, technically, video game zombies and the zombie media they have inspired could
fall within the Romero-style category, I believe they can be more usefully given their
own category: video game-style zombies.
99

These zombies tend to differ from Romero-style zombies in a few key ways.
One, while the majority of Romero-style zombies are slow, many video-game zombies
tend to be fast. This makes them more of a threat in games where the objective is to kill
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
97
Perhaps most notably on the “Pink Eye” episode of South Park in 1997.
98
Of course, zombies have also been characters in literature, comic books, stage plays and other media, but
for the purposes of this chronology, the main focus is film, with forays into television and video games.
Zombies in video games will be discussed in Chapter Four. For an interesting analysis of why zombies
make such popular video game characters, see Tanya Krzywinska, “Zombies in Gamespace: Form,
Context, and Meaning in Zombie-Based Video Games,” Zombie Culture: Autopsies of the Living Dead,
eds. Shawn McIntosh and Marc Leverette (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2008): 153-168.
99
Tanya Krzywinska also argues for a third categorization of zombies based on those in video game play
(Krzywinska, 159).
42

zombies before they kill the player’s avatar. With video-game zombies, there is also a
return of a zombie master, or at least an identifiable source of the zombie contagion: in
almost all video game-style zombie manifestations, the game’s backstory cites either the
government or big business (or both) as the corrupt force creating zombie viruses. Thus,
as with voodoo-style zombie films, there is a traceable source causing the zombie
problem, which means that implicitly, there is a potential way to solve the problem—or at
least a way to make those responsible for it pay.
100
Finally, while Romero-style films, at
least as they were originally imagined in Romero’s “Dead” trilogy of films (Night of the
Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead), tend to view zombies on the
outside attacking living humans on the inside, many video game-style zombie texts
imagine a reverse scenario: living humans entering a space infested with zombies to kill
them in order to prevent the virus from spreading. Thus, there is a return to the voodoo-
style idea that zombies exist in very specific contained spaces, and the thrust of these
games, as it was in voodoo-style narratives, is to keep zombification and zombies from
spreading outside of their current borders. With Romero-style narratives, invasion
underlies the zombie threat, in voodoo- and video game-style narratives, containing a
localized threat is key.
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100
A built-in assumption of many zombie video games is that the player, most often conceived of as a
living human opposing zombies, can potentially WIN the game. Therefore, while the games might adhere
to the apocalyptic themes of Romero-style films to a degree, in almost all zombie video games, living
humans can possibly thwart the zombie apocalypse.
43

The most immediate influence of the zombie video games was, of course, felt in
the films that were based directly on them, like the Resident Evil series of films (2002,
2004, 2007, and 2010) or the House of the Dead films (2003 and 2005). However, the
influence could also be felt in the fast zombies of Zack Snyder’s 2004 Dawn of the Dead
remake and in 28 Days Later (2002). Finally, the zombie-hunting aesthetic so prevalent
in zombie video games can be seen in films like 2008’s Quarantine, where the
protagonists find themselves locked in a Los Angeles apartment building with rabid
zombies, and 2009’s Zombieland, with it’s “Kill of the Week” and its narrator’s rules on
surviving in a post-apocalyptic zombie world.
In fact, it was the popularity of zombie video games and the films they inspired
that prompted a zombie film renaissance in the early 2000s. However, while Romero-
style narratives of this era could produce sympathetic zombies related to those of the
1980s spoof cycle, the zombies of video game-style narratives tend to be far less likable.
Like the zombies of most zombie video games, they tend to be faceless hordes bent on
destroying and devouring the living. Thus, the zombie of the 21
st
century is both
huggable and horrible—in some texts, a comic, sympathetic and even heroic figure and in
others, a cold, unthinking killer.

44

READING THE ZOMBIE
In “Some Kind of Virus: The Zombie as Body and as Trope,” Jen Webb and Sam
Byrnand observe, “There are many points of attraction in the zombie character, and in a
period when zombies seem to be permeating popular culture and emerging in scholarly
literature, there are perhaps as many ways of approaching and evaluating zombies as
there are people who approach and evaluate.”
101
Meghan Sutherland likewise sees
zombie films as potential allegories for a number of concepts, or as she notes, “a kind of
structural scaffolding that can effectively support endlessly different platforms over
time.”
102
During the nearly century-long tenure of zombies in U.S. popular culture, they
have been read in a variety of ways: as political allegories, economic symbols, religious
figures, and subjects of philosophical debates. It seems zombies, as humans deprived of
their humanity either through slavery or through infectious cannibalism, become clean
slates for a host of cultural anxieties.
There is a growing literature on zombie media in academia,
103
but most of it
focuses on zombie films and then, either on films before Night of the Living Dead (what I
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
101
Jen Webb and Sam Byrnand, “Some Kind of Virus: The Zombie as Body and as Trope,” Body and
Society 14.2 (2008), accessed on July 21, 2010, Sage Publications Online, 83.
102
Meghan Sutherland, “Rigor/Mortis: The Industrial Life of Style in American Zombie Cinema,”
Framework 48.1 (Spring 2007), 66.
103
There is a much smaller literature on zombie video games and other media; perhaps the best collection
to include some of these is Zombie Culture: Autopsies of the Living Dead, eds. Shawn McIntosh and Marc
Leverette (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2008). Also, in the next few paragraphs, I will attempt to
highlight some of the best, or most noteworthy, academic writing on zombies, but this review of literature
should in no means be taken as exhaustive.
45

would classify as voodoo-style films) or exclusively on Romero-style films. There is
therefore a very real, although rarely discussed, divide implied in academic writing on the
subject, and the similarities and continuities between voodoo- and Romero-style texts
tend to be overlooked. Furthermore, while there is an acknowledgement that the zombie
genre existed before Night of the Living Dead, most writing on pre-1968 films tends to
focus only on two films, White Zombie, which was the first feature-length zombie film,
and I Walked with a Zombie (1943), which carries with it a Val Lewton and Jacques
Tourneur pedigree and is considered a masterpiece of classic horror.
104
Similarly, with
the Romero-style films, the most attention has been paid to Romero’s “Dead” trilogy.
105

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104
Gary Rhodes’s White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film is perhaps the only scholarly book devoted to
a single pre-1968 zombie film, and in it, Rhodes details not only the pre-history of zombies in the United
States but also gives a close reading of White Zombie and provides lengthy discussions of its production
history and exhibition; see Gary D. Rhodes, White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film (London: McFarland
and Co., 2001). For examples of the bias toward White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie, see Rhodes,
Tony Williams, “White Zombie Haitian Horror,” Jump Cut 28 (April 1983): 18-20; Edna Aizenberg, “‘I
Walked with a Zombie’: The Pleasures and Perils of Postcolonial Hybridity,” World Literature Today 73.3
(Summer 1999): 461-466; and Bishop, American Zombie Gothic. Although it is not an academic text, an
exception to this would be Bryan Senn’s Drums O’ Terror: Voodoo in the Cinema, which gives fairly
detailed synopses of zombie films with ties to voodoo up through 1995 (see Senn).
105
For instance, R.H.W Dillard’s seminal close reading of Night of the Living Dead, “Night of the Living
Dead: It's Not Like Just a Wind That's Passing Through,” examines Romero’s use of the mundane to
produce the film’s horror. Meanwhile, Robin Wood’s essays about the trilogy, eventually reprinted in
Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan…and Beyond, discuss Romero’s progressive politics, especially
regarding race and gender, as the films advance (see Dillard and Wood). Unfortunately, most writing
values the Romero-style films much more than their voodoo-style predecessors. Kyle William Bishop, for
instance, states, “Romero took a rather insipid, two-dimensional creature, married it to an established
apocalyptic storyline, and invented an entirely new genre” (Bishop, “Raising the Dead;” see also Steve
Beard, “No Particular Place to Go,” Sight and Sound 3.4 (1993): 30-31; and Haining). As I will argue
throughout this dissertation, there were progressive moments in zombie films before Romero (just as there
are reactionary moments after Night of the Living Dead) and that it is much more useful to see the
similarities and the differences between voodoo-style and Romero-style films without making value
judgements as to which style is better than the other.
46

There is therefore a great deal of the genre that has gone, and continues to go, unnoticed
academically.
106

Moreover, because the zombie is not the only movie monster that could be
classified as both living and dead, it is ripe for comparison with other undead creatures.
In detailing the differences between various cinematic monsters, for instance, James B.
Twitchell focuses on their selection of victims and remarks,
The vampire is never confused about whom to seduce; the Wolfman never
gets lost; Mr. Hyde never clubs bystanders. Even though their actions
may appear random, monsters are never capricious. So too the
Frankenstein monster, stupid as he may seem, is always smart enough to
hurt only those who ‘deserve’ it… Only transitory mutants, stalk-and-
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106
As for longer works on zombies, Rose London’s Zombie: The Living Dead (1976) was among the first
book-length treatments of the zombie genre; however, as Marc Leverette and Shawn McIntosh point out,
the text only spends about twenty pages discussing zombies themselves (see Marc Leverette and Shawn
McIntosh, “Giving the Living Dead Their Due,” Zombie Culture: Autopsies of the Living Dead, eds. Shawn
McIntosh and Marc Leverette (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2008): vii-xiv). Indeed, London’s
conception of a “zombie” seems a bit fuzzy as she includes several films that don’t tend to be regarded as
zombie films by other scholars. Furthermore, her definition of zombies seems to be a bit erroneous: she
claims that all zombies are resurrected corpses, which would only be true after 1968 and certainly not
before (which is where the bulk of her discussion lies), and she claims that all zombies follow the will of
another, which would not necessarily be true after Night of the Living Dead (Rose London, Zombie: The
Living Dead (New York: Bounty Books, 1976), 98). Gregory Waller’s astute The Living and the Undead:
From Stoker’s Dracula to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, while providing a much deeper reading of the
zombie in film, still combines writing on zombies with work on vampires and other undead creatures; see
Gregory Waller, The Living and the Undead: From Stoker’s Dracula to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986). Peter Dendle’s The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia, then, was
one of the first books to attempt a reading of the genre’s entire history, from its beginnings in the 1930s to
the contemporary period, without prolonged discussions of other undead beings. While the book is mainly
an encyclopedic index/synopses of zombie films, it does have a short introduction that details the zombie’s
pre-cinematic roots, its cinematic evolution and possible ways to read the zombie. See Dendle, The Zombie
Movie Encyclopedia. Jamie Russell’s Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema presents
what is probably the best historical account of the genre, from its pre-filmic roots in the Caribbean to
2005’s Land of the Dead (see Russell). Kyle William Bishop’s American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and
Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture, on the other hand, provides a cultural reading of
the zombie, as Bishop argues that zombies, throughout their history, have served as social and cultural
metaphors for larger American society (see Bishop, American Zombie Gothic).
47

slashers, zombies, aliens from outer space, or creatures from the deep are
indiscriminate.
107

Twitchell goes on to claim that the zombie and the mummy, in relation to the vampire,
“are subhuman slugs.”
108

That the vampire is charming and aristocratic, and the zombie decidedly not is
often a point made in comparisons. As Peter Dendle maintains, “The vampire is dashing,
smooth-complexioned, sexy, and erudite…The zombie—the ragged, unkempt, rotting
corpse…is the antithesis of this aristocratic figure.”
109
Anne Bilson notes, “If vampires
are the aristocrats in the world of the walking dead, zombies are the lumpen
proletariat.”
110
Of course, these comparisons really only work when comparing vampires
and Romero-style zombies. Voodoo-style zombies of the pre-1968 films were often
wealthy white Americans,
111
and as they were usually not resurrected corpses but were
merely persons under mind control, they usually showed no physical signs of
zombification.
112

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107
Twitchell, 164.
108
Twitchell, 261.
109
Dendle, The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia, 10-11.
110
Bilson.
111
And as Chapter Two will show, often wealthy white American women.
112
And even if a class reading of voodoo-style zombies is made, at least as regards the white persons
zombified in these films, there was rescue from the zombie (lower class) state.
48

However, besides the clear visual and aural markers that might serve to designate
other forms of the undead as more “aristocratic” than Romero-style zombies—pristine
features vs. decomposing ones; tailored dress vs. ripped clothing; ability to speak vs.
often, only the ability to moan—the differences between the classes of living dead might
also be attributed to three other features: first, much vampire lore links vampirism to
demonic possession, while zombiism, in its Romero-style incarnations, is an infectious
disease. Two, while vampires must suck the blood of others to live, this will not
necessarily kill their victims. Yet, in almost every Romero-style film, zombies will kill
their victims in an attack. Three, traditionally, vampires are thought of as solitary
creatures and even when they run in packs, they are still individuated. Romero-style
zombies are often conceived of as a mass, and as a creature of the mass, the zombie has
usually come to be thought of in terms of an exploited underclass.
113

That the zombie would be taken up as a class symbol fits with the many economic
readings of the creature. In a July 2009 article on the popularity of zombies, Anne Bilson
noted that, “Nothing, it seems, can stop what Time magazine has called, ‘the official
monster of the recession’.”
114
Indeed, it seems that zombies have often been regarded as
singularly economic creatures, and one of the most popular ways to read zombie films is
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
113
Interestingly enough, as I will argue throughout this project, while the conventional way to think about
Romero-style zombies is as part of a group, from almost the beginning, filmmakers have often worked to
individuate certain zombies—hence, the perception of zombies as group creatures often flies in the face of
how they are actually presented.
114
Bilson.
49

through the lens of interrelated critiques of colonialism and capitalism. In short, many
critics see zombies as an ideal representation of bodies undergoing economic
exploitation, as either slaves or workers, and this conception of the zombie body as a
body commodified parallels readings of the zombi as it operates within Haitian beliefs.
115

A number of anthropological studies of Haiti, Vodou and zombis throughout the
20
th
century took on the theme of slavery. For instance, Alfred Métraux and Maya
Deren, among others, identify fear of zombis with memories of slavery.
116
Yet, Joan
Dayan reads the relationship between zombis and slavery slightly differently. In Haiti,
History, and the Gods, she links the concept of zombis to Haitian revolutionary Jean
Zombi and observes that in such a linking, the concept might give former slaves power
over their oppressors. As she argues,
Names, gods, and heroes from an oppressive colonial past remained in
order to infuse ordinary citizens and devotees with a stubborn sense of
independence and survival. The undead zombi, recalled in the name of
Jean Zombi, thus became a terrible composite power: slave turned rebel
ancestor turned lwa, an incongruous, demonic spirit recognized through
dreams, divination, or possession.
117

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115
As noted earlier, in its Haitian conception, zombification is often read as an analogue for slavery: taking
control of one’s body and putting it to work for a zombie master or bokor. For this conception of the zombi
to seem plausible within Haitian belief, Joan Dayan proposes that the culture must already have a certain
conception of the body. As she notes, “The body must be owned, made into property, for possession to
take place” (Dayan, 54). In a sense, then, the body must already be viewed as commodifiable for
zombification to be conceivable. The understanding that any body could potentially be made to work for
another, that slavery is possible, therefore, underlies the zombi concept.
116
Métraux, 282 and Deren, 42.
117
Dayan, 37.
50

Dayan remarks, however, that the zombi does not always possess this revolutionary
fervor and that fear of being enslaved, especially during the American Occupation,
colored local understandings of the zombi: “In Haiti, memories of servitude are
transposed into a new idiom that both reproduces and dismantles a twentieth-century
history of forced labor and denigration that became particularly acute during the
American occupation of Haiti.”
118
Hence, “This reimagined zombi has now been
absorbed into the texture of previous oral traditions, structurally reproducing the ideas of
slavery in a new context.”
119

While the zombie was altered in its adaptation into U.S. popular culture, the links
to slavery were not severed in the earliest zombie narratives and many commentators
saw, and continue to see, the zombie as an ideal means of examining the relationships
between the exploitation of slaves and workers and prevailing economic systems. For
instance, in Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture, Annalee
Newitz examines narratives where ordinary humans are made monstrous by the
machinations of capitalist society. She sees these “monsters” as representing “the
subjective experience of alienation,” which “is what it feels like to be someone else’s
commodity…”
120
While zombies are not her only focus, her reading of them—in
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118
Dayan, 37.
119
Dayan, 38.
120
Annalee Newitz, Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (Durham: Duke
UP, 2006), 6.
51

particular of the anxieties of Western imperialism in I Walked with a Zombie and how
colonialism continues to haunt the U.S. imaginary in films like Night of the Living Dead
and Tales from the Hood (1995)—points to the continued popularity in seeing zombies as
economic creatures.
121
As she relates, “Certainly the dead body of colonialism is still
walking among the living…”
122

Likewise, James B. Twitchell in Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern
Horror, notes that White Zombie, with its zombies who work the Haitian sugar
plantations at night, “provides the Marxist a casebook in which to view the horrors of
Adam Smith; here capitalism literally grinds up the lives of the workers.”
123
The film’s
release, during the height of the depression, only serves to underscore economic readings
of the film that equate exploited workers and zombies. As zombie films throughout the
1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s continued to imagine the human body as something that could be
reduced to pure labor, the analogies continued.
However, as the genre changed, an overt link to colonial relationships dissolved
and by 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, when zombiism became an infectious disease, it
had transformed. Consumption of the (zombie) slave’s labor by a zombie master was
transferred onto the zombie’s consumption of living human flesh in this and other
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
121
Of course, within her reading of these films, Newitz is quick to point out that one cannot divorce race
from the experience of zombihood in these films.
122
Newitz, 121.
123
Twitchell, 262.
52

Romero-style films. Yet, this did not change critics’ readings of zombie films as
allegories for economic experience: only now, capitalism, wage slavery, and
consumption, rather than colonialism, were the focus. In fact, as Mimi Sheller notes
about the films White Zombie, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and The
Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), the issues raised by Romero-style films are not that
different from the issues raised by voodoo-style films:
Each film…deals with issues of consumption through the liminal figure of
the zombie. However, the locale shifts from concern with the industrial
labour that went into sugar production in the Caribbean, to the horrors of
consumer society ‘at home’ (the zombie within), and finally to new forms
of medical research that consume Caribbean ‘ethnopharmacological’
substances.
124

Thus, although the zombie changed, it was still encouraging a Marxist reading.
This is especially true of Romero-style films, as for many, the literal consumption
of human flesh in these films becomes a not-so-subtle metaphor for the consumption of
consumer goods.
125
As Philip Horne describes, “The ‘consumer society’ is literalised in
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
124
Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (New York: Routledge, 2003),
146.
125
For a sampling of the essays that deal with Dawn of the Dead in particular, see: Kyle William Bishop,
“The Idle Proletariat: Dawn of the Dead, Consumer Ideology, and the Loss of Productive Labor,” The
Journal of Popular Culture 43.2 (2010): 234-248; A. Loudermilk, “Eating ‘Dawn’ in the Dark: Zombie
Desire and Commodified Identity in George A. Romero’s ‘Dawn of the Dead’,” Journal of Consumer
Culture 3.1 (2003), accessed on July 21, 2010, Sage Publications Online: 83-108; Russell, 91-96; and
Stephen Harper, “Zombies, Malls, and the Consumerism Debate: George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead,”
Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture 1.2 (Fall 2002), accessed on July 21, 2010,
http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2002/harper.htm. For an essay that explores
Dawn as consumerist critique while reviewing literature on the film, see Shannon Mader, “Reviving the
Dead in Southwestern PA: Zombie Capitalism, the Non-Class and the Decline of the US Steel Industry,”
Spectator 22.2 (Fall 2002): 69-77. Elizabeth McAlister, while not reading Dawn of the Dead exclusively,
53

the zombies’ process of ingestion; they devour human beings as they couldn’t a TV or a
sofa.”
126
Steven Sharviro adds to this in his interpretation of Romero’s “Dead” trilogy:
“The zombies mark the dead end or zero degree of capitalism’s logic of endless
consumption and ever-expanding accumulation, precisely because they embody this logic
so literally and to such excess.”
127

Yet, this metaphor is often turned onto the human survivors of a zombie attack as
well, especially the survivors of Dawn of the Dead (both the 1978 and 2004 versions),
who barricade themselves in a shopping mall. Kyle William Bishop remarks, “Having
been essentially brainwashed by American capitalist ideology, the human protagonists of
Dawn of the Dead find it impossible to see the shattered world around them in any terms
other than those of possession and consumption” and this is what truly puts them in
danger; in fact, for Bishop, the zombie apocalypse reveals the survivors “to be essentially
and inescapably consumers.”
128
Steve Beard notes that “Romero’s zombies stand in for
those workers and consumers who, since the flashpoint year of 1968…have been thrown
on the scrap heap. Economically extinct, socially displaced, they return to devour those
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
sees zombies as a religious response to capitalism; see Elizabeth McAlister, “Dead Men Walking: Zombies
from Haiti to Hollywood,” Wesleyan Center of Humanities Podcast, April 6, 2009, accessed on May 15,
2009, ITunes.
126
Horne, 97.
127
Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 106-107.
128
Bishop, American Zombie Gothic, 130.
54

who have survived them.”
129
Yet, he then observes “…Dawn of the Dead is not a satire
on the Fordist consumer society, however much it thinks it is.”
130
Rather, the zombies
are “an expanding post-Fordist underclass” who “want to consume as much as their
human counterparts; it’s just that they’ve forgotten how.”
131

Whether one wants to read Romero-style zombies (or the survivors who battle
them) as rampant consumers or as an underclass with no access to the means of
consumption, the economic metaphor for zombies continues to be a popular way to
interpret the creatures. Moreover, a resurgence of anthropological work focusing on
Africa brings up possible ties between real-world accusations of zombi-making and
frustrations with the global economy. Jean and John Comaroff argue that a contemporary
upswing in accusations of witchcraft and zombi-making in South Africa coincided with
the post-apartheid globalization of the South African economy. Thus, as some were
becoming newly rich in a new economic and political landscape, others feared that these
nouveau riche were turning people “into zombies; into a vast virtual army of ghost
workers, whose lifeblood fueled a vibrant, immoral economy pulsing beneath the
sluggish rhythm of country life.”
132
The zombi, in this view, then, could be both a
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
129
Beard, 30.
130
Beard, 30.
131
Beard, 30.
132
Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, “Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from
the South African Postcolony,” American Ethnologist 26.2 (May 1999), accessed on July 5, 2008, JSTOR:
55

creature of fantasy and fear, as it could represent, on one hand, an endless supply of new,
cheap labor to make one competitive in the post-apartheid economy but, on the other, fear
of being turned into a commodity oneself, forced to work for the benefit of another.
Peter Delius and Isak Niehaus, though, see problems with the Comaroffs’ reading
of zombis. Delius argues that zombis are not a new concept in Africa, and that reading
them in the light of global capitalism eschews their longer local, folkloric meanings.
133

Niehaus, too, sees limits to reading African zombis solely as capitalist figures, as in his
estimation, this overlooks the fact that most often in stories of witchcraft and zombi-
making, it is those people with the least access to power, and not the most, who are
accused of supernatural dealings; he believes that “the hideous deed of capturing persons
is often constructed as an attack on more fortunate persons and a strategy for survival.”
134

The different readings of these zombis serves to underline how easily they can be
interpreted in different ways. Thus, while an economic reading is the most popular way
to analyze the zombie in U.S. popular culture, it is by no means the only way. For
instance, many zombie films in either the voodoo- or Romero-style have been read as
reflective of their contemporary social and political climates. As such, both Jennifer Fay
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
279-303. See also Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, “Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and
Millennial Capitalism,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4 (Fall 2002): 779-805.
133
Peter Delius, “Witches and Missionaries in Nineteenth Century Transvall,” Journal of Southern African
Studies 27.3 (September 2001): 429-443.
134
Isak Niehaus, “Witches and Zombies of the South African Lowveld: Discourse, Accusations and
Subjective Reality,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11 (2005), 194.
56

and Tony Williams have read the film White Zombie in light of the American Occupation
of Haiti. Fay explains, “…the film offers a fantasy of the cultural and psychological
effects of occupation through this cinematic trope of the zombie. Or, put differently,
though it evades any forthright engagement with the U.S. invasion, the film stages the
experience of occupation as the loss of sovereign subjectivity. Displacing politics with
horror…”
135
Robin Wood, meanwhile, reads George Romero’s “Dead” trilogy of films
as comments on the untenable nature of American patriarchal capitalist society in the late
1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
136
For Wood, with each film, the social milieu has changed and
the likelihood that American society (as it existed before the zombies) will survive dims.
The social commentary of zombie films also extends to how they are read as
reflective of popular religious belief.
137
Kim Paffenroth’s Gospel of the Living Dead:
George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth examines George Romero’s “Dead” trilogy,
Land of the Dead (2005), and Zack Synder’s 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead to
explore what these films say about human nature and theological questions of the
afterlife. Paffenroth sees the films as religious parables and argues that “More than any
other movie monster or mythological creature, zombies vividly show the state of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
135
Fay, 83.
136
Wood; see especially Chapters Six and Fourteen.
137
Interestingly enough, in her research into conceptions of the zombi in Haiti, Elizabeth McAlister (who
uses the term zonbi) notes that in an interview with a man who sold her zonbi in a bottle, the man claims
the first zonbi ever was Jesus Christ and that the knowledge of zombification was stolen from God by two
of Christ’s bodyguards; she relates, “The Zonbi-Christ story is also a morality tale: it tells us that the bòkò
engaged in ‘zonbi production’ is using a secret stolen from God” (McAlister, “A Sorcerer’s Bottle,” 316).
57

damnation, of human life without the divine gift of reason, and without any hope of
change or improvement.”
138
Still, in these films, Paffenroth sees the human characters as
those “who in fact embody the majority of the seven deadly sins.”
139
Given the nihilistic
leanings of most Romero-style films and the religious questions that naturally tend to
surround end-of-world scenarios, Elizabeth McAlister also sees a quasi-religious logic in
American zombie films, mainly stemming from their references to a sort of biblical
apocalypse.
140

Peter Dendle believes that because notions of an apocalypse are so central to
Romero-style zombie narratives, an apocalyptic event like 9/11 was needed to help spur
the zombie film resurgence of the 2000s.
141
Kyle William Bishop agrees and further
notes “Because the aftereffects of war, terrorism, and natural disasters so closely
resemble the scenarios of zombie cinema, such images of death and destruction have all
the more power to shock and terrify a population that has become otherwise jaded by
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
138
Kim Paffenroth, Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth (Waco: Baylor
UP, 2006), 23.
139
Paffenroth, 23.
140
McAlister, “Dead Men Walking: Zombies from Haiti to Hollywood;” Naturally, McAlister’s reading is
only appropriate with Romero-style films that imagine an end-of the-world scenario; for a thought-
provoking reading of the active and passive nihilism present in Romero’s “Dead” trilogy, see John
Marmysz, “From Night to Day: Nihilism and the Walking Dead,” Film & Philosophy 3 (1996): 138-144.
141
Peter Dendle, “The Zombie as Barometer of Cultural Anxiety,” Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and
Metaphors of Enduring Evil, ed. Niall Scott (New York: Rodopi, 2007).
58

more traditional horror films.”
142
Stephen Harper sees the Resident Evil films, in
particular, as tapping into “an anxious cultural climate in which the imagining of
otherness is particularly attenuated.”
143
He further argues that the films tap “into an
audience taste for narratives of ‘just war’ and military vengeance” in the wake of 9/11.
144

In an interview for an article describing the resurgence of zombies in the 2000s, Max
Brooks, author of The Zombie Survival Guide (2003) and World War Z (2007),
145

suggests that zombie narratives fit with feelings of fear and paranoia in the wake of 9/11;
as he states, “They go hand in hand with apocalyptic scenarios.”
146

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142
Kyle William Bishop, “Dead Man still Walking: Explaining the Zombie Renaissance,” Journal of
Popular Film and Television 37.1 (2009), 18; see also Bishop, American Zombie Gothic and Russell, 190-
192.
143
Stephen Harper, “I Could Kiss You, You Bitch’: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Resident Evil and
Resident Evil 2: Apocalypse,” Jump Cut 49 (Spring 2007), accessed on March 26, 2008, http://www.
ejumpcut.org/archive/jc49.2007/HarperResEvil/index.html.
144
Harper, “I Could Kiss You,”; Harper earlier states that some of the imagery in the films “recalls
television images of the World Trade Center attacks” on 9/11; while this might be the case in terms of the
second film, the first film, although released after the attacks on September 11, 2001, was well into
production before then.
145
The Zombie Survival Guide is a tongue-in-check guidebook for survival in a zombie-infested world
while World War Z is a fictional account of survivor’s tales after a zombie pandemic has taken place. See
Max Brooks, The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead (New York: Random
House, 2003) and Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (New York: Random
House, 2007).
146
Warren St. John, “Market for Zombies? It’s Undead (Aaahhh!),” The New York Times (March 26,
2006), accessed on March 27, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/fashion/sundaystyles/
26ZOMBIES.html. In terms of zombie video games, Tanya Krzywinska argues that while they may
resonate with current cultural fears, one must not lose sight of the fact that zombies simply fit well into a
gaming structure: “Game zombies provide the ideal enemy: they are strong, relentless, and already dead;
they look spectacularly horrific; and they invite the player to blow them away without guilt…”
(Krzywinska, 153).
59

It is not only the apocalyptic nature of Romero-style zombie films that lends them
to such a reading, nor is it the common theme of invasion; the Romero-style concept of a
zombie virus as a global pandemic mimics contemporary fears of pandemic diseases (like
SARS or H1N1) or bioterrorist threats. Cecilia Petretto reminds, “In our post 9/11
world…fears of contagious disease…still linger, but threats of bioterrorism loom
large…Viruses epitomize our fear of the end because they signify disaster as
unpredictable and uncontrollable as the flesh hungry zombies…”
147
Before Night of the
Living Dead, zombiism was, for the most part, a localized phenomenon, as it depended
largely on the abilities of a single zombie master.
148
In Night of the Living Dead,
however, the template changed with the addition of a zombie virus: zombiism now did
not depend on one zombie master turning people into zombies—as an infectious disease,
anyone, and potentially everyone, could be affected. Therefore, since Night of the Living
Dead, one of the most popular ways to read the zombie has been as a symbol for
infection. As Peter Dendle argues in The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia, zombie films are
always about a fear of the dead, but in Night of the Living Dead and the Romero-style
films that followed, a fear of bodily uncleanliness, born of infection was introduced as
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
147
Cecilia Petretto, “Attack of the Living Dead Virus: The Metaphor of Contagious Disease in Zombie
Movies,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 17.1 (2006), accessed on July 23, 2010, USC integrated
document delivery, 21. Petretto is by no means the only scholar to link zombies to post-9/11 fears of bio-
terrorism: for instance, see Paffenroth, 3; and Russell, 190-192.
148
An exception to this would be Invisible Invaders, where aliens resurrect corpses worldwide to do their
bidding.
60

well.
149
Richard Harland Smith goes so far as to call Night of the Living Dead, “the
Patient Zero of zombie movies.”
150

Naturally, the “infection” that zombies represent can vary, and the “disease” any
zombie virus is meant to represent can change as the social zeitgeist sees fit. Thus, given
press reports that painted Haiti as a hot zone in the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and
beyond, the zombie virus was easily read as a metaphor for AIDS. Linking stories of
zombies with stories of AIDS, Mimi Sheller maintains, “Both the fear of Haitian zombies
and the fear of supposedly infectious bodies from Haiti arise out of the racialised sexual
encounters and sexualised racial encounters of (post)colonialism…”
151
In other words,
through Haiti, Western fears surrounding desire for the Other coupled with fear of
racial/national contamination could be fused in narratives that warned against Haiti—as it
produced both zombies and AIDS patients. The zombie even appeared in non-theoretical
accounts of the AIDS crisis. Arthur M. Fournier’s memoir of his years as a doctor
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
149
Peter Dendle, The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia, 12; I would argue that zombies have always been a type
of infection. It is just that in the voodoo-style films, it is a cultural or racial infection rather than a disease.
See Chapters Two and Three.
150
Richard Harland Smith, “The Battle Inside: Infection and the Modern Horror Film,” Cineaste (Winter
2009), accessed on March 24, 2010, http://www.cineaste.com/articles/the-battle-inside-infection-and-the-
modern-horror-film.
151
Sheller, 146; Sheller does see a commodification of Haitian bodies at work in both AIDS and zombie
narratives, as the control of the movement of bodies is central to both.
61

working in both the United States and Haiti is entitled The Zombie Curse and uses the
zombie as a metaphor for AIDS and for misguided preconceptions.
152

Linking the zombie, Haiti and AIDS (or really any infectious disease or threat),
the zombie concept becomes both slave of the voodoo-style films and infectious carrier
of the Romero-style films. And this serves to underscore how fluid and flexible the
zombie, as a concept, is. The zombie is capable of calling on its past in its contemporary
renderings and can be read simultaneously as voodoo-style automaton and Romero-style
cannibal contagion.
153
This may be why many scholars and philosophers see such
potential in the zombie-as-concept.
154
In philosophical arguments surrounding the nature
of consciousness, for instance, philosophical zombies (or p-zombies), which are
otherwise physically normal humans without sentience, have been used in debates over
physicalism and whether there could be a “soul” existing independently of the physical
body. In other words, they ponder whether zombies are conceivably possible.
155

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152
Arthur M. Fournier, The Zombie Curse: A Doctor’s 25-year Journey into the Heart of the AIDS
Epidemic in Haiti (Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press, 2006).
153
Moreover, as I argue in Chapter Two, the cannibal links to the zombie go back further than Night of the
Living Dead and, in fact, have been a feature of zombie discourse since it entered U.S. popular culture in
the late 1920s and early 1930s.
154
In using this term, I mean the zombie, not as a particular character, but as a collection of ideas that all
come to mean zombie. Because the zombie is capable of being read in so many different ways and in
multiple ways simultaneously, it might most productively be considered as a condensation in the
psychoanalytic sense. Condensation is the process by which an entire set of associations or ideas are
associated with a single symbol or word. Hence, the zombie-as-concept can stand for both slavery and
exploitation while also carrying the meaning of infection and invasion.
155
For a very succinct description of an example thought experiment about p-zombies, see Paffenroth, 11.
For an overview of how p-zombies have been used in philosophical debates surrounding physicalism and
62

Similarly, one branch of critical work on zombies as they appear in popular
culture approaches zombies as convenient vehicles for thinking about identity formation.
For example, in “The Funk of Forty Thousand Years; or, How the (Un)Dead Get Their
Groove On,” Marc Leverette maintains that the zombie can be most usefully
conceptualized as a Derridian deconstruction. He observes, “…I began to realize that the
real question the (un)dead bring to the table is not what they say about schlock-horror or
B-movie madness—rather, it is their Being that offers an unnerving commentary
regarding the potential liminality of being human. For the zombie exists somewhere
between.”
156
Because of their station as creatures that exist in-between life and death,
zombies are often associated with issues of liminality
157
and the uncanny.
158
To become
a zombie is to become a thing, yet, even as a zombie, one cannot entirely escape one’s
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
the nature of consciousness, see The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “Zombies” at Robert
Kirk, “Zombies,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2009 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta,
accessed on January 13, 2011, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/zombies/. See also Robert
Kirk, “The Inaugural Address: Why There Couldn’t Be Zombies,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
Supplementary Volumes 73 (1999), accessed on July 21, 2010, JSTOR: 1-16; Robert Kirk, Zombies and
Consciousness (Oxford: Claredon Press, 2005); Saul Kripke, “Naming and Necessity,” Semantics of
Natural Language, ed. D. Davidson and G. Harman (Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel, 1972): 253-355; Daniel
Dennet, “The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (1995): 322-
326; and Owen Flanagan and Thomas Polger, “Zombies and the Function of Consciousness,” Journal of
Consciousness Studies 2 (1995): 313-321.
156
Marc Leverette, “The Funk of Forty Thousand Years; or, How the (Un)Dead Get Their Groove On,”
Zombie Culture: Autopsies of the Living Dead, eds. Shawn McIntosh and Marc Leverette (Lanham, MD:
The Scarecrow Press, 2008), 186. Leverette reads this in-between space as horrific and as should become
clear throughout this project, I see it as potentially horrific, yes, but also potentially liberating as well.
157
See, for instance, Leverette for a discussion of how the zombie’s liminality allows it to change with the
times and Paffenroth, 144 n. 31, for a list of other authors who discuss the zombie as liminal being.
158
See, for instance, Bishop, “Raising the Dead,” for his reading of Night of the Living Dead and the
uncanny.
63

humanity. This uncanny resemblance is a feature of both voodoo-style and Romero-style
films, and as fantasies and nightmares of the self rendered as uncanny Other, zombies
become ideal characters for interrogating notions of the self in relation to the Other.
159

Robin Wood notes, “Otherness represents that which bourgeois ideology cannot
recognize or accept but must deal with…in one of two ways: either by rejecting and if
possible annihilating it, or by rendering it safe and assimilating it, converting it as far as
possible into a replica of itself.”
160
In zombie films, the zombie-as-Other, has, broadly
speaking, been dealt with in both ways: amidst dialogue where characters remind each
other that the zombies “are us,” living humans are often trying to annihilate Romero-style
zombies because they are an overt threat to the self; likewise, unaffected humans in
voodoo-style zombie films are often not necessarily trying to annihilate zombies, but
rather annihilate the zombie master and the zombie-making process, that which threatens
the self because it can turn humans into zombie-Others.
Yet, as I will argue throughout this dissertation, zombies of both styles have also
been rendered more familiar and yes, more safe, as assimilated versions of the self—
zombies in film have become the boy next door, the family pet, the seductive stripper,
and what’s more, people are choosing to inhabit the zombie body as self in zombie video
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
159
Interestingly, the resemblance between living self and undead Other is at its least in zombie video games
where zombies are the target—often, in these games, zombies lose almost all traces of their visible
humanity.
160
Wood, 65-66.
64

games and in Zombie Walks. So, in many ways, this rendering of the Other as a closer
version of self (or the rendering of the self as this Other) is the more compelling process.
In my estimation, while it is entirely possible to imagine the zombie as posthuman anti-
subject
161
or as necessary antithesis,
162
the philosophical questions the zombie raises are
secondary to the political work it has done and can be made to do, and the most useful
way to explore this work is to examine those moments when the zombie is not held up so
much as Other as it is another self.

AND THE DEAD SHALL WALK THE EARTH
This project has three main goals. First, it illuminates the continuities between
voodoo-style and Romero-style zombie texts. While many scholars assert that the
zombie did not truly become “us”
163
until the Romero films, the underlying conceit of
almost every voodoo-style film was a (white) American being threatened with
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161
Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry, “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of
Advanced Capitalism,” boundary 2 35.1 (2008), 87. Lauro and Embry are not the only scholars to link the
zombie to conceptions of the post-human. See, for instance, Martin Rogers, “Hybridity and Post-Human
Anxiety in 28 Days Later,” Zombie Culture: Autopsies of the Living Dead, eds. Shawn McIntosh and Marc
Leverette (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2008): 119-133.
162
Kevin Alexander Boon, “Ontological Anxiety Made Flesh: the Zombie in Literature, Film and Culture,”
Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil, ed. Niall Scott (New York: Rodopi,
2007), 33-34. In this essay, Boon actually conceives of several different types of zombie: worker or drone
zombies, zombie ghouls, tech zombies, cultural zombies, and ghost zombies. Boon argues that the zombie
in every incarnation except as ghost works to construct the human as celebrated identity vs. the monstrous
Other—as a ghost retains some trace of humanity, it does not serve this binary.
163
In itself a highly problematic concept as it causes one to wonder just who this “us” encompasses.
65

zombification: while the processes of zombification in these films may often have been
linked to foreign or “native” cultures, the most prominent victims were typically
American people who bear a striking resemblance to the Romero-style undead.
164

Furthermore, while there is a progressive current in Romero-style texts, there were (and
are) progressive/transgressive possibilities inherent in voodoo-style texts as well.
165
By
showing the continuities within zombie media, it becomes possible to see how the zombie
has been operating, politically, within U.S. culture for the last seven decades.
Second, this project insists on conceptualizing of the zombie as more than an
unthinking automaton. While the picture of the zombie as a mechanical body stripped of
its humanity is a significant part of how the concept is taken up in U.S. culture, many
representations of zombies in voodoo-, Romero- and video game-style texts have ignored
or played with this stereotype in compelling ways. For instance, in the film Fido (2006),
which will be discussed in Chapter Three, zombies are initially presented as unthinking
former humans driven to eat the living. However, these zombies have been fitted with
collars to prevent them from acting on that drive. Yet, during the film, at least one
zombie loses his collar and makes a very clear decision about who to eat and who to
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164
Moreover, most often it was white men who wielded the power to turn people into zombies in these
films.
165
Although I Walked with a Zombie is often mentioned by scholars as really the only progressive film of
the voodoo-style, I believe that two other films also deserve mention: 1943’s Revenge of the Zombies and
1957’s Voodoo Island, both of which will be discussed in Chapter Three.
66

leave alone—hence, even as an “unthinking” monster (which this depiction at least
troubles), the zombie is presented as much more complex than a simple eating machine.
Finally, the powers inherent in zombihood need to be examined. Patricia Malloy,
in her essay “Zombie Democracy,” begins to articulate a theory of politically active
zombies in the film Fido and the television movie “Homecoming” (2005).
166
My
intention is to extend Malloy’s observations further—both towards other contemporary
zombies that seem to be actively seeking out some form of political participation in living
society but also towards earlier moments of this participation in voodoo-style films.
167

That the zombie can be quite powerful—and not just as a cannibalistic adversary—is an
underlying assumption of this project, and I believe that this is a feature of the zombie in
many of its contexts and styles.
For instance, in her narrative of the capture of zonbi for use by Rara bands,
Elizabeth McAlister describes the power these souls have as she details how the Rara
leaders are “harnessing the energies and talents of the community’s recently dead, and
launching spiritual and military campaigns with those energies.”
168
In this conception,
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166
Patricia Malloy, “Zombie Democracy,” The Geopolitics of American Insecurity: Terror, Power and
Foreign Policy, eds. François Debrix and Mark J. Lacy (New York: Routledge, 2009): 197-213.
167
The only real drawback to Malloy’s piece, in my view, is that she argues that zombies before her two
examples are passive; my argument is that there have always been, to some degree, active zombies within
zombie media and that this is, actually, one of the reasons the zombie remains so attractive to U.S.
audiences.
168
McAlister, Rara!, 103.
67

then, the zombi of the spirit, while it may be captured to do the work of others,
169
is
presented as powerful—and important to the living community.
Even zombi of the body can be powerful. Lawrence W. Levine, writing on Afro-
American folk belief, notes that slave magic implied, in part, that “the environment did
not have to be accepted docilely; it could be manipulated and controlled to some extent at
least.”
170
Moreover, Levine argues that knowledge of this magic proved that there was
knowledge outside the purview of white masters, proving that they weren’t omniscient.
If one applies Levine’s arguments to the concept of zombification in Haiti, especially as
it may have existed during the colonial era or U.S. Occupation, then the knowledge of
zombis and zombification granted (and continues to grant) Vodouisants a certain amount
of political power in the face of French, American, or other outside control. Hence, the
zombi would naturally be feared by American occupiers, and later American audiences,
because deep knowledge of the creature, despite the travelogues and tales about it, still
rested in Haitian hands. Joseph Murphy takes up this line of thinking when he argues
that one of the reasons voodoo has been almost exclusively linked with horror in
American film is because this “reflects mass America’s real horror of independent black
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169
And as McAlister notes, this may be much more benign than how zombiism is imagined in terms of
zombi of the body—there seems to be an assumption that former Vodouisants will be willing to have their
spirits work for the community after death.
170
Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from
Slavery to Freedom, 30th Anniversary ed., (New York: Oxford UP, 2007), 67.
68

power. If voodoo were powerful enough to free the slaves, might it not free their
descendants?”
171

Yet, beyond the theoretical political power that the zombi, as it has been
envisioned in relation to Haiti, has, the zombie of U.S. popular culture can also be a
politically powerful creature. Brigid Cherry, describing the vampire in films like Martin
(1977), Near Dark (1987), and Blade (1998), notes that it “is an appealing and
sympathetic monster, not only as an extremely attractive (and often sexually arousing)
figure…but as someone who stands outside of ‘normal’ society and embraces their
difference, meaning that viewers will frequently desire them or want to become them.”
172

While not all zombies inhabit a similar space, some do, and it is in the power of existing
both inside and outside of normative society, that the zombie, as it has often been
imagined, is at its most powerful.
The zombie, as a creature of both/and—both slave and master, both living and
dead, both black and white—invades the normative space of the living, a space that is
generally conceived of in terms of whiteness, patriarchy, and heterosexuality. In forcing
those who exist in this space to face a being who at once encompasses their ideals (as a
“living” human being, for instance) and that which the society abjects/rejects (the “dead”
human being), the zombie can tell us much about the political work that figures of the
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171
qtd. in Senn, 15.
172
Brigid Cherry, Horror (Routledge Film Guidebooks), (New York: Routledge, 2009), 182-83.
69

dead can do within the world of the living. Popular representations of the zombie in the
United States thus provide insight into how U.S. culture appropriates figures of death to
make political interventions in the world of the living: as will be shown, at times, the
zombie has been used to try to support heteronormative ideals and the status quo and at
others, it has been used to undercut those same ideals—sometimes within the same text.
Because the zombie exists in a variety of media texts and as a figure of fan
practice and because it has operated in different ways at different points in its history in
U.S. popular culture, it becomes necessary to engage with a variety of disciplinary tools.
While the basis of this project rests in film studies, it is also necessary to build upon work
in Critical Race Theory, whiteness studies, queer theory, visual studies, new media
studies, and cultural studies. Thus, in Chapter Two, the zombie will be located
historically, considering its ties to representations of Haiti circulating in the United States
since the Haitian Revolution. Considering how these representations worked in concert
with discussions of self-rule in the 19
th
and early 20
th
centuries, it will become clear that
zombies came to symbolize the limits and paradoxes of capitalist democracy in the
United States. As such, zombies offered filmgoers a potentially liberating imaginative
escape from dominant systems; however, this was most often restricted by racism in
voodoo-style films.
Chapter Three utilizes Critical Race Theory, whiteness studies and queer theory to
consider how zombie bodies are marked by race and gender in U.S. film. In particular,
70

the role of female characters and characters of color in both voodoo-style and Romero-
style films are reviewed, as these characters are often the most likely to be aligned with
the zombie state. Because of the relationship of zombies with the feminine and the non-
white, many zombie films become sites for staging conflicts over non-heteronormative
desires, both promoting and punishing the transgressive.
Taking up visual studies and new media studies, the fourth chapter considers the
connection between the spectator’s relationship to images of death in 19
th
century
presentations, like phantasmagoria shows and séances, to that same relationship in
contemporary zombie video games. Arguing that certain visual technologies can
encourage a sort of doubling of consciousness
173
that empowers spectators/players, this
chapter maintains that this empowerment, when placed in the context of representations
of the dead-come-back-to life, allows spectators/players to enact desires that show death
not as final, but as something that can be transcended. This abstraction of death and the
dead serves to hide the political realities inherent in real-world experiences of death, and
within video game play, it robs the zombie of some of its inherent political power.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
173
I am here referring to my conception of a doubling of consciousness, which I am carefully not calling a
“double consciousness,” a concept made most relevant by W.E.B. Du Bois and that is paralleled in James
Weldon Johnson’s notions of “dual personality.” While not discounting Du Bois’s or Johnson’s ideas, I
must also take into consideration Cornel West’s descriptions of Malcom X’s argument on the matter (that
double consciousness is less a “necessary mode of being” and more “a particular kind of colonized mind-
set” (Cornel West, Race Matters (1993; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 97). Therefore, I am striving
to move away from a strict binary that places subjects in an either/or situation by showing that the player
exists as “both” and “neither” at the same time (much, I might add, like a zombie can exist as “both” and
“neither” living/dead and black/white at the same time). See W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk:
Essays and Sketches, 3rd ed. (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903) and James Weldon Johnson, The
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912; reprint, Middlesex, UK: Echo Library, 2009).
71

The fifth chapter takes up this abstraction of death to ponder performances of
living death in Zombie Walks, gatherings where people dress as zombies and travel
through public spaces. These events, which interject the undead into the mundane world
of the living, disrupt the normative capitalist expectations of the spaces in which
“zombies” walk while simultaneously allowing walkers to reject Western youth and
beauty ideals by dressing up as rotting, ugly corpses. Yet, they too often invite
participants to make death abstract. Therefore, while zombie walkers offer an important
example of the contemporary carnivalesque, this chapter will discuss how they also
underscore the differences in the zombie’s fictional political power and real-world
manifestations of such. Finally, Chapter Six will serve as a coda to the entire project. In
it, the relationship between the zombie’s syncretic and fluid nature and its representation
as both abject and liberatory will be explored.
Laënnec Hurbon, in an essay exploring how Vodou has operated in American
popular thought over the last century, reveals that in the stereotypical and often grotesque
portrayals of “voodoo” for American audiences,
beyond the logic of expansionist interest, there is also a logic of desire.
All that is repressed in the United States by the dominant Puritan culture is
projected onto the Vodouist who then presents only a satanic face.
Wirkus, Seabrook, but also Wade Davis, to cite only the most well known,
find in Vodou their own fantasies. It is always the other part of the self
which, because inadmissible, is devalued and returned to the self in the
grimacing form of the cannibal and the sorcerer.
174

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
174
Hurbon, 195.
72

The zombie, too, has often done similar work—projecting the image of the barbaric
cannibal onto the Other so that one can forget about those cannibalistic urges deep within
the self. What this project hopes to show is that, throughout the course of its history in
U.S. popular culture, the zombie has also operated in another function: if still as Other,
then as the Other one doesn’t only secretly desire but also rather overtly wants to become.
There can be power in abjection, the zombie teaches us, and even the most rotten corpse
can be appealing when it is showing audiences the norm is not the only way.

73

Chapter Two
“They are not Men…They are Dead Bodies!”
From Cannibal to Zombie and Back Again
1

“They find what we call freedom a fatal slavery.”
!Geologist Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
on Native Americans in the late 19
th
century
2

If it weren’t for the long scrolling titles, explaining what “zombies,” “loas,” and
“bocurs” are, and the opening image of a voodoo doll, one might confuse the first few
moments of the 1935 film Ouanga with a travelogue: a narrator describes “Paradise
Island” in the West Indies, with its “majestic mountains wreathed in clouds” and its
“palm-lined shores.”
3
As bright, chipper music plays, he intones that “the daily life of its
inhabitants is marked by an unhurried peacefulness” and images, not unlike those one
would expect in a newsreel appear.
4
However, the narrator suddenly announces that
“Night falls.”
5
The bright music stops; the images become darker and words like
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
An earlier version of this chapter appears in Better off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human
in Film, Literature, Art and Culture, eds. Sarah Juliet Lauro and Deborah Christie (New York: Fordham
UP, in press).
2
qtd. in Robert H. Wiebe, Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995), 1.
3
Ouanga, DVD, directed by George Terwilliger (USA: George Terwilliger Productions, 1935; Something
Weird Video, 2008).
4
Ouanga.
5
Ouanga.
74

“sinister,” “ghostly,” and “gruesome” fill his vocabulary.
6
As his narration stops, a
ceremony begins, and drums and singing fill the air. The message is clear: by day, this
island, a thinly-veiled substitute for Haiti, is peaceful and simple—the sort of place where
a traveling American might find things a bit rudimentary but still pleasant. However,
something dark is waiting below the surface in places like this, and that traveler might
want to think twice before packing his or her bags. Of course, in zombie films, the
travelers never think twice.
The zombie arises from stories connected to Haitian Vodou,
7
and early zombie
fiction in the United States owes much to fears of Haiti as an independent black republic.
To understand the zombie, then, one must go back to Haiti. From the time of the Haitian
Revolution on, stories of Vodou circulated throughout the Americas and Europe, and the
zombie’s entrance into U.S. popular culture provided yet another variation in the century-
long practice of framing Vodou and Haiti in a threatening light.
The earliest zombie films in the United States—like White Zombie (1932), Ouanga,
and Revolt of the Zombies (1936)—were intimately tied to discourses that tried to
designate Haiti, and by extension, any effort on the part of previously-colonized peoples
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
6
Ouanga.
7
While the zombie is not necessarily a purely Haitian creature, its pedigree in U.S. popular culture is a
Haitian one. However, similar creatures can be found in folklore throughout the Caribbean and Africa.
Perhaps the best-documented of these creatures is the Jamaican duppy. See Patrick Bryan, The Jamaican
People 1880-1902: Race, Class and Social Control (Mona: University Press of the West Indies, 2000), 40;
and Maceward Leach, “Jamaican Duppy Lore,” The Journal of American Folk-lore 74 (1961): 207-215.
75

to rule themselves, a failure.
8
Haiti and other territories—like Hawaii, Cuba and the
Philippines—raised potent questions in the late 19
th
and early 20
th
centuries over who
could and could not effectively govern themselves. Perhaps the most popular reasons
given in the 19
th
and early 20
th
centuries for why Haitians and Vodouisants should not be
allowed to govern themselves were those of cannibalism and child sacrifice, and while
zombies themselves may not have been cannibals, they sprang from a supposedly
cannibalistic culture.
9

Thus, early zombie films took up where folklore and sensationalist news stories of
the 19
th
century left off: previously, exotic peoples were tied to human sacrifice and
witchcraft; now, they could be tied to raising the dead. And while, early on, a
conspicuous link to Haiti dissolved in zombie films so that zombies could be the cultural
product of any Other, the legacies of colonialism and fears surrounding the self-rule of
newly-independent peoples remained in zombie texts; in these films, white, U.S. citizens
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
8
Here and throughout this chapter, I collapse all colonial spaces/peoples into one broad category. Of
course, not all colonies were the same, and colonial experiences differed widely, even when the same set of
colonizers were in charge. Yet, the structures that separated the world into colonizer and colonized, while
always much more fluid than might have been expected, have served a role world-wide in dividing peoples
into “us” and “them.” I use the terms here for a similar purpose!to illustrate the power relations at play in
the U.S. imagination, which, broadly speaking, divided the world into white civilized peoples and everyone
else. For discussions on the colonial aspects of some of the more popular early zombie films, namely
White Zombie (1932) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943), see Kyle William Bishop, American Zombie
Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture (Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
2010) and Edna Aizenberg, “‘I Walked with a Zombie’: The Pleasures and Perils of Postcolonial
Hybridity,” World Literature Today 73.3 (Summer 1999).
9
Actually, in the 1941 film King of the Zombies, a reference to zombies’ preference for human flesh is
made; see King of the Zombies, DVD, directed by Jean Yarbrough (USA: Monogram Pictures, 1941; Alpha
Video, 2001).
76

traveled abroad and faced the threat of being zombified, yet these films postulated a
solution to the zombie “problem” by making sure zombie masters, and by extension their
zombies, were defeated in the end. This served to restore the status quo, making a racial
and political statement: a binary was created between those cultures that produced
zombies and the United States.
Examining travelogues, magazine articles, and political commentary about Haiti
and other dependent territories circulating in the United States in the late 19
th
and early
20
th
centuries alongside early zombie films,
10
it becomes clear that the fears enacted in
these films—that the pure U.S. citizen’s body could be corrupted by “black” magic
11
—
mirror similar fears about the status of U.S. democracy itself: would it corrupt the U.S.
body politic if dependent peoples were made citizens?
12
Yet, in voicing these fears,
cracks in the notion of a viable democracy could be seen: how free was a freedom only
available to some and not to all, and how sovereign were the sovereign nations that
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
10
As stated in Chapter One, I divide zombie films into three main types, and the first type, voodoo-style
zombies, are the focus of this chapter. Voodoo-style zombie texts concern possession of the will rather
than infection of the body, as later zombie texts do, and all domestically-produced zombie films from
1932’s White Zombie to 1968, when George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead introduced Romero-style
zombies, adhere to the possession formula. For the purposes of this chapter, then, early zombie films are
those films produced between 1932 and 1968, when the voodoo-style zombie was enjoying its heyday.
11
See Carol J. Clover’s discussion of the struggle between black magic and white rationality in horror films
in Carol J. Clover, Men Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1992), 66. While the racial aspects of the zombie will be taken up in Chapter Three, it is impossible to
disentangle them from the political concerns expressed here.
12
For an interesting analysis of the ways Frankenstein’s monster has been put to similar uses, see Elizabeth
Young, Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor (New York: New York UP, 2008).
77

needed protecting from themselves? While early zombie films implicitly assert the need
to re-impose control over the colonial world, the zombie also challenges this control, as
in early zombie films, firm concepts like “freedom” are problematized by boundaries that
do not hold—nice white girls become tainted by black magic, the supposedly dead walk
around as if they are alive, and ostensibly free citizens find out that they aren’t really free
at all. In many ways, then, the zombie registers the glaring differences between formal
freedoms enjoyed under U.S. capitalist democracy and real-world experiences of these
“freedoms” under the same system; yet, by encouraging viewers both to identify and to
disidentify with zombies, early zombie films are able to mediate these concerns.

THEY EAT THEIR CHILDREN
Near the end of Mary Hassal’s Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo,
set in the final days of the French colony of Saint-Domingue, she writes, “A settled
gloom pervades the place, and every one trembles lest he should be the next victim of a
monster from whose power there is no such retreat.”
13
This was no conventional monster
Hassal described; rather, to many, the Haitian Revolution and its Revolutionaries were,
quite simply, monstrous.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
13
qtd. in Jeremy D. Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Insurrection
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 328.
78

Following a series of slave revolts in the 1790s, in 1804, Haiti became the first
black-ruled independent nation in the Western hemisphere.
14
As such, Haiti and its
Revolution almost instantly became easy targets for racist stereotyping. Most of the fears
connected to Haiti centered on stories of revolutionary atrocities directed towards white
peoples. While the French Revolution could raise concerns in the United States over the
violent excesses of revolution itself, Haiti was much closer and added the element of
race. As David Brion Davis reports, “…in general, the Haitian Revolution reinforced the
conviction that slave emancipation in any form would lead to economic ruin and to the
indiscriminate massacre of white populations.”
15
There was some justification to these
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
14
In August 1791, after two years of the French Revolution and its repercussions in Saint-Domingue, the
slaves revolted and their fight lasted twelve years, during which time they faced local soldiers, the troops of
the French monarchy, Spanish and British invasions, and another French expedition. Yet, key to
understanding the revolt and the Revolution, at least in C.L.R. James’s telling, is to see how economic and
class interests and political marriages of convenience were what propelled it forward. The revolt was not
begun as a battle for independence but was an extension of the French Revolution—as the Revolutionaries
and Counter-Revolutionaries were at war with each other on the island. In the early years, according to
James, the revolt was not about succeeding from France. After the abolition of slavery, the revolt became
an attempt to maintain freedom, and only in the very late 1790s, once it was clear that France could not
protect the former slaves’ freedom, did it become about (black) independence. See C.L.R. James, The
Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd ed., rev. (New York: Vintage
Books, 1989). Sidney Mintz and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, among others, are also quick to point out that the
Revolution was not simply about slaves trying to throw off their shackles. As they report, “Serious
students of the Revolution take note of the deep cleft between the colonial whites of all class levels, and
those of color. The great power of the free people of color (affranchis) greatly threatened the whites,
particularly the poor or landless whites; and numerous laws were passed to circumscribe the power of
colored free persons. It was in the context of this political struggle that slave resistance flourished” (Sidney
Mintz and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “The Social History of Haitian Vodou,” Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou,
ed. Donald J. Cosentino (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995), 137).
15
David Brion Davis, “Impact of the French and Haitian Revolutions,” The Impact of the Haitian
Revolution in the Atlantic World, ed. David P. Geggus (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,
2001), 4. Jon Kukla adds that white refugees from the Haitian Revolution arrived in the United States with
stories of atrocities and that there were even rumors of Jacobin saboteurs operating in New Orleans for a
time (Jon Kukla, A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America (New
79

fears: reports indicate that Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Haiti’s new Emperor, ordered the
massacre of the whites remaining in Haiti only a few months after the nation’s
declaration of independence.
16
Moreover, the nation existed in almost continual turmoil.
Upon the assassination of Dessalines in 1806, the country was divided between a
kingdom in the North, ruled by Henri Christophe, and a republic in the South, ruled by
Alexandre Pétion. By 1822, Jean-Pierre Boyer had reunified the nation, but a series of
coups and armed revolts followed his departure from office in 1843. The impoverished
nation was often in a state of near rebellion from then on.
17

Furthermore, while in 1789, the French colony of Saint-Domingue supplied
nearly two-thirds of France’s export trade and was the greatest single market for the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 148-50). Furthermore, Carolyn E. Frick maintains that during the Haitian
Revolution, “Strategically, [the United States] desired an independent Saint Domingue…precisely to
prevent the spread of slave emancipation to their own territories…by separating the colony from France
and then isolating it from the outside world by virtue of a memetic Anglo-American trade monopoly, the
cancerous threat of general emancipation and of a future black state in the New World might be contained”
(Carolyn E. Frick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 202).
16
See James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins; of course, in Dessalines’s view, independence and what came
after were the richly deserved reward of the Haitians, and by extension all exploited peoples of the
Americas. He is credited with saying, “We have rendered to those true cannibals, war for war, crime for
crime, outrage for outrage; yes, I have saved my country; I have avenged America” (Joan Dayan, Haiti,
History and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 4).
17
According to a Navy Department memorandum in 1921, prior to the Occupation, the United States was
called upon to intervene in Haiti in 1857, 1859, 1866, 1868, 1869, 1876, 1888, 1889, 1892, 1902, 1903,
1904, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1908, 1909, 1911, 1912, and 1913 (Inquiry into Occupation and Administration of
Haiti and Santo Domingo, Hearings before a Select Committee on Haiti and Santo Domingo, United States
Senate, 67th Cong., 1st and 2nd sess., vol. 1 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1922), 63); see also
Hurbon, 182, for an illustration depicting U.S. interventions in the Caribbean from the late 19
th
century to
the 1990s.
80

European slave-trade,
18
by the time Saint-Domingue became Haiti and was independent,
the richest colony in the world had been reduced to ruins by over a decade of fighting,
and the impact on the global economy was immense.
19
The Revolution disrupted markets
and created massive shortfalls of products like sugar and coffee. It also forced waves of
refugees and migrants into neighboring countries.
As the hemisphere’s only black-ruled republic, Haiti spawned curiosity, which
was fueled by the fact that the island existed in virtual isolation: trade embargoes and the
lack of international diplomatic recognition
20
effectively sealed Haiti off from the rest of
the world.
21
Thus, what little information was available about Haiti wasn’t subject to
much critical interrogation. Much of the 19
th
- and early 20
th
-century writing on Haiti
available in English was written by those with only a passing familiarity with the nation
or those who wanted to use Haiti to further their own ideological causes.
22
They tended
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
18
Kukla, 383 n. 29.
19
For a discussion of the specific U.S. stake in Haiti’s economy both before and after the Revolution, see
Ludwell Lee Montague, Haiti and the United States, 1714-1938 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1966).
20
For example, the United States didn’t officially recognize Haiti until 1862.
21
Even as late as 1920, commentators were remarking on how little Americans knew about Haiti; see
Major G.H. Osterhout, Jr., “A Little Known Marvel of the Western Hemisphere,” National Geographic 38
(December 1920): 468-482.
22
See Austin; “Cannibals in Hayti,” Harper's Weekly 9.453 (September 2, 1865): 545; Pierre Derbighy,
“Hayti: A Crumbling Republic,” Harper's Weekly 52.2697 (August 29, 1908): 11-13; W.W. Harvey,
Sketches of Hayti; From the Expulsion of the French, to the Death of Chrisophe (London: L. B. Seeley,
1827); Hesketh Prichard, Where Black Rules White; a Journey Across and About Hayti (Westminster: A.
Constable & Co., Ltd., 1900); Sir Spencer St. John, Hayti; or The Black Republic, Source Books on Haiti
no. 9 (1884; reprint, New York: Cass, 1971); and Robert Lawless, Haiti's Bad Press (Rochester, VT:
Schenkman Books, 1992).
81

to paint Haiti as either corrupt and de-evolving or trying (and failing) to stand on its
own.
23

Haiti was also a pawn in battles between abolitionists and slavers, used by both to
prove their respective points.
24
In Sketches of Hayti; From the Expulsion of the French to
the Death of Christophe (1827), W.W. Harvey, in many ways an admirer of Haiti,
nevertheless remarks that Haiti’s history since the Revolution “presents to us the picture
of a people newly escaped from slavery, yet still suffering and exhibiting in their
character, its pernicious and demoralizing effects…”
25
Harvey’s views were typical of
the abolitionists and missionaries writing on Haiti during the early 19
th
century—although
they were reluctant to condemn the nation outright, many of these writers still felt Haiti
cried out for some form of guidance from the white world.
26
For example, British
abolitionist John Candler saw Haiti as a success, but a qualified one!and one in need of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
23
Matthew J. Calvin sees two basic narratives emerging out of the Haitian Revolution: one about slave
violence against whites and another about enslaved peoples throwing off the shackles of oppression;
according to Calvin, both were widely used in the United States before and during the Civil War. See
Matthew J. Calvin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second
Haitian Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
24
In fact, some abolitionists went as far as to send U.S. slaves to Haiti so they might be free there; see
Benjamin Lundy, The Life, Travels and Opinions of Benjamin Lundy (1847; reprint, New York: Negro
Universities Press, 1969), 29.
25
Harvey, vii.
26
Perhaps one of the most interesting of these arguments comes from J.F. Barham, who in 1823, argued
that “the evidence of all the Colonies in the West Indies…proves, that, constituted as he now is, the Negro
will not work but under coercion. Hayti proves it…” (J.F. Barham, Considerations on the Abolition of
Negro Slavery and the Means of Practically Effecting It, 2nd ed. (London: James Ridgway, 1823), 15).
Barham continues, noting that white peoples will have to teach freed blacks to desire “artificial wants” and
to live beyond their means so that the freed blacks will be compelled to sell their labor on the market (16).
82

help. In 1842, he relates, “The peasantry of Hayti, through the prevalence of heathenism
and ignorance, have little emulation, and few wants, and grow up contented with
common fare, coarse clothing, and enjoyments of a mere animal nature.”
27
Candler
continues, noting that if only the Haitians could be divorced from “superstition” and
“heathen” beliefs, they could be uplifted and civilized.
Yet, those who outright opposed abolition or the self-rule of Haitians were much
more critical. In an 1805 letter from French Foreign Minister Charles Talleyrand to U.S.
Secretary of State James Madison, for instance, Talleyrand observes:
The existence of a Negro people in arms, occupying a country it has soiled
by the most criminal acts, is a horrible spectacle for all white nations…
There are no reasons…to grant support to these brigands who have
declared themselves the enemies of all government.
28

Spencer St. John, writing 79 years later, minces no words in his opinion of Haiti, either,
claiming, “I know what the black man is, and I have no hesitation in declaring that he is
incapable of the art of government, and that to entrust him with framing and working the
laws for our islands is to condemn them to inevitable ruin.”
29
Haiti’s Revolution
deprived white Europeans and Americans of the ability to “civilize” the black world
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
27
Candler, 38.
28
qtd. in Lawless, 48.
29
St. John, xi. See also Peter S. Chazotte, Historical Sketches of the Revolution, and the foreign and civil
wars in the island of St. Domingo, with a narrative of the entire massacre of the white population of the
island (New York: Applegate, 1840), electronic reproduction (Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale,
2005), accessed on August 19, 2010, http://galenet.galegroup.com.libproxy.usc.edu/servlet/Sabin?af=
RN&ae=CY100314576&srchtp=a&ste=14.
83

formerly known as Saint-Domingue; therefore, Haiti had to be demonized so as to create
a situation where the civilizing forces of the white world could save the nation from
itself. The Revolution and the nation it produced could never be seen as successful.
Following colonialist discourse elsewhere, many writers tended to portray Haiti as
a country in ruins. However, unlike other colonial holdings, Haiti’s ruins were not
evidence of a once great indigenous empire but evidence of French colonialism left to
waste.
30
Often, Vodou was cited as the root cause of the de-evolution these authors saw
in Haiti, and the religion was rarely viewed as anything other than malicious. For
example, a 1920 article on Haiti in National Geographic reported, “Here, in the elemental
wildernesses, the natives rapidly forgot their thin veneer of Christian civilization and
reverted to utter, unthinking animalism, swayed only by fear of local bandit chiefs and
the black magic of voodoo witch doctors.”
31

As C.L.R. James observes, clandestine Vodou gatherings provided the future
leaders of the revolts with the opportunity to meet and gather supporters, and it was, in
fact, at a Vodou meeting that the Revolution began.
32
While there may have been
curiosity in the outside world about the slaves’ religious beliefs before the Revolution,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
30
For instance, in his book Black Haiti, Blair Niles supplies the caption “Ruins…only ruins…” to a
photograph of a decrepit building in the countryside. See Blair Niles, Black Haiti: A Biography of Africa’s
Eldest Daughter (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1926), photo insert opposite page 263.
31
qtd. in Lawless, 34.
32
For more on the role of Vodou in the Revolution, see C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins.
84

after it, there was certainly an interest in Vodou.
33
As Sidney Mintz and Michel-Rolph
Trouillot explain,
Surely no other ‘religion of Negroes’ has ever received so much attention,
nor was it ever as important to demean its content. That slaves would
fight their colonial masters—that masses of uneducated black slaves
would wage war against Napoleonic and French dominion—was thought
to be morally hideous. But that these ‘gilded Africans’ would win was
absolutely intolerable. When they did, their religion (as well as their
presumed failure to survive without European guidance) had to be
exposed.
34

External commentary painted Vodou as central to the revolts, and merely the possibility
of a connection between the Revolution and Vodou presented opponents of Haitian
independence with a means to disparage revolutionary ideas by linking them to a
supposedly barbaric superstition.
35

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
33
Vodou had been widely practiced in Saint-Domingue before the Revolution. By the time of the revolts, it
had been outlawed; it still continued to occur—mainly because soldiers didn’t want to travel into the hills
to oust supposed Vodouisants. However, even after independence, Vodou faced local and national attempts
at eradication. Over the next two hundred years, amidst periodic attempts to outlaw the religion, Vodou
came to be more and more linked to the Revolution and the national character of Haiti, with calls to
recognize it as such. Vodou was finally declared a nationally-recognized (and hence protected) religion in
Haiti in 2003.
34
Mintz and Trouillot, 125.
35
As Paul Gilroy encourages a move away from what he calls “cultural insiderism,” which is a set of
rhetorical strategies fostering a sense of absolute ethnic difference, we too might keep in mind why a form
of “cultural insiderism,” or perhaps more aptly “cultural outsiderism,” produced about Haiti may have
seemed vital to those nations that saw Haiti—as the living symbol of both a successful slave revolt and
black self-rule—as anathema. Ignoring the Catholic and other European influences on Vodou, for instance,
made it a completely, organically black religion and conveniently ignored any other (white) influence,
opening the door to use Vodou as the means to discredit Haiti (Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity
and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), 3). Also, one of the biggest fears connected to Haiti
was that its Revolution would inspire others, and while many commentators used Haiti’s supposed
barbarism to warn against just such a contingency, there were a minority of writers who did not believe
Haiti posed a threat to the outside world. See, for example, Marcus Rainsford, An Historical Account of the
85

The heroes of Haiti's Revolution were also heroes to slaves throughout the
Americas, who in some areas, shared Vodou beliefs. Slaveholders feared similar revolts
and mistrusted slave gatherings, especially those connected to Vodou.
36
As Bryan Senn
notes, slaveholders in the United States saw Vodou “as a powerful unifying force, one
that could incite action and build hope in their oppressed slaves.”
37
Vodou could
therefore not be considered a religion but was rather conceived of as “a heap of
superstitions, and of magical practices and sorcery, stripped of coherence.”
38

Nineteenth-century texts on Haiti devoted many pages to descriptions of Vodou
ceremonies and beliefs. Many of these reports were fictitious, but they were repeated
nonetheless. Spencer St. John, for instance, devoted a great deal of his 1884 book, Hayti,
or the Black Republic, to Vodou. St. John tied it to cannibalism, human sacrifice, and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Black Empire of Hayti: Comprehending a View of The Principal Transactions in the Revolution of Saint
Domingo with its Antient and Modern State (n.p.: James Cundee, 1805).
36
There was merit to these fears: slaves began resisting their lot in greater numbers as the 19
th
century
progressed. For instance, in 1824, Denmark Vesey led an unsuccessful slave revolt; the Underground
Railroad began in the 1820s, and in 1831, Nat Turner’s Rebellion took place. Even well after
Emancipation, fears of Haiti’s influence, particularly in the South, were still voiced: an editor’s note to a
1912 article on Vodou claims “The pertinence of the Voodoo menace to the United States has been made
clear by the recent atrocities of the ‘Human Sacrifice Sect’ of Louisiana. The murder of thirty-five persons
by followers of this phase of Voodooism has brought about an investigation now under way. The
confession of a young negress as to the rites of the sect has shown the hold Voodooism has on certain
colonies of negroes in the South to-day.” See Judge Henry Austin, “The Worship of the Snake: Voodooism
in Haiti To-Day,” The New England Magazine 47.4 (June 1912), 170.
37
Bryan Senn, Drums O’ Terror: Voodoo in the Cinema (Baltimore, MD: Luminary Press, 1998), 14.
Senn’s book is, to my knowledge, the only book-length catalogue of representations of “voodoo” in U.S.
cinema and includes detailed descriptions of dozens of films.
38
Laënnec Hurbon, “American Fantasy and Haitian Vodou,” Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, ed. Donald J.
Cosentino (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995), 183.
86

grave robbing in what would become one of the most widely read texts on Haiti in the
19
th
century.
39
Many writings on Haitian Vodou picked up on these themes of
cannibalism, often claiming Haitians ate their own children in sacrifice to Vodou gods, as
books and articles either borrowed directly from St. John or built upon his assertions.
40

Interestingly, St. John was careful to claim that cannibalism was not endured under the
French, maintaining that it was never mentioned in French colonial accounts of Haiti and
that it would have been difficult to perform when colonial masters kept such a close eye
on their property: one missing slave would have raised suspicions. Of course, inherent in
St. John’s argument was the idea that cannibalism was the result of Haitian self-rule.
41

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
39
Gary D. Rhodes, White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film (London: McFarland and Co., 2001), 72.
40
Cannibalism has its own chapter in St. John’s text, and he asserts that “every foreigner in Hayti knows
that cannibalism exists” (St. John, 188). Thus, St. John’s argument suffers from a warped a priori
reasoning!because he and the other foreigners know cannibalism exists, it exists. Still, from time to time,
stories of cannibalism tied to Vodou rites would surface in American and European newspapers and
magazines. One such story, related more than a year after the fact in Harper's Weekly in 1865, states that
upon the ascension of Soulouque to power in Haiti, Vodou sects ran wild and that one group “after having
stuffed and devoured one unfortunate child, were about to gormandize upon a second victim when justice
overtook them (“Cannibals in Hayti,” 545).” Using cannibalism to critique the Haitian government, the
article also places Vodou as a threat not only to civilization but to Haiti’s future (ie: its children) as well.
St. John refers to this same instance of supposed cannibalism in his book, particularly in Chapter 5:
“Vaudoux-Worship and Cannibalism” and in Chapter 6: “Cannibalism.” For a discussion that builds upon
St. John’s and then offers its own “proof” of cannibalism, see Frederick A. Ober, In the Wake of Columbus,
Adventures of the Special Commissioner sent by the World’s Columbian Exposition to the West Indies
(Boston: D. Lothrop Company, 1893). For a discussion of charges of cannibalism within a Caribbean
context, see Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (New York: Routledge,
2003) and for a larger discussion of cannibalism in the colonial world, see Cannibalism and the Colonial
World, eds. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998).
41
While St. John’s book and its assertions were widely believed, there were some skeptics. James Froude
in The English in the West Indies, discusses St. John’s book and remarks that while he finds it hard to
believe that someone of St. John’s standing would make up charges of cannibalism and child sacrifice,
“one had to set one incredibility against another. Notwithstanding the character of the evidence, when I
went out to the West Indies I was still unbelieving” (James Anthony Froude, The English in the West
87

Vodou was seen as an intrinsic part of Haitian life, something that corrupted
Haiti’s people because it was allowed to operate without restraint.
42
This led outside
observers to conclude that Haitians were unable to govern themselves. In his 1900 book
Where Black Rules White; a Journey Across and About Hayti, Hesketh Pritchard noted
that Vodou was a central part of every Haitian’s life and that its power would remain
undaunted “as long as Hayti retains an entirely negro government.”
43
Vodou corrupted
Haiti so that even institutions that might grant it the appearance of civilization, like a
republican government, were tainted.
44

This can be seen in something as simple as how Haiti was visually represented in
the United States in the late 19
th
century. For example, a series of sketches appearing in a
Harper’s Weekly issue from 1871 show four “characters” from Haiti, three of whom are
military personnel; these caricatures are accompanied by mocking captions—the soldier
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Indies, or The Bow of Ulysses (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1888), 126). Froude continued, noting
that he couldn’t believe that the influence of French culture and the Catholic church wouldn’t counter “so
horrid a revival of devil worship” but that “[a]ll the inquiries which I had been able to make, from
American and other officers who had been in Hayti, confirmed Sir S. St. John’s story (126).” Still, Froude
suspected that the Haitians were being demonized in ways similar to European Jews, who faced similar
charges of child sacrifice (127).
42
Which places Vodou in direct conflict with the Protestant virtue of self-restraint that was so integral to
the 19
th
-century Victorian world view. If civilization, in the Victorian mind, meant self-restraint and
control, Vodou was also uncivilized in that it seemed to have no limitations.
43
Prichard, 94.
44
Thus, charges like those still laid against Haitian leaders today of ties to Vodou (which, whether accurate
or not, often paint the religion as nefarious) are nothing new—Haitian leaders of the late 19
th
and early 20
th

centuries also faced them; see, for instance, Ober, who in his 1893 book, In the Wake of Columbus, claims
that Vodou high priests and priestesses are so powerful they are a “menace to good government, and it is
well known that even some of the rulers of Haiti have been dominated by them” (Ober, 190).
88

in the image labeled “A Celebrated General” walks around surveying his surroundings
barefoot, while the soldier in the image labeled “Light Cavalry” rides a donkey and the
soldier in “A Sentry at his Post—So Soldier Like” wears tattered and patched clothes.
45

These sketches suggest that the Haitians are making a mockery of one element of
traditional civilization: a competent standing military. Racist caricatures of black figures
were not out of the ordinary during this period,
46
and as John Candler, writing in 1842,
points out, attacks on the Haitian military were likewise to be expected; as he notes:
“Great ridicule has been attempted to be cast on the Haytien soldiery, who are
represented in caricature as so many scarecrows;” yet, Candler counters, “their
appearance on the present occasion, except in the want of an exact uniform, was nearly as
respectable as that of an English brigade.”
47
Still, Candler follows this praise by entering
into a discussion of the ill treatment of prisoners in Haiti and the crippling poverty of the
nation, so even Candler’s attempt to defend the Haitian military still manages to paint
Haiti in a poor light. Thus, whether in caricature or in what seemed a more generous
estimation, the question of the Haitian ability to self-rule remained.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
45
Messrs. Marc and Lourier, “Character Sketches in San Domingo and Hayti,” Harpers Weekly 15.742
(March 18, 1871), 249.
46
See, for instance, Ober, 188 or William A. MacCorkle, The Monroe Doctrine in its Relation to the
Republic of Haiti (New York: The Neale Publishing Co., 1915).
47
Candler, 20.
89

DOES THE CONSTITUTION FOLLOW THE FLAG?
The United States faced a number of tests related to the fitness for self-rule of a
variety of peoples in the 19
th
century. The fitness of Native Americans had, of course,
been under discussion well before the 19
th
century, and the relationship between the
United States and Native Americans was paradoxical from the beginning. In 1783,
George Washington noted that the “[i]nterest and safety” of the Native Americans
depended on U.S. “friendship” but thought it was best served by drawing a line between
Native American and white territories.
48
Similarly, Andrew Jackson believed that Native
Americans needed to be relocated where “they will always be free from the mercenary
influence of white men, and undisturbed by the local authority of the states.”
49
Yet, once
resettled, he suggested the federal government step in to “exercise a parental control over
their interests…”
50
Washington and Jackson demonstrated a belief, one that certainly
continued throughout the 19
th
century, that the Native Americans could potentially
become full U.S. citizens but only after adopting the habits and culture of white peoples
and that this adaptation to white ways could only happen at a remove from white
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
48
Alan Axelrod, Political History of America’s Wars (Washington DC: CQ Press, 2007), 52-53.
49
Jackson’s correspondence to James Gadsden (October 12, 1829), qtd. in Robert V. Remini, Andrew
Jackson and His Indian Wars (New York: Viking, 2001), 226.
50
Remini, 227.
90

civilization.
51
Native Americans were like sponges, quickly taking on the worst vices of
white society, and to be civilized, they had to be removed from it.
This paradoxical approach to how best “civilize” Native Americans was mirrored
in official responses to just what the tribes were. In the 1831 decision in Cherokee
Nation v. Georgia, the Supreme Court defined the Cherokees and other tribes as
“domestic dependent nations,” granting the tribes nation status but also deeming them
“dependents” of the U.S. government.
52
Likewise, in the 1832 decision in Worcester v.
Georgia, the court defined the Cherokee as a “nation,” seemingly granting them a degree
of sovereignty, yet this sovereignty meant little in practical dealings with the U.S.
government or individual U.S. citizens.
This push and pull between tutelage and keeping suspect peoples at a distance
was a familiar refrain heard in relation to a number of different peoples in the 19
th

century. In Hawaii, annexation was held up over fears of the large numbers of Native
Hawaiians, Asians, and mixed-race peoples occupying the islands.
53
For instance,
Alabama Senator John T. Morgan described Hawaii’s population as “large and mixed and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
51
By 1835, Jackson states “all preceding experiments for the improvement of the Indians have failed. It
now seems an established fact that they cannot live in contact with a civilized community and prosper”
(qtd. in Axelrod, 109). Interestingly, in the antebellum and post-war periods, similar arguments were made
about free blacks—that they could not thrive in U.S. society. This was one of the arguments for sending
black peoples to live in Liberia.
52
Axelrod, 107.
53
Statehood for New Mexico was also delayed because of the presence there of Mexicans and Native
Americans. See Laura E. Gomez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (New
York: New York UP, 2007).
91

with…few… who are really intelligent, educated people.”
54
It was argued that people of
this sort couldn’t manage the political rights that U.S. citizens handled.
55
Although
Hawaii was annexed in 1898, these concerns about the Islanders’ fitness for self-rule and
the desire to keep them, figuratively, at bay, prevented full entry into the U.S. body
politic as a state from becoming a reality for over fifty years.
56

The situation in the Caribbean was similar. In the wake of the Spanish-American
war, questions over the fitness of Cubans to take over governing the island arose.
57
At
the same time, the question of whether the Puerto Rican people were ready to govern
themselves appeared frequently in Congressional debates.
58
Ohio Senator Joseph B.
Foraker noted in 1900: “The people of Puerto Rico… have had no experience which
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
54
qtd. in Lauren L. Basson, “Annexed Americans: Robert Wilcox, Home Rule, and Self-Government in
Hawaii,” White Enough to be American? Race Mixing, Indigenous People, and the Boundaries of State and
Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 107.
55
Basson, 127; people of this sort included former cannibals, according to some claims.
56
For discussions of the white control over Hawaii’s government, pre- and post-annexation, see Basson and
Noenoe K. Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (Durham: Duke
UP, 2004).
57
See Louis A. Pérez, Jr., On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality and Culture (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1999).
58
Manuel Maldonado-Denis, Puerto Rico: A Socio-Historic Interpretation, trans. Elena Vialo (New York:
Random House, 1972), 89.
92

would qualify them… for the great work of government…needed by the people of Puerto
Rico.”
59
Similar arguments were offered in the case of the Philippines as well.
60

At stake in these arguments was not only the justification of U.S. imperial
expansion, but also definitions of democracy and U.S. citizenship: which peoples were
ready to rule themselves and which were fit to be U.S. citizens? Race played an
important role in answering both of these questions.
61
This had serious implications
stateside in the late 19
th
century: stories of the inability of non-white peoples to self-rule
served as cautionary tales of what could happen if ex-slaves or other subject peoples were
allowed self-rule within the United States. This would have been especially potent during
and after Reconstruction, when the possibility of black political power became a legal
(although not necessarily a practiced) reality throughout the United States.
Emancipation had freed the slaves but in so doing, it raised the question of what
exactly that freedom meant: did it mean full political rights, equality, or access to land?
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
59
qtd. in Maldonado-Denis, 90-91.
60
Even in those places where some degree of autonomy was granted, the United States still played the part
of guide. For example, in 1903, President Roosevelt allowed a revolution in Panama territory against the
Colombians to proceed, as it would serve U.S. interests in building the Panama canal. However, the United
States moved in quickly to secure Panama as a protectorate, granting the nation sovereignty on paper but
giving the United States the right to intervene as it saw fit. To justify this move, President Roosevelt
explained that this was in “our national interest and safety” and that it served “the interests of collective
civilization” (Walter LeFeber, The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical Perspective, updated ed. (New
York: Oxford UP, 1989), 32.
61
Although a similar discussion about the fitness of wage-earners and of women could also be made, my
focus here is specifically on cases dealing with territories outside the contiguous United States. Race will
be dealt with more extensively in Chapter Three.
93

And, was freedom inherent or did freed people need to be educated before taking it up?
Whatever the answer, it was clear things were changing. Thus, white supremacist
thinking demanded that the black capacity for self-rule had to be challenged in order to
appease those fearful of this change. But this created the paradox of having black people
live “outside the law,” existing in a state that, in theory, was free but in practice afforded
no protection from a constant threat of violence.
62

In order to justify such a paradox, examples from far-flung places were used to
underscore the black inability to self-govern or participate fully in U.S. citizenship.
Matthew Frye Jacobson, in examining the use of Sir Henry M. Stanley’s reports of Africa
for the New York Herald in 1877, notes that it is not
of small consequence that explorers’ depictions of ‘darkest Africa’
appeared at a moment when the question of Negro citizenship in the
United States was so hotly contested. Within the context of contemporary
American political culture, the unstated but obvious ideological portent in
these travel accounts was their comment upon African-Americans’ fitness
for self-government…
63

Yet, race was not the only factor at play here. Inherent in the self-rule arguments
about peoples outside of the United States were also political and economic concerns.
Making a territory a protectorate granted the United States a large degree of control over
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
62
C.L.R. James, American Civilization, eds. Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart (Cambridge: Blackwell,
1993), 202; this is precisely what happened to most post-Reconstruction blacks, especially in the South.
63
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race
(Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998), 151.
94

locations of strategic interest.
64
Economically, the United States could use self-rule to
justify “saving” territories that were being “misused” or unused by the natives, thus
increasing access to raw materials and expanding its markets. For instance, Native
American land, the argument went, was wasted by the “nomadic” tribes and could be of
more use to white farming communities. And, by making territories like Cuba or Puerto
Rico protectorates or quasi-protectorates, the United States ensured stability without
having to grant political rights and was still able to keep these places open to U.S.
commercial interests.
65
The exploitation of territories ripe with raw materials was also
seen as a potential remedy to the Great Depression of the late 19
th
century and a means of
fueling industrialization in the United States.
66
Keeping these territories as protectorates
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
64
Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Panama all served as strategic locations, either for transport or
refueling.
65
Maldonado-Denis, 55.
66
For example, part of the attractiveness of Hawaii to U.S. interests in the late 19
th
century was its sugar
production, which was secured in a reciprocity treaty in 1876. Maintaining white ownership and political
power and keeping the coolie labor system on the island were thus imperative to commercial concerns (see
Basson and Silva). Furthermore, the tutelage discussed by those wishing to uplift uncivilized peoples was
often economic in nature. An Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1862 notes that
teaching Native Americans the notion of individual property will assist in “their reclamation and
advancement in civilization…” (Axelrod, 151). And in a 1867 speech outlining why newly-freed blacks
were incapable of self-government, Andrew Johnson noted their disregard for “the rights of property”
(Andrew Johnson, Third Annual Message to Congress (December 3, 1867), John T. Woolley and Gerhard
Peters, The American Presidency Project (Santa Barbara), accessed on August 19, 2010,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29508). In fact, Lauren Basson argues that dedication to both
white supremacy and the institution of private property defined U.S. citizenship during the early 20
th

century. Basson also argues that one of the reasons some politicians fought so hard against Hawaiian
annexation was their fears that this would lead to eventual Hawaiian citizenship and full political rights for
Native Hawaiians—pressing the question, that had largely been side-stepped with the death of
Reconstruction, of what would happen to the political process if it became a mixed-race undertaking
(Basson, 102-3).
95

ensured U.S. economic and political dominance in the Western hemisphere and clothed it
in the guise of recovery and uplift.
Whatever the justification, the United States gained a number of protectorates in
the late 19
th
and early 20
th
centuries.
67
While the very notion of a “protectorate”
presupposes that a certain group of people needs protection from itself, protectorates also
served a useful function in keeping undesirable peoples out of contention for U.S.
citizenship. To annex any of the territories under discussion in the late 19
th
century and
early 20
th
century would have meant incorporating them into the United States. Thus, by
designating certain places protectorates or protectorate-like territories, the United States
was still able to reap the political and economic benefits of controlling these territories
without having to expand the definition of U.S. citizenship. U.S. democracy was thus
kept undiluted while the need for superior races to extend their benevolent “guidance” to
the lesser races was fortified.
While the myth of American Exceptionalism posits that the United States is a land
of immigrants where the social order has always worked to assimilate newcomers, it
seems clear that fears over just who could be let in, both physically and politically, have
always been at the fore.
68
As with discussions of self-rule, the supposed inferiority of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
67
For an insightful look into what differentiated possessions, territories and protectorates during this time,
see Basson, 104-5.
68
Worthiness for inclusion into the U.S. body politic has been judged by a variety of criteria, but in terms
of this project those related to race seem most relevant. Gender, class, sexuality, and religion have also
96

certain races has been used to make the case for their exclusion from full political
participation in the United States, but still another concern has been the dilution of
supposed U.S. racial purity.
69
The emancipation of blacks, the acquisition of
protectorates, and increased immigration were challenging the traditional notions of what
a U.S. citizen looked like and where he/she existed. No longer were boundaries being
drawn exclusively between different kinds of white peoples,
70
non-white peoples were
becoming more likely initiates into the U.S. political system. There were fears that once
emancipated, former slaves would mix their blood with white peoples, creating mixed-
race people, who would disrupt the social order.
71
In a way, fears over the inclusion of
peoples from Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Cuba, and the Philippines mirrored this concern: the
very notion of the body as a symbol for the political system opened up the possibility of
that body becoming tainted through association with the “wrong” sorts of people.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
been used to divide potential citizens from the unwanted; for a discussion of how various groups have come
to challenge the notion of the U.S. citizen, see Wiebe.
69
Between the 1880s and 1920s, a number of bills and acts were enacted that attempted to limit
immigration to the United States and make it harder for those here to gain full citizenship. Starting with the
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and continuing through the quota acts of the 1920s-1940s, who could come
to the United States and who would be considered for citizenship got narrower and narrower; only after
World War II did a loosening begin. For an insightful discussion of U.S. immigration acts, see Thomas J.
Curran, Xenophobia and Immigration, 1820-1930 (Boston: Twayne, 1975); and Roger Daniels, Guarding
the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882 (New York: Hill and Wang,
2004).
70
Although that certainly continued to happen.
71
While it was easier to distinguish black or brown from white, the threat that non-white people brought
was that once admitted, they could mix with white peoples threatening assumed clear visual distinctions
between the political haves and have-nots. A discussion of miscegenation and passing occurs in Chapter
Three.
97

Such concerns represented real reservations about the limits of democracy. It’s
no surprise then that the popular question at the turn of the century was “Does the
Constitution follow the flag?” The Supreme Court, in the insular cases,
72
said no. In the
1901 case Downes v. Bidwell, the majority determined
in overseas possessions inhabited by alien races, differing from us in
religion, customs, laws, methods of taxation, and modes of thought, the
administering of governments and justice, according to Anglo-Saxon
principles, may for a time, be impossible…
73

Yet, the very fact that there was debate—debate on the Senate floor about Puerto Rico
and the Philippines or debate in the Supreme Court about U.S. responsibilities to its
territories—showed that the notion of what a U.S. citizen was was already highly
problematized. In other words, at the very root of democracy is the worrisome problem
inexorably tied to ideas of U.S. citizenship: just who is let in, and what qualifications
should they have?
During the early years of the nation up through the early 19
th
century, this was
simple: white male landowners were citizens with full political rights. But, over the
course of the 19
th
century, given to the particularities of U.S. life and the breakdown of
certain traditional hierarchies,
74
political rights were slowly extended to the poor (poor
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
72
Fourteen decisions on this question handed down between 1901 and 1904.
73
qtd. in Daniels, 37.
74
The social hierarchies of Europe did not survive as well in the United States where a more scattered
population, the slow rise in prestige of wage labor, and decentralized government, among other things,
worked to undermine them. For more on this, see Wiebe.
98

white men, at any rate), and over time, education, rather than land ownership, made good
citizens. Yet, the democratic tendencies of the new nation were not necessarily lauded
elsewhere. As Robert Wiebe notes, “European commentators…accentuated transatlantic
difference by decivilizing American democracy.”
75
Americans were likened to
barbarians and savages, and the United States decried as violent and dirty.
76
Democracy
itself was suspect, but U.S. commentators sought to counter these accusations either by
refuting them or by asserting that the United States was on the path of progress; some
growing pains were to be expected on the way to a glorious future.
77
Calling other
peoples’ abilities to govern into question and offering them guidance and protection thus
served as one means of legitimizing U.S. democracy by making it paternal.
Yet, the contradictions of U.S. democracy—lauded at home and demonized
abroad; granting freedoms to some and not to others—were still visible in the 19
th

century. As C.L.R. James argues, the contradiction between slavery and democracy was
clear to many during this time, and the fact that maintaining such unfreedom in the midst
of supposed freedom could undermine the entire system was evident as early as the
Missouri Compromise of 1820.
78
Similarly, the United States undercut the meaning of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
75
Wiebe, 47.
76
Wiebe, 47-51.
77
Wiebe, 54-58.
78
James makes reference to the Historian F.J. Turner in his work; in the early 20
th
century Turner also
questioned whether or not the United States could sustain its democracy given that the material conditions
99

democracy during the mid and late 19
th
century by undermining the notion of what
constituted a sovereign people—in calling the Native American tribes “nations” or
claiming that protectorates like Panama were sovereign, the United States seemed to be
acknowledging them as equals, but by then qualifying these peoples’ autonomy, the very
notion of the democratic was muddled: that one “sovereign” nation had power over
another “sovereign” nation showed that freedom went hand-in-hand with hegemony.
Some commentators understood the paradoxes inherent in the democratic concept
itself and how tricky democracy could be for anyone to put off; for instance, in 1926,
Blair Niles noted: “Haitians have shown themselves, not as impossible savages nor
entirely righteous martyrs, but as a nation having, like ourselves, a devilishly hard time
putting into practice the democratic ideals which are at once our hope and our despair.”
79

Certainly, Haiti’s presence as the only successful slave revolt and only black-ruled nation
in the Western hemisphere and the continuous turmoil and economic failures on the
island made it the paradigm for self-rule debates, and it should be no surprise that, given
the prevailing opinion of Haiti’s status as a nation in need of guidance, that typically,
Haiti’s example served to strengthen the argument for the necessity of continuing
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
that had given it birth (lots of land and a relatively small population density, for instance) had disappeared
by the turn of the century (James, American Civilization, 103).
79
Niles, 309.
100

imperial domination in other parts of the world—implicit in these descriptions was a
warning to avoid the sort of deterioration seen in Haiti.
80

In an 1867 message to Congress, Andrew Johnson never explicitly named Haiti in
his assertions that newly-freed blacks were incapable of self-rule, but he did note that
while white men had been able to build a great government in the United States, “it must
be acknowledged that in the progress of nations Negroes have shown less capacity for
government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has
ever been successful in their hands.”
81
Likewise, in deciding which party to support in
the 1904 Panamanian elections, William Howard Taft vilified the Liberal party in
Panama because it depended largely on blacks and mixed-race peoples who were “much
less worthy” than their Conservative counterparts; he believed that if the Liberals were
elected, a “large Negro influence” would govern the isthmus, potentially making it a
trouble spot like Haiti.
82

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
80
Although an argument could be made that the presence of Native Americans in the United States
certainly predates the creation of Haiti, I hold that Haiti represented a separate sovereign entity, and while
the Native American tribes did present a threat to the United States in terms of legal challenges and outright
warfare, because of their territorial proximity to the United States and its citizens, Native Americans could
not be imagined as something completely set apart from the United States in the same way Haiti could.
81
Johnson, Third Annual Message to Congress.
82
LeFeber, 40; Similarly, FDR would support the Somoza regime in Nicaragua in the late 1930s because
his dictatorship was considered better than the potential of indigenous revolutionaries or communists in
control (Axelrod, 376).
101

Haiti was also used as justification for not supporting the Filipino struggle for
independence. As Matthew Frye Jacobson observes of the 1899 debate,
Kuryer Polski, a Polish journal in Milwaukee…identified the Filipinos as
a ‘half savage people,’ comparing their prospect of independence to the
‘negro republic of Hayti’ (where, by this account, whites were murdered
in the most terrible manner, where every moment gave birth to a new
revolutionary government, where each new dictator murdered a thousand
opponents, and where corruption reigned).
83

It was not just the social revolution Haiti spawned that made it a cautionary tale in
the United States. The nation’s economic situation warned against following its example
as well. Not only were there memories of the fall in Saint-Domingue’s tremendous
colonial exports, but after the Revolution, plantations were abandoned in favor of small-
scale subsistence farming; as Eric Foner observes, “Caribbean emancipation stood as a
symbol and a warning to the white South, a demonstration of the futility of all schemes to
elevate blacks, and of the dire fate awaiting American planters in the aftermath of
slavery.”
84
Any change in the social order meant that U.S. landowners might face a
challenge to their political hegemony and with it, their abilities to dominate the resources
of production. Black freedom, especially in terms of access to the land, had to be
curtailed lest the United States fall into Haiti’s position.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
83
Jacobson, 209-10.
84
Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper Collins,
2002), 134.
102

As Haiti came to represent a sort of self-destructiveness that could some day spill
over into the rest of the Americas, the belief that Haiti had to be saved from itself, and in
its saving, contained, was prominent. Although sentiment like this may not have been the
only excuse, it did play a part in the U.S. Occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934.
Officially, the United States moved into Haiti to prevent a German attack during World
War I, and Haiti was one of many Caribbean nations occupied by the United States
during the late 1910s, supposedly for their own protection.
85
Occupying Haiti was also a
means of utilizing the Monroe Doctrine to show European nations that the United States
would protect its own interests in the Western Hemisphere against European intervention
or local initiative.
86
It also provided the United States with an opportunity to ensure the
friendlier upper classes kept control of the country. Perhaps most importantly, the
Haitian Occupation allowed the United States to fortify its already strong strategic
position in the Caribbean. However, to most people living in the United States, the
United States occupied Haiti under the pretense of civilizing it; Haiti was proof that some
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
85
Similar rhetoric about the dangers of potential Japanese occupation was used during debates over the
annexation of Hawaii (Basson, 95).
86
In a December 1823 address to Congress, President James Monroe outlined a new U.S. policy
concerning the Americas and the U.S. view of Europe’s future role in the Western Hemisphere. The
doctrine was intended to indicate a clear break between the Americas and Europe and warned European
imperial powers against interfering in the affairs of newly-independent Latin American nations or potential
U.S. territories. In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt added the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe
Doctrine. This corollary justified the right of the United States to intervene in Latin American national
affairs as it saw fit. The Monroe Doctrine kept Europe out; the Roosevelt Corollary was supposed to keep
Latin America in line, and the United States’ “civilizing mission” took care of the rest. Thus, to protect
U.S. economic interests, the United States could justify a military presence in Haiti. For an argument
supporting the Occupation using the Monroe Doctrine specifically, see MacCorkle.
103

peoples weren’t ready for self-rule, and a negative image of Haitians, and of Vodou in
particular, was instrumental in gaining and keeping support for such a position. As Joan
Dayan notes, “What better way to justify the ‘civilizing’ presence of marines in Haiti
than to project the phantasm of barbarism?”
87
In 1915, William A. MacCorkle voiced
this sentiment as he argued for the Occupation: “Our government believes that the
fundamental principles of a country’s life should be freedom and consent of the
governed, yet it is idle to speak of consent of the governed in an island which has never
known anything but a blood-stained despotism.”
88

Similarly, in Captain John Houston Craige’s 1933 memoir of his experiences
during the Occupation, Black Bagdad,
89
Craige recalls a conversation with Marine
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
87
qtd. in Annette Trefzer, “Possessing the Self: Caribbean Identities in Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My
Horse,” African American Review 34.2 (Summer 2000), 300. Similar rhetoric was used during the
construction of the Panama canal—tales of barbarism in Panama helped to justify the U.S. presence there.
For a sampling of books from the period of construction, see Willis Abott, Panama and the Canal, the
Story of Its Achievement, Its Problems, and Its Prospects (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1914);
William D. Boyce, United States Colonies and Dependencies (Chicago: Rand McNally & Company,
1914); Arthur Bullard, Panama: The Canal, the Country, and the People (New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1914); Willis Fletcher Johnson, Four Centuries of the Panama Canal (New York: Henry Holt
and Company, 1906); and William R. Scott, The Americans in Panama (New York: Statler Publishing
Company, 1912). Moreover, Vodou continues to accompany press accounts of Haiti; see for instance, as a
sampling: Michel Laguerre, Voodoo and Politics in Haiti (London: McMillan, 1989); Charles McCoy,
“Black Magic Casts a Deepening Spell Over Troubled Haiti,” Wall Street Journal (October 20, 1988),
accessed on August 7, 2010, ProQuest: 1; Anne-Marie O’Connor, “Today’s Focus: Haiti Military Rulers
turn to Voodoo Powerful Force,” The Atlanta Journal and Constitution (October 27, 1993): A6; Lydia
Polgreen, “An Easter Voodoo Festival with Political Undertones,” The New York Times (April 12, 2004):
A4; and Joe Mozingo, “In Haiti, some see spirit world behind the quake,” The Los Angeles Times (January
22, 2010), accessed on July 23, 2010, http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/22/world/la-fg-haiti-voodoo23-
2010jan23.
88
MacCorkle, 77.
89
So called, according to Craige, because a gun-runner friend of his described the nation as such; Craige
reports his friend said, “This…is black Bagdad. These people are still living in the days of the Arabian
104

Captain Pat Kelly, commander of the Cerca la Source district in Haiti. Kelly explained
the difference between the Christian God!a god of “love and purity”!and the Vodou
God, saying, “The God [a Vodouisant] worships is a big negro with supreme power, no
morals, and an unlimited appetite for rum, women, whoopee and blood.”
90
Kelly
continued, noting that some Vodou gods demanded human sacrifices to satiate their
appetites. Unsettled by this idea, Craige asked if cannibalism was still practiced in Haiti.
Kelly said yes, acknowledging: “Not as often as they used to before the Occupation, but
I’m afraid there’s plenty of that sort of thing going on in spite of all we’ve done to
prevent it.”
91
Kelly’s comments, like St. John’s nearly thirty years earlier, not only
implied the supposed gulf separating savage Haitian cannibals from civilized white
peoples but that white civilization could “cure” this cannibalism—Haitians simply
needed guidance from the Western world.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Nights. You may meet Haroun al Raschid and Giafer, his Grand Wazir, any day, walking arm in arm in the
street. You may hear tales as amazing as any Sheherezade ever told. You may see woolly-headed
cannibals and silk-hatted savants side by side. An amazing place” (John Craige, Black Bagdad (New York:
A. L. Burt Company, 1933), 1-2). Craige’s second book, which was also about Haiti, was titled Cannibal
Cousins (New York: Minton, Balch & Co., 1934).
90
Craige, 98.
91
Craige, 99. Similarly, in 1912 Judge Henry Austin claimed that after a white merchant “assured them
that it was useless to deny what was apparent” Haitian interviewees admitted that under the influence of
Vodou beliefs, cannibalism was “almost a daily practice” (Austin, 172).
105

ENTER THE ZOMBIE
At a 1921 hearing before a select committee of the U.S. Senate, Rear Admiral
H.T. Mayo and Judge Advocate Jesse F. Dyer noted, “Now, for the first time in more
than 100 years, tranquility and security of life and property may be said to prevail in
Haiti. The Haitian people themselves welcomed the coming of our men and are
unwilling to have them depart.”
92
Records of the hearings include several references to
the good works U.S. troops were doing in Haiti. Yet, there were growing concerns about
the Occupation—the hearings themselves were meant to answer not only charges of
abuses of power by U.S. troops
93
but also increasingly loud queries into the real reasons
the United States was in Haiti in the first place.
94

Among the voices of dissent were those who claimed the United States was only
in Haiti for financial gain
95
or to promote its military interests in Panama, and while there
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
92
Inquiry into Occupation and Administration of Haiti and Santo Domingo, Hearings before a Select
Committee on Haiti and Santo Domingo, United States Senate, 67th Cong., 1st and 2nd sess., vol. 2
(Washington: Government Printing Office, 1922), 1688.
93
Charges included, but were not limited to, thousands of civilian deaths and widespread corruption and
abuse (see Inquiry into Occupation and Administration of Haiti and Santo Domingo, Hearings before a
Select Committee on Haiti and Santo Domingo, United States Senate, vols. 1 & 2).
94
For instance, see Herbert J. Seilgmann, “The Conquest of Haiti,” The Nation 111 (July 10, 1920),
accessed on January 28, 2011, http://haitiforever.com/windowsonhaiti/haiti_oc_series_01.shtml.
95
Claims by Stenio Vincent, former Minister of Justice and Interior, Minister to the Hague, and President
of the Senate of Haiti, pointed to U.S. financial interests in Haiti as the reason for U.S. involvement there;
Vincent asserted that many of those with financial interests in Haiti had strong ties to the Wilson White
House (see Inquiry into Occupation and Administration of Haiti and Santo Domingo, Hearings before a
Select Committee on Haiti and Santo Domingo, United States Senate, vol. 1, 3).
106

were counter-charges that these types of accusations were politically motivated,
96
it was
clear that by the 1920s, support for the Occupation, both in the United States and in Haiti,
was beginning to falter. Not only was there a general unease with colonial holdings in
the the post-World War I world, but Haitians were increasingly resistant to U.S.
“tutelage.” The Occupation was losing the support of those Haitian elites who had
originally backed it, and by 1918, rebel activity was on the rise: corvée labor projects
were causing many Haitians to wonder just how free the democracy being imported
really was.
A commission sent to Haiti by President Hoover in February 1930 reported that
the “failure of the occupation to understand the social problems of Haiti, its brusque
attempt to plant democracy there by drill and harrow, its determination to set up a middle
class—however wise and necessary it may seem to Americans—all these explain why, in
part, the high hopes of our good works in this land have not been realized.”
97
Indeed, by
the early 1930s, elections in Haiti had ushered in an anti-Occupation government, and the
United States was preparing its withdrawal.
98
The zombie, thus, entered U.S. popular
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
96
Author Edna Taft, for instance, claimed that they were simply a tool to court the black vote (Edna Taft,
A Puritan in Voodoo-land (Philadelphia: The Penn Publishing Co., 1938), 162).
97
Arthur C. Millspaugh, Haiti Under American Control, 1915-1930 (Boston: World Peace Foundation,
1931), 185.
98
Jacques C. Antoine, in a 1959 book review of Ruth Danehower Wilson’s Here is Haiti, observes that
Wilson claims that even in the 1950s the “final withdrawal of the Marines is celebrated as a date second
only to the Independence Day” (see Jacques C. Antoine, Review of Here is Haiti by Ruth Danehower
Wilson, The Western Political Quarterly 12.1 part 1 (March 1959), 232).
107

culture at an auspicious moment. Joan Dayan explains that while in Haiti, the zombi
could stand for slavery under the French colonial regime, the Occupation, with its forced
labor and abuses against Haitian citizens, reinscribed the zombi and conceptions of
slavery as well; furthermore, it was no coincidence that, “[a]s Haitians were forced to
build roads, and thousands of peasants were brutalized and massacred, tales of zombies
proliferated in the United States.”
99

While stories of the reanimated dead wandering the Haitian countryside had been
circulating since the late 19
th
century, the term “zombie” was virtually unknown in the
West until 1929. At that time, though, zombies entered U.S. popular culture via William
Seabrook’s book, The Magic Island. Seabrook lived in Haiti and in The Magic Island, he
gave detailed accounts of Vodou rituals and folklore. One thing in particular captured his
interest: he wrote, “…I recalled one creature I had been hearing about in Haiti, which
sounded exclusively local!the zombie.”
100
Seabrook devoted one chapter to this
creature. Entitled “…Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields,” the chapter described
zombies in detail:
The zombie, they say, is a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken
from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of
life!it is a dead body which is made to walk and act and move as if it
were alive.
101

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
99
Dayan, 37.
100
W.B. Seabrook, The Magic Island (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1929), 93.
101
Seabrook, 93.
108

Seabrook continued, explaining that zombies were used as slaves by those who raised
them; he then described the physical traits of zombies he had supposedly seen who were
“plodding like brutes, like automatons” and whose faces were “expressionless” and
“vacant” with eyes “like the eyes of a dead man, not blind, but staring, unfocused,
unseeing.”
102
Seabrook's descriptions came to codify zombie behavior in U.S.
imaginations for years to come.
103

One of the earliest appearances of the zombie after The Magic Island was
Kenneth Webb’s 1932 stage play “Zombie,” which borrowed liberally from Seabrook.
104

This was soon followed by the first feature-length zombie film, White Zombie.
105
In
these earliest offerings, the zombie was, in many ways, a continuation of the previously-
employed rhetoric connected to Vodou used to maintain an image of Haiti as backward.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
102
Seabrook, 101.
103
In fact, according to at least two observers, furor in Haiti over The Magic Island centered not so much
on Seabrook’s sensationalist reporting as it did on Alexander King’s accompanying illustrations. Katherine
Dunham reports, “Seabrook with his Magic Island had been a great handicap because the elite were
offended, not so much by the text, which, compared to much that had been written about Haiti, isn’t so
vilifying, but by the illustrations—grotesque impressions not only of the peasants, which wouldn’t have
mattered, but of the elite” (Katherine Dunham, Island Possessed (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co.,
1969), 3-4). Harold Courlander likewise reports, “It is clear to me now that The Magic Island was
unnecessarily damaged by the grotesque illustrations contributed by Alexander King, who up to that time
had never once visited Haiti” (Harold Courlander, “Recollections of Haiti in the 1930s and ‘40s,” African
Arts 23.2 (April 1990), 62).
104
Rhodes, 84.
105
Interestingly enough, the screenwriter for White Zombie, Garnett Weston, also published one of the
earliest pieces of zombie fiction, “Salt is Not for Slaves,” under the pen name G.W. Hutter in 1931 (G.W.
Hutter, “Salt is Not for Slaves” (1931), Stories of the Walking Dead, ed. by Peter Haining (London: Severn
House, 1986): 39-53).
109

The idea of an overt threat (cannibalism) was simply traded in for a fantasy marking Haiti
as a nation of eternal slaves. Stories of zombies worked to show what could happen
under black self-rule: it could reduce a nation to slavery in a reversal of the Republican
principles of individualism, self-determination, and democracy that supposedly made the
United States great. The political threat and the racial threat fused into one in the form of
the zombie.
Haiti is very present in early zombie films.
106
In White Zombie, a connection to
Haiti is clearly marked through location. However, the connection is more implicitly
made four years later in Revolt of the Zombies, which is set in Cambodia. Advertising for
the film capitalizes on the “truth” of zombies—White Zombie advertising had referenced
the Penal Code of Haiti
107
and ads for Revolt of the Zombies do the same thing,
combining references to Haitian law with “years of research” into the building of Angkor
Wat.
108
In films like Ouanga, I Walked with a Zombie (1943), King of the Zombies
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
106
And yet, at the same time, the realities of Haitian life are eschewed in these films. For readings of the
film White Zombie in relation to the Occupation, which would have still been going on but is never
mentioned in the film, see Tony Williams, “White Zombie Haitian Horror,” Jump Cut 28 (April 1983): 18-
20; and Jennifer Fay, “Dead Subjectivity: White Zombie, Black Baghdad,” The New Centennial Review 8.1
(2008): 81-101.
107
Article 249 of the Penal Code of Haiti had been referenced by Seabrook and the stage play “Zombie” as
proof of real-life zombification. This article states that if a person is drugged so as to appear dead, those
who drugged him/her may be charged with attempted murder, and if the drugged person is buried, those
who drugged him/her may be charged with murder, no matter what happens. The article was also used
both in promotional materials for White Zombie and in the film itself.
108
Revolt of the Zombies Pressbook (Academy Pictures Distributing Co., 1936), The Cinema-Television
Archives, University of Southern California, 3. Here, zombies are created through a spell—the very sort of
spell the Halperins and the Revolt of the Zombies pressbook asserted overtook the wills of millions of
slaves in the real-life building of Angkor Wat, and the use of Angkor Wat is telling. The French had, for
110

(1941), and I Eat Your Skin (1964) an implicit link to Haiti is accomplished through the
use of unnamed or fictitious Caribbean islands, peopled with black populations with
some connection to commonly-used tropes of voodoo.
109

A number of the earliest zombie films—White Zombie, Ouanga, Revolt of the
Zombies, King of the Zombies, Revenge of the Zombies (1943), I Walked with a Zombie,
Zombies on Broadway (1945), Voodoo Island (1957), I Eat Your Skin, and Plague of the
Zombies (1966)—feature a zombiism that is explicitly tied to black “native” cultures and
involves narratives where white bodies are threatened by possible zombification, and
hence contamination, by those cultures. “Native”/voodoo culture in these films is often
aurally marked by the constant beat of tom-toms; while in films set in exotic Caribbean
locales, like Ouanga or I Eat Your Skin, this is to be expected, in a film like 1957’s
Womaneater, which is set in modern England, an imported native drummer still
accompanies the local (white) zombie master’s ceremonies.
Costumes also work to identify native cultures in these films. Typical accessories
include feathers, headdresses, and skimpy clothing for native females. Yet, this native
clothing is sometimes only called upon at the very height of voodoo practice. For
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
the better part of seventy years, used it as a symbol of French uplift through the French “discovery” and
subsequent rescue of the temple complex. Angkor Wat showed that the Cambodians were a people in
decline and in need of French rescue, and Dana S. Hale notes, “At the interwar expositions,
[reconstructions of Angkor Wat] dominated as a symbol of French Indochina and perhaps as a symbol of
the entire colonial empire…” (Dana S. Hale, Races on Display: French Representations of Colonized
Peoples, 1886-1940 (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2008), 172). See also Nicola Cooper, France in Indochina:
Colonial Encounters (New York: Berg, 2001), 69-74.
109
For an in-depth discussion of how “voodoo” has been coded and utilized in U.S. film, see Senn.
111

instance, in King of the Zombies, both black and white zombies typically wear
contemporary attire—pants and button-up shirts—yet, at the film’s climactic voodoo
ceremony, suddenly some natives are wearing elaborate feathered headdresses and
necklaces made of animal teeth (figs. 2.1 & 2.2). Likewise, the setting of Plague of the
Zombies is a small village in Victorian England, yet the film opens with the image of
three shirtless black men wearing tall fur hats and playing zebra-skinned drums (fig. 2.3).
Just as in Womaneater, it soon becomes clear that these men have been imported by a
local zombie master.
In associating the processes of zombification with these stereotypical costumes
and actions and by making Haiti an implicit presence, many early zombie films add a
racial component to zombie making. If producing zombies requires the tool and talents
of black culture, then zombification implicitly carries blackness with it. Thus, American
citizens constantly under the threat of becoming a zombie master’s slaves are also under
the threat of having their racial purity tested as well.
As initially Haitian, and therefore black, creatures, zombies were an easy fit with
racist depictions of black peoples in U.S. culture. Zombies could operate within a
discourse that maintained whiteness as normative and constructed those of color as
monstrous. Moreover, zombies were something created outside the experience of white,
middle-class America!they happened “over there,” and fitting with earlier colonialist

112

Figures 2.1 & 2.2: “Native” Costumes, King of the Zombies (1941)

113

Figure 2.3: Victorian England? The Opening Scene of Plague of the Zombies (1966)

discourse that generally accorded white persons an individual identity and lumped
peoples of color into indistinct masses, zombies were imagined as faceless hordes: a new
means of robbing the Other
110
of its individuality in order to keep it as Other.
111
Most
often, in films like Revolt of the Zombies or Revenge of the Zombies, people of color, and
especially zombies of color, have no individual identity.
Perhaps the most potent example of black zombies as a indiscriminate mass of
beings occurs in White Zombie. A throng of zombies work the plantation of zombie
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
110
For a discussion of the Other, see Chapter One.
111
Subjectivity and identity, not to mention concepts like freedom and democracy, depend in large part, on
an individuated subject.
114

master Murder Legendre (Bela Lugosi), and the first scene in his sugar mill sets up a
striking contrast, both between the dead workers and the living aristocrat who is paying a
visit and between the dead workers and Legendre’s special zombies—as he later
describes them, former ranking officials and important people of Haiti. The worker
zombies are initially shown in a wide shot as little more than shadows (fig. 2.4). When
the camera does pull closer, the worker zombies become nothing more than pairs of legs
crossing before the screen (fig. 2.5). Finally, cutting to a long shot that faces the zombie
workers, it becomes clear that they are, indeed, meant to be nondescript: the baskets of
cane they carry obscure their faces, literally turning them into a faceless horde (fig. 2.6).

Figure 2.4: Zombie Workers in the Sugar Mill, White Zombie (1932)
115

Figure 2.5: Zombie Workers as Legs Passing by the Camera, White Zombie (1932)

Figure 2.6: Zombie Workers as Faceless Hordes, White Zombie (1932)
116

Still, even when people of color are not zombies in early zombie films, they often
become part of an exotic background. In I Eat Your Skin, for example, near the middle of
the film, a close-up of dark hands poised over drums leads into a scene with little
narrative connection to the rest of the story, save interjecting a native chant and dance
sequence into the film. The scene focuses on a henchman working for zombie master
Papa Nero (the white overseer of the island): the man sings and performs a voodoo ritual
as a number of other natives writhe in the fore- and backgrounds. While some cutaways
focus on these dancers, their main purpose is to provide an ever-moving, ever-moaning
setting.
112
Native bodies, here, are little more than set decorations for added atmosphere,
and similar configurations of native bodies can be found in Zombies on Broadway and I
Walked with a Zombie.
However, those white Americans who are zombified in these same films are
individualized: they are zombies with names, backgrounds, and loved ones trying to
rescue them. Thus, there is Madeline in White Zombie, who is turned into a zombie by
Murder Legendre while visiting her fiancée in Haiti; Lila von Altermann is zombified by
her husband in Revenge of the Zombies, and Jessica Holland is the titular zombie of I
Walked with a Zombie. Likewise, pilot James McCarthy is zombified by a Nazi trying to
steal war secrets in King of the Zombies, Mike Strager is zombified by yet another Bela
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
112
These same natives are featured in a similar scene before the opening credits and in a later scene of
attempted human sacrifice.
117

Lugosi zombie master in Zombies on Broadway, and Police Captain David Harris is
zombified by a mob boss with plans of a zombie crime spree in Creature with the Atom
Brain (1955). In each of these cases, white Americans are zombified as part of a zombie
master’s evil scheme, and unlike zombies of color, these zombies can find some sort of
escape from the system that subjugates them, as they will most likely be freed from the
zombie spell by film’s end.
Even with the advantages accorded to white zombies in these films, the narratives
generally center on bodies being robbed of their agency, controlled by unseen forces. If,
as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno would claim in 1944, the culture industry
works to usher in new forms of domination rendering spectators as consumers, then the
zombie is the perfect metaphor for the brainwashed masses being passively led by their
masters;
113
as Horkheimer and Adorno see them, these masses are blinded by the myths
of capitalism, and “they insist on the very ideology that enslaves them.”
114
Zombies
would then be those people so dazzled by capitalist black magic that they work tirelessly
to feed its engines, never really complaining or contemplating an alternative.
115
This sort
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113
See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass
Deception,” Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans.
Edmund Jephcott (1944; reprint, Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002): 94-136.
114
qtd. in Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 69; for another
reading of zombies in relation to Horkheimer and Adorno, see Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry, “A
Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism” boundary 2 35.1
(2008): 85-108.
115
For a lengthier discussion of economic interpretations of the zombie, see Chapter One.
118

of notion was not lost on observers in the 1930s: Kenneth Webb’s stage play “Zombie”
opened in New York in February 1932,
116
and in a review of the play for The New York
Times, J. Brooks Atkinson notes the economic significance of zombies, observing, “If
zombies are those who work without knowing why and who see without understanding,
one begins to look around among one’s fellow countrymen with a new apprehension.
Perhaps those native drums are sounding the national anthem.”
117

Yet, not all Americans were cultural dupes, blindly accepting their fate. As David
Skal writes, “The shuffling spectacle of the walking dead in films like White Zombie
(1932) was in many ways a nightmare vision of a breadline… Millions already knew that
they were no longer completely in control of their lives; the economic strings were being
pulled by faceless, frightening forces.”
118
U.S. history also taught the consumers of
zombie fare that political freedom and the freeing of the body did not always translate
into real-world economic freedom.
The Emancipation Proclamation theoretically gave black peoples control over
their own bodies, but Jim Crow laws were all about asserting real-world control over
those supposedly free bodies, and a free body without equal access within the economic
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
116
For a description of the play, see Jamie Russell, Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie
Cinema (Surrey: Fab Press, 2005), 19.
117
J. Brooks Atkinson, review of “Zombie,” by Kenneth Webb, The New York Times (February 11, 1932),
clipping in White Zombie Production Code File, The Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences.
118
David J. Skal, The Monster Show, rev. ed. (New York: Faber and Faber, 2001), 168.
119

system does not count for much. This is why the goal of many Reconstruction-era
reformers was to give Freedmen control over the conditions under which they labored.
119

There was a tremendous fear after the Civil War that without access to land ownership,
freed blacks would trade overt slavery for wage slavery.
120
As Eric Foner observes,
Throughout the Western Hemisphere, the end of slavery was followed by
a prolonged struggle over the control of labor and access to land.
Freedmen in Haiti, the British and Spanish Caribbean, and Brazil all saw
ownership of land as crucial to establishing their economic independence,
and their efforts to avoid returning to plantation labor were strenuously
resisted by the planter elite and local political authorities.
121

In fact, part of the fears surrounding the freeing of the slaves in the United States
were rooted in the belief that there would be wide-scale land redistribution upon their
release. Of course, this did not happen, and in the end, blacks were forced into the world
of free labor with theoretical ownership of their bodies intact but very few other practical
freedoms. Still, the move from slavery to wage labor “required a fundamental change in
the way their labor was regulated.”
122
The U.S. government thus found ways to step in to
establish labor discipline through things like curfews and voting restrictions and by
limiting employment opportunities outside of the plantation system.
123
Hence, the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
119
Foner, 103.
120
Foner, 68.
121
Foner, 104.
122
Foner, 198.
123
See Foner.
120

contradictions apparent in newly-freed black bodies were not only those of concurrent de
jure and de facto legal systems and theoretical “freedom” in the face of concrete un-
freedom, but also the restrictions to freedom inherent in the free labor system itself.
With these paradoxes on display throughout the United States, especially during
the post-Civil War era and the Great Depression, the zombie—the seemingly free living
body turned into dead slave—took root. By the release of the earliest zombie films, it
was becoming more and more clear that, even for many white men, the freedoms
promised by U.S. capitalist democracy were not only impossible, they were contradicted
by capitalist industrialization itself. There was an increasing awareness that
industrialization could easily rob formerly skilled white craftsmen of their humanity by
placing them on assembly lines where one worker was much like any other.
124
As
Anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner noted at this time, technological progress had made it
so “that workers have become interchangeable cogs in a machine…”
125

Early zombie films are, in fact, replete with images of the zombie-worker as cog.
Perhaps the most arresting image of this sort occurs in White Zombie. In the opening
scene of the film, a group of pale figures
126
lumber toward the road where a coach has
stopped; the coachman spies them, then spurs his horses into action, yelling “Zombies!”
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
124
James, American Civilization, 115.
125
qtd. in James, American Civilization, 112.
126
White actors meant to be light-skinned Haitians.
121

As he later helps his passengers from the coach, he explains his haste in leaving the
earlier scene: “They are not men, monsieur,” he says, “They are dead bodies. Zombies!
The living dead. Corpses taken from their graves and made to work in the sugar mills
and fields at night.”
127
In one phrase, the coachman has summarized one possible reason
the zombie fascinated people in the 1930s United States—they are not men—it reduced
an entire group of people to a non-human state and fantasized that they could then be
made to work endless hours supplying the rest of the world’s needs.
128
It represented the
ultimate Other-ing, casting the perceived opposite as a non-entity—and not just non-
entity, but a non-entity ready to work for the well-being of those with their humanity
intact. It was the perfect, guilt-free colonial relationship.
In White Zombie, the plantation’s sugar grinder is a massive warehouse-sized
contraption filled with turning cogs that mirror the ever-moving zombies, who, like a
human assembly line, quietly shuffle through the mill bringing cane in and then moving
back out to the fields. The only sound heard throughout the mill is the creaking noise the
grinder makes as it cuts through sugar cane. In an early scene, as one zombie loses his
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
127
White Zombie, DVD, directed by Victor Halperin (USA: Halperin Productions, 1932; Alpha Video,
2002).
128
Kyle William Bishop makes a similar claim in his essay “The Sub-Subaltern Monster.” His overall
argument constructs the zombie as a “sub-subaltern,” or a subject without any political voice or “ability to
organize” (Kyle William Bishop, “The Sub-Subaltern Monster: Imperialist Hegemony and the Cinematic
Voodoo Zombie,” Journal of American Culture 31.2 (2008), 146). As this chapter shows, that label would
only apply to certain zombies in voodoo-style films and not to all, and it ignores the potentially liberating
aspects of zombihood. Of course, another way to approach this line from White Zombie would be to say
that it also strips zombies of any claims to manhood, effectively feminizing them. This is discussed in
Chapter Three.
122

footing and accidentally falls into the sugar grinder, it elicits no response from his fellow
zombies as he is ground to death, and the sound of the grinder continues uninterrupted.
The message is clear: life is cheap on the sugar plantation.
129

Individual freedom and democracy exist in the abstract, and C.L.R. James
believes that the realization of the gap between the abstract and concrete lived experience
creates a frustration in those segments of the population most clearly aware of the gap in
their own lives (workers, women and African-Americans); this bred, since at least World
War II (if not earlier), a hostility towards the capitalist system.
130
This hostility is
certainly present in a mythology showing U.S. audiences how easily they can be turned
into mindless cogs working for the will of another.
Zombies thus also offer up a critique of the inability of democratic institutions to
ameliorate the deteriorating economic problems of capitalist economies by showing the
flaws inherent in capitalist systems: some are made slaves while others rule, and the
institutions to which one would traditionally go to rectify this (the law, the church, or
civil society) are powerless in the face of zombie masters.
131
Indeed, in many early films,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
129
While not as literal at turning zombies into cogs, Plague of the Zombies (1966) likewise populates a
Victorian tin mine in England with zombie workers, who are literally kept underground as the town
squire’s invisible workforce. Films like Ouanga, Revolt of the Zombies, King of the Zombies, and Bowery
at Midnight (1942) also rely on zombies as a personal workforce for their zombie masters.
130
James, American Civilization, 107-109
131
I, of course, differ somewhat from Frankfurt School theorists like Horkheimer and Adorno who would
see mass culture as a means of disguising capitalist domination. Here, in the form of the zombie, we have a
pop culture icon that expresses the contradictions inherent in the U.S. system and thus has the potential to
serve as a revolutionary tool.
123

only the protagonist(s) are able to defeat a zombie master. In Plague of the Zombies, for
instance, the constabulary in a remote Victorian village can only follow along as medical
expert Sir James Forbes figures out what has been happening to the local dead. Likewise,
in Teenage Zombies (1957), a group of teenagers are the only ones capable of foiling a
communist-inspired zombie plot.
Furthermore, there are those films that postulate that native institutions, those that
embrace zombie culture, offer the only effective means of redressing problems within the
system. In Ouanga, for instance, the protagonist, Adam, is able to turn the tables on the
zombie master (and his former girlfriend) Clelie by using voodoo artifacts to gain control
of her zombies. Voodoo Island envisions the institution of zombification as the only
defense natives have against Western land developers, and it effectively keeps those
developers at bay. Finally, in I Walked with a Zombie, when Nurse Betty, the protagonist
of the film, reminds native maid Alma that doctors can’t cure everything, Alma responds,
“Doctors that are people can’t cure everything… There are other doctors; yes, other
doctors, better doctors…at the hounfort,” which is the center of Vodou practice on the
island.
132
None of these films is overtly making the claim that white civilization should
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
132
I Walked with a Zombie, DVD, directed by Jacques Tourneur (USA: RKO Radio Pictures, 1943; Turner
Home Entertainment, 2005); hounfort (or hounfour) is a Vodou place of worship.
124

be overturned in favor of voodoo, and yet, a dissatisfaction with the efficacy of dominant
institutions—the law, Western religion or Western medicine, for instance—is clear.
133

Moreover, zombie fiction granted most white zombies some form of release from
the system: they were either awakened and restored to their former free-willed selves or
they turned on their masters and destroyed them. In Zombies on Broadway, for instance,
the zombie potion eventually wears off, and in Teenage Zombies, there is an antidote. In
Revolt of the Zombies and Voodoo Man (1944), the zombie spell is broken when the
zombie master is destroyed.
134
Yet, in Revenge of the Zombies, Lila von Altermann, who
has been zombified by her husband, somehow gains the ability to turn on him and leads
his other zombies in an attack, killing him but dying in the process. Similarly, the
zombies of King of the Zombies and Plague of the Zombies are able to attack and kill
their masters at the end of each film.
Finally, in White Zombie and Bowery at Midnight (1942), zombies find both
release and the power to turn on their masters, yet the release is only to the benefit of a
singular zombie. In Bowery at Midnight, after the zombies attack and kill their master,
the lone zombie who was not previously part of the criminal underworld, Richard, is
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
133
Gwenda Young sees a theme of resistance within the film; hence, its refusal to reduce Vodou belief to
mere stereotype. She also argues that the film seems ambivalent about the power of Western medicine.
See Gwenda Young, “The Cinema of Difference: Jacques Tourneur, Race and ‘I Walked with a Zombie’
(1943),” Irish Journal of American Studies 7 (1998): 101-119.
134
The Zombies of Mora-Tau (1957) is similar but as the zombie master of the film is not a literal human
but a curse, its zombies are only freed from their zombie form and allowed to die once the curse has been
broken.
125

shown happily living his life just as he did before he became a zombie, even though he
was supposedly killed during the zombification process. In White Zombie, Murder
Legendre is knocked unconscious, giving the quick-thinking Dr. Bruner the opportunity
to order most of Legendre’s zombies to jump off a cliff. When Legendre awakes, he tries
to regain control over Madeline, who Dr. Bruner and her fiancée Neil are trying to rescue.
However, Charles Beaumont, whom Legendre has poisoned and who is slowly turning
into a zombie, appears and throws Legendre over a cliff before also falling to his death.
Legendre’s death awakens Madeline from her zombie trance.
The zombies in many of these films are thus not simply unthinking economic
slaves, or at least, they are not envisioned as permanently so because there is rescue from
zombificiation waiting for them. Certainly, for some zombies, this is death, but for many
more, it means a return to their former living selves. Therefore, these zombie narratives
offer fantasies of escape from a dehumanizing system by allowing audiences to identify
with people who have their humanity stripped of them but then regain it.
Of course, this fantasy only works if zombihood is seen as a system from which
one must escape. This obfuscates the fact that most characters are escaping from it into
rigid social structures of gender, race, class and sexuality. This is in line with what
C.L.R. James identified as the totalitarian impulses inherent in the United States.
135

Frustrated by a lived reality that shows individual freedom to be an ideal far removed
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
135
See James, American Civilization.
126

from mundane existence, people are often willing to give up some of their freedoms to
leaders who will act as if they will do the peoples’ bidding and who promise them
security.
136
Thus, these people become, as Freud described the primal horde, “basically
equal in their lack of freedom…”
137
There is an implication in these views that U.S.
citizens would be willing to “zombify” themselves to alleviate the frustrations of facing
that they are, to a large extent, already zombified by the system. However, trading some
freedoms for a sense of security still provides citizens with the illusion that they aren’t
colonized, and early zombie films played to this fantasy.
The zombie is also a very visible means of rendering race invisible. In “Ain’t I de
One Everybody Come to See?!: Popular Memories of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Robyn R.
Warhol argues that in the late 19
th
-century plays based on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, slavery
was made into a spectacle that both offered up a nostalgic return to the antebellum South
and made it so that “the spectacle is everything: slavery disappears in the process of its
representation.”
138
The zombie does the same kind of political work in its many forms as
zombification is all about slavery; yet, in this overt display of slavery, slavery, in its real
lived sense, is displaced onto a more abstract form. This is not the systemic slavery
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
136
James, American Civilization, 106 & 263.
137
qtd. in Gregory Waller, The Living and the Undead: From Stoker’s Dracula to Romero’s Dawn of the
Dead (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 277.
138
Robyn R. Warhol, “Ain’t I de One Everybody Come to See?!’: Popular Memories of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin,” Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, eds. Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson,
and Jane Shattuc (Durham: Duke UP, 2002), 662.
127

experienced by blacks in the southern United States or that the Africans in French Saint-
Domingue faced, rather, this is a localized, fairy-tale slavery, from which one can be
rescued simply by breaking the “spell.”
Furthermore, underlying most of these zombie films is the idea that while white
Americans are susceptible to the influence of other cultures or subversive elements from
within, the idealized rugged individual American is the only one who can stop them.
Thus, in Revolt of the Zombies, an archeological expedition is sent to Cambodia to
eliminate a reported zombie spell before it falls into the wrong hands!hands that are
explicitly non-white. The threat is two-fold: on one hand, the zombie master can use
zombified natives against U.S. interests, but he also begins to zombify the white members
of the expedition, and it is clear that it is not acceptable for white protagonists to become
zombies.
139
The subtext is clear; the natives, proven to be incapable of self-rule in the
guise of keeping native secrets secure, need guidance and not just any guidance. The
film plays on the fear of the wrong sorts of people getting control of the natives and their
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
139
In a treatment of the film given to the Hays Office for review before filming, screenwriters Victor
Halperin and Howard Higgin noted about zombies: “…should the method of making such impregnable
soldiers fall into the hands of the yellow race itself, it would doubtlessly mean the annihilation of the white
race (Victor Halperin and Howard Higgin, Treatment for White Zombie, January 11, 1936, Revolt of the
Zombies Production Code File, The Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences, 5).” Although Halperin and Higgin were urged by the Hays Office to “drop the material…which
reflects unfavorably upon ‘yellow races’,” and they did, a very palpable fear of the non-white begins to
show through in the film (Joseph I. Breen, Letter to Edward Halperin, January 22, 1936, Revolt of the
Zombies Production Code File, The Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences). Furthermore, fitting a refrain that pitted the United States against other colonial masters, the plot
of the film required U.S. intervention to best the native Cambodian magic and a zombie master with a
French name.
128

secrets, and as this was 1936, there were several groups who might fit the notion of the
“wrong sorts” of people (the Nazis, the Japanese, and the Communists, to name a few).
140

Americans are the only ones who can contain the threat.
The need to re-claim control is a current throughout early zombie films. Not only
did the Depression throw the individual’s lack of control over his/her own economical
well-being into stark relief, but control made perfect sense in an era when Italy and
Germany were threatening to expand across Europe and Africa, when Japan was making
steady inroads into China, when Spain was locked in a vicious civil war, and when Indian
and Indochinese peoples were rising up against their colonial masters. This need to
control may explain why the earliest zombie films were explicitly located in colonial
situations: although colonial control was never as universally successful as colonizers
would have people believe, colonies could still offer the fantasy of control, or in the
context of the tumultuous period from 1932 to 1968, the fantasy of re-imposing some
sense of traditional forms of control. These zombie texts could thus be read as nostalgia
for the colonial world and the sense of order it represented.
141

Yet, the colonial subtext in these early films is deeper than this—French
colonialism helps link the earliest major zombie films to one another.
142
With Revolt of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
140
In fact, King of the Zombies and Revenge of the Zombies (1943) cast their zombie masters as Nazis.
141
This is not the only argument drawing a link between early zombie films and colonialism; see n. 8.
142
The film Ouanga did come out in 1935, in between the releases of White Zombie and Revolt of the
Zombies, but it was a small-budget feature without a wide release.
129

the Zombies, zombies were moved from Haiti to Cambodia—from former French colony
to current French protectorate. While the move from Haiti to Cambodia could be nothing
more than a coincidence on the part of the Halperin Brothers, who produced both films, it
is interesting that the two earliest major zombie releases represent French colonialism in
the genre. In some ways, this led to the creation of a U.S.-French dichotomy in the films.
The French had, of course, lost Haiti early on. That eventually led to the Occupation,
where the United States was positioned as able to fix earlier French “mistakes” in
guidance.
143
Travelogues and literature in the United States about the Panama Canal
likewise described the French “failure” that opened the way for the United States as
civilizing savior. But Cambodia was different. It was still a French protectorate when
Revolt of the Zombies premiered. In the 1930s, there was some awareness that things
were not as tranquil in Indochina as France would have liked the rest of the world to
believe,
144
but Revolt of the Zombies took this a step further by almost totally eliminating
an active French presence in Cambodia from the film; instead, the power to get things
done largely rests in U.S. hands because Cambodia, with its dangerous zombification
spell, has been, for the most part, left to the Cambodians.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
143
There was a long tradition of comparing other colonial regimes unfavorably to the United States in the
19
th
and 20
th
centuries. Cuban calls for independence in the 1880s were often predicated on getting away
from old-fashioned Spanish ideas and embracing the modernity offered by the United States (Perez, 86). In
taking over Puerto Rico, President Taft noted how ill-equipped the former Spanish holding was to face self-
rule (Maldonado-Denis, 95-96).
144
Cooper, 17-19.
130

The third major American film to feature zombies, 1940’s comedy The Ghost
Breakers with Paulette Goddard and Bob Hope, transported voodoo and zombies to
Cuba.
145
This move from French colony, ostensibly in need of U.S. intervention, to
“independent” former colonial nation under massive U.S. influence, kept the colonial
subtext of the early films alive. In the film, Goddard’s character inherits a haunted castle
guarded by “an old Negro woman with a zombie son.”
146
This zombie is little more than
a guard dog wandering Goddard’s castle, and Hope is easily able to outmaneuver him in
an effort to protect Goddard.
147
However, the film is intriguing in that it suggests that the
ghosts haunting Goddard’s castle and the malignant voodoo practices associated with it
have to do with a slave-holding legacy!at least one character asserts that Goddard’s
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
145
Cuba gained formal independence on May 20, 1902; however, under its new constitution, the United
States retained the right to intervene in Cuban affairs and to supervise its finances and foreign relations. In
1906, in fact, the country was placed under U.S. occupation and a U.S. governor was in control for three
years. The relationship outlined in the constitution stayed in place until after the revolution, when the U.S.
government became increasingly hostile towards Castro’s Cuba and eventually imposed its commercial and
diplomatic embargo on Cuba in 1963.
146
The Ghost Breakers, DVD, directed by George Marshall (USA: Paramount, 1940; Universal, 2002).
147
Although most histories of the zombie in film note that physically-recognizable zombie really only start
to appear after 1966’s Plague of the Zombies, which features visibly rotting corpses, there are several
examples of bodies physically marked as zombies before 1966. Besides the zombie in The Ghost Breakers,
there are the bug-eyed zombies of I Walked with a Zombie and Zombies on Broadway (1945) and the
crusty-skinned zombies of I Eat Your Skin (1964). The zombies of The Incredibly Strange Creatures who
Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1964) are also physically marked, but this is not a result of
zombiism, but rather, of acid being thrown in their faces.
131

castle is haunted in revenge for Goddard’s great-grandfather being the largest slaveholder
in Cuba.
148

Threats from outside the United States are not the only ones protagonists in early
zombie films faced. As zombies moved onto U.S. soil, they often inhabited spaces that
were, in their own ways, exoticized. In Bowery at Midnight, the setting is New York’s
bowery, imagined as a lower-class gutter run by criminals and mad scientists; in Revenge
of the Zombies, the zombies inhabit the Louisiana bayous, and in The Incredibly Strange
Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1964), the zombies work
for a fortune teller at a carnival. Even spaces that might be read as more mundane are
made sinister in zombie films by being shrouded in mystery. Hence, in Voodoo Man, the
zombie master’s mansion is in a remote, unnamed backwoods area, while in Teenage
Zombies, the zombies populate a previously uncharted island somewhere off the
American coast.
If the white United States had once feared that the Haitian example could
spread,
149
then in the face of a changing global landscape from the early 1930s to the late
1960s, the various spaces which came to house zombies could also be seen as spaces in
need of containing or where a containment fantasy could be played out. In films with
exotic settings, where “black” magic is literally on display, there is an obvious racial
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
148
A similar implication that zombiism is punishment for a slaveholding past is made in I Walked with a
Zombie.
149
As it was seeming to do in places like India and Indochina, for instance.
132

component to containment. In other instances, it is containment centered on ethnic
identities or those elements of society seen as incongruous with normative behavior, so in
a film like Creature with the Atom Brain, although the setting is the suburban United
States and there is nary a zombie of color in sight, the zombie masters are heavily-
accented, white mobsters who use zombies to commit crimes. A similar scenario plays
out in Bowery at Midnight and The Incredibly Strange Creatures…, again with heavily-
accented white zombie masters in control.
150
Zombie masters operating on U.S. soil
proved that there are subversive elements within, and in each of these films, this element
must be contained.
151

If the body of the zombie is tied to the U.S. political body, then the fear of a
monster that looks just like the normative ideal and can lurk within speaks to fears of the
contamination of that figurative body. However, at a deeper level, 19
th
- and 20
th
-century
apprehension over the political inclusion of freed blacks or the protectorates (or women
or immigrants) coupled with more general contemporary alarm over an uneducated, non-
voting mass show that there has been a continual dread that U.S. democracy has always
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
150
The idea that these zombie masters fail in their whiteness will be taken up at length in Chapter Three.
151
Still, notably, whether in the United States or elsewhere, in many of the early zombie films, those who
operate outside of normative structures of race, place, or class turn to zombie manufacture in order to beat
the system—this can take the form of using zombies for economic gain, as is done on the sugar plantations
of White Zombie, or through the mafia’s actions in Creature with the Atom Brain (1955); sexual conquest,
in films like White Zombie, Revolt of the Zombies or Voodoo Man (1944); or ideological conflict, as with
the Nazi zombie masters of King of the Zombies and Revenge of the Zombies or the communist zombie
master of Teenage Zombies (1957). The zombie thus exists in-between the push-and-pull of social outcasts
and the system that would render them thus, and becomes the very means whereby they can try to enact
change.
133

been threatened from within—not just from subversive elements but simply from
extending political freedoms to all of its citizens.
There is a notable push and pull in early zombie films, then. The zombie, as both
nameless (racialized) masses and individualized (white) characters, operates as both
Other and double in many of the early zombie films. The mass of zombies of color play
to colonial fantasies of re-asserting control over a tumultuous world, but the white
American zombies stand as a reminder that colonialism and slavery don’t just happen to
“them.” Almost all domestically-produced zombie features of the pre-1968 era center on
zombifying (or attempting to zombfiy) white Americans, and while this, and the parallels
between the zombie and the capitalist worker, may have created a point of identification
with zombies for audiences, zombification itself was still a process of racially Othering a
body. And, while, on one hand, this process can be read as progressive—it does point to
anxieties, rendered visible in these films, that if the self can be Othered, perhaps the self
is not so different from the Other after all. But, in most of these films, the self is rescued
from its Othering, so the implication thus becomes, just as it was when zombies were
used to paint Haiti as barbaric, that zombification comes naturally to some peoples and
not to others. Thus, zombie films that granted white peoples the ability to beat a process
coded as black provided a fantasy of white control over real-world social relations that
134

were undergoing tremendous change.
152
If zombies can stand as a symbol of the limits
and paradoxes of capitalist democracy in the United States and as such, offer a potentially
liberating escape from or revolt against the system, this idealistic feature of zombihood is
limited by a racism that sees it as more fitting for some bodies than others: zombies of
color, after all, are never the reason a protagonist tries to beat a zombie master and save
the day.

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152
At the turn of the 20
th
century, socio-economic changes preceding from industrialization and increasing
immigration had perceptibly altered the face of the United States, so much so that it could have been seen
as a threat to the racial purity of the nation by some white peoples. By the 1920s and ‘30s, African-
Americans had been moving to the industrialized north in large enough numbers that similar perceptions of
a threat arose, which were exacerbated by the economic conditions of the depression (Curran, 129 and
Amity Shales, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (New York: Harper-Collins,
2007), 43); an economic threat read through the lens of race was nothing new: besides the perceived threat
posed by the Chinese that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (Curran, 80) or the anti-immigrant
manifestations following WWI (blaming the influenza outbreak of 1918 on immigrants, for instance, or
linking them to the Red Scare) or the Filipino “problem” during the Theodore Roosevelt administration
(Daniels, 67), perhaps the best example of a perceived threat and official U.S. response to that threat was in
dealing with Mexican immigrants in the 1910s-1930s. During the late 19
th
and early 20
th
centuries,
Mexican immigrants filled a growing need for workers in the U.S. southwest; while restrictions were being
placed on many immigrant groups, a shortage of labor during the first world war meant that many
employers pressured the U.S. government to ease restrictions on Mexicans in the Immigration Act of 1917,
and the Department of Labor acquiesced, allowing Mexican immigration to continue (Alma M. Garcia, The
Mexican Americans, The New Americans Series (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 20-21). Yet,
with the return of soldiers after the war, anti-Mexican sentiment rose, and the Great Depression exacerbated
this feeling (Garcia, 28). Demands for restrictions grew to the point that the U.S. government instituted a
“repatriation” program, sending apx. one million Mexicans back to Mexico during the 1930s; state and
local governments also attempted to limit non-native access to employment during this time (Francisco E.
Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 74 & 158). Interestingly, when the economy
improved, resentment abated and Mexican immigration increased and was even welcomed during labor
shortages in WWII (Garcia, 30).
135

FROM CANNIBAL TO ZOMBIE AND BACK AGAIN
Joseph Maddrey, in analyzing the reception of Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks,
notes that the strong reactions to that film were due in part to the fact that “audiences
were unable to dismiss the horrors as eccentricities of backward countries across the
globe.”
153
Most zombie films in the period before 1968 were set in exotic locations!if
not necessarily overseas, then at least in somewhat fantastic spaces in the United States.
In this light, zombies of this period could be read as “safe” monsters, fueling a fear of the
Other while also implying that when compared to it, most (white) people in the United
States were normal. If the cannibal had been used during much of the 19
th
century as a
means of separating the world into civilized and non-civilized, the zombie was
continuing its work in films of the 1930s, ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s. Yet, because almost all
early zombie films centered on zombifying white Americans, the assurances of normality
and civility were fragile at best.
Operating within a system that assumed a knowable world and that fed upon an
impulse to categorize and classify, the Other was created. At first, this Other was the
primitive, the savage, or the cannibal, but over time, the Other became a monster.
Watching monsters on cinema screens, white American audiences could say, “I am what
the Other is not.” However, there has often been a sympathetic aspect to the monsters
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
153
Joseph Maddrey, Nightmares in Red, White and Blue: the Evolution of the American Horror Film
(Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004), 15.
136

projected onto cinema screens, and it is no coincidence that Dracula, Frankenstein’s
monster, and the zombie all became popular movie monsters at roughly the same time.
These undead creatures opened up the possibility of identification. In the case of the
zombie, this appeared through fantasies of being tainted by the Other, or becoming a
literal cog in the system, but then being saved.

Yet, while at one level, the zombie represents a continuation of the work that the
cannibal was doing in the 19
th
and early 20
th
centuries, the concept of cannibalism was
also still a potent force in early zombie films. Early zombie fiction invites links to bell
hooks’ concept of “eating the Other,” the one-way consumption of other cultures. As
hooks states, “It is by eating the Other that one asserts power and privilege” and this sort
of “cultural cannibalism” concerns power relations that grant white peoples the ability to
enjoy the privilege of being able to appropriate, utilize, and borrow from other cultures
without having to experience what it is actually like to be a member of those cultures.
154

In a sense, it is being able to try on other cultural forms at will, knowing it will have no
real lasting effect.
This is very similar to what characters are able to do in early zombie films.
Before 1968, zombiism was usually a reversible state!something that could be
experienced then discarded. In a sense, zombification granted one the ability to try on the
culture of the Other without any real fear that one would become truly like the Other. It
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
154
bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 36.
137

allowed one to have all of the pleasures associated with being the Other without any of
the frustrations of such. Thus, it was a slice of Haitian exoticism that allowed one to get
rid of the veneer of white “civilization” temporarily but postulated that eventually, the
status quo would be restored.
If one accepts Homi Bhabha’s argument that in a colonial relationship the
colonizers concurrently try to integrate and block the colonized from full participation in
true humanity and that the entire system is thrown into disarray by the ability of those
colonized to mimic their colonizers, then one must accept the desire and fear inherent in
these relationships.
155
The colonizer both desires the colonized to act/look like him, yet
fears that the colonized may become too good at it. This desire and fear play out in
zombie texts in reverse: the colonizer is able to mimic the colonized for a time, without
fear of a true reversal, and yet, the same result occurs—by being able to mimic the Other,
the system that creates both colonized and colonizer is shown to be inherently unstable—
for either one can become the other. The categories that were meant to separate peoples
into neat groups are disrupted in these zombie texts.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
155
See Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October 28
(Spring 1984): 125-133. I am using Bhabha’s reading of the colonial situation instead of that of Frantz
Fanon, who sees the relationship as one in which the white man creates the black man—for Bhabha does
not see a white identity behind the black mimic’s mask. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans.
Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967). For Bhabha, the colonizer’s culture (which we
could also read as whiteness) carries within it that which can be set to subvert it. The mimic merely works
to enact this—the system itself is unstable. This conclusion is at the basis of my own argument.
138

Early zombie fiction showed how similar white Americans were to people from
other cultures and non-whites: although these Americans eventually solved the zombie
“problem,” they were just as vulnerable to zombification as anyone else. Their
“freedoms” had true limits that zombification exposed. Thus, a cannibalism of sorts
existed in these films. This wasn’t the literal cannibalism of the earliest discourses
surrounding Haitian Vodou but was a cannibalism in which those notions one held to be
true, one’s very mechanisms for defining the self, were slowly eaten away. The Other, in
the figure of the zombie, consumed preconceived notions of whiteness, civilization, and
freedom by personifying the contradictions inherent in them. Hollywood’s zombie films
from the early 1930s to 1968, when Night of the Living Dead enacted its radical break in
the genre, then, confused the boundaries between “us” and “them” on many levels.
By showing that the roots of democracy were also the seeds of its erosion, the
zombie displayed the cannibalistic nature of U.S. civilization. Industrialization made
workers into cogs in a machine; Emancipation had revealed African-Americans to be
“citizens” who existed “outside the law,” and who understood that political freedom did
not necessarily translate into freedom over one’s body, economic equality, or real-world
political representation. Zombified peoples were returned back to their former selves at
the conclusion of zombie films, but it was apparent to many watching these films that
escape from that state wasn’t so easy. The very notion of zombification ate away at the
ideal and gave frustration a bodily form.
139

The cannibal, as an element of a strange religion called Vodou, worked to
separate the world into “us” and “them.” On the surface, the zombie, another fantastic
element of “voodoo,” works to do the same. But, the boundaries drawn by the zombie
are not as solid as they might at first have appeared, for in zombie texts, any “us” have
the potential to become a “them,” and new groups begin to inhabit the world once solely
the province of the racial Other. Yet, while zombie conventions became flexible enough
to allow the zombie to become a sort of all-purpose form for mediating a wide range of
concerns, it continued to carry its past with it. And, by the time zombies came to reside
in the rural Pennsylvania countryside with Night of the Living Dead, cannibalism was
coupled with the zombie in an obvious way. Things had come full circle.
At heart, any zombie tale in the United States is about a fear of corruption that
will rob one of his/her humanity. Throughout U.S. history, similar fears relating to the
U.S. political body have created three major kinds of threats to its safety: the political, the
economic, and the racial. Politically, the question from almost the very beginning of the
union has been: who is worthy of citizenship? But also of pressing concern has been how
the United States can call itself a democracy when it propagates the un-freedom of certain
peoples. U.S. democracy has cannibalized itself in its contradictions until there’s nothing
left for its citizens but empty ideals and their frustrations. Economically, the United
States has dealt with the prospect of newcomers by trying to keep the seemingly destitute
and dependent out. But those already here have faced the realities of wage slavery!of
140

realizing that individual freedom under the capitalist system does not necessarily translate
into being anything more than just another cog in the machine. Thus, a fear of public
charges cannibalizing the resources of the nation have coupled with a fear of the capitalist
system consuming one’s labor and leaving the worker with nothing. Finally, as we will
see in the next chapter, there is a racial threat that prompts the question: if non-white
peoples are allowed into the United States, will the white race itself be cannibalized?
One means of navigating the chaos of all of this cannibalization is to create a
common enemy and in vanquishing it, at least in fiction, regain some sense of stability.
The zombie was, and remains, one of the best tools available for doing this work. The
zombie has thus always represented cannibalistic tendencies!it is, after all, in its earliest
Haitian form, the embodiment of the master’s will consuming his slave’s. But why claim
that it is inherently Haitian and remains so?
Haiti was the paradigm for self-rule questions throughout the 19
th
and early 20
th

centuries. Haiti had already thrown off the fetters of colonization well before much of
the rest of the world was even colonized,
156
so it stands to reason that it would act as the
example of what could happen were subject peoples suddenly granted self-rule. Haiti
was also black, which automatically added a racial component to these discussions. This
is not to say that every discussion of self-rule, nor every discussion of race, inevitably
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
156
Laurent Dubois, “In Search of the Haitian Revolution,” Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical
Introduction, eds. Charles Forsdick and David Murphy (London: Arnold, 2003), 34.
141

returned to Haiti!it certainly didn’t. But Haiti existed as an example par excellence of
all of the evils of the non-white world that white civilization warned itself of: they were
cannibals, after all.
So, in the late 1920s, with its long history in the U.S. imagination, “Haiti” was a
tremendously charged concept. And, in the form of the zombie, all of the fears of
emancipation, the dread of wage slavery, and the terror of miscegenation found a potent
symbol, and one that was intrinsically Haitian. Of course, they have zombies, one can
almost hear people say; they eat their children, too. The logic that painted Haiti as the
prime example of former slave excess gone wild could also accept that the living dead
inhabited Haiti: humans without humanity were a logical outcropping of the discourses
surrounding the nation. Given the history of representations and reports about what went
on in Haiti, it made common sense that Haitians had zombies, and as such, the zombie
was, and always will be “Haitian.” Perhaps not Haitian in the most explicit sense,
zombies have and continue to stand for the same things they did when they were thought
of as uniquely and unequivocally Haitian, and that makes them “Haitian” to this day.
Post-1968 zombie texts are still concerned with containment. The zombie
infections of these styles also speak to traditional fears of contaminating the U.S. body
politic or the white body. Zombies, although typically not traditional slaves after 1968,
became slaves to the drive to eat: they are rampant consumers who continue to illustrate
the ills of capitalistic society. In many of the latest video game-style texts, zombiism is
142

once again conceived of as a problem that can potentially be resolved!cures to the
infections causing zombie outbreaks are sometimes touted. Plus, many current zombies
bow to the will of a zombie master!zombie infections in these texts are typically linked
to corporate interests or the government. Thus, the realization that someone else is in
control and one’s freedom is fleeting is still being worked out through zombie texts.
Therefore, while the genre itself began to allow somewhat looser interpretations of the
zombie tale as it entered the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, the zombie, even in Night of the
Living Dead and the texts that would follow it, still bears traces of a “Haitian” past.
In the end, both cannibalism and the zombie, as channeled through Vodou, were
an attempt to cast Haitians, and by extension any peoples of color, as less than human.
“They are not men,” the coachman in White Zombie declared. Yet, it becomes more and
more apparent that audiences then and now secretly fear he could say something similar
of any of them as well.
143

Chapter Three
What Greater Destiny? The Zombie, Gender and Race

“She makes a beautiful zombie, doesn’t she?
— I Walked with a Zombie (1943)
1

“I’m finally beautiful!”
—Exclamation by a woman after becoming a zombie,
Zombie Strippers (2008)
2

In voodoo-style zombie films, the process of zombification rarely endangers the
physical body; rather, control of the body is usurped. Therefore, one really could be a
zombie and still be considered beautiful by normative standards. However, in Romero-
and video game-style iterations, the physical body is very much transformed. To become
a zombie is to become a decomposing corpse, and to find the beauty in that state, one
must be operating under different standards. Yet, in any style, whether conventionally
beautiful or not, the zombie body exists in a liminal state that, due to its very liminality,
threatens the boundaries that supposedly give the world order.
3
The body zombified is a
nightmare of loss of restraint: it is a body that refuses to conform but that is also always
potentially under outside control. As such, it poses a double threat to the status quo and
normalcy—it mocks boundaries and individual self-determination.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
I Walked with a Zombie, DVD, directed by Jacques Tourneur (USA: RKO Radio Pictures, 1943; Turner
Home Entertainment, 2005).
2
Zombie Strippers, DVD, directed by Jay Lee (USA: Stage 6 Films/Larande Productions, 2008; Sony
Pictures Home Entertainment, 2008).
3
Including: living vs. dead; black vs. white; and us vs. them.
144

Thus, there is a political dimension to becoming a zombie. While, in one sense,
becoming a zombie could be read as an attempt to abandon oneself completely to the
system—live forever, consume, and to hell with the consequences—read in a different
light, to become a zombie is to give in to “perverse” non-normative desires by
abandoning any pretensions of youth or beauty, by ignoring individual free will, and by
feeding one’s cannibalistic urges. At the same time, though, to become a zombie has had
racial implications.
Entering U.S. culture as Haitian slaves, zombies were racially marked,
4
but black
bodies were not necessarily always on display as objects of a zombie master’s collection
in early zombie films, nor did becoming a zombie make one physically “black.” Rather,
the bodies that were zombified in these films, by undergoing a process that made them
slaves/zombies, were constructed as black. On the surface, many of the earliest zombie
films relied on an idea of blackness as signifying chaos so that whiteness could enter
chaotic space and restore order: “black magic” would disrupt the normal workings of
white bodies and only white men were able to counter and disrupt it. However, things
were never quite this clear-cut, because whiteness was actually what was, and continues
to be, complicated in zombie texts.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
4
As Joan Dayan explains, after the ascension of Dessalines, Haiti was literally made black in the 1805
Constitution: “Haitians, whatever their color, would be known as blacks” (Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and
the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 24).
145

In White Screens/Black Images, James Snead notes that in the era which is his
focus (1915-1985), black bodies in U.S. film did not typically occupy positions of power,
nor positions of respect or normalcy: black bodies were noticeably absent as doctors,
lawyers, or intellectuals in most U.S. films of the 20
th
century.
5
Given this norm, one
might expect zombie films to foreground monstrous black zombies, but this is not the
case: while zombies usually inhabit spaces associated with blackness in voodoo-style
zombie films, most of the attention of these films is focused on what happens to white
bodies when they are zombified or threatened with zombification.
6
While zombiism is
explicitly tied to conceptions of black magic in these films, black bodies rarely serve as
more than background filler or comic relief prior to 1968. Voodoo-style zombie texts are
all about white bodies.
In the last chapter of White, Richard Dyer discusses George Romero’s “Dead”
trilogy (1968’s Night of the Living Dead, 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, and 1985’s Day of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
5
James Snead, White Screens/Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side, eds. Colin MacCabe and
Cornel West (New York: Routledge, 1994). Both Snead and Toni Morrison, in Playing in the Dark,
attempt to interrogate the difficult relationship between blackness and whiteness by analyzing how
blackness is employed in the constitution of whiteness and how blackness, even through its omission, is
deployed in literature and film to serve the interests of maintaining whiteness as an ideal. Snead believes
that it is through structuring absences that black bodies are either erased from the screen or erased from
appearing as “normal” citizens of the nation. Although he never refers to something like the Africanist
presence Morrison employs, it is in Snead’s discussion of exclusion that he and Morrison cover the most
similar ground. See Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992).
6
While there are threats to the black sidekicks in The Ghost Breakers (1940), King of the Zombies (1941)
and Revenge of the Zombies (1943), these are done for comedic effect. Serious threats are only posed to
white peoples.
146

the Dead). Much of Dyer’s argument centers on the fact that it is white people who are
the zombies in these films; they are they ones who are eating other white people. In an
argument linking whiteness to death, he says, “all whites bring death, by implication, and
all whites are dead…”
7
And while, on one level, this is true, it seems to be divorcing
zombie films from their history. Yes, in the Romero films, and even in other versions of
the Romero- and video game-style films, the zombies are mostly white
8
—but before
1968 and the introduction of Romero-style zombies, the zombies that mattered in U.S.
films were almost always white; it was the rare featured zombie that was black.
9
Rather,
these films presented the idea that whiteness was corruptible by blackness in the form of
zombie potions and spells. Thus, the change from potions and spells to infection still
positions whiteness, not as death, but as something corruptible by outside forces. Death
is simply the end result of this corruption.
10
To make the kinds of claims that Dyer
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
7
Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997), 211.
8
Inasmuch as rotting corpses can be read as “white.” Although factors like race do ensure that people do
not die equally, in another sense, death would seem to negate one’s claim to a clear racial status: at most,
one could claim to be formerly something.
9
An exception to this would be The Ghost Breakers as its sole zombie is a black male. There are other
films that did feature black zombies a bit more prominently (like I Walked with a Zombie) but even in these
films, the zombies that matter are white.
10
Whiteness, in either the masculine or feminine forms, fails in the voodoo-style texts, and zombies are
what make this visible: the whiteness of zombie masters is destabilized by their connections to zombie-
production and zombie-producing cultures, white male “heroes” are destabilized by their failure to stop the
zombie masters or their zombies (thus rendered unable to assure the purity of the race via the white
female), and white females, in instigating or becoming zombies, likewise have their whiteness tested and
found wanting. Yet, whiteness also fails in the Romero- and video game-style texts as white peoples fail in
their ability to stave off the zombie infection.
147

makes, the vulnerability of whiteness in almost all zombie texts would have to be
ignored, as would the previous cinematic history of zombies. Thus, a claim like Dyer’s
creates a situation wherein the real racial ramifications of zombies and zombification in
Romero-style films becomes elided, so that much like whiteness, post-Night of the Living
Dead zombies are seemingly devoid of race, while actually, their designation as Other
inherently carries with it a potent racial dimension born of the zombie’s Haitian roots.
11
Thus, references to nonwhites did not simply disappear in 1968. Voodoo-style
zombies linger.
12
Additionally, while Romero-style zombie infections are equal-
opportunity infectors: zombie films still divide the world into an “us” and a “them,” and
in fact, with Romero- and video game-style zombies, the “us” and the “them” are now
actively and overtly at war with one another. Moreover, Romero’s “Dead” trilogy
foregrounds race by focusing on parings of white women and black men.
13
Finally, as
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
11
This is not to say that there is no link between zombihood and whiteness. On the contrary, there may be
grounds to consider an explicit link between whiteness and zombies: William Seabrook and others have
described supposed real-world zombies as pale figures, and Edna Taft, in her 1938 book A Puritan in
Voodoo-land, tells the story of a Haitian man given roiry seed for an illness, a side-effect of which was the
loss of skin pigmentation that made the black man look white; she said the man “said for months after his
strange cure his relatives and friends shunned him like the plague, believing him to be a zombi” (See Edna
Taft, A Puritan in Voodoo-land (Philadelphia: The Penn Publishing Co., 1938), 258). See also W.B.
Seabrook, The Magic Island (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1929). In this sense, then, zombies could
be seen as cosmetically “white,” but the position of the zombie as a liminal figure and product of the Other
or product of infection, which, in itself, carries connotations of un-cleanliness, aberrant sexualities, and/or
deviations from the norm, necessarily positions it outside of white heteronormativity in every other sense.
12
And this type of film did not die; although Romero-style zombies have dominated the post-1968
imaginary, voodoo-style zombie films continue to be made.
13
Interestingly, both John Russo and George Romero have mentioned that the casting of Duane Johnson as
Ben, the protagonist of Night of the Living Dead (1968), had little to do with race; he was simply the best
actor they saw in auditions (see DVD Commentary, Night of the Living Dead, DVD (Millennium edition),
148

will be argued here, overt displays of black bodies have never been as central to the racial
considerations of U.S. zombie films as have white female bodies.
White females seem to be one of the few constants throughout different iterations
of the zombie. Whether as victims, easily susceptible to corruption by blackness, or as
saviors, who hold the key to the survival of white civilization, white women are crucial to
understanding zombie texts. However, the role of black women in zombie texts must not
be forgotten, no matter how much black female bodies have been rendered invisible in
the majority of these texts. In juxtaposing how both white and black women are
deployed in zombie texts, it becomes clear that often, the non-normative is aligned with
blackness and femininity. This queer state may be punished or trapped by discursive
strategies that keep queer in its place, but in several films, this state is embraced.
14

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
directed by George A. Romero (USA: Image Ten, 1968; Elite Entertainment, 2000); and John Russo, The
Complete Night of the Living Dead Filmbook (New York: Harmony Books, 1985).
14
While one of his goals in “The Funk of Forty Thousand Years; or, How the (Un)Dead Get Their Groove
On” is to “queer” the zombie trope, Marc Leverette is much more interested in philosophical questions of
the zombie than in specific deployments of it (see Marc Leverette, “The Funk of Forty Thousand Years; or,
How the (Un)Dead Get Their Groove On,” Zombie Culture: Autopsies of the Living Dead, eds. Shawn
McIntosh and Marc Leverette (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2008): 185-212). My use of the term
“queer” in regards to the zombie constructs queer as that which stands outside of white heteronormative
capitalist patriarchy and operates according to a logic of inclusion rather than exclusive binaries. It is
necessarily a fragmented and fluid state predicated more on one’s relationship to and actions against
dominant structures of power than any inherent state of being or identity. While there are those who would
claim that such a general definition could, theoretically, include anyone and everyone and thus render the
term impotent, my very point is that it is more a way of being than a fixed identity. In this sense, it may be
closely aligned to Janet R. Jakobsen’s and Michael Warner’s conceptions of queer that see it more in terms
of action than identity; see Janet R. Jakobsen, “Queer is? Queer Does?: Normativity and the Problem of
Resistance,” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 4.4 (1998): 511-536; and Michael Warner, ed.
Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics, and Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
For a discussion of Jakobsen, Warner, and others’ definitions of “queer,” see Nikki Sullivan, A Critical
Introduction to Queer Theory (New York: New York UP, 2003).
149

Although responding to widely different historical and social contexts, zombie
films across the voodoo and Romero styles have often cast zombies, and those who
become or align with zombies, as threats to white heteronormative patriarchy. These
films become sites for staging conflicts over non-heteronormative desires, both
promoting and punishing the transgressive. To understand how zombie films accomplish
this, the interplay of race and gender in films of both the voodoo style and the Romero
style must be explored. Race and gender are interrelated in the experience of being the
living dead in zombie texts, and there is a remarkable consistency in the zombie’s use as
a condensation of a gendered, queered whiteness throughout the 20
th
and 21
st
centuries.
15

SOMEWHERE IN-BETWEEN
Examining race in early horror films, Elizabeth Young notes that in dealing with
the image of black peoples, “in the racist iconography that sustained such [stereotypes],
the most common cultural image was that of a black man, ‘a monstrous beast, crazed
with lust,’ assaulting a white woman.”
16
Both black men and white women were
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
15
Condensation is the process by which an entire set of ideas are associated with a single symbol or word.
Hence, the zombie can stand for both slavery and exploitation while also carrying the meaning of infection
and invasion.
16
Elizabeth Young, “Here Comes the Bride: Wedding Gender and Race in ‘Bride of Frankenstein’,”
Feminist Studies 17.3 (Autumn 1991), 425; this, of course, directly relates to the once-widespread racist
belief that all black men lusted after white women. The black male threat to white womanhood had been a
justification for white violence towards black peoples for over a century by the time the first zombie feature
film White Zombie (1932) was released. The notion of black lust for white females even entered into the
discourse surrounding Haiti: Edna Taft’s 1938 book A Puritan in Voodoo-land includes her claim that a
prominent black Haitian matriarch once told her “A white woman—especially an American—attracts our
150

imprisoned in sexual stereotypes as a means of controlling them, and early zombie films
were not exempt from using these stereotypes. Yet, these films rarely cast a black man as
the corrupting force and the white woman as susceptible to his advances; rather, if black
zombies posed a threat to white females, they only did so at the bidding of a zombie
master.
17
More often than not, black zombies simply filled the background, and it was
black magic that openly threatened white femininity. Yet, a specter lingered.
In her reading of the 1903 film What Happened in the Tunnel, Susan Courtney
shows how miscegenation could be safely toyed with in early film. She observes that in
the film, “we find a structure that at once allows for the expression of anxiety about the
unstable state of dominant racial and sexual affairs but also offers, in its dovetailing of
said affairs, means of negotiating its multiple anxieties.”
18
Early zombie films do similar
work, as without being explicit, they manage to use zombification to speak indirectly to
fears of miscegenation.
At their core, fears of miscegenation revolve around fears that boundaries will not
hold. And for that reason, at any moment when the purity of whiteness (or its claims to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Haitian men very much, indeed. A white skin is nearly irresistible to them” (Taft, 39). Jeremy Popkin
also points to the play “Le Philanthrope revolutionnarie on l’hectambe a Haiti,” written sometime between
1804 and 1811 that saw black male lust for white women as key to the racial conflicts brought on by the
Haitian Revolution (see Jeremy D. Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian
Insurrection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 247).
17
See The Ghost Breakers, I Walked with a Zombie, Zombies on Broadway (1945), and I Eat Your Skin
(1964).
18
Susan Courtney, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race,
1903-1967 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005), 9.
151

privilege) is threatened, fears of miscegenation rise, for much like zombies, the products
of miscegenation exist as both and neither: they live in-between categories. As Françoise
Vergès’s work on the island of Réunion, a former French colony, has shown, in a colonial
environment, mixed-race people were a potential threat: they presented the possibility of
an Other with claims to white privilege and rights, but these people also “troubled the
European imaginary because they were the signifier of forbidden desire, of the attraction
of the white for the black…”
19
To police racial boundaries, sexual relations have to be policed, for mixed-race
people are typically also evidence of white access to black bodies.
20
In the United States,
anti-miscegenation laws were in existence as early as 1661 and remained on the books
until the late 1960s. At the heart of the laws was a two-part process: pathologizing
interracial desire by making it illegal, which thus identified normal, accepted sexual
relations in relationship to abnormal ones.
21
Furthermore, more often than not, the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
19
Françoise Vergès, Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Metissage (Durham:
Duke UP, 1999), 30.
20
The Revolution in Haiti did turn this around somewhat; there are reports of black male sexual assault
against white women, but as Jeremy D. Popkin observes of many of the firsthand accounts of such
atrocities, “Between the lines of these narratives, one can sometimes sense shame about the inability of
white males to fulfill their traditional roles as protectors and even [in at least one surviving account] a
recognition that white men had been equally lawless in their behavior toward white women before the
revolution” (Popkin, 28).
21
For lengthier discussions of miscegenation in the United States, see Peggy Roscoe, What Comes
Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford UP, 2009) and
Barbara C. Cruz and Michael J. Berson, “The American Melting Pot? Miscegenation Laws in the United
States,” OAH Magazine of History 15.4 (Summer 2001): 80-84; for a discussion of how miscegenation
was dealt with in Hollywood film up through the 1960s, see Courtney.
152

realities of sexual relationships between races was transposed into stories of dangerous
black male lust for white females.
22
Identifying mixed-race progeny as the product of a
black/white union acknowledged an unacceptable desire for black bodies; displacing that
desire onto black men justified racist practices.
Edna Aizenberg, building off of the work of Ellen Draper, sees a similar
displacement at work in early zombie films. As she notes, “So great is the horror…of
these forces [of fantasies and insecurities related to miscegenation], that most cinematic
analyses refuse to address the films’ crucial transposition of the zombie from enslaved
black victim vitiated by white colonization to virginal white victim menaced by black
erotic rites.”
23
Aizenberg’s observation is important, and the transfer from black to white
enslavement should not be forgotten, for in the transfer, zombiism, whether affecting
black or white bodies, does not lose its racialized history. Rather, in its sublimation, this
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
22
See n. 16. Also, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert observes in “Women Possessed…” that 19
th
and 20
th
century
tales in (and about) Haiti centering on the zombification of a beautiful light -skinned woman were quite
popular, yet almost all of them relied on dark/light binaries (as the men who would zombify these women
were usually dark-skinned and of a lower class than their victims) that left “intact the identification of
blackness with ‘Voodoo’…” (Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, “Women Possessed: Eroticism and Exoticism in
the Representation of Woman as Zombie,” Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah and the
Caribbean, eds. Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (New Brunswick: Rutgers,
1997), 44). Yet, interestingly enough, Paravisini-Gebert points out that at the heart of these stories is the
“social inaccessibility” of the female and the somewhat progressive attempts to dismantle racial and class
obstacles (Paravisini-Gebert, 42, 44).
23
Edna Aizenberg, “I Walked with a Zombie’: The Pleasures and Perils of Postcolonial Hybridity,” World
Literature Today 73.3 (Summer 1999), 462; see also Ellen Draper, “Zombie Women When the Gaze is
Male,” Wide Angle 10.3 (1988): 52-62.
153

history becomes all the more potent. Thus, zombies in any form are never quite able to
shake their roots as black slaves.
Zombies, either on a cosmetic level as pale black bodies or on a psychological
level as the white body corrupted by black magic, are visual/performative displays of a
sort of miscegenation. Even in those voodoo-style films where atomic science or aliens
corrupt white bodies, the same fears are on display: the white body’s integrity does not
hold and those boundaries which serve to clearly mark it from other groups are shown to
be porous, if not downright imaginary. Similarly, with the introduction of equal-
opportunity zombie infections after 1968, the boundary between civilized and barbaric is
torn down as all peoples are shown to be potential cannibals at heart.
If mixed-race people speak to illicit interracial desires, then those bodies that are
both living and dead embody not only the desires of immortality associated with life after
death but also nod to the attractive qualities of death itself. Moreover, if civilization
resides with the living and the barbaric is associated with death and the dead, then
voodoo-, Romero- and video game-style zombies all speak to desires to break through the
rigid bonds of civilization itself. Zombies, just like the children born of interracial
relations, are thus threatening because they stand as evidence not only that supposedly
fixed boundaries can be transgressed but also that there might be pleasure gained from
doing so.
154

If policing racial mixing and spreading a fear of miscegenation represents
attempts to keep racial boundaries intact, then in some ways, casting zombies or
zombification as bad is one way to keep boundaries solid as well. Yet, it has never been
this simple. Zombies and zombification have rarely been presented as purely evil.
24

Rather, what has often been most frightening about zombies is how eerily similar they are
to “normal” people. Just as there is more at stake in policing sexual boundaries in
colonial and white supremacist spaces than simply eliminating the evidence of forbidden
desires, with zombie films too, fears often revolve around making sure zombies aren’t
mistaken for “normal” people.
25
For the strategies that try to re-stabilize the boundaries of whiteness to work, the
assumption that race is easily readable on the body, either visually or in a performative
sense, is necessary. For the most part, zombiness isn’t smelled, touched, or heard, it is
seen.
26
Furthermore, zombiness is not worn but rather, it is physically manifested
through the body. Early zombies were not necessarily dead—zombification could affect
living or dead bodies in voodoo-style films—and while in many films, the body itself did
not change much, there were ways to discern the zombie body visually. William
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
24
Rather, they have been used by evil people.
25
With mixed-race peoples has always come the possibility of some passing as white, and zombies, in a
sense, are the dead passing as living and the racially Other passing as white.
26
This is one of Kyle William Bishop’s primary claims in “Raising the Dead,” Journal of Popular Film
and Television 33.4 (Winter 2006): 196-205.
155

Seabrook’s descriptions of zombies
27
maintained a hold over film depictions for over
thirty years. Thus, most early zombies, either dead or alive, are pale, with a faraway look
in their eyes; they move slowly and deliberately, and they rarely speak. In some films,
like I Walked with a Zombie (1943), I Eat your Skin (1964), and Zombies on Broadway
(1945), zombies are noticeably bug-eyed, and in other films, most notably The Ghost
Breakers (1940) and Creature with the Atom Brain (1955), zombies are physically
marked in some other way.
28
Yet, it is often hard to differentiate visually between
zombie and non-zombie bodies. Even in those films where zombies are more
differentiated, zombiness is first and foremost about the performative: you know a
zombie by how it moves and acts above all else.
The 1959 film Invisible Invaders and the 1966 British film Plague of the Zombies
introduced a new look to the film zombie—zombies as “visibly rotting” corpses.
29

Although these zombies behave much like their early zombie predecessors behave, they
are dead bodies that show signs of decomposition. With Night of the Living Dead, the
zombie as rotting corpse was popularized, and by the time of Dawn of the Dead, the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
27
Discussed in Chapter Two.
28
The zombies in The Incredibly Strange Creatures… (1964) might also qualify except that their deformity
is not born of their zombiism. Similarly, in Invisible Invaders (1959), the zombie “look” has more to do
with the manner of death of the human body than zombification itself.
29
Peter Dendle, The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia (London: McFarland and Co., 2001), 5; Dendle gives this
credit to Plague of the Zombies (1966) alone but Invisible Invaders centers on alien control of dead bodies
and although zombification does not cause the physical changes to these bodies, the film has decomposing
corpses walking around. See also my discussion of influences on Night of the Living Dead in Chapter One.
156

Romero-style zombie was set: a decomposing reanimated corpse. Although in many
ways, it could be argued that the zombies in Night of the Living Dead and the films that
followed it retain the earlier pale zombie shuffle, these zombies are different in that they
are easily visible as zombies: performance is still crucial to zombiness but now there is
no mistaking a zombie for a living person.
30
The zombie becomes visually coded in
terms of appearance and not just action.

With Romero-style zombies, the threat of passing is eliminated: the zombie can
no longer fool an observer into thinking he/she is a “normal” human being. And yet, with
the coming of video game-style zombies, while zombies may still not be able to pass,
they can once again be “cured.” In video games like the Resident Evil series (1996-
present), the films loosely based on them (2002, 2004, 2007, 2010), or films like 28
Weeks Later (2007), the zombie virus can be reversed, at least in theory. Thus, what we
get in some video game-style zombie texts is the gruesome corpses of Romero-style films
combined with the promise of voodoo-style zombie texts that offer a return to pre-zombie
normalcy. Passing may have passed, but with these texts, there is the notion that the
contamination/infection of zombiism can be overcome.
As a status that the individual can overcome (either through access to wealth or,
more commonly, hard work to obtain a cure), zombihood begins to resemble the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
30
Of course, two notable exceptions to this would be Night of the Living Dead, where Ben, the lone
survivor, is mistaken for a zombie and killed; and Shaun of the Dead (2004), which has a scene in which
the survivors must perform zombiness to trick hundreds of zombies walking between them and potential
shelter.
157

neoconservative idea of race in the last years of the 20
th
century. Jodi Melamed and
Nikhil Pal Singh have both argued that while contemporary liberalism and
multiculturalism are presented as beyond racism or anti-racist, that they, in fact, continue
to produce racial difference.
31
There are many who would like the world to believe that
the structural barriers to any non-white/minority progress in the United States have been
removed and that racism is a thing of the past, relegated to the realm of certain short-
sighted individuals. However, this line of thinking leads to the assumption that it is the
failure of the non-white poor to remove themselves from bad economic situations and not
the fault of endemic structures.
32
If zombies are fundamentally raced (by virtue of their
roots in Haiti and “black magic”), then this parallel becomes that much more clear:
zombihood, by the late 1990s and the beginning of the 21
st
century, begins to be
imagined as something to be overcome.
33

In his exploration of the sexual policing of Chinatowns at the beginning of the
20
th
century, Nayan Shah shows that normalcy was far from clear and that discourses
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
31
See Jodi Melamed, “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal
Multiculturalism,” Social Text 89 24.4 (Winter 2006): 1-24; and Nikhil Pal Singh, “Culture/Wars:
Recoding Empire in an Age of Democracy,” American Quarterly 50.3 (September 1998): 471-522.
32
For a very good discussion of the neo-con turn and notions of behavior-as-culture and behavior-as-
economic-determinant, see Robin D.G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in
Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997).
33
However, it is worth noting that in almost all video game-style zombie manifestations, either the
government or big business (or both) is seen as the corrupt force manipulating zombiness—therefore, there
is a sense in which these zombie texts acknowledge systemic problems at the heart of the zombie epidemic.
Moreover, one could argue that zombiism has always been positioned as something to overcome.
158

surrounding fears of disease were racialized in part, to register how people of color
violated heteronormativity and in part, to shore up normative sexuality and masculinity.
34

These discourses produced abnormal subjects—threats to national normalcy.
35
A similar
discourse is at work in both voodoo-style and Romero-style films.
In the voodoo-style films, the abnormal is easy to spot—it is everything
associated with producing zombies—and it is not only racialized and nationalized,
36
but
because so many women either inspire zombie masters to act or are their primary victims,
it takes on a gendered aspect as well. Yet, even when the zombie is seemingly divorced
from its voodoo/colonial roots in 1968, zombiism becomes a literal disease and again, the
abnormal is easy to spot. Given the nihilistic perspective of many Romero-style films,
most characters do not survive a zombie apocalypse. Those that do, then, could be
viewed as superior to those that do not—they are the characters able to avoid zombie
infection and retain their claims to normalcy.
37
Thus, cannibalistic decomposing corpses
tell viewers just as much about what is “normal” behavior as they do about zombiism.
Several films, especially those I would categorize as video game-style films, also
imagine zombiism as reversible. If one is industrious enough to find the cure, one can
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
34
Nayan Shah, “Between ‘Oriental Depravity’ and ‘Natural Degenerates’: Spatial Borderlands and the
Making of Ordinary Americans,” American Quarterly 57.3 (September 2005), 705.
35
Shah, 721.
36
For a lengthier discussion of zombies and their connections to national citizenship, see Chapter Two.
37
Of course, as I will argue later in this chapter, many of the characters who do survive zombie
apocalypses have tenuous claims to normalcy to begin with.
159

beat zombiism. Although the zombie works to undermine the notion of individual self-
determination—as the individual will is taken over by either magic or infection—it can
thus also be employed to reinscribe the notion that individual industriousness, and not
structural change, keeps one from remaining a zombie. In other words, if you are
zombified, you only have yourself to blame.
The zombie can thus be policed as that which is too weak to remain non-zombie.
However, many Romero- and video game-style zombie films turn the tables on this sort
of thinking in two ways. First, they are able to shine a light on systemic corruption so
that while zombification may not be a desirable process to undergo,
38
zombies, in merely
existing as products of the system, show that structural change is necessary. Second, the
individual industriousness that keeps one from becoming a zombie
39
is often located in
the female.
Thus, while (white) women in contemporary zombie films are often imagined as
those most likely to live through a zombie apocalypse, their claims to normalcy are
sometimes quite tenuous. Furthermore, in pre-1968 voodoo-style films, white females
were often cast as easy victims of zombification—effectively damaging their position as
normal. In both the voodoo- and Romero-style zombie films, then, (white) women have
had difficult relationships with the normative.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
38
Although, as I will argue later, it certainly can be.
39
Or that allows one to choose zombihood or zombies rather than having them thrust upon one.
160

PERFORMING HIS EVERY DESIRE
As the horror of any number of early zombie films
40
revolves around corruption
via black magic, the case could be made for associating zombies with what Rhona J.
Berenstein, in her analysis of race in jungle films, identifies as anxieties over passing as
white while fearing one is really dark, or primitive, at heart.
41
As long as zombification
was only performed on Haitians or other people of color, it could be dismissed as
something primitive and backward, but as soon as it was practiced on white peoples, by
white people, the implications were staggering.
James Snead notes, “…instances of the endangered woman pervade the history of
the Hollywood film. The agents threatening the woman are often, if not always, black,
then coded as representatives of blackness.”
42
Likewise, Thomas Cripps notes that
blackness in U.S. film is most often connected to bad behavior and hypersexuality.
43
In
the earliest voodoo-style zombie films, it is generally a white male who poses the threat
to white womanhood. In later Romero-style zombie films, zombies themselves have
posed the threat, but the white-woman-as-target has remained remarkably consistent. In
Snead’s and Cripps’s estimations, then, the white zombie masters of voodoo-style zombie
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
40
White Zombie, I Walked with a Zombie, Revenge of the Zombies, and The Zombies of Mora-Tau (1957).
41
Rhona J. Berenstein, Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic
Horror Cinema (New York: Columbia UP, 1996), 169.
42
Snead, 22.
43
Thomas Cripps, Making Movies Black: the Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil
Rights Era (New York: Oxford UP, 1993).
161

films and the cannibalistic zombies of Romero- and video game-style zombie films
would be, to a degree, coded as black. Blackness, in zombie films, is a racial concept,
but it is also positioned as anything that strays from the normal. Thus, any deviation
from normative sexual behavior (racially pure heterosexuality within the confines of
marriage) or gender traits (masculinity = active) is pathologized and aligned with
blackness.
This transposition of blackness onto white villains can be seen in the visual
tropes used to advertise early zombie texts. Even one of the earliest appearances of the
zombie in the United States, Kenneth Webb’s 1932 stage play “Zombie,” used images in
its advertising that would populate numerous zombie stories for the next thirty years: in
several ads for the play, a white woman is being threatened by a black figure whose
hands reach out for her. Although in the ads for “Zombie” and some other early zombie
film ads, the threat is coded as coming from black figures, just as often, the threat was
represented as coming from a white zombie master or zombie.
44
For instance, in one ad
for White Zombie (1932), the (white) zombie master’s face is shown looking at a
zombified white woman next to a tag line that reads: “She was not ALIVE…nor
DEAD…just a WHITE ZOMBIE…performing his EVERY DESIRE.” Furthermore, in
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
44
Gary D. Rhodes argues that white slavery, in the form of the scantily-clad white female body lying
powerless before the control of the zombie master or a zombie, was an undercurrent in the promotion of
White Zombie (Gary D. Rhodes, White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film (London: McFarland and Co.,
2001), 114).
162

almost every case, within the films themselves, zombie threats centered on a white
zombie master’s desires.
Pre-1968 voodoo-style zombie masters were often white males, and they can be
coded as aberrant in three ways: one, many display a (sexual) desire for a white female,
and this desire exists outside of the bonds of legally-sanctioned marriage. Two, many of
these zombie masters are depicted as foreign: they are either explicitly linked to another
nation or speak in heavy accents.
45
Finally, in their connection to and familiarity with
black magic (and hence, black culture), the zombie masters become suspect. Their
“blackness” is thus also an inability to live up to idealized U.S. white masculinity.
Additionally, while in the end of most of these films, the zombie menace is halted
by a white male, his whiteness and masculinity is far from secure. White male “heroes”
are largely ineffectual in the face of zombie masters. In White Zombie, for instance,
Charles Beaumont becomes zombified, and Neil Parker is unable to rescue his fiancée
from the clutches of a zombie master. All of the male members of an archaeological
expedition in Revolt of the Zombies (1936) are under the zombie master’s control.
Similarly, Mac, the pilot in King of the Zombies (1941), Richard, the psychology student
in Bowery at Midnight (1942), Police Captain Daniel Harris in Creature with the Atom
Brain, and adman Mike in Zombies on Broadway, are all zombified within the courses of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
45
Examples include but are not limited to: White Zombie, Revolt of the Zombies (1936), King of the
Zombies, Bowery at Midnight (1942), Revenge of the Zombies, and Voodoo Man (1944).
163

their films.
46
None of these men seem able to inhabit a space of ideal white masculinity.
These men are constantly acted upon rather than being active agents within the narratives.
They are unable to protect even themselves from contamination.
47

This fits into horror codes in a generic sense; as Berenstein observes of classical
horror: “Convention holds that males perform both the civilized and uncivilized parts,
and that their status as fiend or hero is determined via a woman. Attack a woman and
you are a monster; save a woman and you are a chivalrous man.”
48
However, as she
notes, the problem with most male heroes in horror “is they usually cannot figure out how
to save the day. Over and over again heroes fail to dispatch the fiend…and are attacked
and subdued by a creature.”
49
Yet, while, as Berenstein explains, the hero is feminized in
his ineptitude, by the film’s conclusion, “[h]is prior failures are seemingly forgotten and
he takes his place as a real man”—thus, with the monster destroyed, gender
destabilization is reigned in as well.
50

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
46
Notably, Zombies on Broadway represents one of the only voodoo-style zombie films where
zombification will naturally wear off after a little while.
47
In fact, the men who become zombies are troubling because zombification seems to imply feminization:
the men are under the control of another man and are forced to do his bidding. This is perhaps most overtly
illustrated in White Zombie when the zombie master Legendre toys with the newly-zombified Beaumont,
saying, “I have taken a fancy to you, Monsieur” (White Zombie, DVD, directed by Victor Halperin (USA:
Halperin Productions, 1932; Alpha Video, 2002).
48
Berenstein, 2.
49
Berenstein, 4-5.
50
Berenstein, 5; while I see many voodoo-style zombie films utilizing this pattern, as this chapter will
show, there are many examples where gender destabilization is not shut down so neatly at the end of the
film.
164

Yet, in zombifying white males, by making them slaves, expectations are that
they will behave according to dictates similar to those placed on idealized white
womanhood, and here lies the paradox: the men in these films are feminized, disrupting
their individual claims to whiteness, and yet, this is a feminization relying on the notion
of contained, idealized white womanhood, which is thoroughly disturbed within these
narratives as well.
Berenstein sees a larger threat coming from white females in jungle films, which
she sees as remarkably similar to horror in their treatment of women:
The white heroine, whatever her other metaphorical functions, signifies
the fragility of whiteness in general and white masculinity in particular…
White women remind male leads that no matter how brave they are, or
how well they save heroines from darker forces, white heroes are destined
to fight an uphill battle against their own ineptitude, and against the
imagined evolutionary pull that binds white women to blacks.
51

The same is the case for early zombie films, but it should be taken one step further. By
generic convention, white males are largely ineffectual in these horror films, at least up
until the very end when the monster is dispatched. The end of these films, then, usually
tries to shore up this damaged masculinity. However, white femininity in becoming
zombified or inciting it, is also found wanting in voodoo-style zombie films, and its
restoration isn’t so secure: the women have been tainted by their encounters with black
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
51
Berenstein, 196.
165

magic in ways their partners have not.
52
A hierarchy becomes implicit—and time and
again, those deemed most susceptible to zombification (or those most likely to inspire or
tolerate it) are white women.
In many of the earliest zombie films, white women either bring about
zombification in some way or, more likely, are its earliest and easiest victims.
53
In other
films, women are the targets of zombies.
54
As those white bodies that most easily fall
prey to black magic (or to black zombies sent by their masters), these women are at once
victimized and sexualized. The reclining white females in the ads for White Zombie,
Revolt of the Zombies, and other zombie films, who often appear as objects of a zombie
master’s gaze or in a zombie’s sinister clutches, are hypersexualized and clearly
dominated by white male desire—perfect examples of “enslaved whiteness.”
55
These
women become the embodiment of a type of whiteness whose purity must be questioned.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
52
There are some notably exceptions to this. In Revolt of the Zombies, Bowery at Midnight, and Zombies
on Broadway, it is the male partner who is zombified and the white female who must act to restore him to
life.
53
Or intended victims; see White Zombie, Revolt of the Zombies, King of the Zombies, I Walked with a
Zombie, Revenge of the Zombies, Voodoo Man, I Eat your Skin, Teenage Zombies (1957) and Womaneater
(1957).
54
See, for instance, Ouanga (1935), The Ghost Breakers, Zombies on Broadway, Scared Stiff (1953), and
The Astro-Zombies (1968).
55
In her essay “Litigating Whiteness,” Ariela J. Gross discusses 19
th
–century court cases in which women,
in order to prove their legal status as white, would be asked to perform in ways similar to black peoples on
the slave block or white women sold as sex slaves. The process served to sexualize these women in very
incongruous ways. Gross notes, “In order to prove whiteness, one often had to perform whiteness through
the rituals of the slave market. Thus, [Walter] Johnson suggests the contradictions inherent in finding these
women ‘white.’ After all, what good white woman would submit herself to such indelicate inspection? If
she were truly, purely white, what good white man would look at her disrobed? Rather, he suggests, these
166

In White Zombie, for instance, Madeline spends an undisclosed amount of time in
the zombie master’s castle as his zombie, and one assumes that, just as the advertising
warns, she is “performing his every desire.” Claire, the heroine of Revolt of the Zombies,
is never made into a zombie, yet, it is her decision to move from one man to another that
sets the zombie master to zombifying. In I Walked with a Zombie, Jessica’s affair with
her brother-in-law spurs her mother-in-law to zombify her; and in Voodoo Man (1944),
zombie master Richard Marlowe keeps a stable of zombified young women in his
basement during his search for a suitable replacement for his dead wife.
Even where a woman’s purity might not be called into direct question, the choices
a woman makes in marrying the wrong sort of man
56
or going to the wrong sorts of
places
57
can call white femininity’s rational decision-making skills into question.
Furthermore, from the beginning, many of these women have been constructed as sexual
beings, especially in their status as unmarried women who are read as sexually available
by zombie masters. Sometimes, simply the very presence of women incites zombies or
the zombie master to act.
58

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
women represented ‘enslaved whiteness,’ the tantalizing, hypersexualized, and commodified whiteness of
the ‘fancy girls’ sold as concubines—white in beauty but not in social status” (Ariela Gross, “Litigating
Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the Nineteenth Century South,” Yale Law Journal 198
(October 1998), 138 n. 100).
56
As the zombified wives of King of the Zombies and Revenge of the Zombies learn.
57
For instance, travel to Haiti in White Zombie; a haunted castle in The Ghost Breakers (and its remake
Scared Stiff); the bowery in Bowery at Midnight; and lonely backwoods roads in Voodoo Man.
58
As in Teenage Zombies, The Ghost Breakers, Scared Stiff, and The Incredibly Strange Creatures…
167

In a similar vein, consider Barbara, the lead female character in Night of the
Living Dead. The film opens with Barbara and her brother visiting a cemetery. While
there and upon first seeing the zombies at a distance and not recognizing them as a threat,
Barbara’s brother teases her, saying, “They’re coming to get you, Barbara,” which, in
fact, they are.
59
Although the zombies of the film may not be explicitly drawn to
Barbara, a petite blonde who spends most of the film paralyzed with fear, the film has
been structured so that the audience follows her to an abandoned farmhouse where she
encounters other stranded living humans and where the zombies will lay siege. The
implication is that the zombies are, indeed, coming to get her.
60
Even with the transition
away from zombie masters to infections, then, the white female presence still incites.
61

This ability to incite would remain in the Romero-style films. In films like 1972’s
Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things and 1974’s Deathdream, for instance, the
white female inadvertently raises zombies from the grave. Yet, over time, even with a
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
59
Night of the Living Dead, DVD (Millennium edition), directed by George A. Romero (USA: Image Ten,
1968; Elite Entertainment, 2000).
60
A similar structure, in which the audience follows the white female, is found in Dawn of the Dead
(1978), Day of the Dead (1985), The Fog (1980), Shock Waves (1977), Night of the Comet (1984), Ghosts
of Mars (2001), Quarantine (2008), and the Resident Evil series (2001, 2004, 2007, and 2010).
61
The male zombie’s lust for a female is even evident in earlier descriptions of supposed real-life zombis.
For instance, in Edna Taft’s A Puritan in Voodoo-land, she relates a story told to her by a Haitian
acquaintance who claimed there was a Haitian man who sold his soul to a papa-loi to pay off a debt. The
man became a zombi and one day, the zombi spotted an older woman, the first woman he had seen since
becoming a zombi. She excited the zombi so much, he followed her back to her home, smashed open her
door, and raped her. The woman decided to keep the zombi as her husband, but when the papa-loi who
held his soul died, the zombi woke up, was aghast at the site of his old wife, and ran away (Taft, 202-206).
168

number of “Final Girl”
62
characters in Romero- and video game-style zombie texts, the
incendiary power of white females has changed somewhat. However, it is in this
transition from one role to another that the consistent use of white female bodies becomes
apparent: white females of voodoo-style films are usually “victims,” or more aptly,
characters whose transgressions are strictly policed and who return to heteronormativity
at film’s end, while Romero- and video game-style white females may be allowed to
enjoy their transgressions and may not necessarily be forced back into heteronormative
structures at the end of their narratives.
Still, the progressive aspects of the voodoo-style films should not be overlooked.
Although there are those who would claim that whiteness acquires its power, in part,
from its ability to change and transgress without fundamentally losing its positionality, in
showing the whiteness of these women as something that needs policing and by showing
how masculine whiteness can come to be “feminized”
63
or how individuals can fail in
their whiteness, these films demonstrate that whiteness is an impossible standard—no one
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
62
The “Final Girl” is a horror film convention conceptualized by Carol J. Clover to describe the last female
left standing in many horror texts: this often virginal woman is the character who will confront the
killer/monster in the film’s climax. She does this through taking up a phallocentric weapon, thus becoming
somewhat “masculinized” as she fights back. Clover suggests that while viewers initially share the killer’s
perspective in horror films, they will shift identification to the “Final Girl” later in the film, allowing for a
great deal of gender fluidity in audience identification. Furthermore, inherent in these films is the idea that
the killer’s terrorization of the “Final Girl” serves to punish her and take away the threat of any potential
aberrant sexuality by shutting it down. See Carol J. Clover, Men Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the
Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992). Also see my discussion of the limitations of the
“Final Girl” on page 192.
63
See my discussion of this on page 163 and in n. 84.
169

in these films is able to consistently achieve and/or maintain it. Whiteness is always a
less-than-stable second order manifestation of its own ideal, and this leaves it vulnerable.
Furthermore, while not explicit in the early films, there is a sense that there could be
pleasure derived from leaving whiteness behind: an undercurrent of these films is that
whiteness may not only be vulnerable, it also might not be the only way.
While there are still classical white females in zombie films (and there are many
films where a white female presence is negligible at best), with Romero- and video game-
style texts, white female characters are presented with more options—in other words,
their transgressiveness does not necessarily have to be reigned in at the end of the film.
What was hinted at before Night of the Living Dead becomes possible in these films.
However, the white female remains key to texts from all of these styles: just as Rhona J.
Berenstein, Carol J. Clover, Linda Williams and Barbara Creed, among others, would
have us expect, it is her relationship to a monster, the zombie, that makes transgression
possible in the first place.

“WHAT GREATER DESTINY COULD MY WIFE ACHIEVE…”
Zombie films center on the interrelated fears and desires wrought of
reproduction.
64
If colonialism and occupation ostensibly centered on transplanting and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
64
This would align with James B. Twitchell’s argument in Dreadful Pleasures, namely that “modern horror
myths prepare the teenager for the anxieties of reproduction” (James B. Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures: An
Anatomy of Modern Horror (New York: Oxford UP, 1985), 7). In fact, Twitchell sees the music video
170

growing civilization on alien soil, then early zombie films showed just how those plans
could go awry as black-and-white miscegenated. Living death was the result of this
situation in these films, and the zombie stood as a potent reminder of just what came of
race mixing. Yet, reproduction was contained in the voodoo-style films: zombie masters
had limited ambitions and the threat that zombiism could be reversed was ever-present,
so zombie numbers were low.
Over time, zombie masters tended to want more and more zombies—the
production of zombie armies became the dream and the nightmare: an endless supply of
willing drones to do one’s bidding but the threat that anyone could be next. In many
ways, Romero-style zombies are the logical outcropping of this, but these zombies aren’t
created in a voodoo temple or in a mad scientist’s lab—they can reproduce themselves,
and this is what truly makes them horrible.
65
In a sense, then, these zombies represent
not only fears that subversive elements will reproduce and grow, but that there is no way
to police such growth because it exists outside of normative, state-sponsored
reproduction. With video game-style zombies, the means of policing reproduction
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
“Thriller” (1983) as allowing teens “to associate dating and sex with zombies, vampires and wolfmen” (67-
68).
65
Some scholars would disagree with this statement; Kim Paffenroth, for one, argues that zombies cannot
reproduce on their own (Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth (Waco:
Baylor UP, 2006), 13). However, my point is that while zombies may be incapable of sexually reproducing
on their own, they are nevertheless, still able to reproduce.
171

returns, both with the presence of new kinds of zombie masters
66
and with the promise of
a cure.
Zombie reproduction, in any style, whether it is policed or not, is threatening to
heteronormativity; it is a queered reproduction that exists outside the ability of dominant
structures to regulate. Zombies aren’t produced via sexual relations: in some of the early
films, they are produced through knowledge of (black) religion and magic; in others, they
are produced via bastardizations of science or “alien” control, and in Romero-style films,
they are produced via virus or infection. In each case, dominant structures have been
circumvented or subverted.
Judith Halberstam in In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies,
Subcultural Lives, utilizes the concept of queer time “to make clear how respectability,
and notions of the normal on which it depends, may be upheld by a middle-class logic of
reproductive temporality.”
67
Thus, “we create longevity as the most desirable future,
applaud the pursuit of long life (under any circumstances), and pathologize modes of
living that show little or no concern for longevity.”
68
It seems clear that in zombie films,
there are certain paths to longevity that are pathologized: living a long life is only
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
66
In these films, the zombie master has returned in the form of corporations and governmental entities that
create zombie viruses or somehow regulate zombies/zombiism. See, for instance, the Resident Evil films or
Fido (2006).
67
Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New
York UP, 2005), 4.
68
Halberstam, 4.
172

valorized/normalized inasmuch as it is done in a (seemingly) healthy body and in a way
that upholds dominant cultural ideologies—look young and beautiful and subscribe to the
notion of individual free will, for instance. Thus, zombie (re)production is pathologized
as racial contamination or infectious disease to eschew white heterosexual patriarchy’s
loss of control over it.
It makes sense, then, that as carriers of white reproduction, white women are key
in each of the zombie’s phases, and in becoming corrupted by zombification or by
allowing it to occur, in many of these films, the woman is unable to hold onto her
whiteness. As Lewis Gordon notes about the white woman: “She stands as a white
blackness, as a living contradiction of white supremacy.”
69
Because the white woman
can potentially produce black children as well as white, she becomes an object of
simultaneous desire and repulsion: her whiteness is unreliable. It is desirable as both a
symbol of purity and repulsive in that it can be shown not to hold that purity, and yet it
also becomes an object of desire in what causes that repulsion—as a sexual being. This
gets to the very heart of fears surrounding the stability of whiteness, for as Gwendolyn
Foster maintains, it is the fear of hybridity that fuels the very notion of whiteness in the
first place. As she states, “White would not be able to exist were it not for fears of race
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
69
qtd. in Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Performing Whiteness: Postmodern Re/Constructions in the Cinema
(New York: SUNY Press, 2003), 39.
173

mixing, gender bending, class-passing, and other forms of hybridity.”
70
The white female
body, as the most visible site of reproduction, then, becomes one of the best places in
which to police miscegenation.
In several voodoo-style films, the white woman quite literally becomes a
zombie—implying that she has been tainted both by black magic and by the advances of
a zombie master. Yet, in those films where zombies play a larger role than that of
window dressing, often the woman is key to ending the zombie spell: Nurse Betsy
Connell in I Walked with a Zombie, Lila von Altermann (as a zombie) in Revenge of the
Zombies (1943), and to an extent, Jean in Zombies on Broadway all act in this capacity.
71

But even when this is not the case, most voodoo-style zombie films end as generic
conventions would have us expect: with at least one white woman brought into a stable
heterosexual coupling with a white male. While in some films this coupling represents
nothing more than a convenient trope, in others, containing these women’s sexuality is
the key to the happy endings in these films.
For Robin Wood, contemporary American society represses sexual desires
because these desires pose a threat to society’s stability; the monster becomes a crucial
figure through which these desires can be vented—monster films allow a safe way to act
out these desires and provide a vicarious experience of the chaos a real-life release of
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70
Foster, 33.
71
Jean actually uses a zombie potion to neutralize the gangster who is threatening the two male leads.
174

these appetites would bring about.
72
In James Snead’s estimation, this vicarious
experience is both “pleasurable and horrific.”
73
Audiences both desire and fear the sense
of chaos connected to the monstrous body. Thus, while films like White Zombie, Revolt
of the Zombies, Revenge of the Zombies and I Walked with a Zombie seem to be enacting
fears associated with the white female body that interrogate notions of white femininity
as inhabiting a space of perfect whiteness, they are also enacting common tropes that link
the monstrous to the sexual and uncivilized. The white female body, when zombified or
inspiring zombification,
74
becomes a conduit through which some audiences can play
with desire and fear.
75

White female sexuality becomes positioned much like stereotypical black female
sexuality in the voodoo-style films—as a threatening sexual space very easily trespassed
against—and as such, it becomes monstrous. Linda Williams has observed that the
monster is a site where the body represents “a fearful and threatening form of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
72
qtd. in Snead, 7.
73
Snead, 7.
74
This is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in 1957’s Womaneater. While the focus of this film is
much more on the processes of creating a zombie elixir than on creating zombies themselves, the film
positions the white female as both a cheap, sexual plaything and as the representation of all that is virginal
and good. However, what is noteworthy about this film is that the zombie potion can only be produced
from an elixir derived from a woman-eating plant: these women are first dressed in skimpy dresses and
then are mesmerized by native Amazonian drumming before being fed to the plant.
75
Naturally, one’s reaction to how these films handle sexuality would depend on a host of factors and for
all of their potential transgressiveness, these films do tend to center whiteness and monogamous
heterosexuality.
175

sexuality.”
76
There is power in this sexuality, though: the monster and the female
become doubles of each other, in Williams’s view, through a film’s shot structures, and
this gives female viewers the opportunity to identify with a powerful creature;
77

moreover, the look shared between the monster and the female may cast the female as
victim, but it also shows that both the monster and the female exist outside of
patriarchy.
78

Zombies do not fit neatly into Williams’s conception, though, mainly because
rather than being monsters that exist outside of the self, zombies are (usually) the self
turned into monster—the self and double combine. Thus, there could be a sense in which
to zombify is to feminize, but I would argue that making one a zombie, in either the
voodoo- or Romero-style films, is to render one as not only the Other to masculinity,
whiteness, and normative sexualities but as part and parcel of them as well—in other
words, the zombie state is the Other to all that white patriarchal capitalist
heteronormativity says is rational and normal while still existing as a product of that
system. The transgressive power of such is tremendous.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
76
qtd. in Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (New York:
Routledge, 1993), 6.
77
Something Berenstein also argues.
78
See Linda Williams, “When the Woman Looks,” Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, eds.
Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp and Linda Williams (Frederick, MD: University Publications of
America, 1984): 83-99.
176

In Williams’s work, she maintains that the rebellious tendencies of the
female/monster are quelled when the monster is destroyed. Berenstein, in her exploration
of classical horror films, also suggests heroines’ “‘apparent victimization’ is the price
they pay in order to break the bounds of convention. If heroines…insist on desiring
fiends, aggressing against boyfriends, and behaving independently…their desires and
powers are masked by a victim role.”
79
Thus, zombification in early films is only a
temporary transformation: bodies are disciplined and/or brought back to their “natural”
state in the end. While Jessica in I Walked with a Zombie must die for the disruption her
body has caused to be firmly contained, in other films, a transformation back to “normal”
is all that is needed, and this usually goes hand in hand with heterosexual coupling.
Thus, the white female body, in the very fact that it can become monstrous as a zombie,
inspire zombie masters to create others as monstrous, or excite the desires of zombies,
generates a space where the unity and wholeness of whiteness is questioned, but only
until this space is shut down at film’s end. Still, the woman’s ability to transgress is
important.
Many voodoo-style zombie films adhere to Berenstein’s and Williams’s findings,
but with the introduction of Romero-style texts, more and more zombie films began
dispensing with the return of the status quo. Night of the Living Dead and the nihilistic
Romero influence on zombie films have made it so that most of the time, zombies survive
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
79
Berenstein, 90, 107.
177

at the end of a film in the Romero style. Their transgression, then, is not reigned in.
Even in the voodoo-style films, while there is the generic convention of returning the
woman to the white patriarchal heteronormative fold and there is an idea that the status
quo will right things in the end, the female body still retains the potential to become both
monstrous or to inspire monstrosity in others.
In Revenge of the Zombies, for instance, Dr. von Altermann has zombified his
wife, which to him makes perfect sense; as he says, “What greater destiny could my wife
achieve than to serve me?”
80
Yet, beautiful zombified Lila von Altermann doesn’t feel
the same way and turns on her zombie master/husband, leading her fellow zombies
against him. Cornering her husband in a swamp, Lila ensures that she and her husband
will sink into quicksand as the other zombies watch. The white woman here is both
beautiful and deadly, the physical manifestation of the monstrous body and that which
will bring it under control through death. While Lila’s transgression is halted, it happens
by her own hand and she is able to take down patriarchy (and heteronormativity) in the
form of her husband while she does it.
Nevertheless, it is important to remember that many believe that one of the
privileges of whiteness is its ability to transgress without damaging the essential nature of
whiteness. As bell hooks remarks in her description of the changes that take place when
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
80
Revenge of the Zombies, DVD, directed by Steve Sekely (USA: Monogram Pictures, 1943; BijouFlix
Releasing, 2004).
178

young white men have sex with women of color: “The seductive promise of this
encounter is that it will counter the terrorizing force of the status quo that makes identity
fixed, static, a condition of containment and death.”
81
hooks notes that sexual
transgression of racial boundaries allows one to step outside of the safety of the status
quo and yet “…to seek an encounter with the Other, does not require that one relinquish
forever one’s mainstream positionality.”
82
Namely, whiteness, even in transgression, is
safe from total disruption: the white person can always return to whiteness.
It is important to keep in mind, too, that zombification is used in these films as a
means of sexual control. As Matthew Frye Jacobson reminds in Whiteness of a Different
Color, “The policing of sexual boundaries…is precisely what keeps a racial group a
racial group.”
83
The voodoo-style films enact narratives where those boundaries are
threatened, but those who threaten the boundaries are destroyed or defeated. Yet, the
Romero- and video game-style films offer no such guarantee. Thus, while in voodoo-
style films the fantasy/nightmare of crossing boundaries is toyed with before the films re-
inscribe white heteronormativity, in many of the Romero- and video game-style films,
this isn’t possible, either because the zombies win or because those left standing after the
zombie apocalypse can’t, by virtue of their race, gender, or sexuality, do it.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
81
bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston, South End Press, 1992).
82
hooks, 23.
83
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race
(Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1999), 3.
179

If, as Barbara Creed maintains, the feminine is often made monstrous in horror
films by showing it to be “that which does not ‘respect borders, positions, rules,’ that
which ‘disturbs identity, system, order’,” then the zombie is both feminized and
threatening because it represents “the clean and proper body” that has become a “body
which has lost its form and integrity.”
84
The ambiguity of bodies that can either
simultaneously inhabit blackness as a zombie and whiteness in appearance or that can
inspire “blackness” in white peers (who either desire her or fail to protect her) must cause
anxiety. They expose whiteness as a fiction. Yet, Creed sees these ambiguous bodies as
abject and the abject, in its ability to violate bodily boundaries or to cross the borders
between life and death, as able to challenge binaristic thinking.
85

Thus, even if their sexuality is contained by film’s end, the white women of
voodoo-style zombie films offer up a progressive challenge to conventional racial
thinking. They therefore do work similar to what Kathleen Rowe, in her book Unruly
Women, sees Roseanne Arnold as doing: Rowe observes that Roseanne’s “copious body
could be seen as a site which makes visible, and reconciles, the conflicts women
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84
Creed, 11. Using Mikahil Bahktin’s “classical” and “grotesque” bodies, we can see that it isn’t a stretch
to position the classical body with a masculine discourse and the grotesque with a feminine one. Classical
bodies are civilized, restrained, and rational—the stereotypical attributes of masculinity—while the
grotesque body is irrational, open, and sexual—attributes most often stereotypically aligned with the
feminine. If a case could be made that zombies are examples of grotesque bodies, and this assertion that
grotesque bodies seem to share the characteristics of feminized bodies is likewise accepted, then to zombify
could be seen as feminizing. However, as this chapter will argue, I believe that it is more productive to see
the zombie as Other in a way that doesn’t pathologize femininity. I will be returning to issues of the
grotesque body in Chapter Five.
85
See Creed.
180

experience in a culture that says consume (food) but look as if you don’t.”
86
As
both/and—both living and dead, both black and white, both sexualized and pure—the
women of voodoo-style films enact the conflicts between dominant normativity and
anything seen as Other to that state. They exist in-between normal and abnormal, which
at once queers the normative while it normalizes the queer. They thus exist in much the
same discursive space as the zombie.
Sue-Ellen Case’s reading of the vampire in “Tracking the Vampire” is instructive
here; in her evaluation of the vampire as a queer creature, she states “Life/death becomes
the binary of the ‘natural limits of Being: the organic is the natural. In contrast, the queer
has been historically constituted as the unnatural.”
87
I would claim that in the form of the
zombie (and sometimes the woman in zombie texts), queer space becomes that which is
both natural and unnatural—a space where the two seemingly incongruous states can co-
exist. Elizabeth Hills, building off of both Creed’s and Brain Massumi’s work, sees the
character of Ripley from the Alien films (1979, 1986, 1992 and 1997) as doing similar
work; she states, “Ripley does indeed become monstrous but this can be viewed as a
creative process.”
88
Building off of this, the female in zombie films—as both hybrid in
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86
Kathleen Rowe, Unruly Women: Gender and the Genres of Laughter (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1995), 59.
87
Sue Ellen Case, “Tracking the Vampire,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3.2
(1991), 3.
88
Elizabeth Hills, “From ‘Figurative Males’ to Action Heroines: Further Thoughts on Active Women in the
Cinema,” Screen 40.1 (Spring 1999), 46.
181

her own right but most importantly as hybrid in her connections to the zombie itself—can
therefore be seen as a creative force, and in Romero-style films, this creative power faces
fewer and fewer obstacles.

GOOD GIRLS DON’T HANG OUT WITH DEAD BOYS
One might expect that the presentation of whiteness and gender in zombie films
would be altered with the introduction of cannibal zombies in 1968, and yet, while the
zombies changed, the white female remains crucial to zombie texts. As stated earlier,
Barbara in Night of the Living Dead is very similar to many heroines of voodoo-style
films: she seems to be the center of zombie attention but is helpless to do anything about
it.
89
As Robin Wood has observed, Night of the Living Dead undercuts generic
expectations by doing this, by having no heterosexual coupling survive the zombie
onslaught and by literally destroying the nuclear family.
90

The most noteworthy change in Night of the Living Dead, however, is that the
hero, Ben, is black: blackness is here coded as the most rational, the most able to
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89
Gregory Waller claims that while Barbara’s state might be linked to her gender, it might also be linked to
the fact that “she is the character who is most fully connected to tradition and religion” (Gregory Waller,
The Living and the Undead: From Stoker’s Dracula to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1986), 283).
90
Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan…and Beyond, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia UP,
2003), 102.
182

survive,
91
and yet, while Night of the Living Dead marks the first appearance of a black
male protagonist in a zombie film and can certainly be read as a turning point in the genre
in regards to race, three observations should be made. First, while Ben is certainly the
first black hero of a U.S. zombie film, there are earlier examples, as will be discussed
later, of black figures who are empowered via voodoo or knowledge of black magic.
They may be cast as villains (or on the side of villainy) but these characters know more
about the workings of the world than their white counterparts. Second, while black
zombies were mostly background filler in voodoo-style films, they were at least
present—the same cannot be said of many zombie crowds after 1968. Finally, the
inclusion of characters like Ben did not signal the removal of racial problems from
zombie films—these remain, just in different forms.
Thus, even though Ben is shown as the best candidate for the future of humanity
in Night of the Living Dead, he is killed by a posse hunting zombies at the end of the
film—they mistake him for a zombie. Wood maintains that the posse functions to restore
the social order and that the film ends having contained the threat.
92
Being associated
with the all-white posse, then, it would seem logical to see the status quo as white. Thus,
the earlier notion of a return to normalcy is somewhat maintained in Night of the Living
Dead, and Ben must be destroyed to keep the status quo intact.
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91
This will not be the case in the 1990 remake.
92
Wood, 103.
183

Night of the Living Dead, then, works well as a transitional moment: the white
female is still inciting and the white male is still ushering in the return to normalcy. But
blackness is more ambiguous here. As death in the form of the zombie threat to white
womanhood, blackness is still bad, but as Ben, it is shown to be more able to survive than
whiteness. Yet, under the system the posse is trying to protect, Ben was never a full
living member of the status quo anyway. An excerpt from the working script of Night of
the Living Dead is telling in this sense: at the end of the film after shooting Ben, the
posse enters the farmhouse and “The men look down at him, but step past him toward the
cellar. They do not know he was a man…”
93
Although this line explicitly speaks to
Ben’s status as living versus dead, it also speaks to his status as one with full claims to
manhood in the posse’s society. While Ben has shown himself the most competent of the
survivors at the farmhouse, the posse still can’t distinguish him from one of the living
dead. Ben stands in the way of their normalcy unless he is destroyed. The link between
zombies and black bodies is thus made.
Whiteness in this film, then, is set up both as that which needs protecting and that
which destroys. It inhabits the tricky ideological middle ground so often inhabited by
zombies. This strange conundrum, whereby white heteronormative patriarchy is set up
both as under attack and as also producing the zombies that attack it, is an undercurrent in
most Romero-style films. Wood claims that the black male, Peter, in Dawn of the Dead
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
93
Russo, 36.
184

is noteworthy in this regard: “his color used…to indicate his separation from the norms of
white dominated society and his partial exemption from its constraints.”
94
Just like Ben,
Peter exists as a very visible indicator of an outside to white civilization. Blackness is
thus still set up as Other to white civilization, just as it was in voodoo-style films, and
even if Romero-style films may seem to position white civilization as corrupt and
undesirable, the binary, pitting black versus white, remains.
Yet, the fact that the Other has become not something to try on and discard but a
very permanent alternative is telling, and there is something compelling about the fact
that Dawn of the Dead ends with the escape of a black man and a pregnant white woman.
While there is no indication of any type of romantic relationship existing between them
and the baby she carries is decidedly white, the promise of a post-white civilization
populated by black men and white women is made plausible in this film. As Wood
observes, the black male and white female are “the survivors…who show themselves
capable of autonomy and self-awareness.”
95
Yet again, while this can be read in a
positive light, it can also be read as a comment on the inability of white women and black
men to fit within white heteronormative patriarchal society. If both zombies, as products
of that society, and survivors who eventually become zombified are equated with white
patriarchal heteronormativity, then white women and black men exist in a nowhere land
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
94
Wood, 107.
95
Wood, 107.
185

in these films. They become the true liminal beings: they don’t fit in living society nor
do they fit with the living dead, either.
96
Of course, not all Romero-style films have the black-white patterns of the “Dead”
trilogy, but the positioning of white civilization as both that-which-must-be-defended and
that-which-must-be-escaped is almost always a given. Furthermore, as products of their
culture, zombie films did not radically change in their depictions of women overnight. In
a Romero-style film like Garden of the Dead (1974), the white woman is used as a decoy
to catch prisoner-zombies; in Deathdream, a mother’s grief over her dead son brings him
back from Vietnam, and she is content to look the other way as he kills people. In Shock
Waves (1977), the white female is the lone survivor of an attack by Nazi zombies. In
each of these cases, it is clear that the white female still functions as that which incites
zombification or excites zombies. Yet, Rose in Shock Waves, as the sole survivor of a
zombie attack, stands at the beginning of a long line of new white women in zombie
films—empowered heroines who either hold the key to a post-zombie future or who
subvert expectations by embracing zombie culture.
97
Fran in Dawn of the Dead and Sarah in Day of the Dead are the best places to
start in exploring this new woman. As Wood notes, while Night of the Living Dead’s
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
96
Of course, their liminality is still visible; black women disappear from even these more ‘liberal’ critical
takes.
97
Again, its notable that this seemingly more feminist version re-centers white women as standing in for
feminism as such, and black women disappear; however, as this chapter will argue, black women are not
completely elided within this genre.
186

Barbara was “a parody of female passivity and helplessness,” Fran begins Dawn of the
Dead “thoroughly complicit in the established structures of heterosexuality, then learns
gradually to assert herself and extricate herself from them.”
98
With Sarah in Day of the
Dead, “the woman had become, quite unambiguously, the positive center around whom
the entire film is structured.”
99
Sarah is a scientist and often the most rational person at
the compound where she lives. While Wood sees the film as capturing “the hysteria of
contemporary masculinity” in an era full of Rockys and Rambos, this shift toward a more
rational, empowered female heroine in zombie films also seems to accompany a re-
inscription of the zombie as more sympathetic.
100
To be sure, there were and continue to be those zombies that exist only to hunt
and kill the living, but by the 1980s, two other trends were also visible: there was a rise in
the number of comic zombies and sympathetic zombies. A string of several films starting
in the early 1980s played zombies for laughs,
101
while films like Creepshow (1982), Day
of the Dead, The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), Land of the Dead (2005), and Fido
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
98
Wood, 292.
99
Wood, 292.
100
Of course, this “shift” belies a tremendous amount of continuity in that the empowered heroines of the
Romero-style films and the “victims” of the voodoo-style films both exist in worlds where white women
are key—the center of femininity is white, and any other kind of femininity disappears. Yet, as we will
later see, black femininity does play a role in both styles.
101
Including The Return of the Living Dead (1985) and its sequels, Redneck Zombies (1987), I was a
Zombie for the F.B.I (1982), I was a Teenage Zombie (1986), Dead Heat (1988), and continuing into the
1990s and 2000s, Nudist Colony of the Dead (1991), Weekend at Bernie’s 2 (1993), Pirates of the
Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), as well as episodes of the television series South Park, Buffy
the Vampire Slayer, and The X-Files.
187

(2006) and the TV movies “The Dead Don’t Die” (1975) and “Homecoming” (2005)
have presented zombies as more sympathetic characters. In Romero-style films, zombies
are still the Other, but just like with voodoo-style texts, this is complicated. With
voodoo-style films, one could usually try zombiism on and then be rescued from it. With
the comedic zombie films of the 1980s and beyond, often being a zombie isn’t so bad—
you can still get the girl or save the day as a zombie. The once-normal person may look
different, but deep down he/she is the same good person he/she has always been.
Becoming a zombie is mainly a cosmetic process.
With those films that focus on the sympathetic zombie, this also holds true. These
zombies might be a little more rough around the edges, but they are still good at heart.
As George Romero has noted of the evolution of his own films: “Even in Dawn I was
trying to show some zombies with ‘personalities’—a softball player, a nun…I was trying
to give them some sympathy…the humans have always been less sympathetic.”
102
Even
in those films where zombies are simply killing machines, the notion that “it could
happen to you or me” is still prevalent, a holdover from the voodoo style perhaps, made
even more powerful by the zombie’s move to U.S. suburban and urban centers. Zombies,
if anything, became more believable as some of them became divorced of spells and
magic, and in the era of AIDS, one could easily envision a disease taking over one’s
body: the possibility of becoming a zombie, however remote, still seemed to linger.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
102
Giulia D’Agnolo-Vallan, “Let Them Eat Flesh,” Film Comment (July-August 2005), 24.
188

The white female of voodoo-style films was a double for the zombie—not quite
white but not quite not-white either. Ben, in a sense, takes over this space of the not quite
living but not quite living-dead in Night of the Living Dead, and Fran and Sarah of the
“Dead” trilogy seem to be taking over for Ben.
103
The connection, then, between kinder,
gentler zombies and the more empowered heroine is an extension of the connection
between zombies and blackness and black men and white women.
Examining the interplay between Ben and Barbara in the 1990 version of Night of
the Living Dead is telling in this regard. In the film, penned by George Romero, the
character of Barbara is radically rewritten. Barry Keith Grant sees this version as much
more progressive than the 1968 version, which it is, and he sees the “new” Barbara as
enacting an attempt “to reclaim the horror genre for feminism,” which in a way, it
does.
104
In his view, Barbara is positioned as the only person fit to survive the zombie
onslaught: “The others in the farmhouse are unable to deal with the zombies in a
professional manner because of egotism and sentimentality.”
105
For Grant, men in
Romero’s films fail at survival because they get caught up in phallocentric power and/or
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
103
The character of Barbara literally takes his place in the 1990 remake of the film. For an extended
discussion of the “new” Barbara, see Barry Keith Grant, “Taking Back Night of the Living Dead: George
Romero, Feminism and the Horror Film,” Wide Angle 14.1 (January 1992): 64-76.
104
Grant, 74.
105
Grant, 70.
189

fail to work together.
106
Thus, they seem to be living up to the classical generic
expectations presented by Berenstein, except that these men are not re-inscribed as
masculine at the end of the film via the monster’s death because the zombies don’t die.
Yet, this is tempered by two things. First, in order to become the active heroine
who survives the night, Barbara must strip herself of signs of femininity and take up
traditional symbols of masculinity. Thus, she removes her skirt and puts on pants and
picks up a shotgun and begins shooting. More importantly, though, she is not able to
enact her transformation on her own. At the beginning of the film, the new Barbara,
while not as catatonically helpless as her 1968 namesake, is still in a state of shock and
has trouble speaking. It takes Ben’s arrival and his instruction to rouse her: as he tells
her, “I don’t need you falling apart, understand?… I know you can fight when you have
to.”
107
Later, when Barbara formulates a plan of escape—to literally run past the slow
zombies—Ben scoffs, and she forcefully tells him, “You told me to fight. Well, I’m
fighting.”
108
The black male, in a sense, unlocks the white female’s power.
Furthermore, as Grant points out, Barbara appears horrified by the (white)
patriarchal society she encounters after her escape from the farmhouse. While this
society is “monstrous,” as Grant calls it, and Barbara is repulsed, she is still entrenched
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
106
Grant, 71-72.
107
Night of the Living Dead, DVD, directed by Tom Savini (USA: Columbia Pictures, 1990; Sony Pictures,
1999).
108
Night of the Living Dead (1990).
190

within this society to a degree.
109
In other words, she has to play along, if for no other
reason than it affords her some protection from the zombies. Therefore, the victory Grant
sees is a bit qualified. It is dependent more on white men failing to temper their
masculinity with proper “civilization” than in Barbara outright opposing phallocentric
structures. Her repulsion, though, is illustrative of many Romero-style and video game-
style films, especially those that contain white female warriors.
While they may be ostensibly defending white civilization against zombies, white
female warriors don’t inhabit that space as unambiguously as white men in voodoo-style
films did. The most prominent of the female fighters—Sarah in Day of the Dead, Regina
in Night of the Comet (1984), Lt. Melanie Ballard in Ghosts of Mars (2001), Alice in the
Resident Evil series,
110
and Cherry Darling in Planet Terror (2007)—do not actively seek
out zombies to fight. They are thrust into circumstances where they must defend
themselves against a zombie onslaught, and unlike their white male voodoo-style
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109
Grant, 74.
110
Stephen Harper argues that while the Resident Evil films can be seen as progressively feminist to a
degree, they are highly problematic in terms of race, gender, and sexuality. While I will agree with his
reading that the films do tend to fetishize the female body and contain problematic depictions of minorities,
I disagree with Harper on some key issues. He claims that Alice is “super-white,” using her heroism (vs.
others lack of heroism), her costuming, and her place within the mise-en-scene to make his point. I would
argue that Alice’s whiteness is never secure, as she is a “tough” female who is never contained via
heterosexual pairing at the end of a film and more importantly, within the sequels, she is implicated directly
in zombiism and in the spread of the zombie virus: at one point, she becomes temporarily infected, and the
Umbrella Corporation uses her blood to create super zombies. Finally, Harper ties the Resident Evil films’
shaky politics to the post-9/11 cultural climate. While he does acknowledge the films’ pre-history in video
games, he ignores the fact that the first Resident Evil film was well into production before the September
2001 attacks. See Stephen Harper, “I Could Kiss You, You Bitch’: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in
Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2: Apocalypse,” Jump Cut 49 (Spring 2007), accessed on September 2,
2010, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc49.2007/HarperResEvil/index.html.
191

counterparts, almost all of their victories are qualified: Sarah is left on a desert island to
wait out the zombie apocalypse;
111
Regina and her sister find themselves as two of the
remaining six people in an empty Los Angeles; Lt. Ballard faces a court-martial; Alice is
left still trying to destroy the ever-resourceful Umbrella Corporation that unleashed the
zombie virus in the first place; and Cherry is in Mexico with her back to the ocean, still
fighting zombies. Furthermore, none of these women ends up in a heterosexual pairing
with a white male. A white man and a black one join Sarah on her island. Regina is
paired with a Latino man; Lt. Ballard is alone; Alice is unattached at the end of the series,
and Cherry’s boyfriend is dead.
These women may be the stabilizing figures of these films, but the nihilistic
influence of the Romero cycle has left its mark. On one hand, these films could be seen
as somewhat reactionary in their positioning of the white female as the bearer of
civilization. However, in none of these narratives does the civilization these women
could represent survive.
112
And, none of these women seems likely to restart that
civilization reproductively—at least not without some major changes to the racial
makeup of things. So again, just as in voodoo-style films, whiteness fails, but in these
films that is a given from the onset. What is important here is that none of these women
can save it. They are, rather, inheritors of the life-after-death of white civilization. This
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
111
Or, as some interpret the end of the film, she is killed by zombies and this is her final dying fantasy.
112
And Regina is the only one who tries to hold onto it—by quickly trying to form a nuclear family and by
obeying the rules of the old system, even though there is no one around to enforce them.
192

is not to say that these zombie films participate in some sort of racialized feminist utopian
vision of life after white patriarchy; rather, in these films, it is left to a white female to
decide what her “civilization” will now look like.
Moreover, there is another way of reading empowered zombie heroines that will
prove useful here. It comes from calls by theorists like Jeffery A. Brown, Elizabeth Hills
and Maria Derose, to move away from binaristic thinking regarding power. While Carol
J. Clover’s “Final Girl” allows for gender fluidity, it actually ends up reinscribing gender
binaries that posit masculinity as positive/active and femininity as negative/passive.
Clover claims that the “Final Girl,” in assuming power, is masculinized, and thus, argues
Jeffery A. Brown, she is little more than a “transformed boy.”
113
He maintains equating
strong women with masculinity rather than simply seeing them as strong females means
that “women are systematically denied as a gender capable of behaving in any way other
than passive.”
114
This leads Hills to wonder, “Are there ways of reconceptualizing
female desire and subjectivity as productive, transformative and active?”
115

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
113
qtd. in Maria Derose, “Redefining Women’s Power through Feminist Science Fiction,” Extrapolation
46.1 (Spring 2005), 70.
114
qtd. in Derose, 71.
115
Hills, 44.
193

On one hand, the project Hills is asking for might entail reinscribing physical
power as a feminine trait, as Charlene Tung does in her project on La Femme Nikita.
116

On the other hand, it might be as Jacqueline Fulmer argues in her examination of the film
Tales from the Hood (1995): power might best be read as residing with those who win at
the end of the film, so that “[b]y rewriting who wins and who loses” a filmmaker
“deconstructs certain hegemonic notions.”
117
In thinking of power as something beyond
the violent or physically aggressive, Maria Derose also calls for a reinscription of the
concept of power in her work on females in science fiction.
118
Zombie films since 1968
provide fertile ground for both ways of approaching power. There are female warriors
who seem to inhabit traditional feminine characteristics—beauty and motherly attitudes,
for instance—who are also physically powerful.
119
There are also a number of female
warriors who do not fit so easily with depictions of traditional femininity.
120
Furthermore, if the concept of “power” is extended beyond physical strength and
the ability to commit violence—if it can be conceptualized as the power to choose, for
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116
Charlene Tung, “Embodying an Image: Gender, Race and Sexuality in La Femme Nikita,” Action
Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture, ed. Sherrie A Inness (New York: Palgrave
Macmillian, 2004): 95-122.
117
Jacqueline Fulmer, “‘Men Ain’t All’— A Reworking of Masculinity in Tales from the Hood, or,
Grandma Meets the Zombie,” Journal of American Folklore 115.457/458 (2002), 424.
118
See Derose.
119
See, for instance, Night of the Comet and 1986’s Night of the Creeps.
120
See, for instance, Ghosts of Mars.
194

instance—then, many other women of zombie films need to be considered as well. For
instance, even though she is told “Good girls don’t hang out with dead boys,” Missy
McCloud in My Boyfriend’s Back (1993) chooses a zombie boyfriend, Johnny.
121
Part of
this is (implicitly) framed as a nod to interracial dating: Johnny is told at one point by
townsfolk, “We don’t like your kind,” and later, upon seeing Johnny and Missy together,
one person remarks in horror, “By god! If it ain’t a zombie out with a living woman!”
122

Yet, beyond the power to choose who she dates, Missy stands up for Johnny’s right to
live, so to speak. When an armed posse tries to kill Johnny at the end of the film, Missy
faces them, unarmed, and helps shame them into letting Johnny go.
Similarly, Lt. Ballard in Ghosts of Mars helps a black male convict elude the law
because he has helped her fight a zombie uprising. The policewomen of Zombie Nation
(2004) choose to use their status as zombies to help women victimized by men on both
sides of the law, and the strippers of Zombie Strippers (2008) choose to become zombies
because it is economically beneficial. However, the Cycle Sluts of Chopper Chicks in
Zombietown (1989) may best encapsulate both characterizations of feminine power.
The Cycle Sluts, a leather-clad all-female biker gang, begin the film already
outside of heteronormative patriarchy. They are women who curse and fight and who are
vocal in their desires for sexual partners of the moment: for many of them sex, and not
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
121
My Boyfriend’s Back, DVD, directed by Bob Balaban (USA: Touchstone Pictures, 1993; Walt Disney
Video, 2002).
122
My Boyfriend’s Back.
195

romantic love, is on their minds when they take a rest stop in the town of Zariah. They
are also led by an unapologetically aggressive lesbian whose tough love redefines
conceptions of the motherly. The Cycle Sluts can be easily aligned with power as
defined by physical aggression, violence, and the ability to wield weapons. As
townspeople refuse to engage a zombie attack because the zombies are former loved
ones, the Cycle Sluts step up to do battle. Reminiscent of The Magnificent Seven (1960)
or the men of any number of male savior gunslinging groups, the Cycle Sluts not only use
guns, dynamite and whatever other weapons they can find lying about, they also manage
to outsmart the zombies and their master by blowing up the town’s church
123
with most
of the zombies inside and then setting the remaining zombies on their master.
However, the Cycle Sluts are far more interesting not in how they use traditional
forms of “masculine” power, but in how they take up alternative forms of power. First, it
is clear early on that they do not subscribe to heteronormative proclamations about a
woman’s proper place. These women not only exist devoid of a male presence (until they
want it for sex), but they also exist outside traditional economic roles, living a nomadic
life and seemingly getting by without steady employment. These women are able to
maintain and repair their own bikes and vocalize their sexual needs without playing by
patriarchy’s rules. Thus, their very existence speaks to power—the power to exist
outside the system and not only survive but thrive.
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123
Which, in and of itself, can be read as a subversive act.
196

Two exchanges are noteworthy in terms of the Sluts’ claims to alternative forms
of power. First, one of the Sluts leaves the others to call home. She talks to her young
son who asks, “Mama, how can you run away from us?” and then he tells her “The kids
in school say good mamas—” before the call is cut off.
124
Although she is upset by the
exchange and will become overprotective of children during the zombie attack, at the end
of the film, she remains with the Sluts, eschewing her “motherly duties” to do the
opposite of what “good mamas” do. Second, we learn that Cycle Slut Dede is from
Zariah, and she takes the opportunity of her return to visit the husband she left years ago.
After they have sex, her husband hopes she will remain in town as his wife, but she
explains, “it’s not you, alright, it’s me. There’s something wrong with me. I just don’t
hack it as a normal. And homes and families and husbands are for normals…”
125
Her
husband responds by asking her if she has “dyked out” on him, and she answers by
kneeing him in the groin and giving him the dog’s order to “Stay!”
126
While Dede may
see herself as “wrong” for wanting to exist outside patriarchal norms and even considers
leaving the Cycle Sluts at one point, she never considers remaining in Zariah to take up
her former life. By the end of the film, she has embraced her life as a Cycle Slut—she
thus reflects the power to choose an alternative path.
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124
Chopper Chicks in Zombietown, DVD, directed by Dan Hoskins (USA: Troma Entertainment, 1989;
Troma Team Video, 2002).
125
Chopper Chicks in Zombietown.
126
Chopper Chicks in Zombietown.
197

The Cycle Sluts, and Dede in particular, raise issues of the pathologization of
certain sexualities in nationalist discourse. If, as Roderick A. Ferguson contends,
morality, like sexuality, is productive and not simply repressive, creating moral subjects
for (and via) the state, then discourses that strive to mark out some as
diseased/infectious/non-(re)productive also define others as both normal and ideal
national subjects.
127
The idea that certain sexualities are pathologized to promote
capitalism is likewise shared by M. Jacqui Alexander, who Grace Hong references in an
analysis of the book Cereus Blooms at Night. Hong reminds that in producing certain
sexualities as bad/non-normative, “such processes must also create deviant, disorderly
subjects who cannot fit a nationalist definition of morality and thus must imagine new
modes of affiliation than that of nationalism.”
128
I would add that the new modes of
affiliation created by these “disorderly subjects” might look very similar to the Cycle
Sluts—a lesbian-led nomadic gang that exists largely outside heteronormative or
capitalist reproductive time/space.
129
This mode does come at a price—the Cycle Sluts are still held up as different
versus the townsfolk at the beginning of the film. Yet, by the end of the film, the Cycle
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
127
Roderick A. Ferguson, “The Stratifications of Normativity,” Rhizomes 10 (Spring 2005), accessed on
September 2, 2010, http://www.rhizomes.net/issue10/ferguson.htm.
128
Grace Kyungwon Hong, “A Shared Queerness’: Colonialism, Transnationalism, and Sexuality in Shani
Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 7.1(2006), 76.
129
See Halberstam.
198

Sluts have initiated two townsmen into their gang. Lest there be any fear that the
inclusion of men means a patriarchal slide, though, both men ride on the back of a
woman’s cycle and seem to inhabit the role that traditionally a woman would inhabit in a
male biker gang. White patriarchal heteronormativity may survive in Zariah (and it may
not), but the Cycle Sluts’ influence has been felt, and while the Sluts may still be caught
within a system that produces them as non-normative, they are not merely stuck within
their disciplined place, so to speak, but use their non-normative status as a means to gain
power and kill zombies.
And, there is a utopian thrust in that. José Esteban Muñoz sees disidentification
as a strategy used by marginalized peoples to re-negotiate their identities, so to speak—
working against dominant structures while staying within them.
130
The Cycle Sluts could
be read in a similar light and thus, Muñoz’s injunction that “[d]isidentificatory
performances and readings require an active kernel of utopian possibility” must be
remembered.
131
Yes, the Cycle Sluts ride off into the sunset, and no, this does not mean
that the world order has changed (or even that all the zombies are dead), but there is a
utopian theme in that the non-normative group succeeds where the “normals” failed to
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130
Steven Shaviro argues, “The hardest thing to acknowledge is that the living dead are not radically Other
so much as they serve to awaken a passion for otherness and for vertiginous disidentification that is already
latent within our own selves” (Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1993), 112). Yet, while his argument centers on zombies awakening a disidentification within
audiences, which I believe they certainly do, my argument here is that it is the characters within these films
themselves who use these disidentificatory practices.
131
José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 25.
199

even act and that this group is riding off, possibly to save another town, with two new
initiates tagging along.
Similarly, the women who take on zombie boyfriends and lovers are also
participating in the life-after-death of whiteness.
132
In films like My Boyfriend’s Back,
Zombie Prom (2006), and most interestingly Fido,
133
the white woman’s love for an
undead male not only speaks to the fears of miscegenation hinted at in voodoo-style
films, but also speaks to a conscious choice.
134
These women could choose a living white
male or they can choose something post-white, a zombie, and these women choose the
zombie. The forbidden desires that prompted so many miscegenation laws are here
played out as the white woman chooses something other than white for heterosexual
pairing. The fact that the zombies are visually marked as Other simply underscores the
choice—whereas in voodoo-style films, the woman was often shown as susceptible to
zombiism’s black magic, here, she actively selects it.

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132
Samantha, the maid in King of the Zombies, may be one of the first examples of such a woman, as she
hints throughout the film that she still “sees” her ex-boyfriend, who is a zombie; the progressive potential
inherent in this may be a bit tempered by the racial politics of having a black female servant in a
relationship with a dead black man who is being used for slave labor.
133
And to a degree, The Return of the Living Dead and the 2002 Angel episode “Provider.”
134
A humorous take on this happens in the pilot episode of the animated television show Ugly Americans
(2010) where we learn that the character Randall decided to ‘go zombie’ “for all the wrong reasons.”
Specifically, he does it to pick up a girl who claims she only dates zombies (Ugly Americans, episode no. 1,
first broadcast March 17, 2010 by Comedy Central, directed by Devin Clark and written by David M.
Stern, Kevin Shinick, Aaron Blitzstein and Greg White).
200

In Fido, this is played against the background of a futuristic sort of 1950s
domesticity: in an idyllic small town where zombies are servants and menial workers
controlled by shock collars, all middle-class housewife Helen Robinson wants is a happy
family. This heteronormative dream, though, remains unfulfilled as her husband, Bill,
largely ignores her. Bill certainly fails in his masculinity as it is measured in the
traditional sense—while even small children in the town take great pleasure in owning
zombies (and occasionally shooting them), Bill is afraid of zombies; furthermore, he
seems embarrassed by the thought of having sex with his wife.
Yet, Bill also fails in his masculinity in comparison to the family’s “pet” zombie,
Fido. While Bill ignores his son, Timmy, Fido becomes Timmy’s best friend. As Bill
instructs Timmy to let go of emotion in order to become a grown-up, Fido is constructed
as tender and emotionally supportive. For instance, one night Helen asks Bill to dance
with her. He shares a few awkward moments with her before bristling and moving away.
Helen responds “If you’re not gonna dance with me, I know someone who will.”
135
She
then takes Fido’s hand and dances with him. While the relationship between Fido and
Helen is not sexual in nature (neither is the relationship between Bill and Helen, really), it
is constructed as romantically fulfilling in a way her marriage is not.
Thus, in a scene where Helen decides to bring Timmy and Fido cold drinks as
they wash the family car, a snappy love song plays and a close-up reveals Fido watching
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135
Fido, DVD, directed by Andrew Currie (Canada: Lions Gate Films, 2006; Lions Gate, 2007).
201

Helen bring the refreshments. She is shown in slow-motion, smiling at the zombie.
While the scene is structured to imply a romantic connection on both sides, it also makes
the point that Fido notices Helen and that this, beyond any other traits, makes him
attractive and hence, more masculine. Perhaps this is why, at a funeral the family
attends,
136
after Timmy announces “I’d rather be a zombie than dead,” and Bill recoils in
horror, Helen tells him: “Bill, get your own funeral. Timmy and I are going zombie.”
137

Two other human-zombie relationships within the film are worth noting. First,
Mr. Theopolis is the Robinson’s next door neighbor and something of a neighborhood
black sheep because everyone knows he is having sex with his young female zombie
servant, Tammy. While this relationship itself may be problematic,
138
Mr. Theopolis is
inscribed as sympathetic for the very reason that he is capable of loving a zombie. Thus,
he is the one adult Timmy knows he can turn to to help rescue Fido from the evil Zomcon
company, and at the end of the film, he and Tammy are part of the extended family
pictured with the recently-widowed Helen, Fido, and Dede and Cindy Bottoms.
Dede Bottoms is married to a top-level executive at Zomcon and for most of the
film, she seems to live in fear of him. Her daughter, Cindy, however, actively works to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
136
In the world of the film, only 10% of those who die get a funeral; everyone else is destined to become a
zombie, and hence a worker/servant, after they die.
137
Fido; of course, inherent in the discussions of funerals and whether or not one can afford them is a class
bias: those who can afford to will be able to stave off perpetual servitude after they die; those who can’t
afford a funeral will have no choice. Thus, Helen’s proclamation is not only pro-zombie but also anti-
classist as well.
138
As it carries a strong suggestion of sexual slavery.
202

undermine her father’s authority by helping Timmy and Mr. Theopolis rescue Fido.
Moreover, her father is killed during the rescue, and during the last scene of the film,
Cindy comes to Timmy’s house with her new pet zombie on a leash—her father. As she
tells Timmy, “It’s sort of cool in a way, and he’s a lot nicer.”
139
The moral of the story
seems to be that bad fathers get their comeuppance and women of all ages prefer to have
zombies in their lives.
140

This is a conscious choice for the women in Fido. Yet, in other films, the
connection to zombiism is in a woman’s very blood. In Night of the Comet, the sister-
heroines are immune to the zombie disease which kills most of humanity; in 28 Weeks
Later, Alice, the mother of two, is only half infected with the zombie virus, so she (and
her children) may hold its cure. Similarly, the cure to the virus in the Resident Evil series
is held in Alice’s blood. Yet, both of these women are also implicated in further zombie
contamination. In Resident Evil, Alice’s blood is used by the Umbrella Corporation to
create super-zombies, and in 28 Weeks Later, Alice’s blood doesn’t seem to work: it
grants immunity but those immune can still infect, and that is just what her son does,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
139
Fido.
140
Patricia Malloy’s observations on Fido, and the television movie “Homecoming” (2005), are worth
noting; her interest is in how both of these films position zombies as political actors. She says, “What we
see in both Homecoming and Fido are cooperative and collaborative alliances between the living and the
dead that resist both sovereign rule (be it state or corporate) and the exploitation of Others” (Patricia
Malloy, “Zombie Democracy,” The Geopolitics of American Insecurity: Terror, Power and Foreign Policy,
eds. François Debrix and Mark J. Lacy (New York: Routledge, 2009), 210). I believe my reading of the
film is similar. However, while Malloy’s interest in in the zombies themselves, my interest lies in how the
living women of the film, in particular, seem the most likely (and able) to align with zombiness without
becoming zombies.
203

spreading the virus throughout Europe. Thus, in these two narratives, the woman stands
as both savior and curse, that which could halt the destruction of white civilization but
that which ultimately is its undoing. They are therefore positioned much like the women
of voodoo-style films.
Yet, there are also women who use their status as zombies to undermine the
system that created them. Although Lila von Altermann in Revenge of the Zombies
would be one of the earliest, if not the earliest, examples of this sort of empowered
zombie woman, Vera LaValle in “The Dead Don’t Die” is in many ways the first post-
1968 example of this. Vera actively works against her zombie master to save the life of
Don Drake, who is investigating the circumstances of his sister-in-law’s death. Her
interference makes Don’s discovery of the truth, both of who the zombie master is and
who killed his sister-in-law, possible. In both of these films, though, zombihood itself is
not empowering so much as the inherent goodness of these women shines through.
But, the low-budget film Zombie Nation presents the female murder victims of a
psychotic policeman as able to seek their vengeance (and later, a higher level of
empowerment as law enforcement officers in their own right) by becoming zombies.
Zombihood is what allows these women to reach their full potential. It also allows these
women to seek redress from a corrupt system—the legal system that trained and
protected their murderer—by infiltrating it and taking it over. Law enforcement may be
204

reinscribed as a valid institution within the film, but it is still disengaged from patriarchy
as the zombie policewomen have made it their own.
Likewise, in Zombie Strippers, a group of strippers in the not-so-distant future
notice that becoming zombies gives them more paying customers and more power over
those customers: overtly playing on the desire/repulsion that zombies have traditionally
inspired, these zombie strippers also manage to undermine the ultra-conservative U.S.
civilization that relegated them underground in the first place.
141
There are certainly
some problems with the film’s empowered heroines being strippers.
142
However, the film
turns this on its head as the strippers become more attractive to their customers as
zombies. Furthermore, their tastes as zombies run almost exclusively for male flesh, so
private lap dances come to involve castration and the satiation of the female’s appetite
instead of her customer’s sexual desires. In both films, these women-as-zombies follow
Romero-style conventions and are cannibalistic, but zombihood allows them to use the
system to their own ends; patriarchy doesn’t stand a chance.
Thus, the dream/nightmare hinted at in earlier zombie fare has finally found overt
expression. Women and zombies—as monsters of gender—are no longer reigned in;
rather, they have turned the tables on the system that would classify them as monstrous in
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
141
The film takes place in the future during the fourth term of George W. Bush, and stripping, along with
many other things, has been outlawed.
142
Their occupation being embroiled in heteronormative/patriarchal dictates that women should be
sexually/visually appealing.
205

the first place.
143
In voodoo-style films, the system was threatened because women could
become zombies, but here, women choose to become zombies. They are not trying on to
later discard but are actively choosing an alternative path.
144

A PROUD AND POWERFUL LINE
Non-white female zombie masters and voodoo priestesses are also worth
considering here. Many of the voodoo-style zombie masters already inhabit a position of
questionable whiteness by virtue of being “foreign.” These women, on the other hand,
could be seen as occupying a space completely Othered from white patriarchy. Yet, their
status as evil-doers has always been ambiguous at best.
For instance, in 1935’s Ouanga, the West Indian mulatto Clelie has just been
dumped by her white lover of the past two years, Adam. On his return to Paradise Island
in the West Indies, Adam has decided to marry his white fiancée, Eve. Implicitly
gesturing at so many real-life white male/black female relationships, he tells Clelie: “You
were wonderful during those two lonely years, and I loved you immensely, but…you
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
143
Interestingly, in “The Zeppo,” a 1999 episode of the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, zombiism is
used to re-masculinize. In a plot that sets up zombified high school bullies as uber-masculine vs. the
somewhat less-than-tough character Xander, Xander’s ability to reject zombification and to stare down one
of the zombies in a game of chicken reestablishes his masculine power. See Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
episode no. 13, first broadcast January 26, 1999 by the WB, directed by James Whitmore Jr. and written by
Joss Whedon and Dan Vebber.
144
And what makes this more remarkable is that in neither of these films is the video game-style cure an
option; they are permanently zombies.
206

belong with your kind.”
145
Clelie is later reminded by a mulatto friend that she can’t
marry a white man because she is black, even if she has white skin. After Adam
continues to spurn her, Clelie decides to own her blackness, stating: “Black am I?
Alright, I am black. I’ll show him what a black girl can do!”
146
Clelie raises zombies to
abduct Eve, and of course, she is vanquished in the end, but what is noteworthy is that
while Eve is prized for her (white) beauty, she is passive and docile. Clelie is an active
agent in her own life—even her demise is partly of her own doing. Furthermore, owning
her blackness empowers Clelie. It is her access to black culture, specifically voodoo, that
makes her attempt to destroy Eve possible.
147

Similarly in 1939’s all-black cast film The Devil’s Daughter, half-Haitian Isabel
is jealous of her half-sister, Sylvia, both because Sylvia just inherited the family’s banana
plantation in Jamaica and because local landowner John is in love with Sylvia. Thus,
while Sylvia is being hoodwinked by a con man, Isabel actively seeks revenge on Sylvia
by pretending to know Obeh and acting as if she can turn Isabel into a zombie. Although
it is much ado about nothing and the sisters reconcile in the end, the woman with stronger
roots in the Indies has much more power than the woman who has been gone so long
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
145
Ouanga, DVD, directed by George Terwilliger (USA: George Terwilliger Productions, 1935;
Something Weird Video, 2008).
146
Ouanga.
147
For an interesting description of the production’s relationship to Vodou and its attempt to shoot in Haiti,
see Bryan Senn, Drums O’ Terror: Voodoo in the Cinema (Baltimore, MD: Luminary Press, 1998), 41-44.
207

“she doesn’t understand the people here anymore.”
148
Again, a connection to black
culture, specifically religion, is empowering.
Thus, while in many zombie films of the voodoo style, one can certainly read
blackness as aligned with the agents of evil or villainy, these films suggest a re-appraisal.
Access to non-white culture, in these films explicitly but even in other films more
implicitly, means access to power structures that exist outside of dominant systems. The
film Voodoo Island (1957) is especially telling in this regard. In the film, white
entrepreneurs are trying to purchase and develop an unnamed South Pacific island where
they plan to build a luxury hotel. However, the first expedition to survey the island has
disappeared, save one man who has returned to the mainland zombified. The developers
wonder what has happened to him, and rumors abound of vicious natives and malicious
witchcraft, so a second expedition is sent. This expedition discovers that there are,
indeed, natives who are none too happy with the planned encroachment on their island.
The natives’ spokesman relates how his people have been forced from island to island
throughout history: “As your world moved in, [it] crushed ours.”
149
Using the island’s
cannibalistic plants and voodoo as weapons, the natives promise to continue zombifying
development crews until they stop coming. As more and more of the expedition’s crew
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
148
The Devil’s Daughter, VHS, directed by Arthur H. Leonard (USA: Sack Amusement Enterprises, 1939;
Timeless Video, 1994).
149
Voodoo Island, DVD, directed by Reginald Le Borg (USA: Oak Pictures, Inc., 1957; MGM Home
Entertainment, 2005).
208

become zombified, their once-skeptical leader begins to believe in the power of voodoo
and decides to leave the island, promising that no one will ever come back. The natives
are thus able to hold their ground both literally and figuratively.
Even in films with white zombie masters, like King of the Zombies and Revenge
of the Zombies,
150
access to power comes via “native” culture. In King of the Zombies,
Dr. Sangre
151
must rely on his native maid, Tahama’s, knowledge of voodoo rites to try
and gain U.S. military secrets via zombiism. Tahama may be aligned with the forces of
evil, but they couldn’t operate without her knowledge and power. Revenge of the
Zombies is a bit more complicated. In the film, Scott Warrington learns that his sister,
Lila von Altermann, has died. Suspecting foul play, he takes his friend Larry to her home
in the Louisiana bayou to investigate. While there, they learn that Lila’s husband, Dr.
von Altermann has zombified Lila. It is implied that Dr. von Altermann developed his
zombie potion from a folk poison used by his black housekeeper, Mammy Beulah.
However, she makes it clear that she is not in league with the doctor by helping Larry
figure out what is going on. But, what is remarkable about her place within the film is
that she seems to know more of what is going on than anyone else. Early in the film, this
is made clear when Dr. von Altermann’s secretary tells Mammy Beulah to go to the
chapel to get the doctor and to tell him that Larry and Scott have arrived. Beulah laughs
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
150
Or in Plague of the Zombies, Voodoo Man, Zombies on Broadway, White Zombie, I Walked with a
Zombie, or Womaneater.
151
Which is Spanish for “blood.”
209

at this, which confuses Larry, Scott, and the secretary, but the next scene makes it clear
that Beulah knows more about what the doctor is doing than the secretary does—Beulah
goes to the empty chapel and smiles before heading down to the doctor’s secret
laboratory.
Furthermore, when the zombified Lila disappears, Beulah is the only one who
knows why and how to find her. As she tells Larry about Dr. von Altermann’s
relationship with the zombies: “Always he tells ‘em what to do and they do it, but not
Miss Lila. She goes her own way, living or dead.”
152
Thus, it is not necessarily her
connection to black culture, but rather her observational prowess that gives Mammy
Beulah power within the household—and it is a power that both the good guys and the
bad rely on to fortify their own positions. In Ouanga, The Devil’s Daughter, King of the
Zombies and Revenge of the Zombies, black femininity is also active and knowledgeable
and can’t be rendered invisible. Thus, in all of these cases, black femininity stands as a
threatening challenge to white patriarchy.
153
This is perhaps nowhere as strangely illustrated as in 1974’s The House on Skull
Mountain. The film centers on the gathering of Pauline Christophe’s four great
grandchildren after her death. Just before she dies, black matriarch Pauline sends letters
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
152
Revenge of the Zombies.
153
For a very interesting interpretation of I Walked with a Zombie along similar lines (seeing voodoo as
potentially liberating within the film), see Gwenda Young, “The Cinema of Difference: Jacques Tourneur,
Race and ‘I Walked with a Zombie’ (1943),” Irish Journal of American Studies 7 (1998): 101-119.
210

to these four cousins, who have never met, so that they may gather for the reading of her
will and learn more about their family. As the letter tells them: “Yours is no common
ancestry but a proud and powerful line…”
154
To complicate matters, at least for some of
the cousins, is the discovery that one of the four, Andrew Cunningham, is white. Strange
things start happening as soon as the heirs have gathered and soon, two of them are dead.
While this might sound like the beginning to any number of horror films, this film is
peculiar in several ways.
First, while in the beginning, she is quick thinking and verbally aggressive, the
film soon positions Lorena Christophe, its heroine, in much the same way as any voodoo-
style film might position its white heroine (figs. 3.1 & 3.2). She is virginal and yet
desired, and eventually, she comes under the spell of a voodoo master.
155
However, part
of the reason this master, Thomas Pettione, wants Lorena is because of her name. A
letter from Pauline to the heirs has told them that there is power in the Christophe
name—and Thomas wants some of it.

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154
The House on Skull Mountain, DVD, directed Ron Honthaner (USA: Chocolate Chip, 1974; Twentieth
Century Fox, 2007).
155
Harry M. Benshoff notes that there was a turn in blaxploitation horror films like this film and Sugar Hill
(1974) to use “voodoo as a ‘more authentic’ expression of the African American supernatural” and that
while the use of voodoo “might seem racist in films made solely by whites…within these films they usually
represent a form of black cultural empowerment” (Harry M. Benshoff, “Blaxploitation Horror Films:
Generic Reappropriation or Reinscription?” Cinema Journal 39.2 (Winter 2000), 37).
211

Figure 3.1: Smart and Skeptical: Lorena at the Beginning
of The House on Skull Mountain (1974)

Figure 3.2: The Virginal Victim: Lorena Later, Falling Under the Voodoo Priest’s Spell,
The House on Skull Mountain (1974)

212

The use of the name Christophe is no accident. As it is explained in the film, the
Christophes are supposed to be descendants of Henri Christophe, the Haitian
Revolutionary who would become the country’s President and eventually, its first
King.
156
During the film’s climactic battle, as Thomas tries to kill Andrew, Andrew calls
on a voodoo goddess and the spirit of Henri Christophe to save him, and it works. There
is power in the Christophe name, indeed.
Andrew, however, is a bit of an enigma. As a white male hero facing off against a
black voodoo priest to protect a damsel in distress (Lorena), he would seem to be
problematic. Yet, Andrew is an orphan, intent on figuring out his lineage, and when he
learns he is mixed race and a Christophe descendant, he embraces it. He uses his
knowledge of voodoo to figure out that Thomas is up to no good, and he calls upon his
(black) ancestors at the appropriate moment. Furthermore, at the end of the film, he and
Lorena are the only survivors, and each has a claim to Pauline’s estate, but Lorena
doesn’t want it. Andrew wants to explore the history of the place and figure out the
relationship between the Christophes and the Pettiones to understand why Thomas
Pettione wanted to destroy them, but Lorena simply wants to leave. Thus, there are two
ways to read Andrew. He could simply be enjoying his privilege as a white male hero,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
156
In fact, Michèle Bennett Duvalier, the first lady of Haiti from 1980-1986, was actually Henri
Christophe’s great-great-great granddaughter.
213

although he does not get the girl in the end.
157
Or, Andrew could be read as embracing
his blackness, which is what gives him the power to protect himself and makes him the
one heir ready to take on the task of delving into the family’s history.
But, it isn’t actually Andrew who defeats Thomas. It is Pauline Christophe.
Early in the film as the maid Louette fusses to Thomas, we learn that Pauline was a
powerful voodoo priestess: “That old woman had more power than we ever dreamed.”
158

Thomas dismisses this, reminding Louette, “Pauline is dead, and the dead have no power.
Only the living have power.”
159
Not only is Thomas overestimating his strength—he was
trained by Pauline, after all—but he ignores the power held by the dead and by one’s
ancestors in a way that Andrew does not. At the film’s climax, Thomas raises Pauline
from the dead to kill Andrew. But, when Andrew calls on his Christophe blood to protect
him, the zombie Pauline turns on Thomas and kills him: great-grandma protects her own,
and black femininity again proves to be the most powerful thing of all. The House on
Skull Mountain may not make a direct assault on white patriarchy, but its destabilization
of the white male (who is really black) and its valorization of black femininity in the form
of Pauline Christophe serve as implicit challenges.

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157
Although there are some implicit suggestions of an incestuous interracial relationship between Andrew
and Lorena in the film.
158
The House on Skull Mountain.
159
The House on Skull Mountain.
214

However, the 1974 blaxploitation film Sugar Hill takes this a step further and
renders an explicit assault. Diana “Sugar” Hill wants revenge on the white men who
killed her club-owner boyfriend, Langston.
160
She turns to voodoo priestess Mama
Maltreese for help, and Mama Maltreese asks her, “You have always been a disbeliever.
Why do you now believe?”
161
Sugar answers, “Because I want revenge!”
162
Mama
Maltreese thus has Sugar call on Baron Samdi,
163
and part of their intonations to him
include Mama Maltreese asking, “Where does the power come from?” and Sugar
answering, “The living among the dead.”
164
Mama Maltreese then asks, “Who can use
the power?” and Sugar replies, “The dead among the living.”
165
As Baron Samdi calls
forth an army of zombies to kill the men who killed Langston, he summons all who are
pledged to him: “…slave and master, master and slave, arise!”
166
Black zombies,
wearing their slave shackles, arise from the ground armed with machetes and are sent to
kill the white bad guys in a perfect re-imagining of a slave uprising (fig. 3.3). Here,

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160
Langston held valuable property and wouldn’t sell it, so he was killed.
161
Sugar Hill, DVD, directed by Paul Maslansky (USA: AIP, 1974; Blaxploitation Film, n.d.).
162
Sugar Hill.
163
This is a direct reference to Vodou belief, where Baron Samdi (Bawon Samedi) is Loa of the dead.
164
Sugar Hill.
165
Sugar Hill.
166
Sugar Hill; it is explained that these men were slaves brought to the United States from Guinea who
died on the trip over and whose bodies were then dumped into swamps.
215

Figure 3.3: Slaves Rising from the Grave, Sugar Hill (1974)

power is located in traditional Vodou belief: black female access to the power of the
dead-among-the-living/living-among-the-dead grants Sugar the ability to seek justice for
Langston.
Not only is a black-versus-white dichotomy in place, but black and white
femininity are also contrasted in the film. After a warning visit from Sugar, the chief bad
guy, Valentine, comments on how classy she is. His white girlfriend responds: “That’s
not class; it’s color” to which he replies, “Well, whatever it is, you could use some.”
167

The power inherent in black femininity is present here—and acknowledged as superior to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
167
Sugar Hill; Baron Samdi would seem to agree; in payment for use of his army of the undead, Sugar
gives him the white girlfriend. Samdi agrees but says he would have preferred Sugar.
216

white femininity by a white man.
168
As something more akin to black femininity (or at
least temporarily occupying that space), white femininity is made powerful and therefore
threatening in many zombie films in the same way that black femininity is. Thus, as
Sugar uses voodoo mind control to force Valentine to kill himself, she declares, “There’s
nothing you can do; I have the power to destroy you!”
169
Here, black femininity is both
attractive and destructive, and it represents a true counter to white patriarchy (figs. 3.4 &
3.5).
Zombie Nation also shows this to be the case: while the empowered female
zombies are white, they are raised and guided by a group of black voodoo priestesses.
Black and white women are finally working together to take down white patriarchy.
Empowerment, in these films, then, comes from embracing zombie culture, and for white
women this often means embracing black femininity. Black women are at their most able
when they are acting as zombie masters or zombies, and white women, perhaps because
of the inherent privileges of whiteness, have more options. They can fight, love, or
become zombies, yet they too are actively working to disrupt the status quo.

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168
Benshoff notes that the film is not without its problematics, though: “Sugar Hill comes closer to some
kind of gender equality since Sugar is smart, strong and independent…Yet, her mission for revenge is
predicated solely on the loss of her man, and…Sugar is sexually objectified throughout” (Benshoff, 41).
169
Sugar Hill.
217

Figure 3.4: Black Femininity as Attractive and Destructive:
Sugar Facing Valentine in the Film’s Climax, Sugar Hill (1974)

Figure 3.5: White Male Power in Retreat:
Valentine Facing Sugar in the Film’s Climax, Sugar Hill (1974)

218

Thus, while the position of women, both black and white, changed with the
coming of Romero- and video game-style films, the tenuousness of and failings of
whiteness continued to be on display around them. Black women already exist outside of
whiteness and when they own their blackness, they become empowered to fight white
patriarchy. Many of the white women have a choice and could return to whiteness, but
they choose something else instead. Unlike earlier zombie films, individuals in these
films aren’t so much failing to live up to idealized whiteness as whiteness is shown to
have failed, forcing people to move onto something different. What is remarkable is that
blackness/Otherness is still posited as an escape, but increasingly in the Romero and
video game styles, it is not a fantastical/magical escape but a plausible and rational one.

LIFE’S A BITCH AND THEN YOU DIE… USUALLY
170

Robin Wood argues that the most interesting horror films of the 1970s wrestled
with the notion that the monster is essentially born of normality.
171
Wood asks three
questions about the horror genre related to this: “Can the genre survive the recognition
that the monster is its real hero? If the ‘return of the repressed’ is conceived in positive
terms, what happens to ‘horror’? And is such a positive conception logically
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170
From the opening credits of Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town.
171
Wood, 85.
219

possible?”
172
Wood’s questions are important to consider in terms of zombie fiction.
Wood sees the “Dead” trilogy of films as positioning their heroes against not only
zombies but also against the patriarchal capitalist culture that breeds zombies.
173
In this
sense, then, the monsters, to varying degrees depending on the film, were and are a
product of normalcy as society knows/encourages it.
I do not want to discount Wood’s argument. It is valid. To be sure, Romero-style
zombies should be read as products of the system. However, before 1968, while zombies
and zombie-making were tied to notions of the exotic and zombification was taken as an
extraordinary event, there was a very real sense in which zombies could be seen as
products of imperialism, racism, slavery, democracy or capitalism, so Romero-style
zombies shouldn’t be divorced from voodoo-style zombies. “Normalcy” has always been
producing zombies. Neither should we forget that zombies are liminal bodies. As such,
zombies are not only products of “normalcy,” they are also the manifestation of its
deepest fears and desires.
And while Wood sees the zombies of the “Dead” trilogy as not bearing the stigma
of being inherently “evil,” like the monsters in reactionary horror films are, he claims that
they do not carry positive connotations either.
174
This may not be entirely accurate—part
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172
Wood, 97.
173
See Wood, Chapters Six and Fourteen.
174
Wood, 102.
220

of the fantasy of voodoo-style films is watching people “try on” black magic as an escape
from whiteness. Even though zombies are made grotesque in Romero-style films, they
become active participants in these narratives, often emerging victorious in the battle
between the living and the living dead, and there is something appealing in that. The
zombie strippers of Zombie Strippers most vividly display the attractive qualities inherent
in the repulsive features of zombies, but just as with voodoo-style zombies, with Romero-
and video game-style zombies, there is something appealing in throwing off the fetters of
white civilization. Night of the Living Dead was radical in its brazen portrayal of the
literal destruction of the nuclear family, as Wood comments, showing us the “film’s
judgement on them and the norm they embody.”
175
But, zombie films had been
undercutting notions of stability, civilization and normalcy for years—in essence,
Romero-style zombie films are doing the very same political work as before, just under a
different guise.
Rosemarie Thomson explains that “like the bodies of females and slaves, the
monstrous body exists in societies to be exploited for someone else’s purposes.”
176
In
zombie texts, the female, the slave, and the monster often exist in the same body and that
body is put to a myriad of uses. Extending W.E.B. DuBois’s idea of double
consciousness to P.T. Barnum’s attraction “What Is It?,” Thomson, building off of James
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
175
Wood, 103.
176
Rosemarie Thomson, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York
UP, 1996), 2.
221

W. Cook, argues that “What Is It?” became “a hybrid caricature of blackness which
easily absorbed both hard-line and reformist visions of a white dominated, racially
determined social hierarchy…”
177
The zombie does similar work—on one hand, it
represents threats to white patriarchal capitalism, but on the other, it represents a desired
escape from that system. As the embodiment of these contradictions, it is the perfect
liminal body.
And herein lies its attractiveness: the zombie offers an imaginative alternative
mode of existence somewhere between the absolutes of living in white patriarchal
heteronormativity and being dead, or more to the point, being irrelevant and invisible to
that society. If the zombie, as both living and dead, gestures towards another way of
being, then often, the female is our point of identification with this state. In the voodoo-
style films, this paradigm-shattering mode could be tried on but was strictly policed. Yet
increasingly after 1968, it was positioned, if not as the more desirable choice, then at least
as the more successful one, and the policing of it seemed to break down. Race and
gender matter in zombie films precisely because they matter in real-world social
relations; it’s just that in zombie films, there is often a reversal of hierarchies, even if for
only a few moments and even if it is “cured,” and women are often the ones enacting this
reversal. This wasn’t born in 1968 but has been a feature of zombie films from the very
beginning.
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177
Thomson, 153.
222

Chapter Four
You Ever Get the Feeling You’re Expendable?
Seeing Death, Beating Death, and Containing Zombie Power

“People understand zombies, but not everyone can answer the question,
‘…what does it mean to play the zombie?’”
—Video game developer Alex Seropian
1

Andrew Monday is the visionary behind Punchbowl, Pennsylvania, a retro-
futuristic municipality touted as “a city built for the space age,” a place where friendly
robots do menial work and where crime and poverty have been eliminated.
2
As Monday
extolls, Punchbowl offers life “free of all its unpleasantness,” life as it was meant to be.
3

But soon a stranger comes to town and upsets this perfect apple cart. This stranger will
be the player’s avatar in a video game, and as the stranger enters the city, a message at
the bottom of the screen flashes: “Be safe. Have fun. Eat brains.”
4

The stranger is a zombie named Stubbs, and Stubbs is out to attack the living, eat
their brains, and turn them into an army with the ultimate goal of destroying Punchbowl.
As so often happens in zombie media, the dead in the video game Stubbs the Zombie in
Rebel Without a Pulse (2005) are at odds with living society. In other words, everything
was fine until the zombie showed up.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
qtd. in Matt Leone, “Stubbs the Zombie: The Challenge of Video Game Humor,” 1UP.com (April 1,
2005), accessed on January 10, 2011, http://www.1up.com/features/stubbs-the-zombie?pager.offset=0.
2
Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse, Video Game, Wideload Games/Aspyr Media, 2005.
3
Stubbs the Zombie.
4
Stubbs the Zombie.
223

Of course, this isn’t really the case—while Stubbs is a zombie, he is also a force
for social good, and Punchbowl, while seemingly perfect on the surface, is little better
than a fascist police state. Yet, in the modern world, the dead, at least as an abstract
concept, are often positioned as being at odds with the living.
5
Zombie media have, of
course, taken this up countless times: in voodoo-style films, unscrupulous zombie
masters used armies of the living dead against living interests, and in Romero-style
iterations, the dead are literally trying to eat the living. But Stubbs and other video game
zombies sometimes complicate this binary by asking the living player to play as the
living dead. What desires are being enacted in displays like this where death is not only
transcended but embraced?
To answer that question, this chapter proposes going back to the 19
th
century to
examine both changing conceptions of the relationship between the living and the dead
and the rise of technologies that could supposedly allow the living to communicate with
the dead. Even though the dead were supposedly loosing their place within the living
community in the 19
th
century, there were still many people who chose to believe that the
dead could come back to the world of the living, and this choice does not have to be
interpreted as wrong or somehow less rational than the decision by others to believe that
the dead are not a part of the living world. If we envision a spectatorial position that
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
5
See, for instance, Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (1960), trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1984); see also Chapter Five.
224

accounts for negotiated readings of the world, in this case, in terms of images and
spectacles of the dead returned to the world of the living, then it is possible to take the
question of whether the dead can actually return off the table and instead focus on the
role of belief in seeing.
6
Yet, this is a process of interacting with the world that is not just
applicable to 19
th
-century visuality but can also be applied to contemporary video game
play, as part of the logic of many games depends, in part, on the player being able to
negotiate between his/her real-world embodied self and his/her avatar-character within
the game.
7
Nineteenth-century spectators could negotiate with belief, context, and
presentation to come to a personal conclusion about the validity of the images being
presented them just as a contemporary video game player can likewise negotiate with
embodiment and immersion to make sense of the images presented to him/her.
Yet, in both instances, as this chapter will show, a living position is reified.
While the 19
th
century technologies that helped “prove” the existence of an afterlife—like
the spirit photographer’s camera or the phantasmagoria projector—seemingly mediated
between the living and the dead, providing a means of communication with those in the
afterlife and maintaining the dead as members of the living community, this
simultaneously contained and ordered the dead via visual representation. Moreover,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
6
For an extended discussion on the role of belief and feeling in seeing, see David Freedberg, The Power of
Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
7
While I am not necessarily arguing that visual spectacles like phantasmagoria or séances were training
spectators to look in ways in anticipation of gameplay, what I am suggesting is that the modes of looking in
each of these cases can be read as empowering.
225

these dead were visualized in service to the living, especially as they functioned to ease
any qualms one might have about the existence of an afterlife (proving, in essence that
humans can live forever). In setting up the living spectator as the ultimate meaning
maker in the process, the dead were stripped of any real-world referentiality they might
have had and only had meaning inasmuch as the living attributed it to them.
The relationship between the living and the dead in video game play is less literal,
and yet “death” is still contained within gameplay.
8
With video game play, the afterlife
as a spiritual realm is not part of the equation, and yet, the same promises of immortality
are made. The living player’s avatar may die, repeatedly, but this is only temporary and
has no bearing on his/her real-world embodied self: immortality, in a sense, is a given
from the very outset.
This has ramifications for zombie video games, especially those games in which
one plays as a zombie. The previous chapter argued that the zombie has often been
depicted as an attractive transgressive symbol—able to exist in-between dominant
structures and social oblivion—and that will be an assumption of this chapter as well.
However, as this chapter will show, the progressive political work of the zombie can be
subsumed in the abstraction and spectacle of death: what functions so well in the realm of
fiction becomes much more complicated as an identity that a player may try on.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
8
Of course, the viewers of spiritualist phenomena, phantasmagoria shows, and video game players were
and are responding to different historical factors and technologies that are producing images of the dead for
widely different reasons. However, as this chapter will argue, across eras, there are some similarities in
how spectators and players are engaging with the images presented to them.
226

Ultimately any figuration of the dead, or the living dead, serves, on some level, to
make death comprehendible, but as this chapter will show, often, in figuring death—
especially in the form of the dead come back to the world of the living—death is made
abstract and thus, it loses much of its real-world meaning. Death as an abstract idea is
conceived of as something that happens to all living beings equally, but this divorces it
from the realities of what dying actually entails for different peoples.
9
When death is
conceived of as a concrete reality, death is acknowledged as an experience shaped by a
host of factors, including historical era, geographical place, race, class, gender, sexuality,
and religious belief, among other things. Yet, death, as it has been represented in
séances, spirit photography, phantasmagoria shows, and now in zombie video games, is
often presented as the former version, obfuscating the systemic inequalities and historical
realities that generate the latter. Therefore, the technologies discussed here work not only
to confirm the existence of an afterlife but also work to tame it by making it abstract.
10

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
9
Ruth Wilson Gilmore declares, “Racism is the state-sanctioned and/or extra-legal production and
exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death, in distinct yet densely
interconnected political geographies (Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Race and Globalization,” Geographies of
Global Change: Remapping the World, 2nd ed., eds. Ronald John Johnston, Peter James Taylor and
Michael Watts (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2002), 261), and this is a good starting place for discussing
the inequalities of death, which broadly speaking are the factors, like poverty, oppression, or systemic
prejudices, that prevent a person or a group of people from attaining the same medical care, political
representation, and economic services as others; as a result of these barriers, this person or this group is
placed at a higher risk for disease and premature death.
10
Of course, gaming itself is not an abstract experience but rather games render death abstract through an
embodied experience.
227

This ultimately empowers the living and grants the individual spectator a high degree of
choice in how he/she encounters death visually.

THE PLACE OF THE DEAD
Many scholars see profound changes in the cultural beliefs surrounding death and
the dead with the transition from the Middle Ages to the Modern era.
11
The dead of the
Medieval period were more a part of everyday life than they are now. Buried in nearby
churchyards and imagined as beings who could easily intercede in the world, the dead
were a part of the living community. Yet, Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall observe that
“the Reformation fractured the community of the living and the dead… it cast out the
dead from the society of the living and abolished the dead’s status…”
12
With the coming
of the Reformation and later, Enlightenment thinking and the scientific and industrial
revolutions, the dead, in many ways, lost their place within living communities. Not only
were the bodies of the dead more and more likely to be buried in cemeteries removed
from town centers, but the dead themselves were becoming more and more impotent in
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
11
See for instance, Philippe Ariès, “The Hour of Our Death,” Death, Mourning, and Burial: a Cross-
Cultural Reader, ed. Antonius C.G.M. Robben (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004): 40-48; Philippe Ariès,
“The Reversal of Death: Changes in Attitudes Toward Death in Western Societies,” Death in America, ed.
David E. Stannard (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975): 134-158; Keith Thomas,
Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner, 1971); and Nancy Caciola, “Wraiths, Revenants,
and Ritual in Medieval Culture,” Past and Present 152 (1996).
12
Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall, “Introduction: Placing the Dead in Late Medieval and Early Modern
Europe,” The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe,
eds. Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (New York: Cambridge UP, 2000), 9.
228

living affairs, increasingly painted as imaginative fictions rather than real beings.
13

Throughout the Middle Ages and up through the 19
th
century, then, death—as a social
process—and the dead—as members of the community—were undergoing tremendous
changes.
14

In Philippe Ariès estimation, a new kind of death began to occur in the 16
th

century, as dead bodies were gradually more and more likely to be hidden away; yet, a
preoccupation with funerary art and memorialization continued, albeit in new forms.
15
In
the Middle Ages, funerary art was used to remind believers of the inevitability of death.
Art about death and the dead often focused on the fragility of the material world and the
perishable nature of all worldly things, especially the body, “so that representations of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
13
See Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the
Uncanny (New York: Oxford UP, 1995), especially Chapter Ten.
14
For an extended discussion of these changes, see Plinio Prioreschi, A History of Human Responses to
Death: Mythologies, Rituals, and Ethics (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 1990); Thomas; and Morris
Berman, The Reenchantment of the World (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981). For an overview of changes in death
beliefs since the middle ages, see Philippe Ariès, “The Reversal of Death” and “The Hour.” See also
Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Patricia M.
Ranum (Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 1975) and Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen
Weaver (New York: Knopf, 1981). Social historian Ariès has been influential in death studies and has
traced what he sees as the changing conceptions of death in the West in the last six centuries. While
Thomas, Prioreschi, and Berman would most likely agree with his assertions, Ariès’s chronology of death
beliefs in the West has been criticized for failing to notice continuities within the change. Still, Ariès
proves a good jumping off point for most dealings with the issue of death, as his books are among the most
widely read in the field.
15
See Prioreschi; James Deetz and Edwin S. Dethlefsen, “Death’s Head, Cherub, Urn and Willow,”
Natural History 76 (1967): 29-37; Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall, eds., The Place of the Dead: Death
and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge UP, 2000); and
Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey, Death, Memory, and Material Culture (New York: Berg, 2001).
229

decomposing corpses and rotting bodies became prevalent.”
16
The viewer was thus
reminded that the body was material and should be of little concern!the afterlife should
be one’s focus. Yet, with the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the need to admonish
the living through the visualization of what would happen to their bodies after death
ceased to be as effective. Funerary sculpture was largely divorced from religion, and as
Plinio Prioreschi explains, “With the Renaissance, death ceases to be desirable and
becomes an ugly necessity that…is to be lamented as the great robber of life…”
17
The
dead were thus still envisioned in funerary monuments, but instead of showing the
ravages of death on the body, the dead were preserved as they were in life, granting what
Prioreschi sees as “another life” after death.
18

Yet, this was supplanted during the 19
th
century, when the focus on one’s personal
death shifted, so that death became about the loss of a loved one, and the afterlife ceased
being about personal reward or punishment and became a place of reunion. For Ariès,
the 19
th
century was crucial!it was the point at which a major transformation in beliefs
concerning death in the West took place because death was both universal and individual
as it was inscribed in the person of the Other. Whereas previously, death had been
connected to ideas of community and then to the individual self, “Under these conditions,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
16
Prioreschi, 87.
17
Prioreschi, 361.
18
Prioreschi, 378.
230

the death of the self had lost its meaning. The fear of death…was transferred from the
self to the Other, the loved one.”
19

Death became at once, more removed from the self, yet as Drew Faust observes,
“death was hardly hidden, but it was nevertheless…denied…through an active and
concerted work of reconceptualization that rendered it a cultural preoccupation.
Redefined as eternal life, death was celebrated in mid-nineteenth century America.”
20

Faye Joanne Baker’s doctoral dissertation, which traces tombstone art, epitaphs, and
mourning pictures in New England in the 18
th
and 19
th
centuries, also illustrates this.
Baker sees:
an enormous change in the way death was viewed… The willingness to
accept the mortality of the flesh and to exhibit visual symbols of that
mortality gradually evolves into a willingness, almost a delight, in
dwelling on the abstract idea of death, while avoiding its physical reality.
21

Although Baker’s area of interest is small,
22
her findings mirror what other scholars have
been suggesting: a shift in how the West visualized death, especially in funerary art and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
19
Ariès, “The Hour,” 45.
20
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Vintage,
2009), 177.
21
Faye Joanne Baker, Toward Memory and Mourning: a Study of Changing Attitudes Toward Death
Between 1750 and 1850 as Revealed by Gravestones of the New Hampshire Merrimack River Valley,
Mourning Pictures, and Representative Writings, Ph.D. Dissertation, The George Washington University
(1977), 43A.
22
Most of her study focuses on cemetery art from one part of Massachusetts.
231

memorials, seems to have taken place just before and during the 19
th
century.
23
As Baker
states, the shift is one that moves “from a willingness to acknowledge mortality to a
desire to memorialize the dead and to mourn.”
24

Death in its concrete, everyday form was, then, concealed by death in its abstract
material form: instead of being housed in charnel houses and nearby church graveyards, it
now resided in mourning clothes and distant cemeteries. Even when a more concrete
version of death confronted late 19
th
-century Americans facing Civil War casualties,
there was a temptation to try to turn it into a “good” death or state spectacle.
25
Death was
still present, but it was spectacularized.
During the 20
th
century, what many have called the “medicalization” of death
took place,
26
producing what Geoffrey Gorer has called “the Pornography of Death.”
27

Gorer argues that death in the 20
th
century, like sex, became something to be avoided,
cloaked in euphemisms and kept behind closed doors. Yet, in the very shrouding of
death in abjection, it became all the more tantalizing. Hence, while death in its concrete
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
23
See Ariès, “The Reversal of Death;” Deetz and Dethlefsen; and Allan I. Ludwig, Graven Images: New
England Stonecarving and its Symbols, 1650-1815 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1966).
24
Baker, 119.
25
See Faust.
26
Antonius C.G.M. Robben, “Death and Anthropology: An Introduction,” Death, Mourning, and Burial: a
Cross-Cultural Reader, ed. Antonius C.G.M. Robben (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 4.
27
Geoffrey Gorer, “The Pornography of Death” (1955), Encounters: an Anthology from the First Ten Years
of Encounter Magazine, eds. Stephen Spender and Melvin J. Lasky (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1965): 152-157.
232

form—the reality of dying bodies and burials—was more and more hidden, as an abstract
display, death could enter the everyday world as spectacle and entertainment. However,
this is the dead as they were related to burial, mourning, and memorialization. What
about the dead that had previously been thought to have been a real, material part of the
community? What about the dead believed come back to life?

TALKING TO THE DEAD
While many would argue that belief in ghosts and spirits simply disappeared with
rational Enlightenment thinking, Keith Thomas argues that the dead, who had previously
been so important as social actors within the community—serving, for instance, as
devices of social sanctioning—were simply made obsolete by new forms of bureaucratic
state power.
28
Moreover, as ties to the land and the local were disrupted by increased
urbanization, ties to the dead—buried in specific localities and believed to be tied to
those places—were likewise diminished.
29
The dead’s role within the community may
have changed, and shifting populations may have rendered their power over certain
people tied to certain places a thing of the past. Moreover, the Enlightenment and the
scientific and industrial revolutions may have raised the possibility that ghosts were
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
28
See Thomas.
29
Thomas; also see Terry Castle, Chapter Ten, for a discussion on Thomas and the “skeptical assault on
traditional beliefs” (171).
233

nothing more than deceptions, optical illusions, or hallucinations.
30
Still, there were also
continuities present within these changes.
Geoffrey K. Nelson observes that the occurrence of phenomena like
communication with the dead is a universal element in all human societies, and “many
groups and individuals throughout history have claimed the ability to communicate with
the ‘dead’ or other spirits as part of their religious practices…”
31
Thus, even though
Enlightenment thinking was in full swing, supposedly producing more rational subjects,
traditional beliefs about the dead and an afterlife continued to thrive. Perhaps the most
popular manifestation of such was the modern spiritualist movement, which was born in
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
30
Castle, 172-175.
31
Geoffrey K. Nelson, Spiritualism and Society (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 3; Both Thomas and
Thomas A. Kselman also see precedents for modern spiritualism in the past. Thomas notes that in the
Middle Ages, it was considered bad form for the dying to promise to try to come back and that it was
likewise improper to try to contact the dead!implicit in his argument is an assumption that these things
could be done but were frowned upon. Kselman, on the other hand, is one of the few scholars to make an
explicit link between the long tradition of seers (armiers) in France!people who would carry message
from the dead to the living!and the modern spiritualist movement and its mediums. Likewise, Mervyn
Heard’s history of phantasmagoria begins by noting that a fascination with ghosts and ghost-raising, one of
the most popular subjects in phantasmagoria shows, has been popular in the West since at least the
Greeks—and that entertainment connected to such has been around almost as long. See Thomas; Thomas
A. Kselman, Death and the Afterlife in Modern France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993); and Mervyn
Heard, Phantasmagoria: The Secret Life of the Magic Lantern (Hastings: Projection Box, 2006), 15-22. Of
course, in a sense, belief in the supernatural has always been popular and terms like occult, spiritualism and
supernatural depend largely on who is talking: one person’s occult is another person’s serious spiritual
belief and vice versa. Therefore, while there are those who would certainly like to draw a line between
“civilized” religious belief and “barbaric” superstition, it is an assumption of this chapter that belief in an
afterlife and/or belief in ghosts/the return of the dead cannot be used as a measure of a person’s supposed
cultural or intellectual superiority or inferiority. There is simply no basis in such claims, and it is not
within the purview of this project to prove or discount religious, spiritual, or other beliefs, but rather the
intention is to show how some beliefs, namely that the dead are able to interact meaningfully with the
living, may shape certain attitudes toward visual technologies, visual spectacles, and certain representations
of the undead, namely zombies.
234

1848, when the Fox sisters of New York began interpreting raps and other noises heard at
the family farmhouse. The girls’ ability to supposedly communicate with the dead was
much publicized and was the beginning of a wave of similar phenomena throughout the
Western world.
Spiritualism occupied an interesting position in terms of its claims to legitimacy.
Drew Faust observes, “To an age increasingly caught up in the notion of science as the
measure of truth, spiritualism offered belief that seemed to rely on empirical evidence
rather than revelation and faith.”
32
And while it was at once a “scientific” religion, it was
also considered a form of magic and a popular entertainment, so spiritualism could be
enjoyed by different persons in different ways, and, as some scholars allege, by the same
person in a variety of ways as well.
33
This gave spiritualism a high degree of fluidity and
contributed to its variety of manifestations: spiritualist phenomena ranged from rapping
and noises to materializations and clairvoyance, and two of t he most popular ways in
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
32
Faust, 180.
33
There is still some contestation as to why spiritualism was popular at the time. R. Laurence Moore
maintained that spiritualism was a manifestation of the longing for a rational religion infused with the spirit
of science. Edward Ayers, however, disagrees, seeing spiritualism as popular for its therapeutic and
emotional benefits, casting it alongside more traditional religious practice. While Kselman sees the
scientific links that spiritualist practices had!maintained in part by famous thinkers who were adherents to
the spiritualist cause!he also notes its strong ties to entertainment in the 19
th
century. See R. Laurence
Moore, “The Occult Connection? Mormonism, Christian Science, and Spiritualism,” The Occult in
America: New Historical Perspectives, eds. Howard Kerr and Charles L. Crow (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1983); Kselman; and Edward Ayers, “Science and the Seance,” Reviews in American History
6.3 (1978): 306-312. For a discussion of all three potential uses for spiritualism, see Pat Jalland, Death in
the Victorian Family (New York: Oxford UP, 1996); For a discussion of Jalland, see Nelson, 28.
235

which spirit communication was visualized, the séance and spirit photography, can help
show the myriad ways spiritualism could be consumed.
John Monroe observes that the séance, beyond being a space in which the dead
could communicate with the living, was also a liminal space and “a source of anxiety.
The séance was a social space in which all the usual rules ceased to apply.”
34
Beyond the
normal rules of decorum that might be broken during a séance—as there could be
shouting, furniture could be moved or thrown about a room, or a medium might even
produce “manifestations” from his/her bodily orifices—they were also spaces in which
the public and the private could merge, as most séances took place in private homes.
Moreover, those who were spectators at séances could range from believers to skeptics to
those who were observing what they considered entertainment. The very presentation of
the phenomena of séances thus often created a strange in-between space: as Ksleman
notes, by the 1860s, séances were so much a part of the Parisian social scene that while in
one theater you might have a medium performing a spiritualist séance, nearby you might
also have a magician showing how the same phenomena was produced without
supernatural help.
35

Spirit photography also opened up multiple viewing spaces as, like séances, it
could be used by believers as evidence of the spirit world, by skeptics for opposite
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
34
John Monroe, “Making the Seance ‘Serious’: Tables Tournantes and Second Empire Bourgeois Culture,
1853-1861,” History of Religions 38 (1999), 245.
35
Kselman, 153.
236

purposes, and by others simply interested in the phenomena as entertainment.
36
The
history of spirit photography begins in Boston in 1861 when photographer William
Mumler began to see apparitions in his photographs. The phenomena spread fairly
quickly in the United States, and Crista Cloutier observes that while the cost of a spirit
photograph was often hundreds of times more expensive than a normal photograph, part
of the draw of spirit photography was the hope of acquiring a “desired image.”
37
The
notion that the living spectator had an agenda in acquiring an image of the dead is
compelling because it speaks to the important role the spectator played in the process—
just as a séance, in part, depended on participants’ desires to communicate with the dead,
spirit photography required a spectator who believed in order for spirit photographs to be
read as anything other than entertainment.
Part of the allure of these photographs was thus a chance to see one’s dead loved
ones again, but as Paul Firenze remarks, they also offered a “scientific” way for
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
36
For instance, Paul Firenze sees photography itself as occupying a liminal space between art and science
during this time. People still weren’t sure what the photographic image’s relationship to concepts like
“reality” and “truth” were. See Paul Firenze, “Spirit Photography: How Early Spiritualists Tried to Save
Religion by Using Science,” Skeptic 11.2 (2004): 70-78 and Louis Kaplan, “Where the Paranoid Meets the
Paranormal: Speculations on Spirit Photography,” Art Journal 62.3 (2003): 18-29. Paola Cortes-Rocca
also notes the similarities in approaching photographic images and spirit images in photographs:
photographs inherently offer a piece of immortality. Plus, Cortes-Rocca relates that ghosts aren’t bodies or
souls, but are something in-between; likewise “what photography does precisely is to turn a body into
something else, into an image” (Paola Cortes-Rocca, “Ghosts in the Machine: Photographs of Specters in
the Nineteenth Century,” Mosaic 38.1 (2005), 159).
37
Crista Cloutier, “Mumler’s Ghosts,” The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, eds. Clement
Cheroux, et al (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2005), 21.
237

“resurrecting the dead.”
38
These photographs could instill belief by offering “scientific”
proof to spiritualist claims, but the same photographs could just as easily be created for
entertainment.
39
Clement Cheroux sees nothing at all strange about these two
potentialities and, in fact, believes that while it might seem as if viewers had to choose a
single viewing position from which to appreciate these photographs, that wasn’t
necessarily the case. Cheroux remarks,
…a distinction must be made between producers and receivers. While the
concomitance of these images [used for entertainment] was an
embarrassment to the spiritualists,…it does not seem to have bothered the
public. No doubt the latter were already used to the coexistence of
categories of representation that were similar in form but contradictory in
content.
40

Cheroux notes that in the 1860s, Parisian spectators were used to seeing ghosts on both
the stage and in spiritualist séances, but that “…the two categories of representation
continued to coexist in the public mind, without contradiction.”
41

In Theorizing Documentary, Michael Renov states that what is different about
documentaries versus their fictional counterparts is “the extent to which the referent of
the documentary sign may be considered as a piece of the world plucked from its
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
38
Firenze, 70. The fact that the origins of spirit photography coincide with the Civil War seems to support
the idea that spirit photography helped mourners cope with grief. See also Kaplan.
39
See Lafcadio Hearn, Spirit Photography: How Intelligent People May be Humbugged…The Method
Wherein a Cincinnati Artist Carries on Business (Los Angeles: John Murray, 1933).
40
Clement Cheroux, “Ghost Dialectics: Spirit Photography in Entertainment and Belief,” The Perfect
Medium: Photography and the Occult, eds. Clement Cheroux, et al (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2005), 46.
41
Cheroux, 53.
238

everyday context rather than fabricated for the screen.”
42
Or, as Michael Leja puts it:
“How one looks depends on what one is looking at.”
43
Thus, one of the biggest
considerations as to whether an image will be read as believable or not is the expectations
of a spectator. If an image is labeled a humbug or fantasy, a spectator will most likely
expect something different from it than from an image labeled news or documentary.
How images are contextualized by their producers, but also by those who consume them,
is thus very important to how they will be interpreted.
Moreover, because in many versions of spectacles like spirit photography or
séances, the apparatus could be used for scientific and/or entertainment purposes, a
slippage could occur: for instance, the same “scientific” instrument, the camera, could be
used by those trying to prove spirit photography was legitimate and by those trying to
debunk the process. Therefore, the camera’s ability to record the “truth” often hinged on
one’s preconceived notions of what it could do and the uses to which it was being put.
Context mattered. If a spectator expected it to produce evidence of the afterlife, then the
photographs taken were more likely to bear this out. Furthermore, spectators were able to
read images as belonging to more than one category. Thus, as Don Slater, in his
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
42
Michael Renov, Theorizing Documentary (New York: Routledge, 1993), 7; emphasis mine.
43
Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004), 12.
239

examination of dioramas, explains: audiences were able to experience these visual
spectacles “as both magical and technological.”
44

In both spirit photography and séances, the camera was instrumental in proving
the validity of spiritualist claims. While this may be self-evident with spirit photography,
in séances too, the camera was often used to record, and thus prove, spirit
communications and manifestations. The camera thus not only acted as a scientific
instrument capable of producing empirical evidence, it was also a mediator between the
living and the dead. The camera became that which could speak to (and about)
supernatural realms.
45

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
44
Don Slater, “Photography and Modern Vision: The Spectacle of ‘Natural Magic’,” Visual Culture, ed.
Chris Jenks (New York: Routledge, 1995), 218. Also, Tom Gunning notes “…new technologies evoke not
only a short-lived wonder based on unfamiliarity which greater and constant exposure will overcome, but
also a possibly less dramatic but more enduring sense of the uncanny, a feeling that they involve magical
operations which feature familiarity or habituation might cover over, but not totally destroy. It crouches
there beneath a rational cover, ready to spring out again” (Tom Gunning, “Re-Newing Old Technologies:
Astonishment, Second Nature, and the Uncanny in Technology from the Previous Turn-of-the-Century,”
Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, eds. David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 47).
45
Seeing the camera as that which troubles the line between the living and the dead is not unique.
Historically, theorists like Bazin, Barthes, and Philip Rosen have linked photography to death, yet their
work is mostly concerned with the ability of the photographic image to freeze a moment in time. For
Bazin, there is a sense of being able to beat death in a photograph, as the image will live on after the body
photographed is gone, and while the object of a photograph is freed from its original time and space by the
photograph, there is still an ontological guarantee that it once existed (See André Bazin, “The Ontology of
the Photographic Image,” Film Theory and Criticism, 6th ed., eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New
York: Oxford UP, 2004): 166-170). Barthes is more pessimistic, because he feels that the past captured in
a photograph is not necessarily tied to the real, as the signifier-sign relationship has slipped somewhat. He
notes that the person photographed becomes “a specter,” turned into an object—made over as death. For
Barthes, in a sense, every photograph offers the return of the living as dead. See Roland Barthes, Camera
Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). See also
Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2001).
240

Since the earliest daguerreotypes, photographic cameras have been marked as
devices for entertainment, art and as scientific tools—able to record reality faithfully, but
also able to detect that which the unaided human eye could not see.
46
As Leslie K.
Brown reports, “Even today, photography continues to explore the farthest regions of the
universe; our only proof of the existence of these objects or phenomena is photographs of
things we could never ‘see’ with our naked eyes.”
47
There is thus a strong impulse to
believe what we see: seeing is believing, after all, and that adage is only strengthened by
the fact that discourses of science—with their attendant claims to “truth”—have been
used to legitimize the indexicality of images since photography was born.
48

Yet, photographic images can also be ripe for manipulation.
49
The camera thus
inhabits a strange liminal space whereby it can be seen as both impartial observer and
manipulator of what is placed in front of it. An epistemological crisis of sorts is
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
46
Many film theorists, especially in the early 20
th
century, were especially fond of thinking of the film
camera as that which could see better than the human eye. For instance, Dziga Vertov called the camera
the “kino-eye” and held it to be superior to the human eye as it could slow life down, speed it up,
superimpose images one on the other, or view life at the microscopic level. See Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye:
The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’ Brien (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984).
47
Leslie K. Brown, “Concerning the Spiritual in Photography,” In the Loupe, Journal of the Photographic
Research Center at Boston University (January/February 2004), accessed on July 22, 2010,
http://www.bu.edu/prc/spirit/essay.htm.
48
And, a case could be made, up through today. Of course, there is an assumption inherent in such claims
that scientific measurements and recordings offer unmediated fact, which is debatable.
49
Besides overt manipulation like CGI or Photoshopping, the very shooting and editing of a series of
photographs is a manipulation: the deliberate selections of how close to a subject to shoot, in what light,
from what angle—even the selection of a subject at all—speak to some form of authorial presence.
241

occurring—the spectator must wrestle with her belief in visual evidence, on one hand,
and on the other, her belief that the visual may deceive or that it might not show all there
is to be shown. With séances and spirit photography, the camera served to
“scientifically” validate non-empirical or highly personal sensory evidence. The camera
was assumed to be objective. Therefore, the aura of science served as a marker of truth,
and it worked to reinscribe personal sensory experience as a legitimate test of the world.
Yet, this scientific aura has to compete with personal belief.
In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag notes that those images “offering
evidence that contradicts cherished pieties are invariably dismissed as having been staged
for the camera.”
50
Likewise, in terms of spiritualist or supernatural phenomena, it seems
that when faced with evidence of deception or trickery or non-supernatural explanation,
believers often dismiss evidence that runs counter to belief in favor of the notion that
evidence itself can sometimes be tainted and wrong. Again, the scientific reliability of
the camera breaks down somewhat. Belief surpasses the scientific aura. Therefore, for
believers, the existence of frauds and of those who can replicate supernatural phenomena
using non-supernatural means does not necessarily mean that supernatural phenomena
isn’t true; it just means it wasn’t true in that instance.
51
Thus, for spirit photography and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
50
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 10-11.
51
For an interesting discussion on belief in the face of evidence to the contrary, see D. Alan Bensley,
“Why Great Thinkers Sometimes Fail to Think Critically,” Skeptical Inquirer 30.4 (2006), accessed on
March 5, 2007, http://www.csicop.org/si/archive/category/volume_30.4.
242

séances, the camera can bring a scientific aura to evidence, yet this scientific aura is not
allowed to supersede belief.
Mervyn Heard has noted a similar tug-of-war in phantasmagoria shows of the 19
th

century. Often promoted not only as entertainment but as educational or scientific tools
as well, phantasmagoria were designed to show audiences the folly of their beliefs in the
ghosts of magic lantern shows. Yet, just like the séance or with spirit photography, a
spectator had the opportunity to occupy multiple positions when watching a
phantasmagoria show.
52
While spiritualist phenomena had a direct link to conceptions of
death and the afterlife, phantasmagoria shows did not necessarily!they could be about
any number of things. Yet, they were born of ghost stories and continued to feature the
undead prominently.
53

Étienne-Gaspard Robert, known as Robertson, was perhaps the most well-known
phantasmagoria showman, and central to Robertson’s show was the pull between belief
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
52
Which can be translated as “an aggregation of ghosts” or “ghosts speaking out” (Heard, 10).
53
Phantasmagoria shows came out of magic lantern shows. They were, in fact, magic lanterns with rear
projection, meaning the means of projection was hidden from the audience; yet, Heard notes that later
lantern (post-1800) and phantasmagoria show operators consciously worked to distance themselves from
older-style (i.e. ghost-raising or prophecy) lantern shows by associating the newer shows with science,
religion, and social reform. Even so, the ghosts and ghost stories, so popular in the older lantern shows,
remained (Heard, 8-9). For an insightful discussion on Robertson’s phantasmagoria, see Simon During,
Modern Enchantments: the Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002); James W.
Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001);
and Mervyn Heard. Frances Terpak has also noted that almost from the beginning, magic lanterns
straddled the line between entertainment and science (Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak, Devices
of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001),
298).
243

and skepticism!Robertson would produce a show full of seemingly real ghosts and then
finish with a speech on the importance of science and reason. Similarly, phantasmagoria
showman Philador (aka Paul de Philipsthal), a precursor of Robertson’s, is credited with
opening a show on February 28, 1793 thusly:
I bring before you all the illustrious dead, all of those whose memory is
dear to you and image still present to you. I do not show you ghosts,
because there are no such things; but I will produce before you
entertainments and images, which are imagined to be ghosts, in the dreams
of the imagination or the falsehoods of charlatans. I do not wish to
deceive you; but I will astonish you. It is not up to me to create illusions.
I prefer to serve education.
54

Again, obtaining the “desired image,” in this case of “those whose memory is dear to
you,” is crucial to the success of the entertainment. In fact, Philador would often invite
audience members to meet him ahead of time and to bring descriptions or pictures of lost
love ones they’d like to see, and he was by no means the only showman to do so.
55

While there were disclaimers that these were scientific entertainments
(“scientific” and “entertainment” themselves troubling clear categorization), the
likelihood they could play on the emotional vulnerability of audiences or simply their
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
54
Heard, 80-81. While they were used for teaching and scientific experiments, they were also used to
entertain, and by the 19
th
century, most phantasmagoria offered “stage embellishments” like musical scores
and special effects (Heard, 9). In fact, these shows were, at times, chastised for putting too much
entertainment into what some thought should be purely scientific endeavors (Heard, 40); for a discussion
on the theatricalization of science in the 19
th
and early 20
th
centuries, see Lisa Jardine, “Weird Science,”
BBC News Online Magazine (June 27, 2008), accessed on July 22, 2010,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7477982.stm.
55
Heard, 82.
244

desires to believe despite evidence to the contrary was high. As Heard reports, “Despite
Robertson’s claims to be an artist in physics and not a magician, many believed
otherwise.”
56
The displays confused secure boundaries between what was verifiably real
and what wasn’t, and Max Milner notes that instituting a sense of uncertainty in one’s
perception was central to the phantasmagoria.
57

The desire to believe in the afterlife was strong and was further strengthened by a
desire for technology to produce seemingly verifyable truth, which then sometimes
outweighed any claims that it didn’t. For instance, an eyewitness to one of Robertson’s
shows reported that while the rulers of the republic “said that the dead return no
more…go to Robertson’s show and you will soon be convinced of the contrary, for you
will see the dead returning to life in crowds.”
58
As this person’s report makes clear, this
device and others like it opened up the possibility of experiencing belief and doubt at the
same time. Audiences wanted to believe what they were seeing.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
56
Heard, 112. This may be due to the fact that Robertson’s speeches were “ambiguously phrased and even
open to the interpretation that the ghosts about to be seen were real” (see X. Theodore Barber,
“Phantasmagorical Wonders: The Magic Lantern Ghost Show in Nineteenth-Century America,” Film
History 3.2 (1989), 74).
57
Cheroux, 53.
58
Heard, 92.
245

SKEPTICAL BELIEF/BELIEVING SKEPTICISM
James W. Cook sees a similar mode of visuality operating in the 19
th
century
exhibitions of P.T. Barnum. In his book, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in
the Age of Barnum, Cook notes that in Barnum’s exhibitions featuring Joice Heth,
uncertainty as to the authenticity of the exhibition was part of its allure. As Neil Harris
notes in relation to Heth: “The public would be more excited by controversy than by
conclusiveness.”
59

While Barnum’s exhibits were seen as dangerous by some contemporaries!as
they could corrupt the easily-swayed minds of the naïve public
60
— they could be just as
dangerous because they encouraged the audience to forego expert opinion and approach
the visual skeptically and use personal judgement.
61
As Harris notes,
The objects inside the [American] museum, and Barnum’s activities
outside, focused attention on their own structures and operations, were
empirically testable and enabled!or at least invited!audiences and
participants to learn how they worked. They appealed because they
exposed their processes of action. Adding an adjective to the label, one
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
59
Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 23.
60
Although outside of the purview of this analysis, I would argue that one of the dangers of Barnum’s
exhibitions was their blending of high culture forms (science, the museum) and low culture practice
(aiming for a mass audience, “tricks,” and trills).
61
As Neil Harris notes in Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum, as science, religion, philosophy and magic all
contested with each others’ claims to truth, their experts were subsequently found to be fallible so that more
and more, the authority to discern genuine from false and right from wrong now increasingly lay with the
“much-celebrated common man” and his common-sense view of the world; this led to a condition of
uncertainty, for as Harris remarks, “When credentials, coats of arms and university degrees no longer
guaranteed what passed for truth, it was difficult to know whom and what to believe. Everything was up
for grabs” (Harris, 3).
246

might term this an ‘operational aesthetic,’ an approach to experience that
equated beauty with information and technique, accepting guile because it
was more complicated than candor.
62

This view sees these spectators not as ignorant dupes but as cunning consumers who
craved more than simplistic explanations of how the world worked and who responded to
the liberatory impulse inherent in being able to see and judge for themselves. Moreover,
the technological and scientific breakthroughs of the late 19
th
century made it quite
difficult to say that anything was impossible!so many things previously thought
impossible were now realities, that to rule anything out seemed unwise.
63
Possibility was
attractive and believable, and this opened up the likelihood that some spectators would
read images against the grain.
Cook sees entertainments like Barnum’s as opening up a space where “belief and
skepticism intermingle,” and that the popularity of such entertainments was an outgrowth
of this intermingling and these entertainments’ “capacity to be both things at once…”
64

Cook’s point is that these sorts of entertainments, in their self-reflexivity, allowed
spectators to become aware of how they were being manipulated visually, thus shining a
light on the fact that “truth” was an unstable concept.
65
Michael Leja likewise believes
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
62
Harris, 57.
63
Heard, 73.
64
Cook, 15-16.
65
Harris is more cynical and sees Barnum’s exhibits as boiling down the judgments a spectator would have
to make into “is it real or is it fake?” This takes out the fears of trying to apply any sort of thoughtful
247

that deceptive imagery taught spectators to “look askance” by approaching the visual
cynically, but that this gave them the freedom to let down their guards and then to marvel
knowingly at the illusions intended to deceive.
66

Leja, Cook, and Harris all examine images, objects, and events intended by their
producers to be deceptive. Yet, this believing skepticism, “operational aesthetic,” or
practice of “looking askance” could be applied to those visual images not intended to
deceive as well. One could certainly argue, from a skeptical point of view, that the
producers of images of the dead found in séances, spirit photography, and
phantasmagoria shows that were not intended to be read as entertainment were producing
deceptive images. One could also claim that this was not necessarily the case. Yet,
regardless, because these images dealt with a subject matter that itself existed in a liminal
space—life after death cannot be definitively proved or disproved and one must come to
one’s decisions about it via belief—it was possible for spectators to approach images of
the dead with either skepticism or belief.
Moreover, while the skeptical consumer each of these men envisions is
preferential to Horkheimer and Adorno’s cultural dupes, there is something else going on
here as well.
67
First, belief and skepticism should not be so neatly compartmentalized,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
analysis to the exhibits as spectators might be expected to with an exhibit in an art museum. As he notes,
“onlookers were relieved from the burden of coping with more abstract problems” (Harris, 78-9).
66
Leja, esp. 137-8.
67
See Chapter Two, n. 113 & 114.
248

especially when it comes to viewing the dead.
68
Belief in the supernatural or magical
cannot be treated as automatically suspect or wrong. Rather, defining belief not as a
delusional state that ignores facts, but as a willingness to invest in feeling, gut reaction,
and one’s own sense of sight in tandem with rational thought, is productive because it
envisions the believing spectator as aware of both the rational and the magical and
willing to concede power to both. Therefore, there may have been more to the visual
culture surrounding tricks and frauds than simply spectators becoming more skeptical
visual consumers, although there is evidence that this was happening. Certainly, as Leja,
Harris, and Cook argue, spectators were being trained to understand the inherent
instability of any claim to truth, but they were also invited to come to “truth” via non-
empiric or non-rational means.
Placing value in one’s belief in the supernatural, the not-yet-understood, or simply
in the possibility that something could be true was probably not the aim of showmen like
Barnum or Robertson, but many spectators did react with faith in the face of
explanation.
69
Beyond being skeptical, these spectators, who were already taught that
certain technologies could “see” better than humans could, were applying that knowledge
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
68
My arguments might be valid for other types of subject matter, but images of the dead are a convenient
starting point for these discussions.
69
Richard Allen, in his discussion of images that fool the eye, argues that spectators are more willing to
believe the reality of an image the more the medium is hidden; this would certainly coincide with
phantasmagoria; see Richard Allen, Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997). See also Slater. Yet, with spirit photography, video games, and
séances, the medium and apparatus are apparent—in fact, in each of these experiences, they are a vital part
of the spectacle.
249

to the camera’s or projector’s ability to “see” the dead, which would have been a rational
step. However, these spectators were also comfortable believing their own vision in the
face of evidence to the contrary. The era and the entertainments were teaching spectators
that truth wasn’t stable, so spectators utilized less-than-stable means of reaching some
sort of truth that could account for what they were seeing. If this meant both valorizing
technology as able to see what the human eye couldn’t while simultaneously holding up
one’s own vision as superior to the showman’s or the critic’s, so be it.
For instance, at the 1875 trial of supposed spirit photographer Edouard Buguet in
Paris, Buguet confessed to faking his photographs, yet as Martyn Jolly reports:
Despite his confession, and the police discovery [of the props he used to
perpetrate the fakes], witness after witness…came forward to testify in his
defense. They each refused to accept the court’s construction of them as
simply Buguet’s gullible dupes… One after another they left the witness
box still protesting that they chose to believe the evidence of their own
eyes, rather than Buguet’s confession…
70

Spectators were thus embracing their choice in how to interpret images—in this case, to
invest them with supernatural meaning or to read them against the official grain. After
all, a resistant reading is not a purely contemporary manifestation. This could be
considered a hold-over of pre-modern religious or magical beliefs, and it may have been.
Using the familiar to cope with or interpret the new is certainly probable. However,
beyond seeing the ability to be both skeptical and faithful at the same time as a coping
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
70
Martyn Jolly, Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography (West New York, NJ: Mark
Batty Publisher, 2006), 22.
250

mechanism for dealing with modern life, we should also consider the pleasures such a
viewing position could engender. There may have been some sense of delight in
allowing faith to creep into one’s skeptical approach to what one was seeing.
Similarly, while belief itself was not the same as a magical spell or object, it may
have conferred onto the believer a similar sense of empowerment in the face of visually-
confusing spectacle.
71
In some ways, then, this is akin to what Avery F. Gordon sees
happening in the novels of Luisa Valenzuela and Toni Morrison in which a mode of
seeing is utilized by certain characters who can see what is invisible, dead or gone; as she
reports about these characters, they “possess a vision that can not only regard the
seemingly not there, but can also see that the not there is a seething presence…These
women comprehend the living efforts…of what seems over and done with, the endings
that are not over.”
72
They are thus privy to information thought lost or rendered invisible
and are empowered by it.
While there are those who would claim that the spectators who believed
phantasmagoria, spirit photography, and séances enabled legitimate contact with the dead
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
71
Outside the purview of this project, but still worth considering, are the gendered/class/racial aspects of
belief in the face of evidence to the contrary and how this may have worked to empower certain groups.
Lawrence W. Levine, for instance, notes that one benefit of slave magic in the 18
th
and 19
th
centuries was
that it allowed for a knowledge white people had no access to and proved that white masters were not all-
knowing; it gave slaves access to and control over an arena outside of white scrutiny; Lawrence W. Levine,
Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, 30th
Anniversary ed., (New York: Oxford UP, 2007), 73-74.
72
Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2008), 195.
251

were not accessing lost or invisible information, these spectators may have believed that
they were—again, their choice to read the images in this way may have served to
empower them. Moreover, in engaging with a “desired” image, these spectators were
making themselves the center of meaning in these experiences. They therefore operated
both as external spectators and as internal participants. To many spectators in the 19
th

century, then, seeing wasn’t necessarily believing—seeing was negotiating with belief
and skepticism at the same time, and what one saw was only a starting point.

“FACE YOUR FEARS”
73

The negotiated seeing that some spectators were using in the face of images that
at once encouraged belief but also encouraged skepticism was by no means a universal
phenomenon, but it would certainly account for those spectators willing to believe in the
“fact” of an image of the dead-come-back-to-life when the producer and other spectators
held that same image up as fiction. This was a personal decision on the part of the
spectator and not an inherent part of the media they were encountering.
74
Contemporary
video game play is necessarily a very different experience from attending a 19
th
century
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
73
Tagline for the first Resident Evil game (Resident Evil (Biohazard), Video Game, Capcom, 1996).
74
Although the use of projection, immersion, and audio “tricks” may have helped, especially in the case of
phantasmagoria or séances, and the use of double exposures, matting, and other photographic “tricks” may
have likewise helped in the case of spirit photography.
252

séance or phantasmagoria show, and yet, it too invites a kind of negotiated seeing on the
part of players, but one that is built into the very logic of gameplay itself.
For viewers of the phantasmagoria or Barnum’s exhibits, viewing encouraged a
sort of doubling of consciousness
75
in which some spectators were both aware of the
purported artificiality of the situation and the strength of their convictions that perhaps
what was seen wasn’t artificial at all: in other words, the preferred spectatorial position
and an alternative position that could be simultaneously occupied.
76
This mimics what
some scholars see at work in gameplay. Video game players understand that they aren’t
in the world of the game, just as spectators to phantasmagoria were told that what they
were seeing was fiction; yet, some acceptance of the possibilities inherent in these
mediated situations occurs. In Rules of Play, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman discuss
the “immersive fallacy” in regards to video game play, which is the idea that the pleasure
of a mediated experience lies, in part, in its ability to sensually transport the participant
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
75
As I discussed in Chapter One, I am here referring to my conception of a doubling of consciousness,
which I am carefully not calling a “double consciousness,” a concept made most relevant by W.E.B Du
Bois and that is paralleled in James Weldon Johnson’s notions of “dual personality.” While not
discounting Du Bois’s or Johnson’s ideas, I must also take into consideration Cornel West’s descriptions of
Malcom X’s argument on the matter (that double consciousness is less a “necessary mode of being” and
more “a particular kind of colonized mind-set” (Cornel West, Race Matters (1993; reprint, Boston: Beacon
Press, 2001), 97). Therefore, I am striving to move away from a strict binary that places subjects in an
either/or situation by showing that the player exists as “both” and “neither” at the same time (much, I might
add, like a zombie can exist as “both” and “neither” living/dead and black/white at the same time). See
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches, 3rd ed. (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co.,
1903) and James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912; reprint, Middlesex,
UK: Echo Library, 2009).
76
Furthermore, especially with experiences like séances and phantasmagoria shows, or even exhibits like
those staged by P.T. Barnum, a high degree of spectator immersion into the spectacle was possible.
253

into a simulated reality.
77
In other words, players actually buy into the fantasy of what
they are presented in visual media, which they fully accept as true. Salen and
Zimmerman agree that in terms of gameplay, players become engaged and engrossed and
there is a sense of being taken out of mundane reality, but one’s engagement with games
comes through play itself; to Salen and Zimmerman, play becomes a space/time in which
the player is both aware of the artificiality of the situation but is also immersed in the
meanings generated by play.
With phantasmagoria, spirit photography, and séances, the spectator could make
him or herself the center of meaning making in the experience by choosing how to read
the images presented. A video game player is likewise structured as the center of
meaning making within the game: he/she chooses when to play, for how long, and in
what ways. Thus, while phantasmagoria spectators might have been aware of themselves
as both external viewers and internal participants, video games take this a step further.
Players are often tied to an avatar during gameplay. In games like the The House
of the Dead series (1996-2006) or the Resident Evil series (1996-present), the player
assumes the identity of a pre-constituted character, who is usually given a lengthy
backstory and motivation. In first-person games, the player sees the world of the game as
if through the eyes of this character. In third-person games, the player controls the
actions of a character but that character remains fully visible on the console’s screen. In
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
77
Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 450.
254

each of these scenarios, rather than building a character from the ground up and infusing
it with the player’s own desires, the player is given a pre-existing character that already
has motivations and physical traits.
78
This is much more akin to the character-spectator
relationship engendered by films than in MMORPGs,
79
like World of Warcraft (2004-
present),
80
where within certain parameters, the player constructs his/her avatar and
infuses that avatar with his/her desires and goals. In any of these games, though, the
player still has some degree of control over how the avatar completes missions (or even if
he/she undertakes missions at all).
81

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
78
In “Video Games and Embodiment,” James Paul Gee makes a convincing argument for the reasons why
we cannot discount a player’s goals in terms of gameplay and how these will affect his/her attainment of
the avatar-character’s goals and vice versa. See James Paul Gee, “Video Games and Embodiment,” Games
and Culture 3.3-4 (July 2008): 253-263. Also, for a thorough explanation of how game format can impact
player action, see Tanya Krzywinska, “Zombies in Gamespace: Form, Content, and Meaning in Zombie-
Based Games, Zombie Culture: Autopsies of the Living Dead, eds. Shawn McIntosh and Marc Leverette
(Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2008): 153-168.
79
Massively multiplayer online role-playing game: role-playing games (RPGs) where a number of players
can interact within a virtual game world (some of the most popular MMORPGs host millions of players).
These games are not only goal-oriented but also encourage a high degree of social interaction and
cooperation with other players. For more on MMORPGs, see R.V. Kelly, Massively Multiplayer Online
Role-Playing Games (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2004); Miroslaw Filiciak, “Hyperidentities:
Postmodern Identity Patterns in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games,” The Video Game
Theory Reader, eds. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York: Routledge, 2003); and Torill Elvira
Motensen, “WoW is the New MUD: Social Gaming from Text to Video,” Games and Culture 1.4 (October
2006): 397-413.
80
World of Warcraft was actually a series of real-time strategy games, first produced in 1994, before
becoming an MMORPG in 2004.
81
It isn’t uncommon for players of certain types of games, especially sandbox-style games that allow
avatars to veer from a mission to play relatively freely within the game environment, to do so. Two
popular examples of such in zombie video games would be Dead Rising (2006) and Dead Rising 2 (2010).
Still, even in sandbox-style games, where the player has a high degree of freedom to do as he/she pleases
within the environment, there are constraints: there are the limits of space and time, for instance. In Dead
Rising, the player’s character is limited to the space of a shopping mall and until certain missions are
completed, certain areas of the mall will remain locked. Furthermore, while the player may ignore a
255

The avatar is important, because with video games, one makes sense of the game,
not through piecing together a narrative per se but through causing and reacting to events
depicted. As Jasper Juul notes, “…the player [in a video game] inhabits a twilight zone
where he/she is both an empirical subject outside the game and undertakes a role inside
the game.”
82
In many ways, inhabiting an avatar in gameplay comes close to presenting
one with a doubling of consciousness—the player becomes aware of him/herself as both
observer and observed (as both avatar and he/she who watches the avatar).
Yet, in negotiating between these two positions, the player must also invest some
belief in the images presented within the game—although this is not the same as a 19
th
-
century spectator believing in the ghosts being raised in séances, a similar process is
taking place: to be successful, the player does not necessarily have to be willing to ignore
the differences between the real world and the game world, and yet, for most players,
some form of immersion within the fictional construct of the game world does take place.
Thus, while there is a sense of belief-in-the-face-of-disbelief operating in gameplay, there
is also a sense of doubled identification present as one goes back and forth between
embodied and virtual selves.
83

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mission, the mission clock within the game still counts down and if the player does not complete the
mission, he/she will have to start the mission over.
82
qtd. in Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska, “Introduction: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces,” Screen Play:
Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces, eds. Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska (London: Wallflower, 2002), 23.
83
There are some theorists who do not believe that identification with the avatar is occurring during video
game play, that rather the avatar is more like a vehicle used to accomplish goals. While this view is valid, I
256

There is a sense of empowerment in that kind of action. While 19
th
-century
spectators could be empowered by negotiating between context, presentation, and belief
in how they chose to read certain images, contemporary game players can likewise feel
empowered in investing belief into the process of playing, of allowing themselves to
become immersed into the fiction of the game. In that way, the avatar’s achievements
become the player’s own.
84

Would this sense of empowerment, or level of immersion, then, be in any way
altered by the content of a zombie video game? For the vast majority of games, probably
not. While the previous two chapters have detailed how the zombie in several texts from
the 1930s to the present can be read as transgressive or progressive, with sympathetic
zombies and characters embracing a zombie lifestyle, the majority of zombies in video
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
would argue that even if the player isn’t identifying with the avatar as a fully-constructed character (for
example, in playing as Lara Croft, the player does not identify as white, young, and female) there is still a
sense of identifying with the body on the screen as an extension of one’s own. To borrow from my own
experiences of physically reacting when a video game avatar is attacked (inadvertently recoiling when an
adversary comes toward my avatar, for instance), I believe that it is acceptable to acknowledge that the
player identifies the body on screen as falling under his/her control and does share a sympathetic, if not
empathetic, sense of what is happening to that body. For more on avatarial identification, see Bob Rehack,
who takes a psychoanalytical view in “Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and the Avatar,” The Video Game
Theory Reader, eds. Wolf, Mark J. P. and Bernard Perron (New York: Routledge, 2003); and Martti Lahti,
who sees the avatar as potentially offering an uncanny experience of the strange and the familiar in “As We
become Machines: Corporeal Pleasures in Video Games,” The Video Game Theory Reader, eds. Wolf,
Mark J. P. and Bernard Perron (New York: Routledge, 2003). The relationship between genre and avatarial
identification is discussed in Diane Carr, “Play Dead: Genre and Affect in Silent Hill and Planescape
Torment,” Game Studies 3.1 (May 2003), accessed on August 9, 2010,
http://www.gamestudies.org/0301/carr/; finally, James Paul Gee argues that players inhabit an avatar in
ways similar to how they inhabit “characters” to face everyday real-world situations (see Gee).
84
Although they already are, on one level, as it is the player controlling the avatar. However, the point here
is that there is a profound separation between, say, driving a car through a course or shooting zombies and
operating a game controller—yet, to some extent, these two actions fuse during gameplay.
257

games are simply adversaries one is trying to kill. Tanya Krzywinska, in fact, argues that
the zombies of most video games are less ideologically compelling than their filmic
counterparts; as she observes, these zombies are “more conventionally monstrous,” and
they “are easily shot, cut up with a chainsaw, or blasted by nail guns, requiring little
hesitation or care. There is therefore little opportunity for players engaged in action to
dwell on their possible meanings.”
85
Yet, while these zombies may exist as little more
than “cannon fodder” in a practical sense, they do carry meanings that not only affect
gameplay but also color how the zombie is taken up in other media.
86

Hence, the fast adversarial zombies of many zombie video games have found
their way into films like 28 Days Later (2002) or Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the
Dead (2004), and the construction of zombies as little more than targets to be shot and
killed has likewise been taken up in films like Zombieland (2009). In these examples, the
zombie is not individuated, except in its destruction, and zombies become creatures of the
mass. Moreover, they are hungry, infected creatures of the mass—in other words, for the
zombie-as-target-practice to work, the zombie must be stripped of any individuality and
any humanity, two factors that significantly play into the construction of sympathetic
zombies in film.

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85
Krzywinska, “Zombies in Gamespace,” 166.
86
Krzywinska, “Zombies in Gamespace,” 165.
258

In the very premise of the zombie, or even the zombi, there is an idea of the
reduction of the human body to the status of “thing.” However, as Chapters One, Two
and Three have shown, in the rendering of the zombie as a fictional character—and even
within the stories of zombis arising out of Haiti—this reduction to “thing” status has
rarely been complete. Yes, there have certainly been “thing” zombies: in the voodoo-
style films, these were most likely the black zombies used to fill backgrounds; in
Romero-style films, “thing” zombies have been made more prevalent. However,
alongside these “thing” zombies have always been individualized zombies—those
zombies with names, with personalities, and with, quite simply, some form of their
humanity intact. Yet, zombie video games almost exclusively set up players to identify
with (and inhabit the bodies of) zombie killers.
In some ways, this mimics the idealized cinematic identifactory practices one
might expect between a viewer and a Romero-style film: in the war between the living
and the living dead, one would presume a spectator would identify with (and root on) the
living. Yet, this is complicated in several Romero-style films where the living are, for the
most part, not presented as wholly heroic: Romero’s own “Dead” trilogy
87
—with its
bickering families, hotheaded showoffs, and trigger-happy soldiers—would seem to bear
this out. However, in identifying with a zombie killer and reducing zombies to a “thing”
state, these games not only try to side-step any moral or ethical questions that might arise
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87
Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985)
259

from the killing of human bodies,
88
they also grant players the opportunity to feel a sense
of empowerment, both in killing attacking adversaries and in surviving a zombie
onslaught. In this way, these games can serve as rehearsals for what one might do should
a similar real-world crisis arise.
89

It might seem laughable to consider zombie-killing games as real-world target
practice, but given the fact that the notion of a zombie outbreak exists within the realm of
possibility, it is not outside the bounds of reason. Aside from the various news stories
that toy with the possibility of zombie outbreaks,
90
Peter Dendle explains that the
apocalyptic nature and ideas of invasion presented in Romero-style texts are appealing,
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88
While there are those who see no ethical questions arising from killing zombies in video games because
they read all Romero-style zombies as monsters and not humans (see, for instance, Shawn McIntosh, “The
Evolution of the Zombie: The Monster That Keeps Coming Back,” Zombie Culture: Autopsies of the Living
Dead, eds. Shawn McIntosh and Marc Leverette (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2008), 13), this
doesn’t quite ring true: if zombies are simply monsters, especially within Romero-style texts, then why do
so many of these texts contain scenes where a character must kill a former loved one who has turned into a
zombie? These scenes are not played for laughs, nor do they paint the zombie as inhuman—quite the
contrary, really—the zombie, in these instances is portrayed as very human.
89
Moreover, many college students across the United States participate in a live action role-playing game
called “Humans vs. Zombies.” All players but one start as humans and can be armed with Nerf guns and
socks (to “stun” zombies). As the game is basically a modified version of tag, the lone “zombie” player
will begin the game trying to tag in more zombies, who will then try to tag more zombies and so on. For
more on the game, see http://humansvszombies.org/.
90
See Chapter One.
260

especially to certain “survivalists and gun fetishists.”
91
As he reports, under the guise of
zombie fandom,
Gun enthusiasts proudly post jpegs of their arsenals to other interested
parties on online message boards, and discuss strategies for defense and
fortification in an imagined post-apocalyptic countryside. The line
between reality and fiction often seems blurred in some of these
individualistic communities…
92

While it would be easy to dismiss these fans’ preparation and discussion as paranoid or
extremist, in many ways, these fans are negotiating with zombie discourse in a manner
not unlike some of the 19
th
-century spectators of images of the dead—they are
negotiating between the information presented to them (about zombies, about viruses,
and about corporate or government experimentation) and their belief about the topic.
Furthermore, Romero-style zombies, the blueprint for video game-style zombies,
are the result of an infectious disease. While in Romero-style films, the cause for this
disease is rarely locatable, most video game-style texts envision a cause, and it usually
resides in a government or corporate laboratory. The plausibility that, in the real world,
one of these entities could engineer a virus or act in a way that might endanger living
humans exists. Therefore, the possibility that a real-world zombie virus outbreak could
happen underlies the very logic of most zombie video games.

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91
Peter Dendle, “The Zombie as Barometer of Cultural Anxiety,” Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and
Metaphors of Enduring Evil, ed. Niall Scott (New York: Rodopi, 2007), 53.
92
Dendle, 53.
261

And herein lies a compelling paradox: while these games may reduce the undead
to “things” and envision a world overrun with viruses, these games also envision a
solution to the zombie problem. Video games, by their very nature, are winnable. Thus,
if a player in a zombie killing game can survive long enough, he/she can potentially solve
the zombie problem: the zombie master, be it a corporate entity, nefarious government
agency, or run-of-the-mill mad scientist, can be caught or destroyed and the zombie
threat can be contained.
93
In Chapter Two, fantasies of containment in voodoo-style
films were linked to real-world fantasies of containing (or re-containing) the colonial
world or subversive elements within the United States in an attempt to keep traditional
binaristic thinking about the world (“it’s us vs. them”) alive and operative. In a similar
way, containment here is also working to create neat boundaries, seemingly between
zombies and living humans, but also metaphorically between red states and blue states,
patriotic Americans and terrorists, or any other configuration that serves to define an
outside trying to work its way in.
Moreover, these games are typically structured in a way counter to most Romero-
style films. While in the films, living survivors often exist on the inside (or a series of
insides) and the zombies try to get in, in the majority of zombie-killing games, zombies
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
93
There may even be hints of a possible cure to zombiism.
262

exist within an identifiable space, and zombie killers enter it to kill/contain the zombies.
94

Thus, containment is an underlying premise right from the start, and the fears of an
outsider group trying to invade the inside are reinscribed in a fantasy of striking first and
being on the offensive rather than the defensive. In this sense, then, these games serve
much the same purpose as the voodoo-style policing of previous generations of zombie
films: with zombies effectively made into “things” and always potentially destroyed or
contained, fantasies of a clearly-definable world with coherent fixed boundaries can be
enacted. Any liberatory power seen in voodoo- or Romero-style texts is effectively shut
down.
However, while those games in which one kills zombies represent the majority of
zombie video games, there are a number of games that envision a much more
complicated relationship between a player and zombies: one may control zombies, one
may cooperate with or try to save zombies, or one may even play as a zombie. In these
games, zombies are not reduced to “thing” status but exist as sympathetic creatures,
ranging anywhere from slaves to anti-heroes, and it is in these games that the question of
player empowerment vis-à-vis the zombie arises.

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94
A notable zombie-killing game that would be an exception to this is Plants vs. Zombies (2009). In this
game, the player positions a garden of plants to kill zombies trying to enter the house of living humans; for
an interesting discussion of the relationship between space, bodies, and Otherness in zombie films, see Jeff
May, “Zombie Geographies and the Undead City,” Social & Cultural Geography 11.3 (May 2010): 285-
298.
263

PLAY DEAD
While there is debate about the degree to which a player identifies with his/her
onscreen avatar, considering for a moment the implications of choosing to become
something radically different—say another gender or race or even, as will be discussed in
a moment, a zombie—means that the pleasures in taking up an avatar, either wholly or
partially disconnected from one’s real-world life experiences, must be examined.
Although players can never really leave their real-world bodies behind as they play a
video game (as they always bring their real-world embodied experience to bear on
gameplay), there is a sense that one can “cross-dress” in one’s choice of avatars. If we
apply Eric Lott’s or Michael Rogin’s notions of the uses of blackface to avatarial
identification, then (racial) masquerade or “cross-dressing” in games could represent both
a desire to control the body of the Other and a desire to inhabit that body.
In his discussion of the use of blackface in The Jazz Singer (1927), Rogin sees
blackface as an Americanizing force that allows for some acknowledgement of racial
desire. Important to Rogin’s reading of The Jazz Singer is the idea of doubling. Jackie
Rabinowitz (who becomes the blackface performer Jack Robin) controls his double—it
brings him success (in a sense, it is a slave to his ambition). Blackface thus allows him a
more mobile and fluid identity, and grants him the ability to climb the social ladder. But
we must keep in mind that Robin plays a person of color and is not mistaken for one. He
has the power to put on and take off the blackface and, blackface being what it is, there is
264

no danger that he will be mistaken for black. As Rogin notes, “The jazz singer rises by
putting on the mask of a group that must remain immobile, unassimilable, and fixed at
the bottom.”
95
Therefore, while it liberates Jack Robin from a fixed identity, blackface
keeps black peoples in their place. While the choice of one’s avatar in a video game does
not (necessarily) have the racial ramifications of playing blackface, it does speak to this
ability to manipulate a double to one’s advantage within a system without fear of ever
becoming that double.
Of course, there is also the element of desire at work in taking another’s (racial)
identity and trying it on. Eric Lott sees blackface as a form of racial cross-dressing that
enacts a desire (conscious or not) to overcome racial separation. Inherent in Lott’s
argument is the notion that control of the Other abroad is linked not only to control of the
Other at home but also control of the Other within—thus, blackface operates as a means
of performing such control, in essence performing “an internal colonization.”
96
Enacting
Otherness in a video game does not have the real-world implications of wearing
blackface, but it does afford the player a sense of control through splitting one’s identity
into the embodied real-world self and an Other.

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95
Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998), 92.
96
Eric Lott, “White Like Me: Racial Cross-dressing and the Construction of American Whiteness,”
Cultures of United States Imperialism, eds. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham: Duke UP, 1993),
476.
265

Martti Lahti argues that this back-and-forth presents a player with something
similar to Carol J. Clover’s idea of spectatorial identification with both the slasher and
the “Final Girl” in slasher films;
97
Lahti believes players are at once, trying to orient what
the avatar does to their own physical actions and at the same time, they are often playing
with the fantasy of trying on exotic other selves—thus, players are able to inhabit the
same and the very different at the same time.
98
This, of course, begs comparison to bell
hooks’s notion of “eating the Other” and does offer the player, regardless of his/her real-
world identity, a position akin to real-world heteronormative whiteness: he/she can try on
the exotic without fear of losing his/her real-world positionality.
99
Thus, like those
zombified in voodoo-style films, the Other appears as an attractive but ultimately
reversible state.
And herein lies the problem. While the zombie, by its position as Other (or
liminal being, or even simply as something radically different from the player’s real-
world lived identity), presents the promise of granting the player the opportunity to
experience an altogether different way of being in the world, this is circumscribed by the
way the process ultimately empowers the living player’s power to choose and discard the

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97
See Chapter Three.
98
See Lahti.
99
See Chapter Two, 136.
266

avatarial identity at will. This serves to paint that identity as subject to the whims of the
living player and manages to undercut any of the inherent power it might contain.
Similarly, Tara McPherson notes the similarities between blackface and trying on
digital identities but sees one major difference in the two processes: “Now there is a
tendency towards seamlessness, a flipping of whiteness into otherness without the seams
of artifice that the burnt-corked faces of minstrelsy always revealed, a move towards
transparency which disavows connection.”
100
This is a vital observation in terms of
players taking on a zombie or zombie-identified avatar. Death, in some renderings,
especially those where one is made more acutely aware of the processes of
transformation into “death,” might become, if not necessarily more concrete, then at least
more relevant to the self.
101
Yet, in the form of the zombie avatar, it becomes abstracted.
It is simply another costume, another virtual positionality to try on.
Still, while the relationship between the player and avatar may work to undermine
a zombie identity as identity, it still holds power as a symbol. In “The Funk of Forty-
Thousand Years,” Marc Leverette claims, “The living dead are a celebration of the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
100
Tara McPherson, “Self, Other and Electronic Media,” The New Media Book, ed. Dan Harries (London:
BFI Publishing, 2002), 188.
101
If, as will be discussed in the next chapter, one consciously made over oneself into a decomposing
corpse using real-world make-up and costuming, for instance.
267

liminal space that we can only hope we never experience directly.”
102
Yet, as this project
has shown in Chapter Three and will show in Chapter Five, the zombie state and its
inherent liminality can be very imaginatively attractive and empowering for some: the
zombie exists both inside and outside “living” dominant structures, so it is, at once, able
to be the transgressive outsider while remaining visible/viable within the system. As was
stated in Chapter Three, the zombie gestures toward another way of being, and this makes
it an attractive symbol for those who might otherwise feel exploited or made invisible by
dominant systems.
For instance, Ron Scott, in his discussion of players who play as undead in the
MMORPG World of Warcraft or as Necromancers (zombie-makers) in the action RPG
Diablo (1996-present), notes that originally Blizzard, the company that developed both
games, assumed that players would not want to play as “bad guys,” meaning that they
wouldn’t want to be zombies or Necromancers; as he observes, in the case of World of
Warcraft, “Blizzard even tried to stack the deck by making the undead difficult to
play…”
103
Even though originally both the undead and Necromancers were conceived of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
102
Marc Leverette, “The Funk of Forty Thousand Years; or, How the (Un)Dead Get Their Groove On,”
Zombie Culture: Autopsies of the Living Dead, eds. Shawn McIntosh and Marc Leverette (Lanham, MD:
The Scarecrow Press, 2008), 196.
103
Ron Scott, “Now I’m Feeling Zombified: Playing the Zombie Online,” Zombie Culture: Autopsies of the
Living Dead, eds. Shawn McIntosh and Marc Leverette (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2008), 172.
268

as bad guys within the games, Scott reports that many players still wanted to play as them
“instead of one of the other, more heroic races.”
104

Choosing these identities, though, is not necessarily easy for players. Scott states
that players who chose to play as undead or Necromancers “form clans that are often
abused by other clans of ‘good’ characters,” so in some ways, zombies and zombie-
makers are positioned as outsiders by those players more conventionally aligned with the
dominant system’s (game world’s) standards of good and evil.
105
Still, often, these
players also embrace their outcast status. For, as Scott reports, playing as these
characters, among other things, allows players to fly in the face of conceptions of clear
demarcations between good and evil that may underlie the premises of these games.
106

These are zombies or zombie-makers within RPGs, where a player has much
more control over his/her avatar’s actions, goals, and interactions with other players, so
the kind of zombie or zombie-maker one might be, while certainly constrained by the
rules of the game world and social rules dictated by other players, is more at the
discretion of the player than in other games. Still, even though these undead and
Necromancers may not represent the more progressive kinds of zombies discussed in
Chapter Three (although they certainly may), they do point to the attractiveness inherent
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104
Scott, 173.
105
Scott, 180.
106
Scott, 180.
269

in the zombie for some: although an underlying assumption of this project is that zombies
are popular characters, in part, because of the “liberatory” potential of the zombie state,
players who choose to play as undead and Necromancers remind that zombies may also
be appealing because of their inherently contrarian nature. Zombies stand in opposition,
be it to the “good” guys or to the living.
In games where a character’s goals are more predetermined by the game itself,
there are still a number of positions to inhabit in regards to zombies. One of the most
complicated of these are those games that allow one to become a zombie master. While
the Necromancer role in Diablo has already been discussed, in the 2008 puzzle game
Corpse Craft: Incident at Weardd Academy, the 2009 games Zombie Tycoon and Zombie
Wranglers, or the MMORPG City of Heroes (2004-present) players also strategically
command groups of zombies.
107
In the essay, “Zombies in Gamespace: Form, Content,
and Meaning in Zombie-Based Video Games,” Tanya Krzywinska notes that “the reason
most people play games is the sense of power and agency that they are afforded in
relation to the game text. In games, the fate of the player-character, with whom we are
invited to identify as well as act through, is very much in the hands of the player.”
108

Yet, in these games, there is a second level of agency exercised over a group of zombies.

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107
This was actually a feature of the MMORPG City of Villains (2005) and that game became integrated
into the game City of Heroes.
108
Krzywinska, “Zombies in Gamespace,” 164.
270

Of course, as with the discussion of Necromancers in Diablo, one could argue that
the zombie-maker/zombie-master character within these games still positions a player
outside of the living norm. Still, the colonial relationship between zombie slaves and
voodoo masters on display in voodoo-style films is here updated to include Romero-style
zombies and can thus give players a deeper sense of control over colonized bodies than
that afforded through voodoo-style films: in these games, one succeeds by exploiting
zombie labor and as zombies are, after all, imagined largely as faceless hordes, they
become highly expendable. Hence, while in the majority of zombie video games—those
in which a player hunts zombies—the ethical concerns about killing humans are
obfuscated by making human bodies into zombie “things,” here, the ethical concerns one
might have about using slave labor are likewise elided by turning human bodies into
zombies and positioning the player as only powerful inasmuch as he/she exploits them.
109

On the other side of the coin, there has also been at least one zombie video game
in which the player inhabits a character actively trying to save zombies. The 1997 game
Voodoo Kid, produced by the French company Infogrames,
110
was aimed at younger
players (ages 8 to 15) who could play as either a young girl or boy. In the game, the
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109
An interesting game that takes up exploitation in the fight against zombies would be Plants vs. Zombies
in which the player arranges a garden of special plants to fight zombies. Part of a player’s strategy within
the game will be to set up certain plants to be sacrificed so that others may survive and fight the zombies.
110
See Chapters One, Two and Three for discussions on the zombie’s earlier connections to France.
271

player’s character reads a story about Baron Saturday,
111
an evil Vodouisant who has
turned his ship’s crew into zombies and holds their souls captive. The character then falls
asleep and while dreaming, visits Saturday’s ship. There, the character tries to defeat
Saturday and free the zombified souls.
Aside from some of the game’s graphics and the constant tom-tom drumming on
its soundtrack, there is little to link this game to voodoo-style films, yet the game is
noteworthy in its attention to Vodou fact
112
and its sympathetic view of zombies as
exploited workers. These exploited slaves-as-zombies are recognized as such, but while
this is a progressive stance and it does not imagine its player’s power coming from
exploiting zombie labor, it can’t be overlooked that the game positions its players as
saviors, not unlike the multitude of white American males who save the day in voodoo-
style films.
While the racial component of such is elided in Voodoo Kid, it does allude to the
larger issues of race found in zombie media. For instance, in Resident Evil 5 (2009), the
game’s protagonists hunt black (African) zombies. Imagery from preview trailers of the
game sparked intense debate when they were released, especially because in viewing
some trailers, it was hard to tell the difference between zombies and “normal” African
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111
This is another rendering of the name of the Vodou Loa Baron Samedi (Bawon Samedi); see Chapter
Three.
112
Its use of spirit jars (see Chapter One, particularly Elizabeth McAlister’s work on zonbi) and its
references to Loa and Baron Saturday.
272

civilians.
113
Furthermore, with text in at least one trailer describing “vulnerable
countries,” “an infection of insanity,” and claiming “the boundaries of light and dark will
be drawn,” some asked if the game was promoting racist imagery that played into
colonial desires to control or destroy Africa; others asked if Africa was simply a random
setting that carried no deeper meanings, and still others wondered if the attention paid to
black zombies in Resident Evil 5 elided the fact that white zombies had been used as prey
in previous Resident Evil titles.
114

What is telling here is that the logic of reducing zombies to “thing” status—so
vital for games like Resident Evil 5 that are predicated on killing zombies—breaks down
for some players in the face of racial identity (and notably, a racial identity that dominant
systems have historically tried to cast as “thing”). Resident Evil 5, like the games that
cast players as zombie masters, straddles an interesting ideological line, then, as it tries to
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113
In at least one trailer, the only difference between “normal” citizens and zombies seems to be red eyes
(zombies).
114
“Resident Evil 5: Tokyo Game Show Extended Alternate Trailer,” (2008) Capcom, accessed on January
20, 2009, XBox console. See also Alex Pham, “Racism in Resident Evil 5? Capcom, two black actors
respond,” Los Angeles Times Online (February 12, 2009), accessed on July 21, 2010,
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/02/resident-evil-5.html; Jamin Brophy-Warren,
“‘Resident Evil 5’ Reignites Debates about Race in Videogames,” Wall Street Journal Online (March 12,
2009), accessed on July 21, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123672060500987853.html; and Tracey
John, “Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal on the ‘Resident Evil 5’ Trailer: ‘This Imagery Has a History’,” MTV
Multiplayer Blog (April 10, 2008), accessed on July 21, 2010, http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/04/10/
newsweeks-ngai-croal-on-the-resident-evil-5-trailer-this-imagery-has-a-history/. One of the trailers for Left
4 Dead 2 (2009) is also noteworthy in terms of its implicit use of race and racial politics, especially when
considered alongside narratives and images of post-Katrina life in New Orleans: set in New Orleans, the
trailer starts out with pictures of the bayou and the French Quarter flashing by, zombies are then revealed to
have infested the city, and the African-American narrator (the in-game character Coach) says, “I ain’t
gonna die waitin’ on salvation. Long as we still got guns, we gonna fight” (“Left 4 Dead 2: E3 Debut
Teaser Trailer,” (2009) Valve Software, accessed on July 21, 2009, XBox console).
273

make death abstract: dead human bodies are made over as ravenous “things” to be killed,
all the while valorizing the player’s ability to stay alive. Yet, a slippage occurs whereby
a game like Resident Evil 5, or even Voodoo Kid, actually begins to bring unequal real-
world vulnerabilities to death back to the fore—life expectancies, or in these cases,
vulnerabilities to zombiism, vary, and things like race and geographical place are clearly
a factor in this.
In Resident Evil 5, the people of “vulnerable” African countries need the
Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance and Delta Team to save them, just as the
zombie crew of Baron Saturday’s ship need the white children of Voodoo Kid to rescue
them. Yet, while these games hint at the realities of concrete death, spectators are
positioned as those who can potentially contain death and beat it. Zombies may point to
an afterlife, but in any iteration, it is often envisioned as an afterlife out of control;
therefore, those who destroy zombies or those who act as zombie masters tame the
afterlife, and given the use of extra lives and repetition in video games, players are able to
conquer “death” in the process.
Video game play is not a fixed experience; rather, for most games, there is
repetition with variation: players learn as they play,
115
but even with this learned
knowledge, players aren’t able to reproduce exactly gameplay from one experience to the
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115
Memory and the ability to repeat actions/experiences factor heavily into video game play. Users draw
on previous experience of playing a specific game, a similar type of game, or another game in the franchise.
Additionally, in games that draw on previous media texts, like zombie games, players are able to draw
upon extra-textual knowledge, like the fact that destroying the brain kills Romero-style zombies.
274

next. Still, the player will try and fail, try and fail, and along the way, she will gather
information and learn how to better master the game. There is thus a sense of self-
determination in video games that is absent in film, and this may produce different
reactions to video game zombies as opposed to their filmic counterparts. Tanya
Krzywinska maintains that because there is a sense of self-determination in horror games,
players experience a more acute sense of losing control when they die or fail than they
would as spectators to a film.
116
In a film, the spectator never holds power over the
outcome of events in the diegetic world; in a video game, the player does.
Furthermore, the repetition in games plays directly with notions of death (you can
“die” and be reborn, usually without serious consequence);
117
video game play allows
players to learn and repeat in order to be able to master the game, and in a sense, players
are learning control over death. In a game like the original Resident Evil, for instance, a
player must die in several attempts at battling zombies before being able to move through
the outskirts of Raccoon City to secure victory, and victory is only attained if the player
can keep his avatar alive to the very end. He must literally overcome death to win.
Beyond the obvious link to the idea of dying and being reborn found in zombie
mythology—of being able to cheat death—there is a pleasure to be found in repetition as
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116
Tanya Krzywinska, “Hands-on Horror,” Screen Play: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces, eds. King, Geoff
and Tanya Krzywinska (London: Wallflower, 2002).
117
Or, in the game Planescape: Torment (1999), dying might actually be a good strategic move; see
Krzywinska, “Zombies in Gamespace.”
275

well. Knowing what is going to happen on a particular level or how to solve a particular
puzzle because you’ve solved it before offers players the ability to master the chaos of
the system. Unlike the non-game world, players can be prepared and ready for what
awaits them. Furthermore, as Eva Kingsepp reminds, death is hierarchical in games:
“Your enemies pass away, but your own death is a rather temporary absence.”
118
Again,
while it isn’t explicit, this arrangement begins to allow the concrete realities of death—
that one’s circumstances largely determine when and how one is going to die—to show
through the abstraction of it.
119

Contemporary representations of death in video games thus seem to align closely
with the medicalization or pornographization of death: survival horror games like
Resident Evil encourage one to become a killing machine, but the “things” one kills are
not necessarily human, or at least, they are not intended to be read as such. Still, death is
toyed with. On one level, one’s explicit aim is not to die, or in dying, to learn how to
beat death the next time. “Death” is a built-in feature of the games and therefore, on an
abstract level, it is being constantly interjected into the player’s entertainment. Yet, on
another level, when engaging with the stories presented by zombie games, one is also
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118
Eva Kingsepp, “Fighting Hyperreality with Hyperreality: History and Death in World War II Digital
Games,” Games and Culture 2.4 (October 2007), accessed on October 14, 2010, Sage Publications Online,
371.
119
On one hand, having a zombie infection or a zombie spell would seem to indicate an equal-opportunity
form of death, but as was discussed in the previous chapter, death, in the form of zombification, does not
affect all equally.
276

trying to avoid death—being bitten by a zombie is typically a gory processes and it not
only means the end of gameplay, it also means one becomes a zombie. This
transformation may not be presented within the game itself, but it is an implicit aspect of
any game dealing with hunting or fighting Romero-style zombies.
One must also consider that in some games, death, in the form of a zombie
identity, is a given from the outset. Yet, in games where one plays as zombie, death is
avoided in its very presence: the character—as a zombie—is already dead, which, beyond
the repeatability of the game and the extra lives a player may have, serves to soften
death’s sting. If the character is already dead, how much can dying again really hurt
him?
Still, as a zombie, a player occupies the position of death somewhat differently
than in other games. While in any number of games, one might play as a bringer of
death—shooting zombies, for instance—by playing as zombie, one is allowed to become
living death. The 19
th
century events discussed earlier facilitated communication with the
dead via technology, but here, a player can assume the position of the dead-come-back-
to-life via technology. With spirit photography or phantasmagoria, one was given proof
of the afterlife, but it was from the perspective of the dead. Here, the living spectator is
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able to experience that perspective and can enact a fantasy of the afterlife previously
unavailable.
In many ways, then, assuming the role of the zombie in video games like Stubbs
the Zombie, Left 4 Dead (2008), or World of Warcraft is inherently empowering beyond
the mechanics of the game—while the ability to regenerate or replay is a built-in
mechanism of the game, playing as a zombie ensures that one is always already dead and
alive. Of course, this necessarily means that one has to identify with a character that is a
decomposing corpse who probably has a taste for human flesh or is at the very least,
pitted against living human interests. Still, as with the films discussed in Chapter Three,
these zombies, by the very virtue of their position as antagonists to dominant human
systems of power can offer a player a chance to exist outside similar dominant structures
that may come to bear on his/her real-world life.
In Stubbs the Zombie, for instance, the player inhabits the character of Stubbs.
Stubbs was a traveling salesman during the Great Depression, but he was killed by the
father of a farm girl he bedded, and in the game, he has risen two decades later to seek his
revenge and to find his lady love. Stubb’s mission is clear: hunt humans, eat their brains,
and turn them into a zombie army that can run amok in Punchbowl, Pennsylvania. As

278

one’s avatar, Stubbs is a green, male,
120
visibly-rotting corpse who wears a rumpled suit
and a fedora, smokes cigarettes, and has the typical Romero-style slow gait.
Unlike many zombie-killing avatars, or zombie-making characters, Stubbs is not
necessarily visually imposing, nor does he wield conventional weaponry. Rather, Stubbs
relies on a rather non-conventional set of skills to battle living humans. He can eat the
brains of the living, which will turn them into zombies that can likewise eat the brains of
the living and turn them into zombies as well. He can herd nearby zombies by whistling,
but perhaps his most important strength is that he can use his body parts as explosives or
rip body parts off of others to make makeshift weapons. He can even use his body parts
to “possess” the living in order to use their weaponry and machinery against them. Thus,
the Romero-style zombie, whose body is imagined as decaying and falling apart, is here
empowered by that very fact: the processes of decomposition grant Stubbs the ability to
outmaneuver his opponents, who have no similar recourse. Yet, at the same time,
because Stubbs can “possess” the living via his body parts, he also has access to all of
their weaponry too. It’s the best of both worlds; Stubbs can exploit both living and
“dead” technologies.

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120
Interestingly enough, while in a game like Stubbs the Zombie or Dead Rising, your avatar is male, many
of the other zombie-killer franchises offer a choice of genders, male and female, for your avatar, and the
Resident Evil and Left 4 Dead franchises in particular tend to offer avatars in a variety of races as well. See
Krzywinska, “Zombies in Gamespace,” for a discussion of the various avatarial choices available in zombie
games.
279

In Stubbs the Zombie, living humans are posed as the adversaries, and unlike
those games that position zombies as “things,” these humans still retain some degree of
humanity. Yet, as residents of Punchbowl—touted as a paradise of clean living but
quickly revealed to be a fascist state—they are also positioned as either dupes, who don’t
understand or care about the true nature of the society in which they live, or those
complicit in the society in the first place. In his effort to destroy Punchbowl, then, Stubbs
is positioned as a force for social good. On one level, then, playing as Stubbs grants the
player a positionality not unlike he/she would get from any other avatar on the side of
“good.” This would allow one the pleasure of transgression—eating human brains and
inhabiting the space of the living dead—balanced by the safety of being structured as the
moral/ethical right.
However, just as in the films discussed in Chapter Three or the performances that
will be discussed in Chapter Five, playing as a zombie is also tempered on one side, by
the temporary nature of the identification and the possible colonizing impulses
underlining “trying on” the identity of the Other, but on the other side, by the rejection of
the reification of the normal (living, clean, conforming) as necessarily good. In this way,
inhabiting the identity of the zombie within a game like Stubbs the Zombie allows one to
inhabit (temporarily) the space occupied by some of the characters discussed in Chapter
Three, whereby one may still be operating under dominant structures but one also
remains able to challenge and contest these structures as well.
280

Still, as with the other zombie games discussed, trying on zombiness in a virtual
world, which could be read as an attempt to confront the death of the self in a meaningful
way, ultimately only serves to make death abstract. As “death” in the form of a zombie
like Stubbs, death becomes an identity that one can try on, and the realities of one’s own
real-world mortality are subsumed by the medium’s insistence on repeatability and the
character’s very premise as a figure that has already beaten death. The realities of
death—the messy and costly processes of dying and unequal vulnerabilities to death—are
hidden behind the fact that a game like Stubbs the Zombie has reversed the tables on the
traditional zombie-killing construct: although the human adversaries/targets of Stubbs are
humanized, the game’s very structure serves to set them up as Other to the moral right.
They thus become that which must be destroyed (or transformed into zombies) for the
player (and/as Stubbs) to win.
121

Marc Leverette argues that “the zombie is a state of exception” as proposed by
Giorgio Agamben.
122
This logic works in the majority of zombie video games and in
other Romero- and video game-style texts where zombies are those bodies that are both
produced by dominant systems yet are removed from the supposed protection of those
systems. This process of making the state of exception visible could be read as a
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121
Of course, inherent in the premise of Stubbs the Zombie, in particular, is that although he is killing these
humans, it is a very temporary death as they will almost immediately reawaken as zombies.
122
Leverette, 198; this is a premise shared by Meghan Sutherland in “Rigor/Mortis: The Industrial Life of
Style in American Zombie Cinema,” Framework 48.1 (Spring 2007): 64-78.
281

progressive stance in these games and films as they display, via the metaphor of the
zombie, the real-world processes by which some are constructed as politically viable and
others are excluded as expendable. However, the spectacularization of zombie bodies via
special effects and gore and the tendency, especially in video games, to render them as a
mass rather than as individuated characters serves to dilute, if not completely eradicate,
any such work. This is one reason that it becomes much more difficult, narratively, to
kill off a sympathetic zombie like Bub in Day of the Dead (1985) or Fido from the film
Fido (2006): zombies as a state of exception only work when stripped of all humanity.
The game Stubbs the Zombie turns the typical zombie-killing logic around and
imagines all of the living humans of Punchbowl as existing in a state of exception. Of
course, within the logic of Punchbowl’s society itself, Stubbs and his zombies occupy
this position, but under Stubb’s logic—and more importantly, under the game’s built-in
logic—the living humans come to be, in effect, zombified: they are bodies that must be
dispatched with for the moral right (Stubbs) and the player to win. Yet, while the
potential for real political comment exists within the game, it is buried under the
construction of the game world as a retro-futuristic fantasy and through the assumption
that any adversary—human, zombie, robot, or monster—is processed via the same kind
of game logic (this must be killed for the player to win) that exceeds any ideological
questions the player might have (why is it okay to kill these living humans?).

282

This, of course, is only within the realm of the game. While the logic of the game
may ask a living player to assume the living humans of the game world exist in a state of
exception, the player’s real-world lived identity undergoes no similar change. Still, the
choice to become Other—and at that, an Other often depicted in opposition to the living,
of which the player is necessarily part—allows the player to flirt with notions of the
afterlife and the ability of the dead to re-emerge in the world of the living.
Some games, however, go even further and try to completely destablize the notion
of a clear-cut normal/good and abnormal/evil. In the game Planescape: Torment (1999),
for instance, Diane Carr notes that the game “is not set in a place where ‘normality’ has
gone wrong: there was no normality to begin with. Its….zombies are not agents of
perverse disruption or upheaval.”
123
Yet, while these zombies might be neutral, they are
also mute workers who often have clues for the player’s avatar, The Nameless One, sewn
into their mouths. The game thus assumes a world not unlike those envisioned in the
earliest zombie films. However, Tanya Krzywinska reads the game a bit differently. For
her, The Nameless One, by virtue of dying and coming back to life, is himself a
zombie.
124
Within the game, The Nameless One is trying to reconstruct his past by
regaining lost memories, and Krzywinska observes, “Being a zombie amnesic affords
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123
Carr.
124
Krzywinska, “Zombies in Gamespace,” 162.
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enigmatic, other-to-oneself status…”
125
Certainly, the game does not participate in the
binaristic thinking of most zombie video games. Yet, even here, the realities of death are
obfuscated in a game where dying is sometimes a good strategic move.
126

DEATH ISN’T SO BAD
Given the comparatively high cost of spirit photography, it is safe to assume that
most sitters enjoyed a relatively privileged lifestyle. Similarly, evidence points to a
largely white middle class audience for séances.
127
One can also assume that, given the
cost of most video game consoles and the games themselves, most players have
disposable income. Therefore, one might extrapolate that the entertainments thusfar
discussed had and continue to have consumer/spectators with relatively priveleged life
chances versus the rest of the world. They at least have an economic advantage others do
not have. What does it mean, then, that these people, who are probably less likely to fall
prey to the circumstances that lead to early death, find entertainment in seeing the dead
and magically transcending death? If one is encouraged, both by the technology and by
the spectatorial position it engenders, to accept death as a fact but also to acknowledge
that its finality may not be set in stone, death becomes something to be manipulated.
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125
Krzywinska, “Zombies in Gamespace,” 162.
126
Krzywinska, “Zombies in Gamespace,” 162.
127
I am basing this, of course, on the photographic evidence and descriptions of séances I have reviewed.
284

In 19
th
-century spectacles like séances, spirit photography, and phantasmagoria
shows, death was mainly focused on communication with dead loved ones, and there was
some sense of community or intimacy with these dead. At the same time, though, while
the dead of the Medieval period were somewhat equal members of the community, these
19
th
-century dead operated in service to the living. They did not appear to admonish or to
govern so much as to assure the living and serve their interests. Even though the dead
were supposedly returning (and this was certainly ripe for debate), which would seem to
bring death back into the cultural consciousness in a meaningful way, these deaths were
made over as safe and aesthetically pleasing. There was nothing personal, nor nothing
truly grounded in the realities of dying, about them.
Yet, in zombie video games, the relationship between the living and the dead,
when they appear, is not so straightforward. First of all, the dead in most zombie video
games are largely adversarial in nature. There is no personal connection to them. They
are merely bodies to be disposed of. Death has become even more impersonal in this
rendering—people die every day in wars, political attacks, and senseless tragedies, but
the reality of those deaths is masked behind a technology that teaches players that dead
bodies are points to be earned.
Of course, while a player could be said to be dealing with the death of the Other
in the form of his/her avatar, he/she is also forced to deal with the death of the self—as
the double/avatar dies, so too does the player, in a sense. Death is therefore made highly
285

personal, and yet, because one has the opportunity to die so many times and in so many
ways during gameplay, death is re-abstracted: it is a hollow, painless procedure from
which one recovers quickly.
In this sense, then, while there are moments that allow the concrete realities of
death to show through in zombie video games, in most, because of the mechanics of
gameplay or the game’s inherent goals, death has become even more abstracted and
distanced than it was in phantasmagoria shows and spirit photography studios. The 19
th
-
century events allowed spectators possible reunion with dead loved ones and at the same
time, created a space in which the individual spectator could be centered as meaning-
maker. Video games make death even more abstract, but they also overtly center the
spectator to an even higher degree. In each, death is transcended while centering the
living spectator. This re-inscribes the assumed (dominant) audience’s real-world
positionality under the guise of confronting death.
To play as a zombie is no different. Death is seemingly embraced as one becomes
the undead, but the very nature of the zombie in the first place already negates that—
zombi fact and zombie fiction in almost any form are about death being cheated. This is
made even more apparent with a medium in which beating death is a given: embracing
death, to a degree, is the only way to learn and to win. Still, performing as zombie, as
will be discussed in Chapter Five, can be a critical action: one can disrupt normative
expectations of behavior and appearance, or as a dead body in the world of the living, one
286

can point to the hypocracies and inequalities of living structures, and this is certainly
evident in a game like Stubbs the Zombie.
Yet, the very nature of gameplay serves to undercut any progressive positioning
of the player that a game like Stubbs the Zombie might do. Yes, Stubbs is a zombie, but
in many ways, he is no different from any of the zombie-killing characters in other
games; the roles have simply been reversed. Zombiism, in Stubbs the Zombie then,
almost becomes a reactionary position defending the norm. Almost.
128

One also does not confront one’s own mortality in the process of becoming
Stubbs—at least not in a concrete sense. Stubbs is a character one tries on, and putting
on the zombie is like a form of cross-dressing or blackface. One puts on the trapping of
what could be called an anti-human Other and is free to eat brains and cause mayhem,
safe in the knowledge that one is the “hero” of the piece, on the side of the moral right.
Then, one is able to stop. The game ends; the avatar/double disappears, and one returns
to one’s real-world lived identity. Ultimately, the ability to try on this Other, without fear
of any lasting effects, reifies one’s position as living and in fact, does the same kind of
ideological work that so many voodoo-style films did: it shuts down the progressive
potentials of the zombie state.

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128
I say almost because Stubbs does still exist in opposition to Punchbowl and its fascist imagining of
American society as clean and conformist. Stubbs also flies in the face of traditionally beautiful heroes.
287

The removal of representations of the dead from mundane life in the West during
the 19
th
and 20
th
centuries contributed to a way of approaching the dead, death and visual
manifestations of the two in dualistic ways: death, for the most part, was no longer
something ordinary, something experienced in the home and the community as a natural
part of everyday life; death was taken out of the home, put into the hospital and was made
odd. As such, the ways in which one could face death and make sense of it, while
remaining similar in terms of what was produced (images of dead loved ones) and what
the ultimate goal of production was (to make sense of death), were much less visible, and
much less familiar, on a personal level. Hence, in order to encounter death in ways much
more akin to how it had previously been experienced!in other words, in order to
encounter it as something everyday and fairly ordinary!one turned to specialized
representations of death where it could be experienced safely. Spectacles where the dead
were on display, like spirit photography, phantasmagorias, and séances, provided a means
of doing just that.
These media, however, also taught audiences that seeing and believing weren’t
necessarily the same thing. Such phenomena were often intended to be deceptive and
thus taught audiences to approach the visual skeptically, with a mixture of belief and
disbelief. Yet, these spectacles played on one’s beliefs and hopes and produced images
that seemed to both validate technological progress—there were instruments that could
“see” better than the human eye—while simultaneously re-inscribing sight as a valid
288

measure of the world. So, many audience members continued to believe in that which
they could see, especially as it was mediated by the camera or projector. While this
might be called a willing suspension of disbelief, it is something different. These
spectators did not invest in the notion that the scenes they saw played out were self-
contained worlds, like the diegetic world of a film, but that these scenes were part and
parcel of the very reality they inhabited, causing some spectators to hold a doubled
viewing position where they existed as both external and internal to the processes of
meaning making and in which notions of “real” and “imaginary” and “true” and “false”
became much more muddied.
Video game players are engaging with a self-contained diegetic world when they
play games like Resident Evil or Plants vs. Zombies (2009), yet like the spectators of
phantasmagoria, spirit photography, and séances, they bring their learned knowledge and
their beliefs to bear on their experiences. They too hold a doubled viewing position,
existing at once as both inside and outside the game world itself and they too deal with a
technology that seemingly transcends death. With spirit photography, séances, and
phantasmagoria, the camera and the projector appeared able to see the spirit world and
communicate with an Other, who was dead and who was the focus of the interaction:
death existed outside the self and yet was ironically all about the self—the self being able
to mourn, memorialize and hope. The dead existed to entertain and to enlighten the
living and to prove that belief (or disbelief) in an afterlife was valid.
289

With video games, communication is not the focus; rather, technology allows one
both to beat and in some cases, to become, death. Death, here, is also all about the self:
as the player learns more, he/she lives longer and forestalls death. However, the player’s
death, when it does come, is a privileged death, a death without permanency, a death one
can learn from. So yet again, death exists to entertain and to enlighten the living; death is
all about the self as the player is centered as meaning maker within the process. In both
instances, death is made abstract—either turned into an image of the Other or made into a
painless process one quickly recovers from—and the concrete realities of death are
subsumed into spectacle.
At first thought, fitting zombies into the urge to aestheticize death and hence, to
neuter it could provide an opportunity for the concrete realities of death to show through
the spectacle. And, in some ways, this does play out. The Medieval conception of death
envisaged the dead as substantive members of the living community, even able on
occasion to help police and protect it. Yet, over time, these dead lost their place. Within
some zombie video games, though, zombies take over a similar role.
Necromancers in Diablo may use their zombies in ways counter to other groups,
but this not only serves their clans’ purposes (and helps these players/avatars achieve
their goals), it also serves the desires of some members of the community to play as and
identify with characters that do not maintain traditional heroic status. They, in effect,
serve as a counterbalance to the traditionally heroic as it is imagined in the game world.
290

For these players, operating as something outside the normative definitions of “good” is
liberating. Moreover, Stubbs could certainly be seen as a figure of the dead able to police
the living community. Still, while these examples show that the dead today can be
imagined in ways similar to the Medieval dead, these video game dead exist only as non-
corporeal beings and their relationship exists with the living of a game world and not the
real world. Additionally, the zombie, as it is known in U.S. popular culture, already
exists as an aestheticization and abstraction itself—hiding the concrete realities of
slavery, colonialism, and racism behind a movie monster mask. Therefore, when the
zombie is made the focus of a text, the abstraction of death is likely to remain.
Horror hides horror. Thus, at the end of Stubbs the Zombie, if the player has
managed to keep Stubbs “alive” and vanquish his enemies, he/she is rewarded with
Stubb’s reunion with his lady love, Maggie Monday, whom he promptly bites and
zombifies; Stubbs also learns that he has a son—none other than Punchbowl’s founder
Andrew Monday. Andrew is none too pleased with this revelation and sends his goons to
kill Stubbs. If the player is able to survive this last fight, Stubbs escapes Monday’s
headquarters with Maggie in tow and makes it to a rowboat. Fighter jets fly overhead
and a bomb begins to drop. As Stubbs and Maggie lean in for one last kiss, a nuclear
explosion sounds and the image fades to black. The realities of a depression-era
salesman, murdered by an angry farmer, are cloaked behind the fun of playing as a
zombie out to destroy a fascist town, and the end of the game itself makes Maggie’s
291

transformation into a zombie beautiful and sensual—the culmination of normative
heterosexual desire. Even their “deaths” in the rowboat, kissing, serve to take the sting
out of dying by making it something beautiful, transcendent, and remote.
In the 19
th
century, a spectator could buy a spirit photograph and be told, in
essence, it’s alright; death isn’t so bad. Now, a player can play a game and learn that
death isn’t so bad; after all, you’ll get to play again. Death is made over into spectacle,
temporary experience: as real-life death and dying were removed from everyday life and
made foreign, they actually reentered mundane life, and continue to reenter it, in ways
that serve to make them comfortable and comforting.
Zombies aren’t a visual technology; they are folklore and fiction, belief and
skepticism, faceless slaves and hungry cannibals, and yet, in all their horror, they too
serve to make death over. To read about, to watch, or to play as a zombie is to learn that
death can be transcended just as it can be ordered and controlled. Keeping that nagging
belief alive that zombies could be real is thus a strange but not altogether irrational
comfort: it centers the spectator or player and reminds him/her that death is what one
makes it.

292

Chapter Five
Carnivals of the Undead: Performing the Zombie

“[T]he first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make
oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead…”
—Roland Barthes
1

UNION DELEGATE: What do we want?
ZOMBIES: Brrrraaaaiiinnnns!
UNION DELEGATE: When do we want them?
ZOMBIES: Brrrraaaaiiinnnns!”
—Chant heard at the 2006 Melbourne Zombie Shuffle
2

Five teenage girls sat on a curb in Newhall, California late one October 2009
afternoon. Their faces were pale, their clothing ripped, and they were covered in blood
(fig. 5.1). It was a disturbing sight, but these girls were not crime victims nor were they
movie extras or trick-or-treaters. They were zombies, and the environment surrounding
these girls was telling: they were outside a comic book store, flanked on one side by boy
scouts and food drive collectors and on the other side by a make-up tent where other
“zombies”—mothers, fathers, grandparents, people of all ages and races—were waiting

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1981), 31.
2
Luke Buckmaster, “Living to be Dead: The Melbourne Zombie Shuffle,” Infilm Australia (June 2006),
accessed on April 18, 2007, http://www.infilm.com.au/features/zombieshuffle.htm.
293

Figure 5.1: Waiting for the Zombie Walk, Newhall, CA
(Photograph by author, October 17, 2009)

to be transformed into the undead (figs. 5.2, 5.3 & 5.4).
3
In a few minutes, the zombies
were set to ramble through Old Town Newhall for no real purpose other than to take their
zombie horde for a walk through town.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3
While I think it is important to discuss the demographics of participants of the walks, this is difficult as
organizers and participants generally do not keep track of those sorts of statistics and walks vary from place
to place. Given my experience of walks and my research, I believe I can say, generally speaking, that many
participants are in their late teens and twenties; however, there are walkers who are in their thirties, forties,
fifties, and sixties, as well as children at the events. The majority of walkers seem to be white, but again,
there are a wide variety of ethnicities and races represented in walks. There may be slightly more men than
women involved in the walks, but again, that might be debatable.
294

Figure 5.2: Boy Scouts (on the Right) Wait to Lead the Zombies on the Walk;
in the Background, Organizers Collect Food for a Canned Food Drive
(Photograph by author, October 17, 2009)

Figure 5.3: Preparing Zombie Walkers: Behind the Girls (to the Left), the Make-Up Tent
(Photograph by author, October 17, 2009)

295

Figure 5.4: The Make-Up Tent
(Photograph by author, October 17, 2009)

Zombie Walks are events where groups of people dressed as zombies invade
public spaces, and walks like the one in Newhall have been taking place throughout the
world, especially in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, and Great
Britain, since roughly 2001.
4
Typically, word of an event spreads online through
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
4
Also known as Zombie Marches, Zombie Crawls, and Zombie Shuffles. There are two similar types of
events, which I will not be discussing in this chapter. First, there is the Zombie Pub Crawl, which is a type
of Zombie Walk where “zombies” travel from pub to pub drinking over the course of an afternoon/evening.
Second, there are Zombie Proms, which are, just as you might expect, proms where all of the guests are
dressed as zombies. Of course, Zombie Walks are also related to events like political marches or parades.
However, they do not have the overt political intentions of political marches, nor are they related to the
same ideas of civic involvement that are part of most parades. It would be most useful to consider them in
relation to Flash Mobs, fan practice, and performance art/theater, which will be discussed presently,
although they do not fit into any of these three categories exclusively. Furthermore, as many of the earliest
events were largely undocumented, it is hard to pin down with any precision when the first Zombie Walks
were. A zombie parade in Sacramento in 2001 may have been the first; others date a small walk in Toronto
in 2003 as the first.
296

discussion boards, dedicated Zombie Walk sites, and social networking sites, and there,
walkers learn when and where a walk will take place and if it is connected to a charity
drive or another event.
5

This is not intended to be an ethnographic study of zombie walkers but rather an
examination of the meanings generated by walks in a more general sense, and while there
is no way to ascertain why Zombie Walks appeared in the early years of the 2000s or
why they are so popular at this moment, some general observations can be made.
6
First,
as was discussed in Chapter One, there was a resurgence in zombie media in the early
2000s, spurred on by their popularity in video games and further strengthened with the
release of films like the first Resident Evil film (2002) and 28 Days Later (2002).
7

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
5
As will be discussed later in this chapter, many walks are connected to local charity drives; others are
connected to specific celebrations or entertainments, like Halloween festivals or zombie movie nights. This
is one way in which walks are distinct from Flash Mobs. However, Zombie Walks are related to Flash
Mobs and borrow some of their organizational structure: in Flash Mobs, potential participants are typically
made aware of an upcoming event over the internet, either through email, discussion boards, or postings on
social networking sites. Then, at a pre-designated time and place, they will meet, perform an action, and
then, within a few seconds or minutes, disperse. One of the first successful documented Flash Mobs, taking
place in 2003, saw over one hundred people congregate on the ninth floor of Macy’s in New York City,
gathering around a very expensive rug for about ten minutes. Still, unlike Flash Mobs, which often resort
to cloak-and-dagger methods to keep their events secret, Zombie Walk organizers often publicize events to
make sure the number of “zombies” is high.
6
Of course, Zombie Walks are not the first instance of zombies taking to the public streets. As Sarah Juliet
Lauro points out, part of the ballyhoo of films like White Zombie (1932) was to have “zombies” out in
public promoting the film; see Sarah Juliet Lauro, “Playing Dead: Zombies invade performance art…and
your neighborhood,” Better off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human in Film, Literature, Art
and Culture, eds. Sarah Juliet Lauro and Deborah Christie (New York: Fordham UP, in press).
7
For a discussion of the “Resident Evil” effect, see Kevin Stewart, “The Zombie Aesthetics and the Post-
Apocalyptic Franchise,” Kinema (Spring 2007), accessed on July 17, 2010,
http://www.kinema.uwaterloo.ca/article.php?id=32&feature. See also Jamie Russell, Book of the Dead:
The Complete History of Zombie Cinema (Surrey: Fab Press, 2005); and Kyle William Bishop, American
297

Second, many commentators have remarked on the appropriateness of the zombie
metaphor for this particular social moment: whether zombies represent post-9/11
terrorists, the dead soldiers of the Iraqi/Afghan wars, victims of the recession, or the
banks that helped cause it, zombies seem to fit the cultural zeitgeist because they can be
so many things at once.
8
Yet, these readings still tend to paint the zombie in a rather
negative light.
Naturally, this is reflected in some cultural practice: survivalist groups like
Zombie Squad use the myth of the zombie, especially as it has been presented in the
invasion narratives of Romero-style media, to structure their places as potential zombie
killers within a post-9/11 world full of supposed invaders.
9
However, there has been a
growing trend in zombie media, discussed in Chapters Three and Four, towards the
presentation of sympathetic zombies, and zombie walkers seem to take up zombie
identity, in part, because of the sympathetic meanings that can be associated with it—its
ability to stand as a symbol of resistance to forms of domination, which might be
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture (Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 2010).
8
See Chapters One and Six.
9
Zombie Squad participants identify with zombie killers and participate in things like target practice to
prepare for fictional zombie invasions. See Christopher Zealand, “The National Strategy for Zombie
Containment: Myth Meets Activism in Post-9/11 America,” Better off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie
as Post-Human in Film, Literature, Art and Culture, eds. Sarah Juliet Lauro and Deborah Christie (New
York: Fordham UP, in press). See also my discussion of similar groups in Chapter Four.
298

particularly attractive to anyone who feels like an outsider and who does not want to sit
quietly and accept his/her status. Zombies Walks thus reflect a growing trend.
Yet, Zombie Walks, at least on some level, can also be seen as one means of not
only trying to create communities through outsider identification or the practices of
zombie fandom and zombie appreciation, but also of taking these communities out of the
virtual plane and seeing them manifest in the real world. In an era marked by the digital
and the mediated, by virtual friendships on Facebook, and the constant need to be
plugged in via smart phones and other portable electronic devices, these events envision
not an extinguishing of those interactions and impulses but a pause in them. Therefore,
the need for real-world interaction is key to these events and their meanings. A very
public transformation into a fantasy character is taking place in Zombie Walks.
Therefore, the walks include a high-degree of performance and require some sort of
make-up and costuming, as walkers are expected to perform as resurrected corpses in
public during the event. Furthermore, as zombies are usually conceived of in terms of the
mass, walk organizers typically encourage as many zombies as possible to attend, and
documented walks have ranged in size from six or seven participants to several
thousand.
10

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
10
According to Guinness World Records, the largest gathering of zombies occurred in August 2009 in
Herdfordshire, UK during the “Big Chill Festival” at which time over four thousand zombies were present.
However, unofficial estimates of Zombie Walks in Seattle, Denver and Brisbane, Australia number nearly
5,000, over 7,000 and 10,000 respectively. See “Largest Gathering of Zombies,” Guinness World Records
online, n.d., accessed on January 28, 2011, http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/Search/Details/Largest-
299

With events attracting hundreds, or even thousands, of participants and happening
regularly throughout the Western world, it becomes clear that Zombie Walks offer an
insight into the subversive potentials available in contemporary public space, as well as
how one might conceptualize the contemporary carnivalesque.
11
Entering public spaces
as zombies not only gives participants the opportunity to shock “living” onlookers, but it
stages participants as very potent symbols as well. Dressing up as a movie monster may
seem like meaningless fun, but as this project has shown, zombies are overdetermined
characters, and dressing up as a zombie necessarily marks the body with these
determinations, whether a participant explicitly intends as much or not.
This chapter will not argue that zombies are the only characters that fans are
dressing up as, far from it. However, the walks themselves do seem to be something of a
unique phenomenon in that while fan costuming is often popular at conventions and
within other fan-centric spaces, cosplay and other forms of fan costume activity rarely
travel out onto the public streets the way Zombie Walks do.
12
Moreover, zombies—in
their Romero- and video game-style incarnations—are typically imagined as a mass.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
gathering-of-zombies/116348.htm; and “Zombie Walk: World Records,” Wikipedia, n.d., accessed on
January 28, 2011, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_walk#World_records.
11
Certainly, the specific meanings generated by any particular Zombie Walk would depend on a number of
variables: the number of zombies participating, the time of day the walk takes places, the time of year it is
taking place, where it will happen, who is organizing it, for what purpose, and how much both participants
and spectators know about Zombie Walks, and this walk in particular, beforehand. Still, some general
observations about the events can still be made.
12
See n. 25.
300

Vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and other monsters may be imagined as part of a group,
and they may not. Yet, zombies are usually conceived of only in terms of the group,
which would encourage group-based events like Zombie Walks as well.
13

While the last chapter explored the ramifications of taking on a zombie identity in
a virtual world, this chapter explores some of the meanings generated when the living
enact zombiness in the real-world
14
and argues that in Zombie Walks, zombihood
becomes a utopian position where one can exist both inside and outside of normative
social structures but that this position faces several barriers to its full realization.
Beginning by examining the walks as a fan practice that blurs traditional
spectator/spectacle boundaries, this chapter shows that an “undead” gaze largely controls
these events. Furthermore, in marking the body as zombie, walkers make themselves into
the kinds of bodies condemned by contemporary Western youth/beauty culture. The
chapter next considers how the dead are often conceptualized as operating as a
“community” in opposition to the living and how this abstract concept is taken up in
Zombie Walks, providing them with a political thrust.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
13
Additionally, zombie masses are a parody of the crowd as it might be envisioned in a parade or any other
type of event where humans meet collectively and publicly for the social good. This may also be one
reason so many Zombie Walks incorporate food drives or other charitable works into the event. By
reinscribing a parody of collective human action as actually able to fulfill the promise of the events being
parodied, some sense of the community service and civic duty associated with these parodied events is
given over to Zombie Walks.
14
As opposed to enacting it in the virtual worlds of video games discussed in Chapter Four.
301

Even though there may be heated debate among participants and observers as to
the political nature of these events, the political potential of walks, especially in their
association with the carnivalesque,
15
becomes clear: the zombie, as an abstract concept,
can be liberating, but its power must be measured against the real-world environments in
which walks take place. Thus, Zombie Walks provide a means for re-inscribing public
space, yet the very carnivalesque nature of these events often ultimately serves to
undercut the zombie’s symbolic potential and any underlying political thrust to these
events by obfuscating the concrete realities of death in abstract spectacle.

LOOKING AT THE (UN) DEAD
In “Playing the Game: Performance in Digital Game Audiences,” Garry Crawford
and Jason Rutter argue that media images often provide us with the raw materials from
which we can construct our own social performances of self; as they observe, “we live in
an increasingly narcissistic and ‘performative society’ where individuals will draw on the
media as a ‘resource’ (such as informing the way they dress, speak, or act) in
constructing their social performances.”
16
While most people may use media images in
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
15
For a discussion of the carnivalesque aspects of zombies in film, see Linda Badley, “Zombie Splatter
Comedy from Dawn to Shaun: Cannibal Carnivalesque,” Zombie Culture: Autopsies of the Living Dead,
eds. Shawn McIntosh and Marc Leverette (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2008): 35-53.
16
Garry Crawford and Jason Rutter, “Playing the Game: Performance in Digital Game Audiences,”
Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, eds. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C.
Lee Harrington (New York: New York UP, 2007), 276.
302

performing their social selves, some media consumers interact with media texts in
another way, taking the text and crafting it into something altogether different. These are
fans, and in order to better understand zombie walkers’ relationships to zombies, it is
pertinent to consider their roles as such.
17

Henry Jenkins’ earliest work on fandom uses Michel de Certeau’s concept of
poaching to describe how fans use media texts; he explains that in taking a text and
reconfiguring it to make it one’s own, fans participate in “a kind of cultural bricolage
through which [they] fragment texts and reassemble the broken shards according to their
own blueprint, salvaging bits and pieces of found material in making sense of their own
social experience.”
18
Thus:
One becomes a ‘fan’ not by being a regular viewer of a particular program
but by translating that viewing into some kind of cultural activity, by
sharing feelings and thoughts about the program content with friends, by
joining a ‘community’ of other fans who share common interests. For
fans, consumption naturally sparks production, reading generates
writing…
19

Therefore, while the walkers are reinventing themselves as zombies, they are also
participating in a larger re-invention: they are maintaining, and at the same time, altering,
popular conceptions of just what a zombie is.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
17
Not all of the participants of Zombie Walks are necessarily zombie fans, but my experience of the walks,
coupled with what can be read in message boards and on walk websites, leads me to believe that many are.
18
Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (New York: New York
UP, 2006), 39-40.
19
Jenkins, 41.
303

As was discussed in Chapter One, there are several traditions of zombie present in
U.S. media, yet there is no one canonical zombie text to reference in Zombie Walks.
Still, the majority of zombie walkers take their visual and performative styles from the
zombies created in George Romero’s “Dead” trilogy of films.
20
Even so, as Gary
Crawford and Jason Rutter, note “the object of media fandom, be this even one film,
cannot be understood as a singular static text, as what fans consume will involve not only
their own reading of this text but also that of others, along with what has been written
about the text and further textual productions associated with it (such as fan fiction).”
21

Thus, even though the zombie has a history much longer than the “Dead” trilogy of films,
the zombies being performed are largely based on this cinematic imagining, distinct from
other forms of the zombie in the United States and from zombies as they are imagined
elsewhere.
Still, most walks would not exist without cyber communities and their informal
databases: on dedicated Zombie Walk websites, message boards, or social networking
pages, one can see photos of past events, read messages about how to construct a zombie
look, or discuss past and future walks. Therefore, while many walkers use the Romero-
style zombie as a starting point, they embellish, refine and alter what it means to be this
kind of zombie: walkers are inventing themselves in response to, and in dialogue with, a
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
20
1968’s Night of the Living Dead; 1978’s Dawn of the Dead; and 1985’s Day of the Dead.
21
Crawford and Rutter, 274.
304

shared cinematic past,
22
but cinematic memory becomes an archive against which
personal memory, community memory, and walk-inspired memories of zombies work.
23

Furthermore, in the walks, zombies take on a host of identities—from zombie
nurses and clowns to zombie brides and soldiers—and zombie may be inarticulate
moaners, hungry for brains, or they may be highly articulate agitators trying to make a
point. While in his more recent films, Romero has explored the more sympathetic, less
animalistic zombie, the traditional Romero-style (and video game-style) conceptions of
zombies place them directly at odds with the living, and in the majority of media texts,
spectators are ideally expected to identify with and actively cheer on the living. There is
certainly an element of this enacted in zombie walks—some walkers playfully “attack”
the living; others groan for “brains.”
Yet, zombies are privileged in the walks. Rather than taking on the guise of the
protagonists of most zombie media, zombie walkers choose zombies as their avatars.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
22
The zombie, as a larger concept, does not solely exist as a cinematic figure: zombies are found in games,
comic books, novels, video games, on stage, on television—there are any number of platforms for zombies.
Yet, arguably, it is the cinematic forms of the zombie that are most widely recognized and are most
influential on the general conception of what a zombie is.
23
The walkers are also in dialogue with other traditions of political marches and histories of public
performances of death, as in Day of the Dead celebrations and performances of the Danse Macabre.
Moreover, although it is certainly outside the purview of this chapter, these performances of the zombie
could be read in parallel to masquerade as it exists in carnival in Haiti; see Edwidge Danticat, After the
Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti (New York: Crown Journeys, 2002); and Gerard
Aching, Masking and Power: Carnival and Popular Culture in the Caribbean (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002). For discussions of carnival and the performative aspects of Vodou religious
practice itself, see Alfred Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti (1959), trans. Hugo Charteris (New York: Schocken
Books, 1972); and Donald J. Cosentino, “Imagine Heaven,” Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, ed. Donald J.
Cosentino (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995).
305

The traditional antagonist is thus remade, and what was adversarial in most zombie media
becomes a point of identification in Zombie Walks. Moreover, while there are some texts
that focus on the zombie’s point of view,
24
most zombie texts do not, and so Zombie
Walks give walkers a chance to inhabit a position generally unavailable in zombie
media.
25

By taking up the zombie in this way, zombie walkers not only get the chance to
experience the world as they might imagine a zombie would, but, as discussed in Chapter
Four, they are situating themselves in a sort of binary opposition to “living” spectators.
Moreover, they create a situation where the “living” spectators they encounter get to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
24
Video games like Left 4 Dead (2008) or Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse (2005), comic books
like Marvel Zombies (2005-2006), and films like Dead Heat (1988) or Zombie Strippers (2008) are
examples of texts that provide the zombie’s point of view.
25
It is worth noting here that Zombie Walks could be seen as a form of cosplay. Simply put, Cosplayers
fashion costumes matching chosen media characters as closely as possible. Figures from anime and fantasy
media are especially popular, and there are zombie cosplayers, with costumes based on specific zombie
characters, like Stubbs the Zombie. Other zombie cosplayers take a media character and convert it into a
zombie; hence, there are zombie Dumbledores (from the Harry Potter universe) and zombie Lady Gagas.
However, many zombie cosplayers stray from the typical cosplay focus on precision in mimicking and
simply create their own zombies from scratch. There are elements of cosplay at work in the walks (with
fans for whom the costume is largely the point). Yet, most walks provide makeup stations to help
transform participants into zombies, as some walkers do not come pre-made-up or pre-costumed.
Similarly, while crafting a cosplay costume can be very expensive, most zombie looks are achieved
cheaply. Very few walkers are attempting to fashion authentic costumes based on a particular character, so
there is a freedom for personal interpretation in the walks. One could make the claim that one focus in
cosplay is the beauty of a finely-crafted costume made to exacting detail. As will be discussed later,
performing as a zombie can be read as a counter practice, as ugliness is often valued. In this sense, the
order of cosplay resists the disorder of the zombie walker’s body (both as a body without one clear referent
and as one in disorder as a corpse). Zombie Walks could also be related to participation in Role Playing
Games (RPGs), especially live-action RPGs (LARPs). However, these games do not typically invite or
encourage spectator interaction in the way Zombie Walks do. For a discussion of the performative aspects
of fan practice in RPGs, see Kurt Lancaster, Interacting with Babylon 5: Fan Performances in a Media
Universe (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001).
306

experience a “zombie” invasion as well. As Zombie Walks occur not only in
environments associated with fan practice
26
but also in public spaces devoid of any
general connection to fandom, the walks allow walkers to take fan practice out of
(sometimes isolated) fan communities and engage those outside of zombie fandom
directly. This might seem to engender a traditional performer-spectator relationship in
the walks, but in many, it becomes difficult to narrow down exactly who is watching and
who is being watched.
In The Audience, performance theorist and theater director Herbert Blau reflects
on the post-modern condition and how it affects our engagement with the world: “When
we think of the scale of awareness required to live consciously in this world, we’re not
entirely sure, in the illusory passage of current events, whether we are spectators or
participants.”
27
While it isn’t the purpose of this chapter to use Zombie Walks as a
metaphor for this post-modern view of the world, these walks do situate both “zombies”
and their on-lookers in a way that blurs spectator/spectacle boundaries. In much of
Blau’s writing in The Audience, he discusses the impossibility of precisely narrowing
down who is watching and who is being watched in the traditional theater. He makes
reference to Anne-Marie Albrach, who in a review of the poetry performance “Theater,”
stated, “We are aware of movement, of pressure, of recoils and forward surges, but the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
26
Conventions or other fan meeting times/spaces.
27
Herbert Blau, The Audience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990), 2.
307

question of who is acting or being acted upon remains the central and tantalizing mystery.
Actor and spectator interpenetrate…”
28
A similar blurring of boundaries occurs in
Zombie Walks, but their relationship to traditional theatrical practice is tenuous at best.
The walks could be more closely aligned with the performance art tradition of
Happenings.
29
Yet, while the walks are closely related to that type of art practice, it may
be more useful to consider them as something separate, if for no other reason than the
intent of the events: Zombie Walks, at least for the most part, are not necessarily intended
to be read as artistic practice, although there are observes who interpret them as such.
30

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
28
qtd. in Blau, 148.
29
Markku Eskelinen and Ragnhild Tronstad explain Happenings as artistic practice designed “to break the
barrier between art and life” (Markku Eskelinen and Ragnhild Tronstad, “Video Games and Configurative
Performances,” The Video Game Theory Reader, eds. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York:
Routledge, 2003), 200). Not necessarily intended to be read as “art” in any traditional sense, Happenings
are artistic events that have “participants only—no audience” (200). For more on happenings, see
Eskelinen and Tronstad and Happenings and Other Acts, ed. Mariellen R. Sandford (1966; reprint, New
York: Routledge, 1995). Zombie Walks could also be related to Augusto Boal’s attempts to overcome the
spectator/actor divide through Theatre of the Oppressed/Invisible Theatre or the realm of Relational Art, as
put forth by Nicolas Bourriaud. Of course, as Blau is quick to point out, theatrical/art events like these
have a long history in the Western world; he cites everything from medieval processional theater to mass
demonstrations during the Bolshevik Revolution (Blau, 149). Finally, Donald J. Cosentino links
Happenings (and then voguing) to Vodou ceremonial practice. He states, “If we substitute “Caribbean
history’ for “New York painting’ and the disharmony of Port-au-Prince for that of Manhattan, the common
look of the two dramatic forms becomes explicable. At least on the surface. But to find deeper parallels,
we must look uptown, to the runways at the Voguing Balls, where diaspora youth evolved a new
performance art during the lush and terrible years of the ‘80s” (Cosentino, 54).
30
Those who have categorized Zombie Walks as a form of artistic practice include Elizabeth McAlister and
Gendy Alimurung; see Elizabeth McAlister, “Dead Men Walking: Zombies from Haiti to Hollywood,”
Wesleyan Center of Humanities Podcast, April 6, 2009, accessed on May 15, 2009, ITunes; and Gendy
Alimurung, “This Zombie Moment: Hunting for What Lies Beneath the Undead Zeitgeist,” The LA Weekly
(May 14, 2009), accessed on May 20, 2009, http://www.laweekly.com/content/printVersion/583554).
Sarah Juliet Lauro’s essay on Zombie Walks (see n. 6) contains an interview with Toronto Zombie Walk
organizer Thea Munster who certainly reads the walks as art; Lauro herself, although a bit more ambivalent
on their status as artistic practice, reads the walks in light of Situationalist art practice and theory (see
308

Still, Happenings are a useful starting point from which to consider the relationship
between “zombie” performers and non-zombie spectators as in both Happenings and
Zombie Walks, there is an elimination of the strict boundaries between performer and
spectator at play.
31

Zombie Walks are not necessarily purely interactive in nature—the walks could
occur without “living” spectators and still be successful in that the zombie participants
could appreciate each others’ approaches to zombiness.
32
Yet, most walks are predicated
on “zombies” interacting with the “living” in some way. The interactivity of the events
happens in two ways. First, there is the performative interaction as “zombies” and the
“living” co-mingle. This can range from zombies pretending to attack the living to the
living offering the zombies “brains” to eat (fig. 5.5). In many of the events I have
witnessed, zombies often visit the stores and shops along a walk route—they are not
shopping but rather, simply making their presence known.
33

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Lauro). I would not categorically deny that there may be or have been Zombie Walks organized as art
practice, but in my time both studying and observing walks, I have yet to come across such an event.
Furthermore, labeling Zombie Walks as an artistic practice necessarily assumes an intentionality (to create
art) on the part of organizers and/or participants that may or may not actually be there.
31
Furthermore, both Happenings and Zombie Walks are predicated on the notion that each event is a
unique occasion that can never be repeated, which is valid, but many Zombie Walks are becoming annual
events, which complicates this.
32
An argument could be made that some walks—especially those attempting to break world record
numbers—are not as focused on interaction as they are on achieving a set number of bodies participating,
yet it is still at play, even on a limited basis, in these events. Zombie Walks rarely go unnoticed or
unrecorded by non-participants.
33
Typically, zombies will only do this when it seems as if they will be welcome; many zombie walk
participants are aware that if their behavior is interpreted as in any way threatening, local business owners
309

Figure 5.5: “Hey Zombies Get Your Free Brain Snack,”
Sign at the Way Station Coffee Shop Along the Zombie Walk Route in Newhall, CA
(Photograph by author, October 17, 2009)

The interactions between the living and the undead are part of the fun of a walk.
An organizer for a 2005 Richmond, VA Zombie Walk noted that: “Instantly we were
greeted with laughter and disgust…quite a combination. I have to say, for the most part,
the people [we encountered]…were extremely cool about it and really appreciated our
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
may lobby to have walks banned or moved. As for how zombies behave in general, just as in any
performative situation, some “zombies” are more hammy than others—some will make a point of trying to
interact with the living: standing at shop windows and staring at the people inside or attacking pay phones
by pretending not to understand what they are, for instance. There is a whole range of zombie behavior
during the walks and some of it does not require non-zombie interaction, but much of it does.
310

horde o’ zombies filling their streets with undead entertainment.”
34
Similarly, organizers
of a Zombie Walk at the LSU campus in October 2006 reported that they were met with
confusion by onlookers but that “a lot of people got into it” and a teacher on the campus
even let the walkers ramble through his classroom.
35
Thus, Zombie Walks, to a certain
extent, are meant to shock non-participants. Many of the earliest Zombie Walks (and
even some today) did not widely share plans of the walk outside of certain message
boards and pages on social networking sites. The idea was that only those interested in
performing as zombies would find the information and thus, the walk would catch non-
informed spectators off guard. As Shanna Murphy, a Zombie Walk organizer in
Pittsburgh, said of her plans for a 2006 Zombie Walk, “We want to surprise people…”
36

Interaction in the walks also occurs at the level of identification. In theories of
cinematic spectatorship, most scholars now agree that identification can happen across
genders and can change multiple times during a single film.
37
While Zombie Walks do
not encourage the same sort of spectatorial relationship that film does, because of the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
34
“The 2005 Richmond VA Zombie Walk,” I-Mockery.com’s Halloween Grab Bag, n.d., accessed on April
18, 2007, http://www.i-mockery.com/halloween/bag/zombiewalk05.php.
35
“Zombie Walk,” Small World Podcast #460 (December 22, 2006), accessed on April 18, 2007,
http://smallworldpodcast.com/?p=546.
36
Bethany Hofstetter, “Walk Like a Zombie,” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (August 4, 2006), accessed on
April 18, 2007, http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/tribpm/s_464768.html. Murphy did
not publicly announce the date of her event to non-zombies beforehand. Similarly, some walk organizers
will announce the dates and times of walks but not their routes to keep things secret.
37
For instance, see Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992). See also Chapters Three and Four.
311

blurring of the lines between performer and spectator in the walks, it is possible to claim
that spectators would have two (broad) possible positions with which to identify during
the walks: the living or the undead. The zombie walkers are living persons in costumes
and make-up; this means that most spectators should be able to relate to them as fellow
living beings. Following cinematic convention, which sets zombies against the living,
the walks could also position a non-zombie spectator in such a way that he/she is aware
of him/herself as a living being, or at least as a non-zombie.
While Zombie Walk spectators do not necessarily suspend their disbelief and
think that zombies are really attacking, they are nonetheless being presented with the
visual and performative markers of zombiness, so spectators are encouraged, in part, to
imagine just how they might react in such a scenario. Discussing Bazin’s arguments on
the possible effects of looking at images of violence, Linda Williams notes,
the problem is not…that the image of violence is the same as if it were
happening before our very eyes; rather, it is that the spectacle seems both
so real and yet so distant from us, both temporally and spatially. Our
complicity as viewers of the act is different from what it would be if we
were actually in the room with the ‘object’; it is connected to the fact that
we are watching (whether with fascination, pleasure, horror, or dread) an
act that seems real but with which we have no physical connection
ourselves.
38

A similar situation occurs in Zombie Walks, yet the physical connection Williams notes
as absent in visual imagery is manifest. Thus, the scenario presented to spectators is at
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
38
Linda Williams, Hardcore: Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible,” expanded paperback ed.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 188.
312

once unbelievable and distanced, but it is present enough to cause some of the façade to
wear thin. Spectators are aware that a real attack is not taking place and still, their
experience of the fictional scenario is made all the more realistic by its real-world setting
and the fact that spectators are made over into participants by virtue of being the living in
opposition to the undead.
39

Furthermore, the walkers are enacting death-returned-from-the-grave. Although
spectators cannot relate directly to this image (as presumably none of them are dead or
undead), spectators can relate to the concept that they will, one day, be dead. Thus,
identification with these walking corpses asks spectators not to cross gender, racial or
class lines, but the very lines between living and dead—overt markers of age, gender, and
class, to name a few, become much more irrelevant in the process.
40
While these markers
do not disappear, they become secondary to one’s status as living versus (un)dead. The
markers of death become the ultimate markers of difference in the walks as they work to
separate out zombies from non-zombies. Although all involved may inhabit the
participant or spectator positions at any given time during an event, these original
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
39
In some ways, this might inform the relationships between humans and zombies in the game Humans vs.
Zombies; see Chapter Four, n. 89.
40
To an extent—dressing as a zombie is usually only the first step for many walkers—the zombie identity
is then extended so that walks are populated with all sorts of zombie occupations and identities. As such, it
might be valid to claim that there are gender, racial, and class identities being performed as well (inasmuch
as any of the occupations or identities carries with it traditional markers of race, class or gender).
313

designations of living and dead are marked via signs of death and decomposition: seeing
“death” becomes more important than seeing any other marker of identity.
Additionally, the walks allow for both spectators and “zombies” to play with
fantasies of their deaths, lives, and of their possible lives after death. As previously
stated, the walks allow a rehearsal of the living body as imagined corpse. Zombie
walkers themselves can overtly participate in this imagining, but spectators too, when
confronted with other living humans performing death, can imagine what this would
entail for themselves: seeing a group of zombies walking down the street could force the
question, what will I look like when I am dead?
This might seem to open up a space whereby death in its concrete form—the
reality of dying, of one’s own mortality—is made more visible. Participants and
spectators are, after all, engaging with bodies being performed as corpses. However, just
as with the video games discussed in Chapter Four, this is covered over by death
abstracted and spectacularized: the costumes and playful nature of the events serve to
reinscribe death as something that happens to all equally.
Still, Zombie Walks provide an insight into the walkers’ own fantasies of their
lives. Walks are filled not just with zombies but more often than not, participants choose
to be a zombie-something. This means that there are zombie brides, grooms, nuns,
priests, soldiers, clowns, rock stars or any other kind of identity the walkers wish (figs.
5.6—5.9). As an invitation to the 2009 Newhall Zombie Walk intoned: “Prepare your
314

Zombie Look. Where were you when you got the zombie virus? In a dentist’s chair? At
the prom? Getting married? Performing surgery? Your zombie look tells a story.”
41

Here, the zombie becomes a mask for (possibly) the real-world fantasies and wishes of
participants, and seeing individualized zombies not only mirrors the trend in zombie
films and some zombie video games towards more sympathetic, individuated zombies,
but also grants these zombies a status as other than “thing.”

Figure 5.6: Period Zombie Walker, Costa Mesa, CA
(Photograph by Thomas Fisher, October 23, 2010)

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41
Atom AtBnw, “SCV Main Street Zombie March,” Facebook Event Page, n.d., accessed on September
30, 2009, http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=104514073253&ref=share.
315

Figure 5.7: Zombie Priest, Costa Mesa, CA
(Photograph by author, October 23, 2010)

Figure 5.8: Zombie Mad Scientist Makes Up Zombie Convict, Costa Mesa, CA
(Photograph by author, October 23, 2010)
316

Figure 5.9: Zombie Policewoman and Friend, Newhall, CA
(Photograph by author, October 17, 2009)

Steven Shaviro argues that Romero-style zombies,
preserve the marks of social function and self-projection in the clothes
they wear, which identify them as businessman, housewife, nun, Hare
Krishna disciple, and so on. But this becomes one of the films’ running
jokes: despite such signs of difference, they all act in exactly the same
way. The zombies are devoid of personality, yet they continue to allude to
personal identity.
42

However, I would claim that this allusion is important because it serves to mark these
zombies as something other than the mass. As was discussed in Chapter Four, any
reference to human identity, even in allusion, rescues zombies from “thing” status.
Therefore, the zombies conceived of in these walks, although imagined in the Romero
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
42
Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 98-99.
317

style, are not stripped of their humanity but rather bask in the positionality discussed in
the previous two chapters—of being able to exist as both outside (as dead corpses) and
inside (as living individuals) at the same time.
Zombie Walks also allow both walkers and spectators to toy with fantasies of
resurrection. The walkers themselves are literally enacting a form of life after death, and
the walks celebrate overcoming death—corpses are not only animated but they can return
to the world of the living and command its attention. In this sense, then, the walks tap
into a very deep cultural desire, discussed in Chapter Four, to rob death of its finality by
showing it as easily transgressed. Although one might argue, as Mary B. Campbell does,
that when zombies come back to life, it is an “empty resurrection,” in Zombie Walks, the
resurrection is far from empty.
43
Zombies are able to provoke the living, disrupt
normative patterns within public spaces, and live out the fantasy of retaining one’s living
status by being a bride or priest or any number of things.
Because of the many non/performative positions one may occupy during a
Zombie Walk
44
and the many modes of identification available, it might be hard to
ascertain who has the agency in the interactions discussed here. In such a highly
interactive environment, there is no one stable subject or object of the gaze: at times, the
zombies may possess the power to look at the living—the ability to shock non-zombies is
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
43
Mary B. Campbell, “Biological Alchemy and the Films of David Cronenberg,” Planks of Reason: Essays
on the Horror Film, rev. ed., ed. Barry Keith Grant (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 334.
44
“Living” spectator, “living” participant, zombie spectator, zombie participant.
318

prized in many walks, after all—yet, at other times, the living may hold the power to look
at the zombies, who are, ultimately, with their make-up, costumes, and performances,
constructing themselves as beings “to-be-looked-at.”
45
However, there are three
important observations to be made about the exchange of looks happening in these walks.
First, due to their very nature as performative gatherings where participation
comes from both the living and the undead, the gaze is not firmly located with one
position. Both zombies and non-zombies become aware of the play of looking and of
being the objects of the others’ gazes. Second, the two gazes are not necessarily
gendered, racialized, or classed; they are more aptly classified as a “living” gaze and an
“undead” gaze. And while we could call the undead, because they are the dead intruding
on the space of the living and are presented as spectacle, objects in either a colonial or
capitalist sense, this is complicated because this object/Other looks back. Therefore, it is
the undead who are ultimately in control of the situation—zombies know the walk’s
route; the living may or may not know this. They “invade” the space of the living and are
largely responsible for how long to linger there; finally, the zombies usually decide how
far to take their interactions with the living. With the walks, the ultimate form of the
colonized/disenfranchised returns to look at the living. The living may or may not look
back, but it is nearly impossible to ignore the zombies completely.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
45
See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6-18; while the
zombies do not offer resistant gazes (as they typically do not refuse to acknowledge the spectators’ looks
and actively return the look), spectators could offer one—yet, this is problematic because to pretend the
zombies aren’t there, one first has to acknowledge their presence.
319

ZOMBIE BODIES
The idea that we are coherently readable as bodies is very important to how
zombiness is performed in the walks. Since Night of the Living Dead (1968), becoming a
zombie has very much been about the body being marked with the signs of death and
then performing zombiness (moaning, shuffling slowly, and/or trying to attack humans).
In voodoo-style zombie films, there is not necessarily any bodily marking—it is all
performance.
46
Therefore, there is a sense in these texts of the undead being able to pass
for the living. Voodoo-style zombies are all about the colonization of the mind; Romero-
and video game-style zombies are all about an infection of the body.
The fear associated with becoming a zombie in the voodoo-style films, then, was
the fear of losing one’s distinct identity; yet, even in Romero-style texts, the fear of
becoming a zombie is not only the fear of the destruction of the once-healthy body but
also the fear that one will become a mindless automaton, a “thing” without a unique
personality, driven only to eat. Whether it is an effect of anthropomorphization or a
fantasy of the continuation of one’s individuality after death, as was discussed in
Chapters Three and Four, the paradox is many zombies across media have often retained
their individuality.
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46
Of course, those zombies were not cannibals; they were simply people (dead or alive) under the power of
a zombie master, and there are some notable exceptions to this with the bug-eyed zombies in The Ghost
Breakers (1940) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943), for instance; see Chapter Three.
320

As Chapters Two and Three explained, in the earliest zombie features, a white
protagonist often traveled to an exotic destination and there, became zombified: many
voodoo-style films focused on attempts to de-zombify a loved one. Yet, even after Night
of the Living Dead, many zombies have tended to stand out from the crowd, so to speak.
The Hare Krishna zombie of 1978’s Dawn of the Dead and Bub from Day of the Dead
(1985) are but two examples. This is extended in Zombie Walks, where participants are
not only members of a group but are constructed as individualized zombies as well.
Therefore, while zombies are usually popularly imagined as group creatures,
performances of them often ironically depart from that ideal.
As Zombie Walks, and the films and video games discussed in Chapters Three
and Four, show, then, zombihood can be imagined as a progressive state. However, this
is often only inasmuch as it is also an individualized and humanized state. Masses of
zombies without personalities or distinct identity markers are relegated to “thing” status.
Zombies that stand out from the crowd, those who are, quite simply, more human, are the
ones that have the true political potential.
Still, whether they are blending into the group or attempting to subtly subvert
expectations by standing out, walkers can’t escape the fact that the bodies they are
presenting are living/lived subjects. Within the realm of performance, then, the
“zombies” can never completely lose access to their individual living identities. As such,
it is important to remember that the idea of an individuated zombie is a given from the
321

outset in Zombie Walks, and also any walker’s ability to participate in an event is linked
to his/her identity as marked by gender, class, and race, among other things, and this
identity cannot be completely transcended. There is not a transformation of bodies taking
place in the walks, but rather a display of a certain kind of body through performance.
Thus, while the bodies of the zombie walkers will be altered via make-up and costume, it
is not their lived bodies that are of the most concern here; it is the bodies they are trying
to enact.
In his meditations on photography in Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes discusses at
length the power being photographed has on one’s conception of self: “Now, once I feel
myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of
‘posing,’ I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance
into an image.”
47
In being photographed, one becomes aware of oneself as both self and
Other. For Barthes, that Other is always already dead—any photograph tells its viewer
both that the thing photographed was there to be recorded at some earlier point in time
and that, at some later point, it will no longer exist. Zombie Walks encourage a similar
spectatorial position—non-participants may be aware of themselves as “living” beings in
opposition to the “zombies” on display and they may imagine what it would be like to
perform as corpses at the same time. The zombie walkers also play with this notion as
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47
Barthes, 10.
322

their bodies become both corpse and that which is clearly not corpse. The very practice
of dressing the living body up as dead makes it uncanny.
The rendering of the familiar, presumably healthy body of the zombie walker into
the unfamiliar, seemingly decaying corpse is of key concern, and Foucault’s theories of
the body as it is understood in relation to the modern state are useful when considering
the body performing as corpse. In Foucault’s estimation, modern states work to produce
an idealized body, not through overt forms of coercion, but through administrative
practices that encourage citizens to be self-disciplining. A focus on keeping track of
bodily statistics like births, deaths, and marriages (which the state can assume will lead to
reproduction) and medical, scientific, and media discourses
48
which valorize the young,
healthy, (re)productive body work to produce citizens who, in a desire to conform,
attempt to reach/maintain the normalized body.
49
Moreover, bodies that might be seen as
threats to the orderly system—the bodies of the sick, for instance—are secluded from
normalized bodies by the system using discourses of health, science, and sanitation.
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48
Since the 19
th
century, there has been a marked decline in the belief in supernatural means of extending
one’s life beyond death and a transference to faith in medical/technological means of prolonging life. Yet,
Zombie Walks and zombies are all about retuning to a supernatural model (even those zombie texts that
envision an infection causing zombiness rest, to a degree, on speculative fiction and not fact).
49
Similarly, Guy Debord sees spectacle as valorizing youthfulness. Yet, Zombie Walks, which do
spectacularize the body, seem to fly in the face of this as their focus is on death (even in its transgressed
state) and the body-as-corpse. See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1995).
Although it is possible to argue that fantasies of cheating death are, in any form, a means of exalting youth
culture, these zombies are not pretty—the walkers of Zombie Walks perform decay and decomposition,
using blood and gore as markers of life-beyond-death. Death is transcended by giving in to its markers.
323

Like those bodies, the dead body has no place in such a system. It is non-
productive and therefore becomes a drain on state resources.
50
As the 2004 French film
Les revenants (They Came Back) or the television movie “Homecoming” (2005)
envision, if the dead were to return to the world of the living, it would be a bureaucratic
nightmare—what rights would these “people” have? Where would they live? What
would their status as citizens be? The dead body returned to life, then, poses many of the
same questions of citizenship raised by newly independent, colonial and protected
peoples in the 19
th
and early 20
th
centuries discussed in Chapter Two.
Zombie Walks take this one step further and perform just such a nightmare: the
decaying, non-productive bodies of the dead, those bodies feared by the state (and those
trying to conform to its idealized notion of body), intrude on the world of the living.
51

These are bodies stripped of their political rights/citizenship that nonetheless demand to
be noticed, and these are bodies that are not self-disciplining, that fly in the face of the
ideals of youth, health and productive capacities (both in the sense of labor and sexual
reproduction). Zombies are already a fantasy of reproduction gone very wrong—as new
bodies are produced not through state-sponsored means (sexual reproduction via
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50
It is interesting to note the similarity in describing zombies and other perceived threats to the state’s well-
being, esp. immigration rhetoric; see Chapter Two.
51
Perhaps the strangest Zombie Walk I have encountered in relationship to this was a walk in October 2010
in Beaumont, CA. Advertised as one in a series of “events in an effort to help promote a Healthy and Safe
City,” the walk consisted of a series of 1.5 to 6.1 mile walks at the community’s sports park to promote “a
healthy lifestyle within our community” (J.T. Events, “Beaumont Zombie Walk,” Active.com, n.d.,
accessed on September 3, 2010, http://www.active.com/running/beaumont-ca/beaumonts-zombie-walk-
2010).
324

marriage) but through magic or infection. Furthermore, the bodies produced are not the
highly-disciplined bodies the state idealizes—they are unhealthy and decomposing, and
they do not work to the benefit of the state; they are, in essence, anti-bodies.
52

These bodies are offering up a sort of parody of biopower as it is put forward by
Michel Foucault: as the modern state is concerned with the production/reproduction of
life, zombie bodies are the nightmare of the system. They are the literal production and
reproduction of death, and in many contemporary zombie texts, it is the state or corporate
interests that produce them.
53
The control afforded the state when it can produce and
control healthy living bodies is shown to be absurd when production creates decomposing
zombie bodies. Moreover, as zombiism is an infection that affects any and all living
bodies, the healthy bodies produced via the state’s biopower are revealed to hold the
seeds of the destruction of the orderly system put in place by their production in the first
place. In performing this type of body, walkers may not be overly contesting the
biopolitical engines that produce ideal citizen-subjects, but they are, in a sense, rejecting
the youth/beauty culture so prevalent in the contemporary West. Wearing zombiness,
and celebrating it, is a way not only to actively resist those discourses that would make
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52
An argument could be made that zombie walkers are participating in the valorization of the highly-
commodified body by choosing to dress like a media figure, but this argument breaks down in the sense
that this figure, in the Romero-style form preferred in most walks, draws attention to consumption in rather
overt ways and presents not a youthful, sexy image but one of decay.
53
See discussions of this as it relates to video game-style texts in Chapter One and Chapter Four and
voodoo-style texts in Chapter Two.
325

the body conform but also to make oneself over as “ugly” and take pleasure in the value
of that ugliness.
As Alexandra Howson notes, our contemporary consumer society “actively
creates a particular kind of self, which is oriented towards self-indulgence rather than
self-denial.”
54
While this would seem to posit that the post-modern capitalist body has
less self-control, this type of body is still highly restrained, especially in terms of making
bodily functions invisible. Moreover, there is still a focus on maintaining a semblance of
youth through things like plastic surgery and fashion purchases intended to decorate/hide
the body.
55
As such, appearance is taken as a sign of internal discipline and will. In
Howson’s estimation, then, death is seen as the “ultimate failure” of the body.
56
The
zombie can thus be viewed as the failed and not-failed bodies combined: a failure in that
it has died, the zombie body does not fail in that it is also living. Yet, its most visible
markers are those of death, so that while the zombie body could be said to have not failed
by virtue of beating death, it has still cosmetically failed in that it cannot be used as a sign
of bodily discipline.
Zombies are not death, per se—they are, in the strictest sense, fantasies of
overcoming death, of living beyond it. As such, these characters are always already
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54
Alexandra Howson, The Body in Society: An Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2004), 93.
55
Howson, 99
.
56
Howson, 156.
326

presenting the promise of mastering death. Also, the fact that the walks are intended as
celebratory intrusions into everyday life seems to indicate not a desire to beat death so
much as one to use it as a means of countering the mundane. As discussed in Chapter
Four, moving death and dying out of the home and away from everyday life in the 19
th

and early 20
th
centuries served to render death as something at once invisible and yet
strangely visible: death moved from the mundane to the extraordinary.
57
Therefore,
Zombie Walks become a means of re-interjecting death into the mundane, seemingly as
entertainment and spectacle, but also as something more profound. Here, living
performers are overtly projecting the dead into the world of the living. If, on an abstract
level, the dead are imagined as in opposition to the living, then having a concrete body
enact this supposed adversary is startling to say the least.
However, if we consider for a moment that the dead have not always been
necessarily cast in an adversarial role, the reemergence of dead bodies into the living
world speaks to deeper continuities. In Chapter Four, the Medieval conception of the
dead as corporeal members of the living community was discussed. These dead had the
power to act as a social sanctioning mechanism within the community—haunting evil-
doers, for instance. While on the surface, this role of the dead is being reenacted, at least
to some degree, in zombie-making games like Diablo (1996-present), where a zombie
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57
This could be seen in everything from the spiritualist phenomena discussed in Chapter Four to
celebrations of Halloween or the Day of the Dead. It is also visible in the corpses and other “dead”
characters of EC Comics or the corpses that populate contemporary television series like CSI, NCIS, Bones,
or the Law and Order franchise.
327

master can use zombies to his/her advantage, it is even more clear in a game like Stubbs
the Zombie (2005), where Stubbs is quite literally policing the living of the game world.
However, this power is ultimately shut down in these examples because it all exists
within a virtual world. In Zombie Walks, though, the corporeal dead are returning to the
real world in a very overt fashion.
Certainly, these “undead” are not acting in the same capacity as the Medieval
dead were, and yet, these performances of death do have the potential, if not necessarily
to keep the living in line, then at least momentarily to raise issues that might otherwise
stay hidden. For instance, moving, for a moment, away from a Foucaultian reading of the
body and its relationship to the state, it is also pertinent to observe that bodies have long
been used as markers separating the civilized from the barbaric. At a basic level,
colonialist discourse produces civilized bodies as those that are restrained and exercise a
great deal of control over their bodily drives and functions. Barbaric bodies are thus
produced as those bodies that give into their bodily impulses and desires and do not try to
hide bodily functions. The zombie body is thus the barbaric body—it is a body that has
given in to the ultimate bodily function: death. It is thus the antithesis to civilization.
Yet, the meanings generated when a living person tries to enact such a body are
complex. Walkers are performing as the living dead, and as living bodies are the only
bodies with the true power to imitate the dead-as-living, a walker can be sure that he/she
328

will be seen as imitating a zombie but will not be mistaken for one.
58
The living exercise
the power to choose to masquerade as the undead. The walkers therefore seem to reify
the fixed position of the dead through their performances: the dead are simply another
Other to imitate.
However, the contemporary corpse is not nearly as visible as the dead once were, so
enacting the living corpse in Zombie Walks makes what is largely invisible
59
visible.
This changes the power dynamic somewhat. Furthermore, while the performance of the
Other allows one to explore the fluidities inherent in any identity, by performing as a
zombie, one is not simply trading one aspect of identity (race, sexuality, gender, class,
etc.) for another: death eradicates all other markers of identity, or at least, overshadows
them. Moreover, as discussed in Chapter Three, many zombie texts play with the notion
that empowerment comes from embracing zombie culture.
60
The zombie is thus not
simply an incarnation of the dead passing as the living; it represents a queer position
61

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
58
Of course, there is always a chance that a zombie walker could be mistaken for a real zombie, and in my
personal experience, I have seen many young children watch walks convinced that the zombies were real
monsters.
59
Or visible only at certain ritualized/spectacularized times/spaces.
60
Which is most often associated with blackness and the feminine.
61
As stated in Chapter Three, my use of the term “queer” in regards to the zombie constructs queer as that
which stands outside of white heteronormative capitalist patriarchy and operates according to a logic of
inclusion rather than exclusive binaries. It is necessarily a fragmented and fluid state predicated more on
one’s relationship to and actions against dominant structures of power than any inherent state of being or
identity. While there are those who would claim that such a general definition could, theoretically, include
anyone and everyone and thus render the term impotent, my very point is that it is more a way of being
than a fixed identity. In this sense, it may be closely aligned to Janet R. Jakobsen’s and Michael Warner’s
conceptions of queer that see it more in terms of action than identity; see Janet R. Jakobsen, “Queer is?
329

that can offer those who inhabit it a means of opting out of white, heteronormative
patriarchy while avoiding social death.
62

Yet, in the performance of zombiness, because of the temporary and performative
nature of Zombie Walks, the subversive potential of zombies as they exist in fiction
becomes less subversive and more of a critical engagement with social realities by
making visible the oppressive nature of social roles or the absurdity of cultural
assumptions. For instance, in terms of gender roles, zombie nurses and nuns make a
mockery out of traditional conceptions of the female as caregiver, as these roles, when
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Queer Does?: Normativity and the Problem of Resistance,” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies
4.4 (1998): 511-536; and Michael Warner, ed. Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics, and Social Theory
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). For a discussion of Jakobsen, Warner and others’
definitions of “queer,” see Nikki Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (New York: New York
UP, 2003).
62
Social death might be conceived of as a status conferred upon a person or a group of people, typically by
dominant systems of power, whereby this individual or group is marked as not fully human and therefore
not entitled to the same rights and privileges as fully “living” humans. Social death, like the state of
exception discussed in Chapter Four, may be thought of as a means of excluding individuals or groups from
the community and has often been used to describe the status of slaves, of victims of the holocaust, of non-
white peoples under apartheid, or any other group that faces severe political exclusion and oppression. The
exclusionary practices of social death may range from the figurative (social shunning) to the literal
(genocide), but in any case, dominant systems of power are eliminating certain bodies for the supposed
good of the larger body politic. See, for instance, Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell UP, 1989); Claudia Card, “Genocide and Social Death,” Hypatia 18.1 (Winter 2003): 63-79;
John Edwin Mason, Social Death and Resurrection: Slavery and Emancipation in South Africa
(Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2003); and Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social
Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982). Social death is not a fixed position.
For instance, Orlando Patterson discusses the idea of social rebirth out of social death, and John Edwin
Mason asserts that slaves, “challenged and compromised social death long before the colonial state granted
them their freedom” through individual assertions of their rights and dignity (x). In relation to zombies, if
the dead can be read as a metaphor for the socially dead, which in the zombie’s case, given its connections
to slavery, exploitation, and racial/gender prejudices, among other things, should not be too much of a
stretch, then the dead coming back to life would be a metaphorical rendering of the process Mason
describes.
330

zombified, are about causing harm to the living. Similarly, zombie bunnies subvert
assumptions of what is “cute” and harmless by turning a seemingly innocuous creature
into a killing machine.
In many ways, then, the zombie operates much as the transvestite. In Vested
Interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety, Marjorie Garber explores representations
of the transvestite and argues that the transvestite functions “to indicate the place of …
‘category crisis,’ disrupting and calling attention to cultural, social or aesthetic
dissonances…”
63
For her, a category crisis is “a failure of definitional distinction, a
borderline that becomes permeable, that permits of border crossings from one (apparently
distinct) category to another…”
64
Similarly, the boundaries separating clean, proper
bodies from dirty, unsuitable bodies do not hold in zombies—they are both and neither at
the same time. They are bodies without a clear sense of place. As such, they come to
inhabit a space similar to the one that Rosemarie Thomson sees occupied by the freak; as
those bodies visibly marked as something both human and something different, freaks
represent “at once boundless liberty and appalling disorder…”
65

A body’s place is vitally important to its status in the West. Not only does the
state mark some bodies as fully “living” and others as only partially so or politically
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
63
Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 16.
64
Garber, 16.
65
Rosemarie Thomson, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York
UP, 1996), 12.
331

“dead,” but there are rituals intended to label bodies as such: besides those rituals which
mark individuals as part of a community, like communions and marriages, for instance,
there are those rituals intended to remove members from the group, like
excommunication and even funerals. As Sociologist Bryan S. Turner notes, “The transfer
of bodies out of culture back to nature is…ritualized by exclusionary practices. The dead
are buried, cremated or embalmed; their persons are deconstructed by rituals which
indicate that they are now to some extent once more ‘natural’.”
66
Yet, the exclusion he
describes happens as a result of biological death; exclusion may also occur after social
death as well.
The zombie, at least in its Romero-style incarnations, is visibly marked as having
undergone biological death, but in enacting zombiness via live bodies in Zombie Walks,
the walkers illuminate how the zombie comes to stand for the corpse’s rescue from
“social death” as well: that which has been rendered invisible and irrelevant to living
society and obedient to the state is brought back.
67
Furthermore, it is not brought back
quietly and politely, but is brought back in pageant and spectacle, to intrude on the world
of the living.
There are very real political limits to the body in contemporary Western society.
As soon as one dies, their corpse usually becomes object or property and is silenced by
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
66
Bryan S. Turner, The Body & Society, 3rd ed. (Los Angeles: Sage, 2008), 174.

67
These bodies are obedient in that they will be put away in burial or put to productive use in scientific or
medical research laboratories.
332

the state accordingly.
68
Typically, funerals allow the living to enact their grief before the
dead body is hidden away (either put into the ground, cremated, or put to scientific use).
Yet, what if there were a way around the total objectification of the corpse, a way to
allow the dead to regain some of their former political power?
Zombie Walks are not funerals. Instead of putting the dead body away, it is
returned to the world of the living, and it demands to be seen. While the zombie, as a
dead body coming back to life, is visible in a number of media,
69
thus making the idea of
the invisibility of the dead body seem a bit untenable, outside of mediated experience and
entertainment, the dead body is typically not made visible in U.S. society, except as part
of rituals of mourning. The zombie body that walkers are performing certainly represents
the former kind of body (with still some reference to the latter), but it exists outside
traditional mediated experience in the real world. In this instance, the context of the
zombie body matters tremendously.
It is in this real-world visibility that the zombie body’s critical power rests—just
as the political power of any real-world dead body (or socially dead body) rests in its
visibility, or rather, its ability not to be rendered invisible by science, religion, or the
state. Moreover, the walkers’ bodies are not bodies being made visible by the state for its
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
68
William Bogard argues that the corpse is a necessarily modern invention of technological societies that
need to fix and categorize dead bodies in ways symbolic societies do not. As he notes, technological
societies, “dismantle and decode dead bodies and convert them into commodities and ‘useful things’” (see
William Bogard, “Empire of the Living Dead,” Mortality 13.2 (May 2008), 188).
69
As are the corpses of television shows like CSI, for instance.
333

own purposes,
70
but rather they are bodies that are being transformed by living
performers into their fantasies of a gruesome life-after-death.
This return of the corpse
71
is similar to Bhabha’s notions of mimicry: colonial
authority is destabilized by the very mechanism that it set in place to try to create order.
72

Discourses which serve to reify health and beauty naturally work to render those bodies
that are not healthy or beautiful abject, and modern power structures try to hide these
kinds of bodies. By rendering the corpse as abject as possible, the modern state has tried
to make it invisible and this, inadvertently, gives it a tremendous amount of power when
it does reappear in unexpected ways—the most marginal of bodies, the dead body, is
made into a visual marker of all the state dreads a body will be. Thus, while Zombie
Walks do not rescue the dead body from its social death, the walkers don’t allow this
body to be rendered invisible, either; rather, they celebrate it and make sure it is seen.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
70
For instance, using the bodies of dead soldiers to promote a war (or, in recent U.S. history, to try to hide
the bodies of dead soldiers in an effort to promote a war); see Patricia Malloy, “Zombie Democracy,” The
Geopolitics of American Insecurity: Terror, Power and Foreign Policy, eds. François Debrix and Mark J.
Lacy (New York: Routledge, 2009): 197-213.
71
Interestingly enough, Bogard argues that zombies are not corpses, at least as he understands corpses (see
n. 68) and although I refer to them as such, I agree. Zombies are not corpses as corpses are conventionally
displayed or imagined but are, rather, corpses liberated from their obedience to dominant systems.
72
In his work, this is the process whereby colonizers attempt to make over the colonized in their image.
See Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” October 28 (Spring
1984): 125-133.
334

A ZOMBIE COMMUNITY
Zombies have often been popularly conceived of as crowds, masses, hordes and
swarms. As Gregory Waller remarks about Night of the Living Dead: “…Though the
creatures in Romero’s film do not emerge from any one specific social class, perhaps the
living dead are our version of what in the past was called the ‘rabble’.”
73
Of course, it
has only been in the last century that the crowd
74
has been re-considered by theorists as
something other than a purely negative force.
75
For years, writers in the tradition of
Gustave Le Bon saw the crowd as essentially barbaric and destructive.
76
And there is, of
course, a reason that some would associate the crowd with such—the modern conception
of the crowd has long been connected with the American and French revolutions,
moments when the masses inverted traditional means of instigating political change.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
73
Gregory A. Waller, The Living and The Undead: From Stoker’s Dracula to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead
(Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 278.
74
Or the mass or mob, each of which has a slightly different connotation but a very similar denotation—
each can mean at its most basic “a large group of people;” mob may also mean “an unruly crowd/mass,”
but the other denotation is also used. For a discussion on the historical uses of “masses,” which explores
both the notions of the crowd and the mob, see Raymond Williams, Keywords, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford
UP, 1985), 192. See also, Al Sandine, The Taming of the American Crowd: From Stamp Riots to Shopping
Sprees (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009). Furthermore, Gustave Le Bon and Elias Canetti, two
theorists of crowds, who hold radically different interpretations of them, both use the terms masses and
crowds somewhat interchangeably. See Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1896,
reprint; Batoche Books, 2001) and Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (1960), trans. Carol Stewart (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984).
75
See especially Canetti and Sandine.
76
As Le Bon quickly notes in The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, “Crowds are only powerful for
destruction” (Le Bon, 10). Al Sandine actually claims that Le Bon’s crowds resemble George Romero’s
zombies and notes that “The subtext of zombie fear is surely crowd fear…” (80).
335

“The people,” that ambiguous classification of everyone who was not previously
sovereign, were now in charge. Thus, the lingering class-based assumptions that the
crowd could be a threat to those in power—that it could present the possibility of things
getting out of control
77
or that it could become something easily manipulated by an
opposition leader—remain to some degree.
One of the major proponents of reevaluating the crowd has been Elias Canetti,
who in his 1960 book Crowds and Power set out to examine the psychological and social
components of crowd formation. In the opening line of the first essay of the book,
Canetti states, “There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown.”
78

In his estimation, it is this fear that pushes humans to form crowds. Lesley Brill explains
Canetti’s position: “Within crowds, people feel safe from most sources of attack…”
79

This sense of safety in numbers certainly manifests in Zombie Walks. The
zombie walker can find security in playing the zombie when there are hundreds of others
doing it too. As Lucinda Michelle Knapp observed of a 2006 Hollywood Zombie Walk,
“You’re staying together for safety—a lone zombie is a zombie in trouble.”
80
Moreover,
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77
Which could be read as either a fear of the destructive potential of the crowd in terms of property damage
or in terms of damage to political power.
78
Canetti, 15.
79
Lesley Brill, Crowds, Power and Transformation in Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2006), 5-6.
80
Lucinda Michele Knapp, “Hunting for Brains in Hollywood,” Los Angeles Alternative (October 9, 2006),
accessed on April 18, 2007, http://www.laalternative.com/index.php/2006/10/09/hunting-for-brains-in-
hollywood/.
336

Zombie Walk organizers time and again remind participants on their websites that these
events are only considered successful when there are significant numbers of participants.
As a 2007 Calgary Zombie Walk website stated: “Remember: zombies are only really
effective as massive swarming crowds.”
81

While Zombie Walk organizers do value large numbers of zombies, individual
zombies still stand out. In fact, as previously discussed, many zombie walkers are
actively trying to stand out—their costumes or behavior intended to separate them from
the rest of the zombies. The crowd may provide the first line of protection (“I won’t be
the only one doing it”) but once that safety is in place, many walkers attempt to make
themselves known as individuals.
82
The fantasy enacted in walks becomes, then, that
death is not the great equalizer, that the living will be able to retain their individual
identities when they pass on.
In Canetti’s reasoning, the associations between crowds and death run deep. One
of his categories of crowd is the invisible crowd, which can be anything from demons and

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81
“Updates,” Calgary Zombie Walk Website (October 19, 2006), accessed on April 18, 2007,
http://www.calgaryzombie.com/. Of course, the use of the word “swarming” is telling, with its links both
to insects (non-human “things”) and its links to hordes; in both cases, destructiveness is implied.
82
There is a sense where the crowd also provides zombie walkers with the pleasure of interacting with
other zombie fans—this too could color one’s desire to stand out: in order to impress the other fans.
337

spirits to bacteria and viruses, and one of the most important invisible crowds are the
dead. As Canetti observes,
Over the whole earth, wherever there are men, is found the conception of
the invisible dead. It is tempting to call it humanity’s oldest conception.
There is certainly no horde, no tribe, no people which does not have
abundant ideas about its dead. Man has been obsessed by them; they have
been of enormous importance for him; the action of the dead upon the
living has been an essential part of life itself.
83

The dead, then, serve as a double of the crowd of the living; they are its opposition, and
as such, require constant consideration. Yet, the living are aware that the dead possess
greater numbers and power and that eventually all of the members of their crowd will
join the dead. As Canetti states, “The living are always on the retreat.”
84

Imagining the living and the dead posed as such, it becomes easy to think about
how zombies are imagined as crowds.
85
In the earliest zombie texts, the living were
made over as the dead (whether they were truly biologically dead or not) and were used
against living interests, yet in all of these texts, the living were able to beat “death” in the
form of the zombie—enacting a fantasy in which the dead (or the seemingly dead) do not
have power and the living are not in retreat. In Romero- and video game-style zombie
texts, zombies are literally the dead who are reanimated and then attack the living. In
these texts, there is a figurative battle between the two crowds, and just as in Canetti’s
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83
Canetti, 42.
84
Canetti, 67.
85
Or, more precisely, at least in Canetti’s terms, as “packs,” the earliest forerunners to crowds.
338

estimation, almost always, the dead have the upper hand. However, Zombie Walks
complicate this by taming the dead—the dead return and in some instances “attack” the
living, but they are a jovial dead, robbed of the power Canetti envisions.
In Chapter Four, the zombie’s relationship to a “state of exception” was
discussed. The vast majority of Romero- and video game-style zombie media envision
zombies as “things.” But this has been complicated in those texts that explicitly render
zombies as individuals with distinct personalities or texts like Stubbs the Zombie that
reverse “thing” status and place it onto living humans. However, in Zombie Walks, the
state of exception status disappears altogether. While the zombies that the walkers may
be imitating might be adversarial, the walkers, in their performance of such, are not.
Furthermore, while most Romero- and video game-style texts construct most living
humans as zombie killers, the walks do not. Additionally, the events are about
celebrating zombiness; to pretend to kill zombies would thus be out of place. Therefore,
the construction of either zombies or humans as acceptable casualties is erased in the
walks—both the living and the living dead are imagined as having full rights to existence.
Still, within Canetti’s conception, one begins to see how the dead are imagined as
a cohesive and productive (albeit abstract) group interested in maintaining a powerful
position vis-à-vis the living. Therefore, the conceptual similarities between Canetti’s
groups and “community” should be taken into account, as it is worth considering what a
339

community is and how it operates in terms of Zombie Walks to begin to approach the
political undertones of these events.
86

Community itself is a highly-contested concept. Even those theorists who seem
to set forth clear criteria for how a community is constructed and who might constitute its
members, like Benedict Anderson, acknowledge that communities are imagined social
constructs.
87
Still, even in acknowledging this, Anderson’s conception is fairly fixed. On
the other end of the spectrum are theorists like Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben,
who see community as both illusory and highly fluid.
88
Rather than something based on
fixed identities where the community is understood as something we “always already
occupy,” they envision communities as ideally operating without “a guarantee of
meaning, identity, belonging; a concept that does not have an essence—that of a unified
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86
Thus, while trying to talk about the walkers themselves as a community, be that as something akin to
Graham St. John’s club communities (which he identifies as communities of the moment, defined by their
ephemeral nature) or Gerard Delanty’s communication communities (those communities that are defined by
their practices rather than by shared social values or a common locality), might be enlightening in regards
to the place of these groups, as they seem to meld traditional conceptions of community with those of
cyber-community models—having both a tie to location (the place of the walks) and common interests but
existing, for the most part, in cyberspace—the intention here is a deeper meditation on community as it
relates to the relationship between the living and the dead. See Graham St. John, “Post-Rave
Technotribalism and the Carnival of Protest,” The Post-Subcultures Reader, eds. David Muggleton and
Rupert Weinzierl (New York: Berg, 2003): 65-82; and see Gerard Delanty, Community (New York:
Routledge, 2003).
87
See for instance, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983).
88
See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 76., ed. Peter
Connor, trans. Peter Connor, et al. (1983; reprint, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) and
Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, Theory out of Bounds, vol. 1., trans. Michael Hardt (1990;
reprint, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
340

collectivity.”
89
In this conception, community becomes action, rather than
categorization.
90

For Agamben, in particular, this notion of action without reference back to a set of
fixed identities/principles is the ideal political form because the most frightening
opponent for the state would be a coalescence that cannot be answered: because this
grouping of people can not be fixed or located according to specific identities (and thus
goals), there would be no way to attack them. Agamben thus begins the last section of
his book The Coming Community with the question: “What could be the politics of…a
being whose community is mediated not by any condition of belonging (being red, being
Italian, being Communist) nor by the simple absence of conditions (a negative
community…), but by belonging itself?”
91
He sees the beginnings of an answer at play in
the Tiananmen protests of 1989; as Leland De la Durantaye explains:
In Agamben’s view, what truly provoked the Chinese authorities was the
protestors’ refusal to make more concrete demands that could then be
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89
Vijay Devadas and Jane Mummery, “Community Without Community,” Borderlands 6.1 (2007),
accessed on June 18, 2010, http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol6no1_2007/devadasmummery_intro.htm.
90
This position, of course, is not without its detractors—first of all, it flies in the face of easy description,
as essentially for both Nancy and Agamben, community defies any fixed definition. This makes
community, as they see it, hard to pin down in any concrete sense. This may explain why even today,
many are much more comfortable discussing communities in terms of some sort of identifying marker,
even if they acknowledge that the concept itself is still fraught with issues. For instance, see Peter Day and
Douglas Schuler’s explanation of community in light of H. Butcher’s conception of the ‘senses of
community’ in “Community Practice: An Alternative Vision of the Network Society,” Community Practice
in the Network Society: Local Action/Global Interaction, eds. Peter Day and Douglas Schuler (New York:
Routledge, 2004), 11-12.
91
Agamben, 85.
341

granted or denied, revised, or ridiculed. The mute insistence of these
protestors, their rejection of not just one incident or aspect of a corrupt
system but that system as a whole, made their protest particularly
threatening to the state…
92

Again, without a clear conception of what a group is or what it wants, it is difficult, if not
impossible, to counter it.
Taking Agamben’s idea of a community through action, a connection to
community as it is envisioned by Joseph Roach in Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic
Performance can be made. Roach’s model of community is not quite as abstract as
Agamben’s, but both rely on a sense of the performative—community requires some sort
of action. For Agamben, this is what constitutes it; for Roach, this is what maintains it.
93

In Roach’s view, the death of any community member leaves a hole, and communities
reproduce themselves by continually trying to fill these holes. Thus, the dead operate in a
special space within any community: they no longer live within it, but they are still a part
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
92
Leland De la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: a Critical Introduction (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009), 171.
93
For Roach, memory is embodied in performance. Cultures reproduce themselves through performances
in which surrogates are fitted into the holes created by the deaths of the original historical players—as the
fit of the alternate is rarely exact, the process of finding the right surrogate becomes one of continually
auditioning stand-ins and through their influence, constantly re-framing the role of the original. Roach
therefore contends that the dead operate in a special space within any living community: they no longer live
within it, but at the same time, they are still a part of it and are not completely Other to it. Roach’s focus in
Cities of the Dead is on London and New Orleans, port cities that he sees as representative of the
performative aspects of the new structures of cultural exchange and intercultural mingling described by
Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (New York: Verso, 1993). Roach
contends that cultures in contact with one another invent themselves by performing their pasts in the
presence of other cultures—as one can’t perform one’s “self” unless there is something against which to
compare it. See Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead (New York: Columbia UP, 1996).
342

of it.
94
Just as in Canetti’s conception, the dead are intimately tied to this community’s
conception of itself. Similarly, Bronislaw Malinowski believes imagery and objects of
death, created by the living, serve in community construction and maintenance. As he
argues, humans need to memorialize the dead and visualize death to counter the impulse
to forget, to destroy all traces of those who have died and thus destroy all traces of
community and civilization.
95
Remembering the dead thus grants civilization its
stability.
96

In each of these conceptions, the dead are an abstract force that exist in a space
where those “conditions of belonging” to which Agamben refers (gender, race, and
nationality, for instance) are meaningless and fixed demands upon the living are not
made. It is only when the dead are given identity and are likewise fixed with a purpose
by the living that their potential political power is assuaged. If death is nothing more
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
94
Roach spends much time on the relationship between the living and the dead. His primary concern is the
politics of communicating with the dead through performance and how the living are empowered through
performances of memory connected to the dead. So, while Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth,
trans. Richard Philcox (1961; reprint, New York: Grove Press, 2004) may not see much of a political edge
to something like Vodou, for instance, Roach does: it is in any group’s reverence of the dead that he sees
the political thrust of the ghosts that haunt them and remain with them. The dead, just like in Canetti’s
conception, are intimately tied to a living community and its conception of itself. See Roach.
95
Bronislaw Malinowski, “Magic, Science and Religion,” Death, Mourning, and Burial: a Cross-Cultural
Reader, ed. Antonius C.G.M. Robben (Malden, MA.: Blackwell Publishing, 2004).
96
For a historical perspective on this process, Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall assert that there existed a
very real relationship between the living and the dead of the medieval period in the West. As they state,
“An awareness of the extensiveness of reciprocity and exchanges between the living and the dead has
encouraged some historians to portray the dead as integral to…constructions of community” during this
period. See Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall, “Introduction: Placing the Dead in Late Medieval and Early
Modern Europe,” The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern
Europe, eds. Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (New York: Cambridge UP, 2000), 6.
343

than a cessation of life, meaningless and devoid of any knowledge of self, then the living
are in danger of likewise losing all sense of certainty as to identity. Thus, Canetti sees
the group of the invisible dead as operating as foil to the living; likewise, Roach and
Malinowski see the dead as operating in a mutually-constructive relationship with the
living.
For these scholars, the dead serve to define the living inasmuch as the living grant
identity or give representation to the dead. The dead are thus robbed of what Agamben
might see as their best political weapon: their lack of identity and clear purpose. Hence,
in identifying the dead through group or community formation, they are robbed of some
of their power. An identity typically means some sort of desires or needs based on that
identity and by giving the dead (assumed) goals, the living can identify what the dead
want and work to counter it.
However, this does not account for those beings that exist in-between living and
dead. For these figures, Roach turns to Arnold van Gennep’s work on death: van Gennep
saw death as a rite of passage creating two categories—the living and the dead—but also
creating a process in between living and being dead: dying. This is a place where normal
behaviors are transgressed, and as such, the liminal state of dying becomes a key
performative site in which to comment upon society.
97
As Roach notes, “In the creative
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97
Roach, 39.

344

scope of liminal categories, periphery and center may seem to change places.”
98

Furthermore, Roach turns to Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, who describe this
reversal even further:
The result is a mobile, conflictual fusion of power, fear and desire in the
construction of a subjectivity: a psychological dependence upon precisely
those Others which are being rigorously opposed and excluded at the
social level. It is for this reason that what is socially peripheral is so
frequently symbolically central.
99

Yet, it isn’t just that the dead are made symbolically important in these constructs; two
other things are happening as well. By conferring upon the dead certain identities/desires
in relation to the living, they have been made over as something that can be answered. In
allowing for an in-between state, though, a new political player emerges: that which is
neither living nor dead—the zombie.
In Haitian belief, the living body that the zombi was may have once had an
identity, but that identity cannot be securely fixed to the body in the zombi state.
100
The
zombi, itself, also has no particular goals or will of its own in this paradigm—and this is
how it is made terrifying. Even if this zombi is directed by its master, there is still a
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98
Roach, 39.
99
Roach, 39.
100
First, because the zombi him/herself may not remember that identity but second, because most stories of
real-world zombis involve the removal of the zombi from the locations of his/her former life. Even if
zombification is not a part of social sanctioning, as Davis suggests, there are still many stories of people
being afraid of zombis and not wanting to be around them, and this would hamper identity construction,
especially as the zombi could not be counted on to remember his/her living identity. See Chapter One.
345

sense of unpredictability about it: zombis exist without will or want of their own. There
is a political potential in this type of zombi—without a master, a colonizing but
stabilizing force, it becomes that which the living are not sure how to handle. As
Elizabeth McAlister relates, “There are important political dimensions to the zonbi
metaphor… Insofar as the zonbi represents the slave, or the worker, there is always the
possibility that the zonbi will wake up, shake off the oppressor, and start a revolution.”
101

Yet, in the zombi’s translation into U.S. popular culture, zombie masters were
always provided.
102
With Night of the Living Dead, zombies changed somewhat and
were fitted with goals, robbing them of their earlier political potential. However, as
Chapter Three argues, a growing number of zombie texts since 1968 have envisioned
zombies differently; they may have easily-identifiable goals (although these may not
always include eating/killing the living) but their strongest allegiance is to the in-
between, to a state with few, if any, fixed identities. Thus, while they might not fully
meet Agamben’s requirements, their political potential is still present.
In Zombie Walks, performances of zombiness can be seen as a means of
organizing the dead into something legible for the living. If the death of a community
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101
Elizabeth McAlister, Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002), 108; she refers to zombi of the spirit as zonbi.
102
An interesting quasi-exception to this would be 1943’s Revenge of the Zombies—Lila Von Altermann is
turned into a zombie by her (Nazi) husband and in the end, she becomes free of his control and turns on
him; she leads him to his death in the swamps—finally able to do what none of the living protagonists were
able to do: stop the Nazi plan and destroy her husband.
346

member creates a hole, as Roach envisions, then the walks make the holes of the
community hypervisible and a source of fun. In this way, the demands of the dead are
lessened through parody. This is, of course, reading the zombies as representatives of the
dead rather than the living dead, per se, but it may account for the carnivalesque feel of
these events: a way to tame that part of the community that must be appeased but cannot
normally be seen.
However, one must also consider how the zombies are being performed. While
most zombie walkers take their inspiration from Romero-style zombies and there may be
moans for “brains” and fake attacks, these zombies have no real purpose in the walks—
they simply walk from one place to another performing zombiness.
103
Zombie Walks are
playful events, but by taking on the role of this liminal being and enacting it, the walkers
are at once, putting on a liminal identity and masking their own—to dress as a zombie
largely mutes one’s own markers of identity; furthermore, while many walks work in
conjunction with food drives or charity fundraisers, the walks themselves are largely
devoid of any pre-ordained purpose, other than to enact zombiness. Most walkers claim
that they are participating in order to “have a good time.” In a sense, then, the walks
serve as brief moments of existence without fixed identity or purpose—this may not
translate into political action but it does offer a critical potential. Blurring the lines
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
103
Of course, the goals are a bit different for those walks that are consciously attempting to break the world
record—in those walks, the number of participants, rather than the event itself, is what is important.
347

between life and death and bringing spaces and populations of life into contact with
living death, even in the form of performative caricature, brings into relief how
ideologies about the value of life and health often coincide with widespread death—
social death, vulnerability to early death, and the medicalization of death.
104
These walks
may not overtly discuss how some people are more vulnerable to early death than others
or how others become made over as socially dead, but by bringing the living dead into
the world of the living, they force what the state and dominant systems of power would
like to render invisible
105
into everyday life, at least metaphorically.
As was discussed in Chapter Four, at one point, death and the dead were
ubiquitous, both spiritually and materially in the West: the dead were seen as a very real
part of mundane life, whether they were conceived of spirits or in material form as
decomposing bodies in the churchyard. Yet, with the modern era and the incorporation
both of discourses of hygiene and Enlightenment theory that seemingly displaced belief
in spirits in favor of belief in rational science, the dead were removed further and further
from everyday life, segregated to special spaces and times. However, even in this
segregation, the dead retained their pull on the living. As Canetti and Roach show, the
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104
As discussed in Chapter Four, the medicalization of death during the 20
th
century worked to hide death
and dying away in hospitals rather than in the family home or community and thus served to render it
strange and frightening.
105
Or relegated to the realm of fiction and entertainment
348

imagined/invisible dead are just as vital to the modern living as the corporeal/mundane
dead were to the West’s pre-modern predecessors.
Thus, rather than confronting the living in everyday life, death haunts the living
106

and becomes manifest in spectacles that ostensibly serve to undercut its still powerful
hold on them. As Drew Faust, writing on Northern and Southern families trying to find
the bodies of Civil War dead, notes, “To embody—quite literally—death was one way to
make it real.”
107
Death seen is death comprehended.
Similarly, discussing the death of Princess Diana, Diana Taylor begins meditating
on the nature of spectacle; she draws from Guy Debord’s view that “The spectacle is not
a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated
by images.”
108
In Taylor’s estimation, “The spectacle, then, is that which we do not see,
the invisible that ‘appears’ only through mediation.”
109
It is making visible that which is
always already there structuring the lives of the living.
110
Death cannot be known by the
living in any verifiable way, yet, as an abstract concept, it holds a powerful pull over their
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
106
For the power that this, in and of itself, may grant to death, see any number of works on hauntology, but
see especially Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
107
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Vintage,
2008), 146.
108
Debord, 12.
109
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham,
Duke UP, 2003), 145.
110
Taylor, 143.
349

lives, so creating images of it or performing it becomes the only means of making it
legible, which takes death’s power and gives at least some of it over to the living.
In the performance or visualization of death, the power garnered from its
invisibility is weakened to the benefit of the living; however, Zombie Walks are not
necessarily about a performance of death. The living take on the guise of death to
perform zombiness, an imagined state somewhere between living and dead. And this is
where part of the political power of these events lingers: death is made legible, yes, but
walkers are also able to embrace, through performance
111
and character,
112
a dialectical
position in which the political potential of both the living and the dead is utilized.
Similarly, the walkers, by being embodied performers, are able to take spectacle
and use it to make an intervention into the social. In discussing the “Billionaires for
Bush” political activist performances during the 2004 election, Kavita Kulkarni muses,
Political activism has perhaps found its greatest antagonist in the culture
of postmodernity in postindustrial Western society. The relativity of
“truth” becomes all too apparent in a country overly mediated and
inundated by images and information extending from endless perspectives.
As mass communication and the mass media propagate a world of signs,
symbols, and icons, we are left to supplant our sense of reality and history
with an amalgamated collection of images and sound bites that present
only a manufactured semblance of truth.
113

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111
As the living playing at dead.
112
The zombie, which is living and dead.
113
Kavita Kulkarni, “Billionaires for Bush: Parody as Political Intervention,” E-Misferica 1.1 (Spring
2004), accessed on June 17, 2010, http://hemisphericinstitute.org/journal/1_1/kulkarni.html.
350

One counter to this trend would be to create real-world, embodied performances just as
the Billionaires for Bush did and the zombie walkers do—in neither set of performances
is there a “truth” to refer back to: none of Kulkarni’s performers are billionaires and none
of the zombie walkers are really zombies, but neither are a set of images, either. They
reference images, true, but as embodied, living performers, they can be interacted with in
a totally different way and hence, because of their presence, they encourage a totally
different relationship to the truth of their messages.
This may be a bit more apparent with the Billionaires for Bush, who use the
theatricality and absurdity of their premise (billionaires who are wholly supportive of the
Bush agenda because it makes them money) to make an overtly political statement.
However, it is also applicable to the zombie walkers. Debord’s premise is that the world
is all image with no real-world referents anymore and that the spectacle serves as a means
and justification for keeping the preexisting system in place.
114
Zombie Walks are
predicated on providing a direct lived experience of an imagined event—one that is not
necessarily pure image but one that is based both on fiction and possibility. The
spectacle here does not uphold the state’s biopolitical power nor cultural assumptions of
normative behavior; it questions them and it allows for moments of lived reality based
not on the perceptual but on folklore, performance and belief.

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114
Debord, 12-13.
351

PARTY LIKE YOU’RE DEAD
In The Practices of Everyday Life, de Certeau notes that those without access to
dominant power positions can use the products and rituals of the system to subvert it;
these ways of “beating the system” aren’t locked or solid, but exist only in their moments
of performance. For de Certeau, walking in the city has its own logic, its own discursive
power. As any person traverses the city, he or she rewrites it according to his or her use
of the space. Spaces are re-inscribed with a new meaning for each set of users, and these
can and will run counter to meanings intended by city planners, and thus intended by the
dominant system. As de Certeau maintains, city spaces, “become liberated spaces that
can be occupied.”
115
He offers up the city as a revolutionary space through the everyday
practice of walking.
For theorists like Iain Borden, modern urban space is primarily the space of the
market. Therefore, actions that serve to disrupt the market uses of a space also serve to
undermine the market logic of it. Borden, discussing how skateboarding transforms the
city, says,
Skateboarding counters signal architecture with a body-centric and multi-
sensory performative activity, and with an indifference to function, price
and regulation, creating new patterns of space and time, and turning the
signals of the city into ephemeral symbols of everyday meaning and
duration…
116

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115
Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” The Cultural Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Simon During
(New York: Routledge, 1999), 132.
116
Iain Borden, “Performing the City,” The Subcultures Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Ken Gelder (New York:
Routledge, 1997), 256.
352

Borden continues, arguing that in confronting the signals and symbols of the city,
skateboarders confront the underlying system that produces these signals and symbols.
Zombie Walks can be read as an extension of these practices—the walks disrupt
normal patterns of expected behavior and market expectations within certain spaces. For
example, at an October 2010 Zombie Walk in Costa Mesa, California, walkers entered a
halloween costume shop at a mall on their route. Enacting zombiness as they roamed the
store, the zombies did not necessarily interact with its customers. Yet, these customers
stopped shopping and watched the zombies, seemingly unsure of how to act or react in
the situation.
Still, there is the notion in de Certeau’s and Borden’s work that space is liberated
largely on an individual level or in a one-sided fashion for just a particular group of users.
Yet, this ignores spectatorship. As the example from Costa Mesa shows, Zombie Walks
problematize this, as their disruption of the dominant readings of a space depends, in
large part, on the relationship created by both participants and non-participants
interacting with each other as both insiders and outsiders at the same time: whether
participant or not, one’s experience of the space becomes dramatically altered; it becomes
uncanny.
117

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117
The spaces in which Zombie Walks take place are typically familiar environments—shopping districts,
college campuses, city parks—but they are made unfamiliar by the introduction of zombies into the space.
353

Walkers may be invited into certain spaces (see fig. 5.5), and many will make a
point of going inside businesses and shops on their route that get into the spirit of the
event and seem welcoming. Generally, these visits do not last long—the zombies may go
up and down an aisle and leave—and yet, a momentary change in the expectations for the
space is achieved. Even when the walkers do not enter a place of business, their presence
can serve to disrupt expectations of a space—hundreds of “zombies” on a sidewalk, for
example, make it fairly difficult to traverse, or large hordes of them may block traffic.
Drivers may pull over or honk at zombies, and bystanders may wave or try to snap
pictures of the them. Even if there aren’t hundreds of zombies in a walk, almost any
number will dictate that on-lookers within close proximity will be in some sort of contact
with the walkers. These spectators may have to wait for the zombies to pass them by;
they may be targeted for some playful “attacking,” or they may simply brush up against
one of the walkers.
In this sense, then, the zombies transform the experience of public space from one
focused on encountering these spaces as spectacles of capitalism to one in which specific
bodies are able to provide spectacle and be available for visual consumption. Yet, the
spectacle is a living person that passes onlookers by, instead of being a space that the
spectator can visually master. Also, the zombies have the power to look back. The
walker is visually consumed by the non-participants encountering a Zombie Walk, and
354

yet, these walkers are empowered zombies who also gaze upon non-participants,
upsetting traditional notions of who masters the gaze.
Furthermore, some walkers do not just alter space through their presence as
zombies among the living; some aim to make sure on-lookers and fellow zombies are
aware a disruption is taking place. In the online discussion preceding the Melbourne
Zombie Shuffle in 2006, for instance, organizers listed possible zombie picket sign ideas
for the walk; these included: “I’m Post-Life and I Vote!;” “Grave rights for gay
vegetarian zombies!;” and “Don’t Tax Our Brains!”
118
Although meant in fun, these
slogans also offer a sly commentary on a variety of current political issues, from gay
rights to abortion. Likewise, a group of zombie walkers in New York in 2005 mocked
the Disney Company’s business practices as they stood outside the Fifth Avenue Disney
Store in New York City. A commentator reports:
“Arrgh,” they cried, pressing their withering faces to the House of Mouse,
scowling at Mickey's diabolical, smarmy presence. “Constitutionally
wrong intellectual property law!” yelled one, in a phrase that never quite
rolls off the tongue, even in zombie speak.
119

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118
“Zombie Picket sign suggestions,” Melbourne Zombies Livejournal Group Administrator Post (May 2,
2006), accessed on April 18, 2007, http://zombieshuffle.livejournal.com/.
119
Corina Zappia, “Zombies Invade Bloomingdales,” The Village Voice (October 26, 2005), accessed on
April 18, 2007, http://www.villagevoice.com/nyclife/0544,zappia1,69428,15.html.
355

Lucinda Michele Knapp describes this exchange at a Zombie Walk in Hollywood
in October 2006:
A zombie In-N-Out employee staggered down Sunset… as the crowd
approached the… In-N-Out by Hollywood High, a muttering chant raised:
“In-N-Out! In-N-Out!”…When the mob surrounded the tiny little building
the seething, bloodied crowd parted, ushering in the In-N-Out zombie,
who…entered In-N-Out, and the hapless patrons froze as he moaned with
great theatrical effect “My paycheck! My paycheck!” and menaced
various customers frozen in shock, before slowly pivoting and exiting,
yelling “I’m NEVER working here again!” Stunned In-N-Out visitors
stared, giggled, or froze and ignored us in their discomfort.
120

After her experience, Knapp felt comfortable identifying Zombie Walks as a form
of “art-protest-prank,” yet she noted that:
The whole march showed a marked reluctance to push the boundaries into
any sort of strong cultural commentary. For a start, though, it was good.
Most of these people had never contributed to a public prank before… Just
the fact that they were willing to tweak the public norms this much was a
good sign.
121

For Knapp, just getting people out into the streets was enough to make the event political.
One of the participants in the 2006 Hollywood Zombie Walk, though, posted a
message in response to Knapp’s article, stating,
How did we manage to turn silly fun into so much drama? Seriously,
lighten up!! Social commentary is necessary and very important, but never
once was this presented (at least from my perspective) as an event that was
supposed to be commentary… In my eyes it was an excuse to live out one
of my favorite movie genres in an very appropriate place, and to have
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120
Knapp.
121
Knapp.
356

some HARMLESS FUN. Please don’t take the fun out of it by making me
feel like it had to mean something…
122

Similarly, in reaction to a BBC story on the 2007 Brisbane, Australia Zombie Walk,
“Alison” in Toronto, Canada described participating in a 2005 Zombie Walk, noting,
“The best part is that it’s a completely free and free-spirited event with no purpose other
than to have fun.”
123
Mark Menold, the host of a late night horror show in Pittsburgh,
agrees, calling the walks, “completely pointless,” but noting that that is their charm.
124

Yet, Joe Medwid, a Zombie Walk participant in Virginia and Pennsylvania, sees
the events as having a purpose beyond just getting to dress up as the undead:
It brightens up people’s day to be eaten by zombies… It’s a break in the
mundane. If you’re at work and on your lunch break, and nothing's
happening then 20 zombies wander by… If they get a good chuckle out of
it, that’s what we're going for…
125

Beyond being able to provide a temporary diversion from one’s everyday life, in a
very basic sense, Zombie Walks are able to highlight just how ridiculous it can be to
render death invisible by making it visible again—and cloaking it in the guise of dead
brides, dead soldiers, and dead rock stars. In the walks, death and life are envisioned as
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122
“Melissa,” Comment in response to Lucinda Michele Knapp, “Hunting for Brains in Hollywood,”
(October 10, 2006), accessed on April 18, 2007,
http://www.laalternative.com/index.php/2006/10/09/hunting-for-brains-in-hollywood/.
123
“Alison,” Comment in response to “’Zombies’ bear down on Brisbane,” BBC News Online (April 1,
2007), accessed on April 18, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6515477.stm.
124
Hofstetter.
125
Hofstetter.
357

shocking, colorful, corporeal, but also comical. And it is in their comedy that the walk’s
true political nature may lie.
Richard Schechner, writing on festivals and carnival in The Future of Ritual,
states that they “are comic theatrical events: comic in desire, even if sometimes tragic in
outcome. When people go into the streets en masse, they are celebrating life’s fertile
possibilities.”
126
Hence, at the very basis of Zombie Walks is the irony of a gathering
“celebrating life’s fertile possibilities,” cloaked in the guise of death. Furthermore,
although most zombie walkers are very rarely trying to give an explicit political flavor to
the events, there is a high degree of parody present.
Whether it is the nightmare zombie parent pushing a stroller with his zombie child
(fig. 5.10), undead Disney characters (fig. 5.11), or the young zombie fashion victim
whose best and brightest accessory is her brain (fig. 5.12), many zombie costumes
suggest a comic thrust to the events—just as the behavior of the zombie In-n-Out
employee and anti-Disney zombies likewise does. Kulkarni notes that parody is powerful
politically because it can provide a form of “resistance to dominant ideologies without
necessarily imposing an equally questionable set of dogma.”
127
It encourages spectators
to think critically about what they see. Thus, even without an event-wide intention to be
political, some events encourage moments of political thought through parody.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
126
Richard Schechner, The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance (New York: Routledge,
1993), 46.
127
Kulkarni.
358

Figure 5.10: Zombie Dad with Zombified Toy Baby in Stroller, Newhall, CA
(Photograph by author, October 17, 2009)

Figure 5.11: Zombie Alice in Wonderland, Costa Mesa, CA
(Photograph by author, October 23, 2010)

359

Figure 5.12: Young Woman with a “Brain” Hat, Newhall, CA
(Photograph by author, October 17, 2009)

Yet, there are walks with overt political or social activist agendas. Groups have
used Zombie Walks to support community service events and charities.
128
As part of
“Buy Nothing Day” protests, zombie walkers will sometimes converge on local malls and
shopping districts.
129
Furthermore, World Zombie Day, which spawns dozens of Zombie
Walks around the globe each year, was designed to raise awareness of global hunger
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
128
For example, the Annual Monroeville Mall Zombie Walk in Pittsburgh supported a food drive, as does
Zombie-O-Rama in San Jose, California; walks in southern California have supported the Orange County
animal shelter; and Zombie-Aid in England raises money for cancer and children’s charities. Of course, on
the other end of things, Zombie Squad, an international organization of people who come together under
the notion of zombie (and hence, disaster) preparedness, also raise money for local charities and food
banks.
129
“Buy Nothing Day” is an informal day of protest against consumerism, observed in Canada and the
United States on the Friday after American Thanksgiving, and the following day throughout the rest of the
world.
360

issues.
130
While it might seem absurd to have zombies be the mascots for good deeds and
serious issues, that is the point. The role of parody in Zombie Walks must be
remembered: for instance, for the many food drives connected to walks, what better
representative for combating hunger could there be than a figure who incessantly feeds
on human flesh?
Considering zombies as figures of parody is but one element of the carnivalesque
at work in the walks. For Mikahil Bakhtin, social oppositions that exist in the political
realm are given material form in the disorder of bodies in carnival. In studying how
people from all socio-economic backgrounds interacted at carnival historically, he found
that there, the the mundane body could be transformed into something extraordinary.
131

Furthermore, because carnival was a time and space in which traditional social
hierarchies were upset and inverted, carnival was (and is) utopian in nature.
Zombie Walks are an example of the contemporary carnivalesque. They provide
their participants with a time/space of social upheaval through performance and
celebration. While spectacular in nature, they also force non-zombie spectators to
become involved in an exchange of gazes that disrupts traditional spectator/spectacle and
consumer/consumed binaries. Additionally, the grotesque body, as Bakhtin envisioned it,
populated carnival—this body, which reveled in its bodily nature and proudly displayed
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130
See the World Zombie Day website: http://www.theitsaliveshow.com/worldzombieday.htm.
131
Of course, inherent in his argument is the process whereby real differences are elided in constructing the
people as one coherent group.
361

its bodily functions, could, at once, be the symbol for life and renewal and at the same
time, be the symbol for death and decay; it was a body that very much represented the
people’s power to affect change, even if for only a few days during carnival. The
zombie, as both living and dead and as that which displays its bodily functions and bodily
nature proudly, is an exaggerated form of the grotesque body.
132

Yet, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White argue that in the modern era, carnival has
been sublimated.
133
It has become spectacularized, and while forms of the carnivalesque
survive, so too do the forms of order and hierarchy that it has always been posed against.
However, Roach, in his examinations of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, contends that there
isn’t so neat a line to be drawn between law and the carnival, that in many cases, the two
have operated and continue to operate simultaneously and in concert with one another.
134

Rather than seeing carnival as sublimated, he contends that those carnival actions that
were once considered transgressive, over time, have become “dignified, sanctioned, and
even legally protected.”
135

Zombie Walks are by no means dignified, but they are legally protected (in most
cases), and they do tend to be rather law-abiding. As Knapp noted of the 2006
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132
Discussed in Chapter Three.
133
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, “Bourgeois Hysteria and the Carnivalesque,” The Cultural Studies
Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Simon During (New York: Routledge, 1999): 382-388.
134
See Roach.
135
Roach, 244-45.
362

Hollywood Zombie Walk: “It ended up being the most well-behaved mob I’ve ever
seen.”
136
Indeed, most Zombie Walks occur without incident and very few invite the ire
of law enforcement.
137
In fact, some occur with the assistance of local government and
law enforcement agencies.
138

Almost all organized Zombie Walks have websites and informational bulletins
that contain rules of conduct, including everything from intonations to stay in character to
rules telling participants not to touch non-participants. As Mark Menold said in planning
a 2006 Zombie Walk, “We have to be well-behaved. You know how it works—if one
zombie decides to get a little crazy and start scaring people, it’s going to make all the
other zombies look bad.”
139
Likewise, the information packet for the 2009 Newhall

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136
Knapp.
137
That isn’t to say that some don’t get out of hand; for instance, police had to be called out to a walk in
Winnipeg in 2009 when walkers got unruly and started ignoring posted traffic signs and beating on cars.
See Gabrielle Giroday, “Zombies bit too lively for event’s organizer,” Winnipeg Free Press (October 27,
2009), accessed on June 17, 2010, http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/zombies-bit-too-lively-for-
events-organizer-66309052.html.
138
At the walk in Newhall, CA in October, 2009, for instance, local police helped cordon off city streets for
the safety of walkers and helped direct traffic during the event. Plus, the event organizers of a 2009
Winnipeg walk discussed enlisting police assistance for their next walk after the behavior of some of their
walkers (see previous note).
139
Eric Heyl, “He Ain’t Drunk, He’s a Zombie,” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (September 20, 2006),
accessed on April 18, 2007,
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/columnists/heyl/s_471261.html. Of course, the
entire idea of making a zombie look bad is well worth considering: if zombies, at least in the Romero
tradition, are cannibals who are bent on devouring humanity, what could possibly tarnish their image?
363

Zombie Walk warned participants: “While zombies may defy the rules of physics, they
are still citizens and thus can and will be held legally responsible for their actions.”
140

Australian film writer Luke Buckmaster was amused by the zombies’ willingness
to obey the law at a 2006 walk, noting, “Faces wincing, tongues drooping wildly, throats
parched by constant groaning and arms flailing akimbo, the zombies shuffling through
Melbourne on May 20 still had the good sense to wait until the little green man arrived
before crossing the road.”
141
Still, most organizers are proud of the fact that they are able
to pull off these mass events without incurring the wrath of the law, and they intend to
keep the events that way. As a posting the day before a 2006 Melbourne Zombie Shuffle
prompted: “…remember, traffic laws still apply to the undead! The Walks so far have
had great press and feedback by the accounts I’ve read, either in AU or international—so
let's keep up the good tradition, shall we?”
142
Even the promotional literature for some
Zombie Walks belies the law-abiding nature of the events. At the Zombie-O-Rama
website, an announcement of the event’s 2010 date came with this description: “Last year
panic filled the streets as the undead swarm flooded across the downtown frightening
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
140
Atom AtBnw.
141
Buckmaster; in my experience as well, zombie walkers are very well-behaved and always wait for the
“walk” sign before crossing the road. As Elizabeth Affusso has pointed out to me, this suggests that
participants desire only to play dead and not to put themselves into any danger of actually becoming dead.
142
“Raaaain?” Melbourne Zombies Livejournal Group Administrator Post (May 19, 2006), accessed on
April 18, 2007, http://zombieshuffle.livejournal.com/.
364

passersby, startling citizens and otherwise creating an organized chaos everywhere.”
143

The zombies of Zombie Walks are, then, in some ways, expected to be the mindless
conforming masses they are performing, and this points to one of the ways in which the
walks are problematic.
144

For Bakhtin, those attending a carnival were organized in ways that defied their
usual social, economic, and political stations. According to Bakhtin, “all were considered
equal during carnival. Here, in the town square, a special form of free and familiar
contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste,
property, profession, and age.”
145
This view of the liberating sense of community
fostered through carnival mirrors Canetti’s conception of discharge for a crowd—a
moment when the differences between all of the members of the crowd seem to
disappear.
146
One could certainly point to a similar equalizing effect happening in
Zombie Walks, especially among the zombies. However, as Canetti warns, “the moment
of discharge, so desired and so happy, contains its own danger. It is based on an illusion;
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
143
“Zombie-O-Rama 2010 Date Announced,” Zombie-O-Rama Website (May 18, 2010), accessed on July
20, 2010, http://www.zombieorama.com/; emphasis mine.
144
For an engaging discussion of the problematics of carnival in the Caribbean, see Gerard Aching (n. 23),
who argues that the progressive potential inherent in carnival is often counter-balanced by the fact that
dominant forms of political, economic, and cultural power have co-opted things like traditional masks,
costumes, and celebrations for their own ends, in effect altering the original meaning of these things.
145
Mikahil Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (1965; reprint, Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 1984), 10.
146
Canetti, 17.
365

the people who suddenly feel equal have not really become equal; nor will they feel equal
for ever.”
147

The same danger lurked within carnival, and it lurks in any carnivalesque event—
eventually, masks must be taken off and performative behaviors ceased. It is at these
moments that the realities of class, gender, and race
148
come rushing back to separate
members of the group. This may be somewhat alleviated by the strong online presence of
many specific Zombie Walk groups (and zombie fans in general) as they are able to re-
connect via social networking sites, bulletin boards, blogs, and forums, yet this
maintenance happens outside of the carnivalesque environs of the walks themselves.
Real-world lived identities must eventually come to bear on the zombie walkers.
Furthermore, while the walks disrupt expectations of space, there is a way in
which they also serve to draw attention away from the realities of the spaces in which
they exist. The Monroeville Mall Zombie Walk, which was, traditionally speaking, one
of the largest walks in the world, took place in the mall that served as the setting for
1978’s Dawn of the Dead. This should be read as an homage to that movie,
149
but it does
tend to gloss over the film’s meditations on the dangers of rampant consumption. While
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
147
Canetti, 18.
148
Not to mention sexuality and age, to name a few.
149
And to George Romero and his films in general. The mall is located in Pittsburgh, where Romero
attended college and started work in advertising before embarking on his film career with Night of the
Living Dead, his first film, which was set in the Pennsylvania countryside.
366

the film presents a critique of U.S. consumer culture—both with the zombies’ literal
consumption of human flesh and the living humans’ desires to consume the mall’s
goods—the goal of this particular walk was to set a world record for the largest zombie
gathering and in a sense, celebrate the mall both as space and as symbol.
150

In a 2009 Newhall Zombie Walk, which was part of a local Halloween
celebration, the route went through Old Town Newhall, an area undergoing revitalization
in hopes of eventually creating a shopping and entertainment destination for Los
Angelenos. The area was still in the primary stages of this, though—during the walk,
several shop fronts stood empty and there were a number of homeless people in the area.
Yet, the reality of the situation—that the space pointed to the very real social deaths of
some of the bodies within it—was elided by a performance, ironically enough, of figures
that could be made to stand for those very same socially dead. The juxtaposition of
hundreds of zombie walkers and homeless persons along the route thus served to
underline that the zombie-as-liberatory metaphor will only travel so far, and while
carnivalesque, Zombie Walks are ultimately only carnivalesque for some; others can’t
escape their everyday lives quite so easily.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
150
For more on Dawn of the Dead, see Chapter One; the Monroeville Mall’s last Zombie Walk was in
2009—the organizers moved the walk to another space for their (renamed) 2010 Zombie Walk.
367

TO BE IN-BETWEEN
Drew Faust reminds us: “Human beings are rarely simply passive victims of
death. They are actors even if they are the diers; they prepare for death, imagine it, risk
it, endure it, seek to understand it. And if they are survivors, they must assume new
identities established by their persistence in face of others’ annihilation.”
151
Death, in
many ways, defines the living—it represents not only the end of life, but it serves as an
imagined but nevertheless powerful counter to the interests of the living. However,
figuring the dead to serve the community of the living and robbing death of its power to
effectively haunt the living largely happens at an abstract level. The dead, in real life, are
hardly ever knocking on the door demanding to be let in.
Because of the abstract nature of how we conceive of the dead, it should be
apparent that real-world texts, even if they are fictional, serve to remind us of the place of
the dead—as that which the living repress because it is what they need. The zombie, in
particular, in any of its incarnations, is a fantasy of the return of the dead into the living
world, but one tainted with issues of exclusion, as the zombie is often a marker of social
death and presents a situation in which living humans are treated as though they are dead.
In the voodoo-style texts, the zombie represents death’s attempt to colonize living bodies
and its ultimate failure at such. The dead are put back into their place as the living re-
assert their power over the living world. An in-between state, where one is both living
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
151
Faust, xv.
368

and dead, cannot be allowed to continue. In Romero- and video game-style texts, the
zombie stands not only for the colonization of living bodies but also an all-out war waged
against the living, and it is a war the living rarely win. In these texts, the fantasy turns
into a nightmare as it becomes clear that there is no way for the living to escape the dead.
In many of these texts, too, then, the blending of living and dead is seen as something to
be feared.
Yet, as Chapter Three shows, if one examines zombie texts of the voodoo,
Romero and video game styles more closely, it becomes clear that many films that seem
to suggest the failure of liminal bodies do in fact still hold these bodies up as a utopian
alternative between the absolutes of being living or dead. Becoming a zombie thus
becomes a third option for those seeking not to exist within the “living” structures of
patriarchal heteronormativity or to be socially “dead” within the system. The zombie can
thus act as a powerful metaphor: living death opens itself up to an interpretation as almost
anything that is not part of normative culture and that refuses to be invisible and quiet.
152

And it is in this sense that zombies, as a concept, seem most productive. Conceived of an
in-between existence, they can operate in both worlds and in neither.
But this is how the zombie works conceptually. There seems to be a strong push
and pull in Zombie Walks between the liberating potential the zombie, as a more abstract
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
152
Of course, death does not always stand as counter to the normative—it can be harnessed for normalizing
projects (dead soldiers can often be made to serve this purpose) but in this instance, the dead do work in
opposition to the normative.
369

concept, provides and the real-world barriers that are enacted to make sure performances
of it touch upon its political potential without being truly radical in nature. Having the
dead body reanimate and interact with the living is one thing in a comic book or video
game, but having it happen in the real world forces one to confront the power of death,
even if for only a moment. However, usually the people enacting and watching this
performance of death are still entrenched in the structures of their lived realities.
Yet, as Judge Bruce Wright of the New York State Supreme Court has noted,
“Participating in the system doesn’t mean that we must identify with it…”
153
And it is
with this sentiment that Zombie Walks should be considered. The zombie, which yes,
can be conceived of as a liberating position, is nevertheless most often portrayed as
antagonist to the living; yet, the walkers celebrate it and revel in the opportunity to turn
their healthy, beautiful bodies into decaying corpses. They may remain living structured
subjects, but in putting on the guise of zombies, they step out of what that means for a
few moments to take on what it means to be ugly and dying.
Furthermore, by performing zombiness in public spaces, the walkers invite
spectators to consider the place of death in the world of the living too. These spectators
may never leave their positions within dominant structures, but seeing a zombie being
enacted on the street does give them the opportunity, if only for a moment. There is thus
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
153
qtd. by Group Material, “On Democracy” (1990), Participation: Documents of Contemporary Art
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 135.
370

a carnivalesque thrust to these events that allows for small moments of utopian inversion
on a case-by-case basis, depending on how involved either a participant or spectator
wishes to be. Thus, Agamben’s notion of a community of action is ultimately an
appropriate way to categorize the Zombie Walks—they defy clear identifying labels and
purpose and yet, in that, their true political potential shines through.
In many ways, then, Zombie Walks are contradictory in nature. On one hand,
they bring death into the world of the living and work to parody biopolitical processes
that tell subjects that they are only worthy as healthy, living citizens. Yet, just as in the
zombie video games discussed in Chapter Four, this critical potential is often muted in
these events: death remains relatively abstract—conceived of as a universal existential
condition that affects all equally. This ignores the real-world realities of unequal
vulnerabilities to death or the structural inequalities that produce social death.
Richard Schechner describes “classic” carnivals like Mardi Gras or Spring Break
as exhibiting “little structural antipathy between ruler and ruled. What inversions occur
happen in an expected way… That is not to deny underlying hatreds and social
contradictions laid bare on those occasions. But there is no chance that Mardi Gras…or
Spring Break will suddenly transmute into a revolution…”
154
Zombie Walks are much
the same: the liberatory potential zombies exhibit in fiction is necessarily shut down in
the real world, both by the fact that none of the zombie walkers can truly (or
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
154
Schechner, 86.
371

permanently) inhabit zombiness and by the very nature of the events themselves.
155

However, as Al Sandine argues, today, “…crowd participation in the United States is
generally limited to watching, shopping, and traveling…”
156
Moreover, as Mary Russo
reminds in her discussion of carnival, “The extreme difficulty of producing lasting social
change does not diminish the usefulness of these symbolic models of transgression…”
157

Therefore, while the political power of a Zombie Walk my be limited (or limiting), it still
offers up an alternative means of expression and congregation that allows participants a
chance to engage with a transgressive identity.
The complicated truth about zombies is that they can be progressive symbols and
bearers of orthodoxy at the same time. As Philippe Ariès contends, neither death nor life
are individual acts.
158
The biological fact that we are born and die shape not only our
individual lives, but shape how any larger society conceives of itself as well. The living
(and the dead) coalesce around the finite biology of the species, yet the existence of the
zombie promises both groups that things are never as finite as they may seem.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
155
The events Schechner describes are annual events, observed at the same time every year. While some
Zombie Walks are designed on a similar annual formula, just as many occur irregularly and/or on a much
more frequent basis. The fact that many of these walks cannot be located or made stable in the same way
as the events he describes speaks to how their inherent political thrust might be somewhat different.
156
Sandine, 14.
157
Mary Russo, “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory,” Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa
de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986), 215.
158
Philippe Ariès, “The Hour of Our Death,” 41.
372

Conclusion
“I Walked.”

“I think I’m dead.”
—J.C. Hooper, Night of the Creeps (1986)
1

When a supposed real-world zombi appeared at a speaking engagement in Cité
Soleil, Haiti, Anne-Marie O’Connor reports, “More than a few people openly expressed
disbelief. One woman powdered her face white with ash and lurched through the crowd,
her arms outstretched, in a comic, mocking imitation of a Hollywood zombie. The crowd
roared with laughter in her wake.”
2
While this interaction could be effectively titled the
zombi meets the zombie, it also serves to show how thoroughly both concepts of the
zombie have traveled the globe and mingled to produce something that, to many, is never
quite completely one or the other.
Yet, the zombi/zombie’s syncretic and global nature has been one of its
characteristics from the very beginning. Born of the mixture of African, European and
Amerindian beliefs and produced in a culture experiencing first, colonization, then
independence, occupation, and a turbulent political history, the zombi has always been a
creature of creolization. And when the zombi became the zombie, it once again was the
syncretic progeny of cultures. Even within U.S. popular culture, the zombie has
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
Night of the Creeps, DVD, directed by Fred Dekker (USA: Tristar Pictures, 1986; Sony Pictures Home
Entertainment, 2009).
2
Anne-Marie O’Connor, “Self-Proclaimed Zombie Entrances Crowds in Haiti,” Times-Picayune (May 23,
1993), accessed on July 21, 2010, Lexis-Nexis, A28.
373

undergone tremendous change, influenced by the undead of old world folklore, Japanese
video games, and a host of other factors that have made it into something that at once
resembles the zombie of 1929 and at the same time is as far removed from it as the zombi
is from the zombie.
But this does not mean that the zombie, because it has existed and continues to
exist on several registers and can be read in so many different ways, thus loses all
meaning. In fact, this is what makes the zombie such a compelling figure to analyze. In
one sense, the various readings of the zombie serve to curtail its inherent power—by
putting a label on the zombie and claiming that it stands for one particular idea, it can be
known. However, in the realization that the zombie is fluid and flexible and that no one
meaning can completely encapsulate it in all its forms, the zombie defies neat
categorization. As something that is, at once, knowable but that will always remain just
out of reach, the zombie becomes politically powerful.
This may account for the push and pull between wanting to identify with zombies
and seeing them as some terrible Other. In The Uncanny, Freud discusses the
transformation the concept of the double has undergone throughout history: early on, the
double was seen as a comforting sign of immortality, but over time, the double became
threatening, in Freud’s words an “uncanny harbinger of death.”
3
While in many ways,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (1899; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 2003),
142.
374

the zombie can be seen as the uncanny double,
4
this transformation from comforting to
threatening does not fit. The zombie—as double—if it ever was completely threatening,
has certainly never been completely so, at least not in U.S. culture. One can be rescued
from the zombie state, and zombies are always beaten in voodoo-style texts; moreover,
there is evidence that to become a zombie, even in these texts, could be interpreted as a
progressive act, and while many might fear the Romero-style zombie’s bite, just as many
texts envision it as a viable option for those otherwise victimized by dominant systems.
The double, in this sense, then, is both comforting and threatening; again, the
zombie’s fluid nature allows for it to be one and the other at the same time. The zombie
is thus a condensation in the psychoanalytic sense,
5
and it necessarily carries with it
multiple meanings. Quite frankly, then, it is not the meanings that matter as much as it is
how the zombie has been used throughout its history: as a tool for demonization that by
its very nature also managed to demonize the oppressor’s system; a means of marking off
the world into “us” and “them” that never quite creates the clean demarcation one would
expect; and as a potentially liberating political identity that has only limited purchase in
the real world.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
4
See Chapter One.
5
Condensation, as defined in Chapters One and Three, is the process by which an entire set of ideas are
associated with a single symbol or word. Hence, the zombie can stand for both slavery and exploitation
while also carrying the meaning of infection and invasion.
375

That the fantasy of the zombie has more power than the reality should not come
as a surprise. That a character that has been aligned with slavery, infection, abjection,
and cannibalism can still be held up as powerful and at times progressive should be. The
zombie is both comforting and threatening, but even at its worst, it carries the potential of
another way of imagining human society, and as such, it can represent the aspirations of
any who feel that they are made over as slaves, cannibals, the infected, or the abject by
society’s standards.
Harry M. Benshoff argues that anyone who rejects heteronormative white
patriarchal identity may be drawn to horror because it presents characters who exist
outside of the norm:
This would suggest that the horror film functions hegemonically, in effect
enabling socially oppressed people to contribute to their own oppression
by consenting to the manufacture of their own identities as monstrous
Others. Yet the actual processes of spectatorship are multiple and fluid,
oscillating between masochistic and sadistic poles, and highly dependent
on the cultural and historical positioning of readers. Thus, identifying with
monsters out to topple dominant social institutions (that oppress both
movie monsters and real-life minorities) can be a pleasurable and a
potentially empowering act for many filmgoers.
6

For zombie fans, then, because the zombie usually exists as Other to the status quo,
identification, especially for those who likewise feel outside of or in opposition to the
norm, is pleasurable.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
6
Harry M. Benshoff, “Blaxploitation Horror Films: Generic Reappropriation or Reinscription?” Cinema
Journal 39.2 (Winter 2000), 32.
376

Moreover, the zombie is not an inherently evil creature, so it doesn’t have to be
read as monstrous in the same way a creature that is intentionally malevolent would be.
Thus, Steven Shaviro notes that zombies “can be regarded both as monstrous symptoms
of a violent, manipulative, exploitative society and as potential remedies for its ills…”
7

This certainly makes them sympathetic: as either victims of society’s exploitation or as
those bodies that can exist outside its restraining structures, the zombie can be both the
self undone by U.S. culture and the Other that escapes its conventions. And this
ambivalence surrounding the zombie—is it Other? is it self? is it the product of evil, or
does it work to be its undoing?—allows the zombie to exert an alternative form of power.
This isn’t necessarily power born of “economic, political, or physical strength…”
8

but is rather a power born of being able to operate within the world in a new way. For
instance, in the 1986 film Night of the Creeps, J.C. Hooper is a geeky college student and
best friend to the film’s protagonist, Chris. J.C. is also physically disabled, relying on
braces to walk. J.C. and Chris soon find themselves up to their necks in an alien invasion
of slug-like creatures who kill human bodies to use as their hosts. Unfortunately, J.C.
becomes a casualty of an alien. However, before the alien completely takes over his
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
7
Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 100.
8
Jacqueline Fulmer, “Men Ain’t All—A Reworking of Masculinity in Tales from the Hood, or, Grandma
Meets the Zombie” Journal of American Folklore 115.457/458 (2002), 424; in this article, Fulmer argues
that the film Tales from the Hood (1995) works to deconstruct certain assumptions by presenting alternative
forms of power as available to and utilized by characters who don’t possess traditional economic, political,
or physical power.
377

body, he is able to leave a message for Chris: “There’s one inside me…it’s in my brain…
I think I’m dead,” he says, and then he adds, “I walked, Chris, all by myself. I walked.”
9

While being infested by a slug alien and becoming a zombie probably doesn’t
sound appealing to many, the second part of J.C.’s message is intriguing. Even though
his body has been taken over and he is aware of his own death, J.C. is temporarily
granted the ability to do something he couldn’t do in his regular life: walk. Furthermore,
J.C. still has the presence of mind to warn his friend and provide him with a possible
remedy—he thinks fire will kill the alien zombies (and he is right). As with so many
zombie texts, the zombie state gives and it takes away.
In the zombie state, one will never completely leave dominant systems: the racist,
sexist, heteronormative, and other barriers to full equality will most likely still exist in
some form, yet some characters are granted the ability to step outside and defy these
barriers for a time. While never being completely implicated in these systems nor being
completely Other to them, these characters, ironically enough, experience a new kind of
freedom. It is not a progressive overthrow of everything that is wrong with with society.
Rather, it is a temporary liberation—and it always comes at a cost: J.C. must die, the
zombie policewomen of Zombie Nation (2004) must give up their friends and loved ones,
and even characters like Fido’s (2006) Helen Robinson and the Cycle Sluts of Chopper
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
9
Night of the Creeps.
378

Chicks in Zombietown (1989) must contend with maintaining their non-traditional
lifestyles in societies that may never fully accept them as “living” members.
Zombies could be said to stand as metaphors for a state of exception or social
death,
10
and this is, in some ways, apt—if zombies are imagined as outsiders or Other and
not if they are seen as figures who inhabit multiple positions in relation to dominant
structures. Thus, as should be clear, voodoo-, Romero- and video game-style texts that
imagine zombies as the mob or the mass—be they the black zombie workers of the sugar
plantations, the hordes trying to invade a Pennsylvania farmhouse, or targets that need to
be dispatched for a win—paint the zombie as socially dead, as an acceptable casualty to
keep society going. However, as this project has shown, several texts don’t see zombies
this way at all.
While the individualization of zombies might seem to “rescue” them from social
death or a state of exception in problematic ways (by humanizing the perceived Other
through cosmetic or narrative tricks designed to soften zombie characteristics), the
processes of transformation or reinscription aren’t as important as the fact of the
processes in the first place. There seems to be a very deep-seated need to move zombies
out of a position of total abjection, and in doing this, the zombie is necessarily placed in-
between.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
10
See Chapters Four and Five.
379

Yes, white voodoo-style zombies were never truly socially dead, and their black
counterparts remain in their state of exception, but zombiism in these texts often played
with issues of miscegenation and corruption in ways that actually provided a space for
contemplating life outside the binaries of black and white and American and foreign.
Moreover, often those using zombies were, in their own ways, social outcasts trying to
claim some power from dominant systems. That they were ultimately shut down does
not erase their attempt.
Romero- and video game-style zombies are where the desire for the in-between
becomes even more visible. In making over some zombies as sympathetic, these zombies
are rescued from social death, but these rescued zombies never come to inhabit the
position of non-zombie living humans. They therefore are able to occupy a position both
inside and outside, and for some—the socially dead or the outcast, for instance—the
fantasy of that kind of transformation, although it is never complete, may be enticing and
somewhat empowering: it shows that one does not have to be fully beholden to dominant
systems to be humanized and to be seen.
This is why to be the living dead or the dead living is an act of rebellion, whether
that means choosing to become a zombie, choosing a zombie paramour, or simply, in the
face of zombies, choosing to defy gender and racial norms. It not only allows one access
to both the inside and outside of dominant systems, but it necessarily renders visible the
380

fact that the neat binaries that make these systems so easy—us vs. them; self vs. Other;
living vs. dead—are untenable.
Thus, while the zombie, on the one hand, stood for all that was wrong and
backward with Haiti in the 19
th
and early 20
th
centuries, it also rendered the very
paradoxes of U.S. democracy visible: sorcery and witchcraft produced the living dead,
but it soon became clear that capitalist democracy did too. Furthermore, while almost all
zombie texts are predicated, at least on the surface, on the idea that becoming a zombie is
not a desirable option, these same zombie texts have often made visible the pleasures
such a state could afford to those who might otherwise be victimized by racist,
heteronormative systems. Hence, women and people of color have often found power in
zombie texts by aligning with the zombie state. As Shawn McIntosh reveals,
There is something terrifying about being turned into a zombie, but
something strangely comforting in choosing to be one, almost like Cholo
(John Leguizamo) in Land of the Dead, after he is bitten by a zombie,
when he tells his friend not to kill him just yet because he was ‘always
curious about what it would be like’—as if it is a lifestyle choice.
11

And for many characters—like the strippers of Zombie Strippers (2008) or the women
who choose zombie boyfriends—it is.
Yet, this lifestyle choice becomes a bit trickier for real-world people who try to
inhabit zombiness. While zombie video games, like Stubbs the Zombie (2005), grant one
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
11
Shawn McIntosh, “The Evolution of the Zombie: The Monster That Keeps Coming Back” by McIntosh,”
Zombie Culture: Autopsies of the Living Dead, eds. Shawn McIntosh and Marc Leverette (Lanham, MD:
The Scarecrow Press, 2008), 16.
381

the ability to temporarily inhabit a space in opposition to dominant structures, they do so
by masking the real-world realities of death and dying. Moreover, this same problem
presents itself in Zombie Walks: participants are able to change the normative
expectations of the spaces they invade, but it is a temporary change that can sometimes
conceal more serious systemic problems, like the fact that the freedoms experienced by
Zombie Walkers are not necessarily available to everyone. There are major differences
in the power that zombies possess as fictional characters and how this is translated into
the real world, and yet the fact that the zombie state has been made attractive enough that
it presents a fantasy identity for some is telling: it means the desire for change is present.
At the end of their essay examining literature and folklore about the zombi, Hans-
W. Ackermann and Jeanine Gauthier express their surprise that many of their interviews
with Vodouisants produced a picture of the zombi of the spirit that they had rarely
encountered in other academic sources. As they note, “In particular, we discovered that
the spirit zombi was a zombi from the start and not a zombified soul…the dualism of the
Haitian soul was acknowledged, and the zombi appeared as one of its components.”
12

The zombi, according to these interviews, then, was “a normal part of a human” from the
very beginning.
13

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
12
Hans-W. Ackermann and Jeanine Gauthier, “The Ways and Nature of the Zombi,” The Journal of
American Folklore 104.414 (Autumn 1991), accessed on October 9, 2005, JSTOR, 488.
13
Ackermann and Gauthier, 488.
382

The dead and death are unknowable. One can project one’s fantasies onto them
and try to know what they are, but this only ends up telling one more about the living
than the dead. The dead, or more to the point, the living dead, are thus “a normal part” of
the living, but as zombies show, they are often put up as the absolute best and worst that
can be imagined: what the living fear they are and what they hope to become, all at the
same time.

383

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