Not Your Average Zombie: Rehumanizing the Undead from Voodoo to Zombie Walks 9781477313183

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Not Your Average Zombie

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Not Your Average Zombie Rehumanizing the Undead from Voodoo to Zombie Walks Chera Kee

University of Texas Press Austin

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Copyright © 2017 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2017 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 http://utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kee, Chera, author. Title: Not your average zombie : rehumanizing the undead from voodoo to zombie walks / Chera Kee. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016043282 | ISBN 978-1-4773-1317-6 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1330-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1318-3 (library e-book) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1319-0 (non-library e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Zombies—History—Social aspects. | Zombies— Psychological aspects. | Zombies in motion pictures. | Zombies in literature. | Zombies in popular culture. | Humanity. | Human beings. Classification: LCC GR581 .K44 2017 | DDC 398.21—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016043282 doi:10.7560/313176

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For José

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction. From the Zombi to the Zombie: The Extra-Ordinary Undead 1 Part I. Zombie Identities

Chapter 1. From Cannibals to Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields: Haiti, Vodou, and Early Zombie Films 25 Chapter 2. Racialized and Raceless: Race after Death and Zombie Revolution

49

Chapter 3. “You Can’t Hurt Me, You Can’t Destroy Me, You Can’t Control Me”: White Women in Zombie Films 72 Chapter 4. A Proud and Powerful Line: Women of Color and Voodoo 98 Part II. Playing the Zombie

Chapter 5. “Be Safe, Have Fun, Eat Brains”: Playing the Zombie in Video Games 127 Chapter 6. I Walked with a Zombie: Performing the Living Dead 150 Conclusion. “I Think I’m Dead.” 165 Notes

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Bibliography

195

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Index

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Acknowledgments

I

never meant to study zombies, but at a crucial moment early in my career, I turned left instead of right. Thankfully, with that turn I found a supportive community of colleagues, mentors, and friends who encouraged me and gave generously of their time and knowledge—there are not enough words to begin to thank all the people who have provided guidance, encouragement, and, yes, even the occasional zombie-themed toy over the past several years, and I am well aware that I couldn’t have written this book without them. Starting at the beginning: I must thank my terrific mentors Curtis Marez, Marsha Kinder, and Janet Hoskins, who were there at the earliest stages of this project and who offered invaluable advice and ideas about how to take it further. At the other end of things, in the final few weeks of editing, Maia Butler was of tremendous service as I was revising the manuscript. In the interim, James Cox offered numerous insightful comments that helped me strengthen not only my ideas but also my writing more generally. I only wish he could give me notes on everything I write. I am also indebted to the editorial staff at the University of Texas Press, including Amanda Frost and the ever-gracious Jim Burr, who kindly saw me through the early stages of the publishing process. At Wayne State University, I have been fortunate to have tremendous institutional support. I was given ample time and resources to research and write this book, including a WSU Humanities Center Faculty Fellowship, the Josephine Nevins Keal Faculty Fellowship in the English Department, a grant from the President’s Research Enhancement Program, and a University Research Grant. In particular, I would like to express my gratitude to those people who came to my Human-

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x | Acknowledgments

ities Center Brown Bag talks on zombies in 2011 and 2012 and who made suggestions and comments on my work in progress. I am also especially indebted to the 2014–2015 WSU Humanities Center Resident Scholars, led by the indomitable Walter Edwards, who helped me think through the bigger picture of my argument and who offered much-needed words of encouragement as I sought out a publisher. I teach great students every semester, but I would especially like to thank two particular sets of them, without whose conversations this book wouldn’t exist. The students in my first “Horror and Zombie” class, in 2011, were enthusiastic about the undead and let me bounce ideas off them as I worked through my thoughts on zombies. They were always willing to go with me as we tried to get to the bottom of the question, what is a zombie? Similarly, the students in my 2012 PhD seminar on biopolitics pushed me in productive directions and forced me to reconsider some of my theoretical assumptions about the undead. It was an honor to work with them. I am further indebted to a number of colleagues who took the time to talk with me, read my work, and hold my hand throughout the bookwriting process. I am eternally grateful for my WSU colleagues Alina Cherry, Sharon Lean, Lisa Alexander, Ellen Barton, Steven Shaviro, Julie Klein, Lisa Ze Winters, and Lacey Skorepa, who all contributed their time and insights to help me write a better book. I am in awe of my brilliant friend Jaime Goodrich, whom I truly admire; her notes on one chapter ended up helping reshape the entire book. Tom Fisher chased after “zombies” with me in Costa Mesa, California, in 2010. Benjamin Han, Courtney White, Dawn Fratini, and Adam Yerima not only lent their time and expertise to my book but also were wonderful friends during this entire process. I am forever grateful for having each of them in my life. My father, John Kee, has been taking me to the movies since I was a kid, but on one fateful day in 2004, he took me to see a zombie movie and started this whole thing. He has been an unwavering source of encouragement from that moment on. Finally, this book is dedicated to my husband, José Guzman. Over the years, José has tirelessly and enthusiastically attended zombie walks, watched films, played video games, read drafts, and otherwise made sure that I never gave up on this project. He has always been my biggest cheerleader. José has lived this project as much as I have, and it is as much his book as it is mine. Thank you, José.

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Not Your Average Zombie

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Introduction | From the Zombi to the Zombie The Extra-Ordinary Undead

A

bout half the time when I tell someone I study zombies, they wince or instinctively move back—as if I might bite them—and tell me, “No, I couldn’t do it. Too scary.” I always chuckle at this. Zombies don’t scare me. It could be that after years of watching zombie movies, I have become desensitized, but I think it has something to do with the first zombies I ever saw. It was the early 1980s, and the video for “Thriller” (Landis, 1983) played twice an hour every hour on MTV. Michael Jackson and his zombies danced across the screen, and they were mesmerizing. I didn’t care that the zombies were decomposing, that their clothes were tattered and torn. It never occurred to me that these creatures were meant to be frightening cannibals. To me, they were just about the coolest things around. My friends and I were obsessed with “Thriller”; we knew the song by heart, and soon we knew every move of the dance. At sleepovers, we would push the furniture out of the way so that we could reenact the video over and over again. We didn’t care about the love story that frames the video—we would fast-forward to the good stuff: the dancing. We wanted to be those dancing zombies. I think about that often, how cool the dancing undead of “Thriller” were, how my first zombies were anything other than what you would expect a zombie to be. Perhaps my childhood identification of zombies as cool wouldn’t have made sense to those more familiar with zombie media, yet in many ways, it was through this portrayal of zombies as dancing creatures that “Thriller” exposed me to some of the deeper contradictions of the zombie. Zombies entered the US imaginary as slaves bowing to the will of

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2 | Introduction

a zombie master. By the 1970s, zombies in popular culture had become the cannibalistic undead, unthinking adversaries out to eat the living. In either case, the zombie has no free will. Either the zombie is a slave, powerless to resist the control of its master, or it is a cannibal whose will has been subsumed by an animalistic urge to eat. Those are our cultural expectations: zombies as nightmares of loss of control over the self—something most of us wouldn’t want to be. The zombie thus becomes a potent symbol for disenfranchisement and loss of agency. But this symbolism works only if we start from the assumption that zombies, in whatever form, are living beings made over as dead: people who have somehow lost their status as fully human, who have become “things.” Thought of in this way, zombies should not possess individuality; they should not be able to act freely; they shouldn’t be able to speak; and they certainly shouldn’t be able to dance. Imagining zombies as dehumanized things is one reason why zombies have become convenient metaphors for any number of contemporary anxieties. They are little more than empty shells, waiting for someone to project fears onto them. Zombie-making cultures, for example, can become threats to American travelers abroad, and cannibal zombies can become shorthand for terrorists or disease. As a former person who has somehow lost their claim to enjoy the full rights of a human being, a zombie is not only something one might fear becoming but also something one might fear will attack. Seemingly pitiless and remorseless, zombies simply act, either on orders from their masters or in response to the drive to eat. The zombie, then, is more a mechanical device than anything else. Its loss of agency corresponds to its loss of the ability to feel (as a human) and its loss of value (as a human). As voiceless beings without agency, threatening us with attack or conversion, zombies become fascinating figures for considering power relations, master-slave relationships, and unthinking urges to violence, among other things. Many scholars have, in fact, approached zombies in this way, their expectations of zombies paralleling general cultural expectations of zombiness. Frankly, most scholarly work on zombies is less interested in zombies than in the living humans interacting with them, but even in those works more solidly focused on zombies themselves, scholars most often see the zombie as a symbol of something else. Their status as things becomes important because it is much easier to make theoretical arguments about beings seen as devoid of humanity and free will—beings that are practically blank slates—than it is about individual beings who clearly think, act, and love.

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Introduction | 3

American media is full of ordinary zombies that meet our expectations of a mute and impotent victim or an unthinking cannibal, but I have discovered that these aren’t the only zombies running around. Time and again, I found that the zombies imagined in film, television, video games, and literature sometimes wandered into the realm of the humanized individual. Zombies in American media have been the boy next door, the family pet, and the seductive stripper. They have foiled Nazi doctors, kidnappers, and mobsters, and they have helped and even taken care of the living. These zombies may have started in places of total powerlessness, but they often didn’t remain there. What’s more, people are choosing to inhabit the zombie body as self in zombie video games and in events like zombie walks, which would suggest that there is something attractive to trying on the zombie identity. The somewhat seductive pull of the zombie may have something to do with the fact that US pop culture is full of what I call extra-ordinary zombies, and I mean extra-ordinary in the sense that these zombies go beyond expectations of ordinary zombiness. These zombies may begin in a traditional state of powerlessness, but they gain some sort of agency over their existence and defy our expectations of zombie nature. Extra-ordinary zombies aren’t something new, though. Even in the earliest tales of the zombi in Haiti, there are zombis who overcome their slavery and escape their masters. It should be no surprise, then, that in American media, zombies who somehow refuse to conform to the slave or cannibal characterization are plentiful. While many expected, ordinary zombies wander around American pop culture, there are also zombies who decline to take orders, zombies who fall in love, even zombies who dance.

The Zombi, Vodou, and Haiti

Zombies are by no means the only undead monsters populating American media, but they are a bit different from their undead brethren. The zombie is one of the few popular Hollywood monsters originating from outside a European literary or folkloric tradition; rather, it arises out of stories connected to Haitian Vodou,1 and early zombie fiction in the United States owes much to fears of and fascination with Haiti as an independent black republic. While the zombie entered the popular consciousness as a Haitian figure, Kyle William Bishop reminds us the zombie is also a “fundamentally American creation.”2

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4 | Introduction

Still, it is imperative to keep in mind that even though the zombie is now thoroughly Americanized, its roots lie in Haiti and Vodou. As we will see in chapter 1, even before the appearance of the zombie, Haiti and Vodou had long captured American and European imaginations. The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) and the subsequent creation of the Western Hemisphere’s first black republic generated an abundance of curiosity about Haitians and their beliefs. The American occupation of Haiti (1915–1934) rekindled interest in Haiti over a century later. Tales of Haiti, in either century, often centered on its supposedly strange beliefs and barbarism, and when the concept of the zombie entered into the American mainstream, it fit right into a worldview that saw Haiti as a mysterious place full of sorcerers and fiends. No book on Haiti published before or during the occupation was as influential for the zombie phenomenon as William Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929). Seabrook was an explorer who spent time in Haiti and returned to the United States with stories of Vodou—and zombies. The zombie, as Seabrook defined it, was “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.”3 There had been reports of the walking dead before The Magic Island, but Seabrook’s book popularized the zombie as never before. It may be hard to imagine a world where everyone doesn’t know what a zombie is. Even though stories of zombies have circulated throughout the Western world since before Haiti became a nation— when it was still a part of the French colony of Saint-Domingue—outside academic circles, the idea of the zombie as a dead body returned to life did not really take hold until The Magic Island.4 Very quickly after the publication of Seabrook’s account, though, the notion of the zombie as the living dead had become so intertwined with how people thought of Haiti that one couldn’t mention the nation without commenting on zombies, even in nonfiction. In Zora Neale Hurston’s 1938 book Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, she acknowledges: “No one can stay in Haiti long without hearing Zombies mentioned in one way or another.”5 Katherine Dunham, who traveled in Haiti in the late 1930s, also observed that the zombie 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.”6 Still, the creature that Seabrook imported—and even

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Introduction | 5

the one that Hurston and Dunham acknowledged in their work—was not the zombi of Haitian Vodou. Seabrook’s account didn’t tell the full story. He told of bodies enslaved, but he made no mention of subjugated souls or spirits. Within Vodou belief, there are zombis of the body, which are what Seabrook described, and zombi astral, or zombis of the spirit. Even with these two designations, there are discrepancies and ambiguities. As the folklorists Hans-W. Ackermann and Jeanine Gauthier note, “Both 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”; in addition, “folktales do not always make clear distinctions between the two main types of zombi.”7 Ackermann and Gauthier’s research suggests that expectations of finding zombis of the body—or, more to the point, zombis that correspond better to the popular American understanding of the zombie—may often color the presentation of the zombi as it exists in Haitian belief, even in academic circles. Generally speaking, the two kinds of zombis in Vodou can be characterized as follows: the zombi of the body is a body believed to be dead that someone buries and later resurrects and forces to work, usually on a plantation.8 The zombi of the spirit is a little harder to define, but it is generally believed to be a soul that has been separated from its body. Sometimes this means that a soul has been magically enslaved; typically, a houngan (a male Vodou priest), a mambo (a female Vodou priest), or a bokor (sorcerer) has trapped the soul in a bottle so that the power of the soul will work on behalf of the living. Thus, whether a zombi is a zombi astral or a zombi of the body, someone else controls it. For this reason, Hurston is quick to point out that since many associate houngans and mambos with positive or neutral works, and bokors with malevolent practices, zombis could be seen as the sole province of bokors.9 Malevolent associations thus become attached to zombi making, and that is, indeed, how many scholars describe the practice. But the processes of zombi making may be a little less clear cut than that. Elizabeth McAlister, in her discussion of zombis of the spirit, 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.”10 There is thus a difference of opinion whether zombi making is inherently sinister. Still, in the Haitian context, the concept of the zombi—especially the zombi of the body or those zombis of the spirit captured to work for others—and the concept of slavery are intertwined.11 Equating zom-

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6 | Introduction

bis with slavery, though, doesn’t always take into account the complexities of the situation: the lingering specter of slavery in a former colony that has faced numerous outside attempts to undermine its legitimacy as an independent nation means that slavery is not a simple, black-orwhite issue in Haiti, but rather provokes a complex set of responses from diverse groups of people. Tales of zombis in Haiti may focus on the loss of free will or some sort of punishment, but they can also speak to rebellion against servitude—as when the zombis wake up. The slavery implied through zombi making in the Vodou tradition is even more complicated, since it is, ostensibly, Haitians enslaving Haitians—and since there are zombis of the body and zombi astral, this may mean anything from real-world Haitians enslaving real-world Haitians to real-world Haitians symbolically enslaving a part of one’s spirit after death. Because zombis become intertwined with the ways in which many people conceive of Vodou and Haiti, the tendency to associate zombis with slavery (and nothing else) ties these three concepts (Haiti, Vodou, zombi) together in a way that is indicative of an overall victimization.12 Haiti, Vodou, and zombis become forever powerless in the process. Joan Dayan, however, reads the relationship between zombis and slavery differently. In Haiti, History, and the Gods, she links the concept of zombis to the Haitian revolutionary Jean Zombi and observes that in such a linking, the concept might give former slaves power over their oppressors: “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.”13 Dayan notes that the zombi does not always possess this revolutionary fervor and that the fear of being enslaved, especially during the American occupation, colored local understandings of the zombie.14 Thus, Dayan still sees slavery as underlying zombi tales, but acknowledges that this interpretation does not mean that the slaves were automatically at a disadvantage. Therefore, there may be ways to see the zombi as both enslaved and yet still quite powerful. For instance, Rara is a type of Haitian festival music used in street processions—usually occurring during Easter week—and it often has a political flavor to it. McAlister describes how Rara bandleaders capture zombis to harness “the energies and

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talents of the community’s recently dead, and [launch] spiritual and military campaigns with those energies.”15 These zombis offer up protection and strength, so in this conception, a zombi of the spirit, while it may be working for others, is powerful and important to the living community.16 Even zombi of the body can be powerful. Lawrence W. Levine, writing on African 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.”17 Levine argues that knowledge of this magic proved that there was information outside the purview of white masters, confirming 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 the US occupation, then knowledge of zombis and zombification granted (and continues to grant) Vodouists a certain amount of political power in the face of French, American, or other outside control. Hence, American occupiers and, later, American moviegoing audiences would naturally fear the zombi/e because deep knowledge of the creature—despite the travelogues and tales about it—still rested in Haitian hands. Thus, the zombi may be a slave, but that does not necessarily make it powerless or unable to act. That is why we should, in thinking about the Americanized zombie, keep in mind the complexities of the Vodou zombi’s slavery and see the strength that can arise out of those complexities.

The Rise of the Slave-Style Zombie

A push and pull between slavery and agency may be at the heart of how the zombi operates within Vodou belief, but as American media producers took Seabrook’s creature and made it their own in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the zombie wasn’t quite so nuanced. In many ways, it was merely a brand-new bogeyman for audiences to consume. One of the earliest appearances of a zombie in US pop culture was in Kenneth Webb’s 1932 stage play Zombie, which, according to a writer for Time magazine, borrowed liberally from Seabrook in its depiction of the walking dead.18 The first feature-length zombie film, White Zombie (Halperin, 1932), soon followed, and it too borrowed from Seabrook. These early fictionalizations, based at least in part on Seabrook’s supposedly true tale, helped inaugurate the zombie in

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American media, and the slave-style zombie rather quickly developed a consistent set of characteristics. Slave-style zombies arise out of folklore and stories about Haitian Vodou, and their most direct antecedent is Seabrook’s The Magic Island. These zombies are slaves without a will of their own, but despite their roots in stories of Haitian zombis, they may or may not be dead bodies resurrected from the grave—at least as American media have imagined them. Often, they are people who only appear dead. There is always an identifiable cause for zombification in slave-style texts: a magic spell, a potion, a hypnotizing machine, or some other form of mind control. These zombies are under the command of a zombie master. Originally, this master had ties to voodoo, or black magic. As slave-style media moved further and further from the Haitian origins of the zombie, though, the master changed. He (or sometimes she) might be a mad scientist, an alien, or even a communist. What matters is that slave-style zombification is traceable back to a source. Because there is always a clear cause for zombification, someone usually figures out a “cure” for zombiism or vanquishes the zombie master, reversing the spell and thus freeing their zombified friends.19 As several scholars have pointed out, because zombies did not come to US popular culture via an already-established literary tradition, nor did they have a long history in Western folklore, US audiences did not have firm expectations when it came to zombies.20 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.”21 Because audiences didn’t know what to expect from zombie narratives, zombies moved to a variety of spaces and situations, and zombie fiction therefore enjoyed a great deal of room for experimentation, which meant artists could mold and manipulate the zombie as they saw fit. By the time of Revolt of the Zombies (Halperin/Yarbrough, 1936), cinematic zombies had already traveled out of Haiti. Yet the ties to foreign lands and people of color remained. Often, these early slave-style zombie tales focused on what happened when an unscrupulous zombie master used voodoo, mad science, or alien technologies to zombify Americans. Well before fears of brainwashing manifested in films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel, 1956) and The Manchurian Candidate (Frankenheimer, 1962), zombie films played out nightmare

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scenarios of young Americans forced to act against their wills (and against their nation’s best interests).22 Zombies were flexible creatures, and that made it easier for artists to change the unscrupulous zombie masters to fit the times. Zombie films responded to World War II with Nazi zombie masters working against the US military in King of the Zombies (Yarbrough, 1941) and Revenge of the Zombies (Sekely, 1943). Likewise, as the rest of the horror genre got swept up in the technological fears of the 1950s, foreign scientists produced zombies via mechanical devices working off brain waves in Creature with the Atom Brain (Cahn, 1955). When fears of alien (or communist) invasions took over horror, alien zombie masters created zombies in Invisible Invaders (Cahn, 1959). As the 1940s and 1950s progressed, more and more of these zombie films were set in the United States. The earliest zombie texts imagined zombiism as something that foreign hands created in exotic spaces— since that was what was supposedly really happening in Haiti. As zombies entered the mid-twentieth century, however, zombiism managed to retain its exotic Otherness on American soil.23 Often, this meant the importation of “native” experts from foreign lands, or it meant that filmmakers removed explicit mentions of voodoo while still linking the potions and spells used in zombification with the foreign in some way. Thus, in Creature with the Atom Brain, the zombie masters are foreign criminals, and in Teenage Zombies (Warren, 1959), the zombie masters are communist spies. Zombies tied explicitly to voodoo and black magic did not disappear, nor were all ties to Haiti necessarily severed. In 1965, for instance, the episode “The Very Important Zombie Affair” of the television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (NBC) revolved around the corrupt leader of an unnamed Caribbean nation (meant to stand in for Haiti) who used voodoo and zombification to secure his power. Likewise, the 1964 film I Eat Your Skin (Tenney) takes place on a fictional Caribbean island full of natives performing voodoo ceremonies. For the most part, zombification—whether emanating from Caribbean religion, American science, or outer space—remained tied to the foreign or “alien,” since those who used it were criminals, Martians, or nonnative English speakers with thick accents who were outsiders in normative American society. Thus, the causes of zombification and the locations in which it happened changed, but the zombie itself remained a fairly stable character—it was someone without free will under the control of another.

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10 | Introduction

Cannibal Zombies

In the late 1960s, zombies underwent a transformation that reshaped everything. This fit with changes that were remaking US horror more generally at the time. As censorship weakened, horror films became bloodier and more visceral, but the gore didn’t typically accompany far-flung foreign threats. Instead, horror became much more focused on the home. Films such as Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960), The Birds (Hitchcock, 1963), and Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski, 1968) ushered in this new kind of horror, and soon there was a new kind of zombie film as well. George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), set in the Pennsylvania countryside, centers on an inexplicable phenomenon whereby the dead rise from their graves to attack and eat the living. The film follows the fates of a group of people who are stranded at a farmhouse and are trying to keep these decomposing, flesh-eating zombies out while social relations within the house break down. It sounds simple enough, but Romero’s low-budget film dramatically altered the zombie genre and introduced a new kind of zombie to the American public: the cannibal zombie. No longer were zombies necessarily slaves bowing to the will of a zombie master; they were the dead come back to life, with a taste for human flesh. A cannibal zombie is a resurrected corpse, and unlike its slavestyle cousin, it cannot be cured or rescued from its fate. This change may have much to do with the fact that Richard Matheson’s novella I Am Legend (1954)—the story of the sole survivor of a vampiric epidemic that has taken over the world—served as an inspiration for Romero.24 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 infection became a part of the film and, hence, the zombie genre as a whole. Zombiism was now a disease. One of the biggest changes to zombie narratives was that Night of the Living Dead got rid of the zombie master. Instead of following a master’s instructions, the zombies were driven by hunger. Cannibalstyle zombie films have thus redirected the typical focus of the genre. Rather than the rescue of loved ones from zombiism and the vanquishing of a villain, the narrative thrust of these stories comes from interpersonal relations among the living. The zombies are also more purely adversarial in cannibal-style films than in slave-style ones, but the true

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antagonists of these films are usually the living. The living survivors in cannibal-style zombie films often end up becoming monstrous as their petty squabbles and infighting lead to their ruin. Thus, in slave-style films, the zombie master typically stood for an evil that those representing good needed to vanquish; in cannibal-style films, it is often the living humans who pose the biggest threats to themselves. Slave-style zombies didn’t completely disappear with the coming of cannibal zombies. The 1970s saw blaxploitation zombie films that retained the slave-style premise, including Sugar Hill (Maslansky, 1974) and The House on Skull Mountain (Honthaner, 1974). William Castle cast the legendary mime Marcel Marceau as a zombie master using dead bodies as reanimated marionettes in Shanks (1974), and zombies on television series such as Kolchack: The Night Stalker (ABC, 1974–1975) or in the TV movie The Dead Don’t Die (Harrington, 1975) stayed true to the zombie’s slave-style roots. As Christopher M. Moreman and Cory James Rushton point out, Marvel Comics even tried “to cash in on the sudden popularity of zombies” after Night of the Living Dead, but rather than create a comic featuring cannibal zombies, they returned to the zombie’s voodoo roots in series such as Tales of the Zombie (Marvel, 1973–1975).25 Still, over time, the cannibal zombie came to be the predominant kind of zombie in US media, and the 1970s, in particular, were a fertile time for experimenting with this new zombie premise. There were films such as Deathdream (Clark, 1974), which dealt with the repercussions of the Vietnam War by having a soldier return home as a zombie; films that mixed the slave-style premise with cannibal zombies (Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, Clark, 1972); and even films with Nazi cannibal zombies (Shock Waves, Wiederhorn, 1977). Plus, George A. Romero came back to the genre in 1978 with Dawn of the Dead. While filmmakers continued to make serious zombie films, such as Romero’s next film, Day of the Dead (1985), a gradually evolving comedy cycle started in the 1980s. At that point, the horror of earlier slave- and cannibal-style films gave way to pure visual excess in films that imagined zombie invasions as carnivalesque farces with lessthan-heroic protagonists. The gore in these films, such as Re-Animator (Gordon, 1985) and Return of the Living Dead (O’Bannon, 1985), unlike the relatively understated carnage in earlier films such as 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 fall-

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12 | Introduction

ing apart that filled the screen. The change in how bodies were depicted brought forth a drastic change in characterizations of the zombie, too. Slave-style zombies were often somewhat humanized—since they tended to be friends and loved ones who needed rescuing from zombification. The cannibal-style zombie, as initially conceived, was not necessarily intended to be appealing: it was a cannibalistic, decomposing corpse, after all. Almost from the beginning, though, there were those zombies who were set apart from the rest of the hordes of zombie infected. Even Night of the Living Dead relied on the slave-style convention of having a loved one turn into a zombie: its heroine, Barbara, eventually confronts her newly zombified brother. By the 1980s, more and more zombies were becoming humanized, and by the late 1980s and early 1990s, films with zombie protagonists, including Dead Heat (Goldblatt, 1988) and My Boyfriend’s Back (Balaban, 1993), were possible. To be sure, horrific zombies hungry for living humans were still around, but filmmakers were now presenting zombies not only as pitiful figures in need of rescue but also as agents of change.

Video Game Zombies and the Zombie Renaissance

By the mid-1990s, zombies were occasionally popping up on television and in a growing direct-to-video market, but mainstream zombie films were largely a thing of the past.26 Zombies were heating up in another media, though. Film zombies had largely become comic creatures, but with their appearances as adversaries in Wolfenstein 3-D (id Software, 1992), Doom (id Software, 1993), Area 51 (Mesa Logic, 1995), and the ever-popular Resident Evil series (Capcom, 1996–present), zombies started making a resurgence as serious fare in video games. Developers replaced the humanized zombie born in the films of the 1980s comedy cycle with a bloodthirsty antagonist that players needed to destroy, and in most games, zombies followed the cannibal-style blueprint—being the infected undead hungry for human flesh—but subtle changes to that formula took place, too. Films such as Romero’s “Dead” trilogy tend to view zombies as creatures on the outside, attacking living humans on the inside, but many video-game-style zombie texts imagine a reverse scenario: living humans entering a space infested with zombies in order to kill them

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Introduction | 13

and prevent the virus from spreading.27 Thus, there is a return to the slave-style idea that zombies exist in very specific, contained spaces, and the thrust of these texts, as it was in slave-style narratives, is to keep zombification and zombies from spreading outside their current borders. In cannibal-style narratives, invasion underlies the zombie threat; in slave- and video-game-style narratives, containment is key. This reversal provides very different conceptions of space within these narratives: cannibal-style texts tend to envision the space occupied by zombies as ever growing, even if not quite limitless. Slave- and videogame-style texts tend to envision the space currently occupied by zombies as limited; it is the hero’s (or player’s) job to keep it that way. While Romero’s films and those directly borrowing from his premise are nihilistic in nature, zombie video games often envision a way to beat the zombie apocalypse and vanquish a zombie threat: in other words, you can win the game. With video game zombies, there is also a return of a zombie master of sorts, or at least an identifiable source of the zombie contagion: some corrupt (or inept) force, often the government, big business, or both, created the zombie virus. Thus, as with slave-style zombie media, the existence of a traceable source of the zombie problem implies that there is a potential way to solve the problem—or at least a way to make those responsible for it pay. By the early 2000s, the rising popularity of zombie video games made Hollywood take notice, and films based on these games soon followed, including the Resident Evil series of fi lms (2002–2017) and the House of the Dead films (2003, 2005). This trend coincided with a new breed of zombie. Films such as Zack Snyder’s 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake and Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) imagined zombies as fast moving and hard to defeat. In fact, the popularity of zombie video games, coupled with the newer, faster zombies of films, prompted a zombie renaissance in the early 2000s. The renaissance saw markedly different zombies from those that audiences enjoyed during the 1980s comic turn. For instance, in 28 Days Later, a man wakes up from a coma to discover fast-moving (and technically not undead) rage zombies, and in Resident Evil (Anderson, 2002), a group battles biochemically engineered zombies of all sizes and shapes—including terrifying zombie dogs—as they try to escape from a research facility. In both instances, researchers created the zombie virus and unwittingly unleashed it upon an unsuspecting populace. This premise resonated with filmgoers: both films were popular and inspired a number of imitators.

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14 | Introduction

Zombies resurfaced not only in films, though. Besides remaining one of the favorite adversaries in video games, they have popped up in a number of novels and literary series, including Stephen King’s Cell (2006), Max Brooks’s World War Z (2006), and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009).28 Zombies have likewise become a popular staple in comic books and on television series, with The Walking Dead (Image Comics, 2003–present; AMC TV, 2010– present) perhaps the most visible example in both mediums.29 In the last decade or so, more and more fans have been showing off their inner zombie in zombie walks, in which groups of people dress up as zombies to invade public spaces. People can shoot the living dead in zombie safaris. In zombie fun runs, zombies “chase” runners during the race. And since 2005, students on college campuses have been playing Humans vs. Zombies, in which one zombie portrayer attempts to turn fellow participants into zombies during a game of tag. The zombie has, indeed, been experiencing a renaissance.

Ordinary and Extra- Ordinary Zombies

Many scholars make a connection between the zombie renaissance and the events of September 11, 2001. Noting the similarities in stories of the living battling the undead in order to protect “our way of life,” or in the anxieties expressed in a genre focused on rampant pandemics in the era of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and the Zika virus, scholars see the zombie as a sort of mirror for American anxieties in the contemporary world.30 Underlying most discussions of the zombie’s social relevance, especially in the post-9/11 world, is the widespread assumption that zombies and the zombie state are negatives; zombies are monsters to avoid. The idea is that zombies must stand for what we fear or dread: terrorists, pandemics, or exclusion. This book reconsiders that premise by exploring those zombies that defy our expectations and force us to reexamine our assumptions of the zombie state. In short, if ordinary zombies exist, at least in part, as a way to think about powerlessness or the loss of one’s free will, then extra-ordinary zombies temper tales of slavery and cannibalism by giving us individuals who refuse to be completely dehumanized. Extraordinary zombies tell us stories of slaves able to challenge their masters, or of cannibals who can prove their continued humanity. Of course, having zombies who are able to defy their zombiness

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Introduction | 15

problematizes their status as zombies. Is it still a zombie if it can articulate its feelings, if it isn’t powerless? My answer is yes. While there have been thousands of Internet debates over whether this zombie or that was really a zombie according to one person’s rules or another’s, these debates belie the slippery nature of the zombie in the first place, and this is where I begin in saying yes. There is no single canonical definition of the zombie, so the idea of a single, innate form of zombiness becomes difficult to defend.31 Sarah Juliet Lauro discusses this at the beginning of her book The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion, and Living Death when she suggests not trying to pin a singular definition onto the concept but rather to approach the zombie as “myth” and “metaphor.”32 Yet many people feel confident that they know what a zombie is, that even without a standard definition, there are assumptions that most of us share when it comes to zombies. These assumptions are what I want to push back against. At its most basic, a zombie—in any of its forms—is a body that appears functionally alive but that has lost those qualities that would other wise make it human. Often, these qualities are directly connected with expressions of free will. The zombie is a being that has lost its free will, through magic, mad science, or a virus, and the expectation is that this loss is defined by victimization or degradation. Yet as this book shows, from the very beginning, there have been problems with this assumption. Numerous zombies have sidestepped their victimization. Therefore, if we step back and reconceptualize zombihood as a state existing somewhere between the human and the not quite human, as a state of liminality associated with—but not entirely dictated by—a loss of free will, then we have a broad definition of zombiness. This broad definition is flexible enough to be amended, depending on the kind of zombie one encounters—a slave zombie, a cannibal zombie, a fast zombie, a slow zombie, an ordinary zombie, or an extra-ordinary zombie—and more importantly, it allows for zombies to change within the course of their zombihood while still remaining zombies. Extra-ordinary zombies may expand our expectations of zombiness and challenge narratives of victimization. Their tales tell us that slavery and powerlessness are conditions that that can be overcome. If the extra-ordinary zombie can rise above its powerlessness and act, one wonders why other zombies aren’t inclined to do the same. The lesson, then, is that if you remain an ordinary zombie, you have only yourself to blame. Thus, if tales of ordinary zombies expose systemic prejudices that might render some of us slaves or cannibals, then extra-

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16 | Introduction

ordinary zombie stories not only show individuals battling the system, but also take the onus off the system and place it squarely back on the individual’s shoulders: change, in this case, can come only from within. This emphasis on personal responsibility would seem to make the extra-ordinary zombie a reactionary figure, yet perhaps that inference sells extra-ordinary zombies short. In many texts, it isn’t only one or two zombies that have the ability to become extra-ordinary; it is a characteristic of all of them. Even in texts in which only one zombie out of the horde is able to become extra-ordinary, that zombie is often fighting against corrupt systems of power. Additionally, in zombie stories in which the zombies remain firmly rooted in the expected, a living human’s interaction with zombie culture—as someone in need of rescue, as a zombie master, or as someone battling zombies—often changes that human. This brush with zombiemaking culture is most transformative for women and people of color, those already at a disadvantage in white patriarchal culture, and their interactions with zombie making are often empowering, even if not positive, experiences. Therefore, just as extra-ordinary zombies may speak to fantasies of gaining agency, contact with zombie-making cultures often does similar work. That is one of the reasons why race and gender become so important when examining zombie media, and why they form a major lens through which I interrogate how media producers and fans have deployed zombies over the last eighty years. Because of the zombie’s strong ties to Haiti in its initial conception, it entered pop culture as a racialized concept, and over the years, even with the coming of cannibal zombies, this racialization—often accompanying a hierarchical ranking of cultures into those that produce zombies and those that resist them—has continued. Women also play a vital role in zombie texts across eras—as victims, zombie hunters, and even zombie lovers. Markers of racial and gender difference within zombie media thus help highlight how, in these texts, the marginalized are able to resist their marginalization via zombie culture. Throughout this book, I explore both ordinary and extra-ordinary zombies and the living people who interact with zombie-making cultures, in order to get at why many representations of zombies and zombie-making cultures defy our expectations. If expected, ordinary zombies produce stories that warn of the dangers of losing the self, then extra-ordinary zombies show us what it is like to gain the self again. Similarly, the stories of the living who somehow become a part

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Introduction | 17

of zombie-making culture are often about people able to defy social rules or stigmas—they are about the powerless being able to feel powerful. Ordinary zombies prepare us for a world where humans can be robbed of their humanity and turned into things, where we are taught to feel no compunction about killing such things or using them as a workforce. Extra-ordinary zombies challenge the logic of being able to strip someone of their humanity. These zombies—the ones who speak, have names, and fall in love—are less killable, less subservient, less reducible to something else. In either form, then, the zombie mediates our fears of losing agency and our hopes that we might get it back. To understand how this works, I present this book in two parts. In part 1, I explore the appearances of ordinary and extra-ordinary zombies via the lenses of race and gender, showing that extra-ordinary zombies have made regular appearances in American media from the very beginning. Thus, while zombies can be horrific, they can also stand as symbols of resistance and change. Chapter 1 begins before the zombie’s appearance in US popular culture, in order to consider how it entered the US imaginary and what kinds of assumptions and ideas accompanied this creature when it first arrived on stages and screens in the early 1930s. Here, I consider the zombie’s ties to representations of Haiti circulating in the United States since the Haitian Revolution (1790–1804). Haiti was an anomaly in the nineteenth century: a postcolonial nation before much of the world had even been colonized. As a blackruled nation, Haiti was a constant ideological threat in a largely racist world; there were fears that its success might influence other peoples to rise up against colonial powers and slaveholders. It became necessary for these powers to try to paint Haiti in as negative a light as possible, and to this end, stories of voodoo and of cannibalism in Haiti started to circulate throughout the world. These stories had implications for people of color besides Haitians. By examining how representations of Haiti’s supposed barbarity and cannibalism worked in concert with justifications of racist practices in the United States and abroad, chapter 1 shows that the zombie entered into the rhetoric about Haiti as a means of continuing the same ideological work that the cannibal had done previously. Depictions of zombies and cannibals showed that there were people in the world incapable of taking care of themselves, and early zombie films often invited audiences to separate the world into zombie makers and those willing to push back against zombie-making cultures: the lesson being

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18 | Introduction

that some bodies were better suited to the kinds of exploitation that ordinary slave-style zombies represented. These films traded on the notion that some people simply make better slaves than others. The first chapter focuses on early slave-style zombie texts, in which, more often than not, young (white) Americans would battle zombiemaking cultures and win. The second chapter explores extra-ordinary cannibal-style zombies who fight back against those who would exploit them. In particular, it focuses on the postapocalyptic nature of cannibal-style zombie films. I argue that cannibal-style films toy with fantasies envisioning the death of the current world order and its attendant forms of capitalist white patriarchy in order to imagine what a world without race or class would be like. While many look to the living survivors of zombie media to see how this postapocalyptic fantasy would play out, I turn to the zombies. In particular, this chapter examines George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead (2005), whose zombies are agents of postapocalyptic change, to suggest that the revolutionary potential of these zombies isn’t located so much in their being nonraced or beyond race as it is in their separation from the systems that would tell them that race matters at all. But because the living are still very invested in these systems—even after the apocalypse—the zombies, while capable of enacting the sorts of changes that the living seem incapable of carrying out, still become trapped by (living) systems that ascribe value to bodies based on markers like race. Chapter 3 considers race from another angle, namely, the roles that white women have played in slave-style and cannibal-style zombie films. Many slave-style stories revolve around the rescue of a white woman, and even in contemporary cannibal-style texts, it is the rare zombie story that doesn’t feature a white woman as a potential victim, a lover, or a stalwart soldier defending the living against the undead. In fact, it is the white woman’s propensity to misbehave and become aligned with zombies in one way or another that disrupts her claims to both whiteness and stereotypical femininity. To understand how this happens, the chapter explores the whiteness of both heroes and villains in zombie texts, and pays special attention to the ways in which white women sometimes attain tremendous power by “contaminating” their whiteness through an alliance with zombie culture. Ultimately, white women often function in the same sorts of ways that extra-ordinary zombies do in zombie texts: as disruptive figures that white, patriarchal culture must rein in. Unlike white women, who are hypervisible in zombie media, peo-

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Introduction | 19

ple of color, and especially women of color, if they appear at all in early slave-style zombie films, usually exist in the background, as either slaves or servants. Even those who command zombies in these films, the zombie masters, are almost always white men. As the relationship between voodoo and zombies weakened with the coming of cannibal-style zombies in the late 1960s, the overwhelming majority of zombie films still focused on the survival of white bodies. But a handful of films since the 1930s have undermined this formula by featuring black female zombie masters and powerful black zombies. Continuing the discussion of gender and race from the previous chapter, chapter 4 considers women of color in zombie films. In particular, in some slave-style films, voodoo is something more than a simple, sensationalistic stereotype. Just as extra-ordinary zombies are, at least in part, zombies that somehow manage to resist their dehumanization, these films envision voodoo as a force able to do the same kind of work. For example, it endows some with the power to raise the dead—a power most often accessible to nonwhite or foreign believers—and often in slave-style films, it is through voodoo that women of color come to the fore. Examining two 1974 blaxploitation zombie films, Sugar Hill and The House on Skull Mountain, alongside the black-cast independent film Ouanga (Terwilliger, 1935) and the low-budget film Zombie Nation (Lommel, 2004), this chapter shows that when women of color can access their knowledge of voodoo, they become empowered to fight the white patriarchal systems that would otherwise keep them out of sight and out of mind. Part 1 focuses on extra-ordinary zombies and the living people who take up with zombie-making culture in order to gain agency over their lives. In part 2, I turn to experiences that allow people to “try on” zombiness, in order to point to how the extra-ordinary zombie’s power to challenge narratives of exploitation or systemic prejudice can become problematized. Chapter 5 focuses on the ability to play as a zombie in the video games Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel without a Pulse (Wideload Games, 2005), World of Warcraft (Blizzard, 2004–present), and Planescape Torment (Black Isle, 1999). In many ways, zombie games highlight the tensions between our expectations of ordinary zombiness and the ways in which media producers have deployed extra-ordinary zombies over the past several decades. Many zombie video games encourage a logic whereby ordinary zombiness is vital: unthinking, ordinary zombie adversaries are dehumanized to make them easy targets and killable fodder. If a zombie begins to enter into extra-ordinary ter-

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20 | Introduction

ritory, then it potentially becomes that much more difficult to kill. But games that dispense with zombie-killing logic and allow one to play as a zombie create a clear hierarchy between ordinary and extra-ordinary zombies. In these situations, the extra-ordinary zombie becomes extraordinary, in part, through its ability to use or abuse the ordinary zombies it comes into contact with, its actions thus replicating the logic of zombie-killing games in which zombies must be treated as things in order to sidestep thorny ethical questions. Chapter 6 extends the discussion of the ways in which extraordinary zombiness can be contrasted with ordinary zombiness. It explores zombie walks, which are contemporary gatherings of people dressed as zombies who travel through public spaces. Scholars have debated the political potential of these public events. I argue that while there could be a political thrust to zombie walks, these events, rather than challenging those mechanisms that work to separate the world into those worthy of life and those who are socially dead—as extra-ordinary zombies in fiction often do—tend to smooth over such binaries by producing a zombiness far removed from the theoretical zombiness of interest to scholars. By making it impossible to reach ordinary zombiness, the walks undercut the logic of the extra-ordinary zombie, which is supposed to somehow rise up out of degrading circumstances. Here, all the zombies are always already extra-ordinary: a walker does not start from a position of powerlessness and escape from it and is never in danger of being dehumanized. Yet by allowing participants to play at being zombies, these events can provide a spectacle in which pretending to be the walking dead subsumes the real-world mechanisms that render some groups socially dead. In the conclusion, I further meditate on this real-world thingification of people by examining how governmental agencies and others use the ordinary zombie in an effort to reimagine the world as full of potentially living and already (un)dead bodies. Focusing on the use of ordinary zombies in disaster-preparedness campaigns and military training exercises, this chapter highlights that while in its extra-ordinary form, the zombie can be a politically enlightened figure that speaks to the ways in which marginalized peoples can fight against their subjugation, in its ordinary form, the zombie can be a tool that zombifies and marginalizes real-world populations. The extra-ordinary zombie, then, becomes the logical result of a world where many people are already zombified—a fantasy of gaining agency offered up to those who feel their agency slipping away.

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Introduction | 21

Even though the zombie is a very slippery referent, media producers and consumers have long been complicating the zombie even further by humanizing it and making it extra-ordinary. This tendency may be due to audiences’ desires to relate to a humanized being, or to the anthropomorphic tendencies in American pop culture, but in light of real-world practices that serve to zombify entire populations, it might also reflect a need to value human life. In an essay exploring how Vodou has operated in American popular thought over the last century, Laënnec Hurbon analyzes the stereotypical and often grotesque portrayals of “voodoo” presented to 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.”33 The zombie has often done similar work—artists have used it to project the image of the barbaric cannibal onto the Other so that audiences could forget about those cannibalistic urges deep within themselves. But what if we were to alter this thinking slightly, in the same way that scholars such as Dayan suggest we reconsider the associations between slavery and the zombi? According to Hurbon, we see ourselves buried deep in stereotypical representations of Vodou. If we find ourselves reflected in the zombie as well, then—as I argue throughout this book—the zombie reflected back to us is often extra-ordinary, not the mindless slave or the heartless cannibal. Instead, it is a zombie self that is searching for valuation, a self that is returned back to audiences as worthy of life and everything that entails. These zombies, then, represent not a loathing of our weaknesses and baser animal instincts, but a strong desire to be counted as fully human.

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1 | From Cannibals to Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields Haiti, Vodou, and Early Zombie Films

I

n the first few moments of the zombie film Ouanga (Terwilliger, 1935), a narrator describes “Paradise Island” in the West Indies, with its “majestic mountains wreathed in clouds” and its “palm-lined shores.”1 As bright music plays, he tells us that “the daily life of its inhabitants is marked by an unhurried peacefulness,” and the accompanying images corroborate this: people walk to market and wash clothes in a nearby river. However, the narrator suddenly announces, “Night falls.” A shirtless black man emerges from the darkness, looming toward the screen, and the narrator tells us, “Mysterious figures slip silently from shadow to shadow. Nature becomes ghostly and unearthly, alive with evil movement, shuddering incantations and gruesome rites, and seemingly from everywhere comes the throbbing, pulsating beat of the voodoo drums.” Drums and voices fill the air, and the filmmakers suddenly transport us to a voodoo ritual. The message is clear: by day, this island—a thinly veiled substitute for Haiti—is peaceful and simple, but something dark is waiting just below the surface. Early zombie fiction often created exotic locations where young Americans became embroiled in what was lurking behind pleasant facades, and this story trope owed much to a more than century-long fascination with Vodou and Haiti. In the years leading up to the first zombie films, writers often portrayed Haiti as the same sort of place as “Paradise Island”: innocuous at first glance but harboring a threatening secret. As the fictionalization of a 1938 radio broadcast put it, “Even at noon, under the blazing scrutiny of the tropic sun, there are dark places in Haiti.”2 Much of that darkness supposedly stemmed from Vodou. Even before Haiti officially became a nation in 1804, stories of Vodou circulated throughout the world, and they generally

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26 | Not Your Average Zombie

aimed to portray Haitians as barbaric, wholly different from the Godfearing peoples of the United States and Europe. When the zombie entered US popular culture in the late 1920s, then, it was not simply an instance of translating Haitian folklore into fictional American myth. The zombie was a supposedly real creature, unique to Haiti, where Vodou sorcerers raised and controlled zombie slaves. The zombie was thus able to provide yet another variation in a more than century-long practice of framing Vodou and Haiti in a threatening light. Haiti, in particular, needed to be demonized: as an example of postcolonial self-rule, it stood in defiance of colonial thinking of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Haiti raised potent questions over who could and could not effectively govern themselves, and these questions were inevitably couched in racist terms: Haiti was, after all, the black republic.3 These questions haunted early zombie fiction as well. From the very beginning, it wasn’t necessarily the zombies that were the threatening creatures in zombie media. Rather, the cultures and people who produced and controlled zombies posed the biggest threat. Thus, the legacies of colonialism and fears surrounding self-rule that had become bound up with depictions of Haiti throughout the preceding century shone through in early zombie texts, which purported to let audiences see exactly what happened in the places where these cultures ruled themselves.4 In many ways, nostalgia for the colonial world permeated these films. The fears enacted in the earliest zombie stories in US pop culture—that “black” magic would corrupt the pure US citizen’s body— led to stories about rescuing people from the clutches of unscrupulous zombie masters. Time and again, these films set up a dichotomy, not only between zombie-making cultures and those who would fight them, but also between those bodies in need of rescuing from zombification and those more suitable to being zombified. Therefore, we might assume that the zombie, as it first entered US pop culture, was an unthinking, ordinary slave-style zombie, but this chapter questions that assumption. In the introduction, I showed how one can read a certain amount of power or resistance in the zombi’s slavery, making the zombi already a bit extra-ordinary. Here, too, what we see is a blurring of the lines between the ordinary and extra-ordinary zombies. Early slave-style zombie narratives are predicated on the idea that zombification doesn’t have to be permanent—especially if one is a young white American—

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Haiti, Vodou, and Early Zombie Films | 27

and thus, these zombies exist as extra-ordinary zombies from the start. They might not be thinking, talking, active zombies, but there is very little danger of their zombification ever being permanent, which dilutes the loss of agency ascribed to the zombie state, at least for them. I am not suggesting that these zombies become extra-ordinary in hindsight, but rather that these zombies were never really ordinary to begin with, even if that is how they were originally intended to be read. Furthermore, these zombies almost always existed in contrast with the ordinary zombies of color who populate the backgrounds of these movies and are much less often assured of receiving the same sort of rescue. In these films, then, zombiism exists along racialized structures that only some can escape.

Haiti’s (Vodou) Revolution

Christopher Columbus landed on the island of Hispaniola in December 1492, claiming it for Spain, which established settlements throughout the territory. Under the Treaty of Ryswick (1697), Spain ceded the western third of the island—the land that is today Haiti—to the French.5 Saint-Domingue quickly became France’s most profitable New World colony, in large part because of sugar, coffee, and indigo exports. The Spanish had imported African slaves to the island beginning in the sixteenth century, and as the economy grew in the French colony, so too did the importation of African slaves. According to Jon Kukla, by the time of the French Revolution, “St. Domingue imported thirty thousand African slaves a year.”6 In August 1791, two years into the French Revolution, the colony’s slaves revolted. During the next several years, they faced local soldiers and French royal troops, as well as Spanish and British troops. Some scholars suggest that the revolt was almost entirely motivated by slaves seeking their freedom, but according to C. L. R. James, the revolt was an extension of the French Revolution. After the abolition of slavery in the colony in 1793, the struggle 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.7 What shocked the world at the time was that the former slaves succeeded: in 1804, after over a decade of fighting, the independent nation of Haiti was born. Mary Hassal’s Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo, in a

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Series of Letters (1808) is a work of fiction set in the final days of SaintDomingue, just before the birth of Haiti. Near the end, 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 retreat.”8 It was no conventional monster that Hassal described. Rather, to Hassal and many like her, the Haitian Revolution and its revolutionaries were monstrous. Haiti had become the first black-ruled independent nation in the Western Hemisphere. The country and its revolution almost instantly became easy targets for racist stereotyping. Following colonialist discourse elsewhere, many writers portrayed Haiti as a country in ruins, evidence of French colonialism left to waste. Often, authors cited Vodou as the root cause of the regression they saw in Haiti, and they rarely viewed the religion as anything other than malicious cult belief. Vodou was of particular interest to outsiders because of its links with the Haitian Revolution. Before the revolution commenced, clandestine Vodou gatherings provided its future leaders with the opportunity to meet and gather supporters, and it was, supposedly, at a Vodou meeting that the revolution began.9 Commentary that painted Vodou as central to the revolution presented opponents of Haitian independence with a means to disparage revolutionary ideas by linking them with a supposedly barbaric superstition. This rhetoric may have seemed vital in those nations that saw Haiti—the living symbol of a successful slave revolt and black selfrule—as anathema. Ignoring the Catholic and other European influences on Vodou, for instance, made it a completely, organically black religion, opening the door for Haiti’s foes to use Vodou as a means to discredit the country. The heroes of Haiti’s revolution were also heroes to slaves throughout the Americas, who, in some areas, shared Vodou beliefs. Slaveholders throughout the Americas thus feared similar revolts and mistrusted slave gatherings, especially those connected with Vodou. There was some merit to these fears. Slaves began resisting their lot in greater and greater numbers as the nineteenth century progressed: the Underground Railroad began in the early nineteenth century; in 1822, Denmark Vesey led an unsuccessful slave revolt; and in 1831, Nat Turner’s rebellion took place. As Bryan Senn notes, slaveholders saw Vodou “as a powerful unifying force, one that could incite action and build hope in . . . oppressed slaves.”10 Slaveholders did not consider Vodou a religion, but rather “a heap of superstitions, and of magical practices and sorcery, stripped of coherence.”11

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Nineteenth-century texts on Haiti devote many pages to descriptions of Vodou ceremonies and beliefs. For instance, Spencer St. John devoted a great deal of his 1884 book, Hayti; or, The Black Republic, to Vodou. St. John tied it to cannibalism, human sacrifice, and grave robbing. His account became one of the most popular texts on Haiti in the nineteenth century.12 St. John devoted a chapter to cannibalism, asserting, “Every foreigner in Hayti knows that cannibalism exists.”13 Writers who borrowed directly from St. John or built upon his assertions picked up on this theme—even claiming that Haitians ate their children in sacrifice to Vodou gods.14 St. John’s argument suffered from warped a priori reasoning: because he and the other foreigners “knew” cannibalism existed, it existed. Still, from time to time, stories of cannibalism tied to Vodou rites surfaced in American and European newspapers and magazines. These stories often implied that Haiti needed outside tutelage. For instance, St. John was careful to claim that cannibalism had not been tolerated under the French, maintaining that it was never mentioned in French colonial accounts of SaintDomingue. He also noted that the practice would have been difficult to perform before the revolution: colonial masters kept such a close eye on their property that one missing slave would have raised suspicions. St. John’s argument thus implied that cannibalism was the result of Haitian self-rule. To many in the United States of the nineteenth century, Vodou was something to be feared. They saw it as an intrinsic part of Haitian life that corrupted Haiti’s people because they allowed it to operate without restraint. Vodou thus came into direct conflict with the Protestant virtues so integral to the nineteenth-century Victorian worldview. If civilization, in the Victorian mind, meant moderation and selfcontrol, Vodou was uncivilized because it seemed to have no such limitations: even ignoring the charges of cannibalism and blood sacrifice, according to reports, Vodouists danced freely and openly enjoyed rum, among other things. Vodou was far more uninhibited than Victorian Protestantism. The view that Vodou corrupted Haitian life led some outside observers to conclude that Haitians were unable to govern themselves. Frederick A. Ober claimed in 1893 that Vodou high priests and priestesses in Haiti were so powerful that they were a “menace to good government, and it is well known that even some of the rulers of Haiti have been dominated by them.”15 Similarly, in Where Black Rules White: A Journey across and about Hayti (1900), Hesketh Pritchard noted that

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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.”16 The belief was that Vodou corrupted Haiti so thoroughly that it tainted even institutions, such as a republican government, that might otherwise grant the nation the appearance of civilization. Almost constant turmoil in Haiti after the revolution compounded those beliefs. Upon the 1806 assassination of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Haiti’s first ruler, the country was divided between a kingdom in the North and a republic in the South. By 1822, the nation had been reunified, but a series of coups and armed revolts soon followed. The impoverished nation was often in a state of near rebellion from then on.17 Furthermore, by the time Haiti won independence, what had been one of the richest colonies in the world was a shell of its former self, and the impact on the global economy was immense.18 The revolution disrupted markets and created massive shortfalls of products like sugar and coffee. It forced waves of refugees and migrants into neighboring countries. The island existed in virtual isolation: trade embargoes and the lack of international diplomatic recognition effectively sealed Haiti off from the rest of the world.19 Thus, what little information was available about Haiti couldn’t be subject to much critical interrogation. Even those commentators who looked kindly upon the new nation tended to do so with reservations. 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.”20 Although Harvey was reluctant to condemn the nation outright, he still felt Haiti cried out for guidance from the white world. Critics of Haiti were far less kind. In an 1805 letter from French foreign minister Charles Talleyrand to US secretary of state James Madison, 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.”21 Spencer St. John, writing seventy-nine years later, minces no words in his opinion of Haiti: “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

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the laws for our islands is to condemn them to inevitable ruin.”22 Haiti’s revolution deprived white Europeans and Americans of the chance to “civilize” it. Therefore, the “civilized” world had to demonize Haiti in order to create a situation where their civilizing forces could save the nation from itself: they couldn’t see the revolution and the nation it produced as successful, and so Haiti’s people were made over as standing for everything antidemocratic and uncivilized.

The Haitian Example

The rhetoric painting Haiti as barbaric could be used elsewhere to show that all people of color needed civilizing. In the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fears—not only over the supposed barbarity of the Haitian nation but also over what to do with the peoples of Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Cuba, and the Philippines, among others—mirrored concerns arising from emancipation. Emancipation had freed the slaves, but it also raised the question of what exactly that freedom meant. Did it mean full political rights, equality, and access to land? Or did it mean that one needed to be educated before being able to fully participate in one’s freedom? Whatever the answer, social, economic, and racial relations within the post-Reconstruction United States were changing. White supremacist thinking sought examples of blacks’ incapacity for self-rule in order to confirm the biases of those fearful of these changes. This need to validate a long-standing prejudice created the paradox of placing black people “outside the law,” existing in theory as free but in practice having no protection from a constant threat of violence.23 To justify such a state of affairs, commentators used examples from far-flung places to underscore blacks’ inability to self-govern or participate fully in US citizenship. Matthew Frye Jacobson, in examining the use of Henry M. Stanley’s reports on Africa for the New York Herald in 1877, notes: “Nor is it 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.”24 It should be no surprise that given the prevailing opinion of Haiti as a nation

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in need of guidance, the country’s status could be used to strengthen the argument for expanding imperial domination in other parts of the world as well as continuing racist practices within the United States. In an 1867 message to Congress, Andrew Johnson noted 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.”25 He did not explicitly refer to Haiti, but his meaning was clear. 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 mixedrace peoples, who were “much less worthy” than their Conservative counter parts; he believed that if the Panamanians elected the Liberals, a “large Negro influence” would govern the isthmus, potentially making it a problem like Haiti.26 Some also used Haiti as a justification for not supporting the Filipino struggle for independence.27 Others saw Haiti’s influence as a more direct threat to the South. An editor’s note to a 1912 article in the New England Magazine 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.”28 Articles like this implicitly suggested that deep down, all black peoples were alike and barbaric, and rather explicitly pointed out that Haiti’s religion directly inspired African Americans, notably in the US South, to get rid of any veneer of civilization and commit unthinkable acts of violence. It was not just Haiti’s religion that made it a cautionary tale in the United States. The nation’s economic situation warned against following its example as well. Besides the sharp fall in exports after independence, many Haitians abandoned plantations in favor of small-scale subsistence farming, and many in the United States feared emancipation would lead to the same situation in the South. 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.”29 Subsistence farming would dramatically change the

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South, to the point that landowners might face a challenge to their political hegemony and, with it, to their ability to dominate the resources of production: Black freedom in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially regarding former slaves’ access to land, had to be curtailed. Haiti represented a system of working the land that put control in the hands of those working it rather than in a few elite landowners: it was a radical departure from the southern way of doing things. But there was a silver lining for those fearful of Haiti’s influence— the almost constant political turmoil in the nation. Since this nearconstant trouble seemed to prove that the Haitians were incapable of ruling themselves, the belief that someone had to save Haiti from itself was prominent. Thus, the continuing negative representations of Vodou in the Western press and in popular and academic literature helped convince many of the need to step in and “help” Haiti, and this played a large part in the US occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. Officially, the United States moved into Haiti to prevent a German attack during World War I, but occupying Haiti was also a means of showing European nations that the United States would protect its interests in the Western Hemisphere. In addition, it allowed the United States to fortify its already strong strategic position in the Caribbean and to justify its interventions in other countries.30 To most people, though, the United States occupied Haiti under the pretense of civilizing it. 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 the consent of the governed in an island which has never known anything but a blood-stained despotism.”31 Haiti was proof that some 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.32 Once there, US Marines and other visitors sent reports that reinforced earlier stereotypes, such as the Haitians being cannibals. In Captain John Houston Craige’s memoir of his experiences during the occupation, Black Bagdad (1933),33 he recalls a conversation with Captain Pat Kelly, Marine commander of the Circa La Source district in Haiti. Kelly explained the difference between the Christian God—a god of “love and purity”—and the Vodou God: “The God [a Vodouist] worships is a big negro with supreme power, no morals, and an unlimited appetite for rum, women, whoopee and blood.”34 Kelly continued, noting that some Vodou gods demanded human sacrifices to

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satiate their appetites. Unsettled by the thought of human sacrifices, Craige asked whether 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.”35 With very few exceptions, there was never any substantiated proof of cannibalism in Haiti; rather anecdotal evidence like Kelly’s provided all the “proof” anyone needed. Still, Kelly’s comments, like Spencer St. John’s nearly thirty years earlier, not only indicated the supposed gulf separating savage Haitian cannibals from civilized white peoples, but also claimed that white civilization could “cure” cannibalism: the occupation had supposedly curbed some of it already. This assertion was proof that Haitians needed guidance from the Western world. And that, ostensibly, is what they got when US marines landed in 1915.

Enter the Zombie

At a 1921 hearing before a select committee of the US 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.”36 Records of the hearings include several references to the good works that US troops were doing in Haiti. There were also growing concerns about the occupation—the hearings themselves were meant to answer charges that US troops in Haiti were abusing their power, as well as the increasingly loud queries into the real reasons for the US presence there in the first place.37 By the 1920s, support for the occupation was beginning to falter. In addition to a general unease with colonial holdings in the post– World War I world, Haitians were increasingly resistant to US “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. Forced corvée labor projects caused many Haitians to wonder just how free the imported US democracy really was. Others saw a different factor at play in diminishing support for the action: the author Edna Taft claimed that charges of US abuses in Haiti were a tool to court the black vote in the United States.38 President Hoover sent a commission to Haiti in February 1930.

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It 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.”39 Indeed, by the early 1930s, elections in Haiti had ushered in an anti-occupation government, and the United States was preparing its withdrawal. The zombie, thus, entered US popular culture at an auspicious moment. Americans would have been somewhat prepared for something like the zombie. Decades of travelogues, anthropological essays, and eyewitness reports of the goings-on in Haiti told stories of malicious witchcraft and cannibalism. Once film crews could travel to Haiti, films that supposedly provided realistic views of “voodoo” also appeared. In 1931, an observer of just such a film being shot by a former Marine named Faustin Wirkus—made to accompany a planned lecture tour of the United States—said that it captured everyday native life in Haiti: “Especially amazing are the scenes of the goat-sacrificingVoodoo ceremony in all its gruesome rites of Paganism.”40 The reporter goes on to observe that Wirkus’s film (and even just his presence in Haiti) serves to show how “a lone white man” can help “primitive people . . . to help themselves.” Films showcasing Haiti’s poverty or its lack of infrastructure were one thing, but with Vodou ceremonies added to the mix—often without much contextualization of what was going on or why—the narrative that portrayed Haiti as in need of economic and military assistance as well as spiritual intervention was made all the more real by images that seemed to confirm decades of written accounts. This sensationalizing may be a large part of the reason why, by 1933, the government of Haiti was trying to put a stop to the filming of Vodou ceremonies. As The Hollywood Reporter disclosed: “It looks like Haiti is just about all washed up so far as pictures are concerned on the subject of ‘Voodoo.’ It seems that Haiti is more than just a bit sensitive on the point and, instead of realizing the potential tourist value of playing up the voodoo idea, heavy penalties are imposed by the government on natives attempting to hold voodoo ceremonies.”41 The government realized the harm these films of “real” Vodou ceremonies were causing. Fictional films that tried to capture an air of authenticity by filming “real” Vodou ceremonies added to the nation’s image problems, and it wasn’t only the government that wanted the filmmakers gone. The

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makers of the film Ouanga (1935) initially attempted to shoot in Haiti, but found strong resistance when they tried to hire local Vodouists as performers. As a reporter for Photoplay magazine detailed, after offering to hire drummers, dancers, and a papaloi for their film, the film’s director, George Terwilliger, and his cameraman found an ouanga on the front seat of their car and one of their tires slashed.42 After a further three days of negotiations with the locals, Terwilliger secured authentic performers for his film, only to be “served with a notice to pack up and get out of the country on the first out-going steamer!” At first the crew refused to leave, but after a series of “accidents,” the filmmakers relocated to Jamaica to make the film. Earlier fictional films, such as Voodoo Vengeance (1913), The Ghost of Twisted Oaks (Olcott, 1915), and Unconquered (Reicher, 1917), took the distorted display of voodoo even further by staging their own “voodoo” ceremonies—often based on what could be culled from travelogues and stories about Haiti. Though none were set in Haiti, these films taught audiences that black bodies practiced a form of sorcery called voodoo in places like Africa and the southern United States, and they centered on the bloodier aspects of supposed voodoo practice. In Unconquered, for instance, a voodoo queen demands a young boy’s blood sacrifice to atone for a follower’s sins. Thus, even without a direct reference to Haiti, these films paved the way for audiences to believe the absolute worst about Vodou belief, even that Vodouists would raise their own dead to work as slaves. Although stories of the reanimated dead wandering the Haitian countryside had been circulating in the West since at least the late nineteenth century, the term “zombie” was virtually unknown until 1929. There are some mentions of the concept of the undead in French texts—Joan Dayan refers to an 1802 book that includes an account of a priest who discusses raising a “zomby” and making it do work43— but as Peter Dendle notes, “Even as late as 1928 folklorist Elsie Parsons mentioned that the ‘zombi’ was virtually unknown outside of Haiti.”44 Reanimated corpses were largely absent from English-language stories of Haitian Vodou, which focused far more heavily on cannibalism and blood sacrifice.45 There were periodic mentions of Vodou rites that allowed Vodouists to raise the dead, but it wasn’t until 1929 that an English-language source in wide circulation gave a name to these walking dead. William Seabrook, who had lived in Haiti, wrote detailed accounts

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of Vodou rituals and folklore in his 1929 book The Magic Island. In the chapter titled “Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields,” he noted, “I recalled one creature I had been hearing about in Haiti, which sounded exclusively local—the zombie,” adding, “It seemed . . . that while the zombie came from the grave, it was neither a ghost, nor yet a person who had been raised like Lazarus from the dead.”46 Seabrook explained the process of zombification: “People who have the power . . . go to a fresh grave, dig up the body before it has had time to rot, galvanize it into movement, and then make of it a servant or a slave.” He made clear that the idea of a reanimated body used as a slave disgusted him, and he initially dismissed the zombie as nothing more than superstition until his friend Polynice assured him that zombies were real. Polynice pointed out that Haitians often buried their dead in busy places or at crossroads, where people would be sure to pass, in order to discourage potential zombie masters from digging up corpses. He then told Seabrook, “At this very moment, in the moonlight, there are zombies working on this island . . . We know about them, but we do not dare to interfere so long as our own dead are left un-molested.”47 He then offered to take Seabrook to see some real zombies. According to the astonished author, the zombies were “plodding like brutes, like automatons.”48 Seabrook’s companion touched one on the shoulder: “Obediently, like an animal, he slowly stood erect—and what I saw then . . . came as a rather sickening shock.” Seabrook was aghast at the zombie’s eyes: “They were in truth like the eyes of a dead man, not blind, but staring, unfocused, unseeing. The whole face .  .  . was vacant.  .  .  . It seemed not only expressionless, but incapable of expression.” Seabrook tried to rationalize what he was seeing by convincing himself that the zombies were, in fact, only mentally impaired people. Yet he ends the chapter by describing an encounter with Dr. Antoine Villiers, whose rational mind was beyond question in Seabrook’s estimation, and who didn’t automatically dismiss zombies. During their conversation, Dr. Villiers showed Seabrook a copy of Article 249 of the Haitian Criminal Code, which criminalized behavior very similar to zombie making: it made it illegal to drug people with the intention of making them appear dead in order to bury them so that you could dig them up to kidnap them into slavery. Seabrook then offered up the text of Article 249 without further comment, but the idea did not die there. This chapter from The Magic Island and Seabrook’s descriptions of

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his encounters with zombies influenced depictions of zombie behavior in fiction for years to come, providing an early guide for zombie stage plays, short stories, and films.

Contrasting Cultures

As the US government planned to leave Haiti and end its tutelage, fictionalized accounts of mindless black bodies in need of a master’s guidance began to circulate throughout the United States. Real-world guidance was traded in for its fictional counterpart. No longer demonized as cannibals or sorcerers, Haitians were remade in Western popular culture as soulless beings, literally the undead, and Haiti was a constant in early zombie texts. The first feature-length zombie film, White Zombie (Halperin, 1932), is set there, as were the first stage plays and short stories about zombies. Even as fictional stories of the undead moved out of Haiti, an implicit connection remained. Besides Ouanga, in which Paradise Island impersonates Haiti, Revolt of the Zombies (1936), which takes place in Cambodia, used references to Haiti’s Article 249 in its promotional material. In I Walked with a Zombie (Tourneur, 1943) and King of the Zombies (1941), the use of fictional Caribbean islands kept a link with Haiti alive. By making Haiti an implicit presence, many early zombie films added a racial component to zombie making. Haiti’s blackness— in both the sense of the race of its inhabitants and the evil supposedly emanating from the nation—had been on display for over a century by the time these films appeared, and in linking zombies with Haiti (either explicitly or implicitly), that blackness carried over into any culture or group linked to zombie making. These films made sure to mark out zombie-making cultures as visually and aurally distinct from white American culture. In slave-style zombie texts, this “native” culture was a hodgepodge of exotic trimmings (usually in the form of feathers, animal bones, and face painting) combined with the constant sounds of tom-tom drums and nearly naked bodies of color. Filmmakers did not necessarily tie these natives to a particular culture, but rather created a general exotic black culture that could exist in contrast to the civilized, modern white bodies of the Americans being threatened in these tales. The native costumes and sounds used in these stories thus served to render black bodies wild and primal. Still, these depictions—at least as far as Haiti was

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Fig. 1.1. Zombies

dressed in ordinary clothes lined up behind a living man (Mantan Moreland) (King of the Zombies © Monogram Pictures, 1941)

concerned—had a small grounding in fact. Reports about Haiti from Seabrook and others made numerous references to the constant beat of tom-toms on the island, which were repeated in almost every slavestyle film that used voodoo.49 Still, filmmakers took a great deal of creative license in portraying Haiti and other exotic spaces. In films set in Caribbean locales meant to stand in for Haiti, such as Ouanga or I Eat Your Skin (1964), the use of the tom-tom motif might seem logical, and while the use of feathers and bones was excessive, it fit with stereotypical depictions of exotic black cultures more generally in Hollywood. Filmmakers extended these markers in less cogent directions, though. For instance, in King of the Zombies, both black and white zombies typically wear contemporary attire—pants and buttonup shirts—yet at the film’s climactic voodoo ceremony, those in charge of the ceremony are wearing elaborate feathered headdresses and necklaces made of animal teeth, as if to underscore the exotic nature of voodoo (figs. 1.1 and 1.2). Likewise, the setting of Plague of the Zombies (Gilling, 1966) is a small village in Victorian England, and still the film opens with the image of three shirtless black men wearing tall fur hats and playing zebra-skinned drums (fig. 1.3). In these films, it is as if an extra layer of “native” coding was needed to fully contrast (black) zombie-making culture with white culture. Filmmakers made a further contrast between white, American culture and exotic black cultures in the narratives of these films. There is no single typical plot in early zombie texts, but many of them share similar tropes: young white Americans travel either abroad or to an

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Fig. 1.2. The zombie

master in a mask and his collaborators in feathers trying to zombify a young woman during a voodoo ceremony (King of the Zombies © Monogram Pictures, 1941)

Fig. 1.3. Victorian

England? The opening scene of Plague of the Zombies (© Hammer Film Productions, 1966)

exotic or remote part of the United States. There, someone familiar with zombie making threatens them, and this person would almost always be coded as “foreign”—through the zombie maker’s thick accent or extranational allegiances. For instance, in White Zombie, the zombie master Murder Legendre, played by the Hungarian American actor Bela Lugosi, zombifies the beautiful Madeline Parker on her wedding night and kidnaps her to his castle. In Revolt of the Zombies, the French zombie master Armand Louque zombifies an entire archaeological expedition in order to blackmail the alluring Claire Duval into marrying him. In King of the Zombies, the foreign spy Dr. Miklos Sangre zombifies Admiral Wainwright so that he will divulge US military secrets. In Bowery at Midnight (Fox, 1942), Professor Brenner (also played by Bela Lugosi) zombifies the men who show up at his soup kitchen, creating a network of criminal minions. Finally, in Voodoo Man (Beaudine,

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1944), another zombie master played by Bela Lugosi, Dr. Richard Marlowe, zombifies young women to try to find a replacement body for his late wife. By threatening white Americans with zombies or zombification and by associating the processes of zombification with stereotypical “native” costumes or with “foreign” zombie masters, many early zombie films added a racial component to zombie making that suggested American citizens in jeopardy of becoming a zombie master’s slaves were also under the threat of him making them over as black. Even if the foreign zombie masters were white men, they were coded as nonAmericans who had some sort of familiarity with (black) voodoo culture. If producing zombies required the tools and talents—and, some might claim, savagery—of black culture, then zombification carried blackness with it. To be zombified was to be so enveloped by black culture as to become a part of it, to be sucked into it and dehumanized by it. Hence, the feathers and bones necessary to complete the voodoo ceremony in King of the Zombies. Zombies operated within a discourse that maintained whiteness as normative and constructed those of color as monstrous and, within zombie-making culture, practically infectious. The fact that these films tended to individuate white zombies served to underscore this. White zombies have loved ones who try to rescue them. The audience knows their names. Thus, Madeline in White Zombie becomes a zombie during her wedding in Haiti; Lila von Altermann’s husband zombifies her in Revenge of the Zombies; Jessica Holland is the titular zombie of I Walked with a Zombie. Likewise, a Nazi zombifies James McCarthy in King of the Zombies, Mike Strager is zombified during a trip to the Caribbean island of San Sebastian in Zombies on Broadway, and a mob boss zombifies police captain David Harris in Creature with the Atom Brain. In each of these films, a zombie master’s evil scheme includes zombifying white Americans, yet these zombies do not become anonymous members of the mass. In contrast, people of color, and especially zombies of color, most often had no individual identity in early zombie films.50 Filmmakers usually imagined zombies of color as faceless hordes. For example, zombies of color in films such as Revolt of the Zombies and Revenge of the Zombies are part of a crowd, without names, and no one tries to rescue them. James Snead noted in his reading of the “natives” in King Kong (Cooper/Schoedsack, 1933) that black bodies in the film functioned as “props” to be “figuratively owned by the whites’ appropri-

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ating ‘look,’” and unsurprisingly, black bodies fulfill a similar function throughout early zombie films.51 Perhaps the most potent example of black zombies as an indiscriminate mass occurs in White Zombie. A throng of zombies works the plantation of the zombie master Murder Legendre, and the first scene in his sugar mill sets up a striking contrast between the dead workers (played by black actors) and Legendre’s “special” zombies, all played by white actors. The film initially shows the worker zombies in a wide shot as little more than shadows (fig. 1.4), and the only sound heard throughout the mill is the creaking noise the grinder makes as it cuts through sugarcane. When the camera pulls closer, the worker zombies become pairs of legs crossing before the screen (fig. 1.5). In a cut to a long shot that faces the zombie workers, the zombies remain nondescript: the baskets of cane they carry obscure their faces, rendering them a faceless horde (fig. 1.6). To underscore how the zombies lack individuality, when a zombie loses his footing and falls into the sugar grinder, the accident elicits no response from his fellow zombies as the mechanism grinds him to death: “life” is cheap on the sugar plantation, especially if it is black. Even when people of color are not zombies in slave-style zombie films, they often function as 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, except for interjecting a native dance sequence into the film. The scene focuses on a henchman working for the 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 foreground and background. Some cutaways focus on these dancers, but their main purpose is to provide an ever-moving, ever-moaning setting. Native black bodies, here, are little more than set decorations for added atmosphere, and there are similar configurations of bodies of color in Zombies on Broadway and I Walked with a Zombie. These practices rendered zombies of color and even just bodies of color as not worthy of distinct, individual attention. But there was also a message that some bodies were more suited for indistinct servitude as zombies. The visual, aural, and narrative practices of slave-style zombie films set up a dichotomy between those cultures that produced zombies (linked with Haiti and blackness) and those that fought zombification (namely, young white Americans), as well as between those bodies better at being zombies (black bodies) and those who could find rescue from the zombie state (white bodies).

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Fig. 1.4. Zombie

workers in a sugar mill (White Zombie © Halperin Productions, 1932)

Fig. 1.5. Zombie workers as legs passing by the camera (White Zombie © Halperin Productions, 1932)

Fig. 1.6. Zombie workers as faceless hordes (White Zombie © Halperin Productions, 1932)

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The horror of these texts, then, was not necessarily derived from the zombies in and of themselves, but from the fact that zombie masters could make over young white Americans in the same mold as the faceless zombies of color, even for just a little while. In zombie fiction, filmmakers amended the rhetoric that for years had told Americans that Haiti’s influence could spread (to the rest of the Caribbean or to the southern United States, but most especially to other peoples of color), in order to show the threat that Haitian and Vodou culture posed to all Americans. As the Marines left Haiti and the occupation ended, the lingering fictional story seemed to be that we needed to remain wary of Haiti. But if zombie masters threatened or zombified young white Americans, friends or loved ones would work to save them, and these rescuers were almost always successful. Haitian culture might be a threat, but it was clearly more threatening to some bodies than to others. White zombies benefited from their whiteness, because no matter how “black” they may have become as zombies, rescue from zombification was available. Thus, white Americans were never zombified to the same degree as the black zombies, who lacked names and friends fighting to free them. Slave-style zombie fiction shows both how white Americans can fall prey to other cultures and how their distinctiveness ensures their rescue. And this is precisely why release from zombification is vital— it reestablishes the norm that white Americans aren’t supposed to be zombies or slaves. Servitude is best left for other kinds of people. The correlative truth thus becomes that some people aren’t supposed to be American citizens, that privilege is best reserved for the kinds of people who look a certain way and live in certain places. These films could thus teach white American audiences that—in comparison with the zombies of the world—they were free, and that should anyone threaten that freedom, the privileges of white Americanness would eventually save them. It also taught them that some bodies, notably bodies of color, were better suited to the kinds of exploitation that zombification represented. Even as fictional zombies moved further and further away from Haiti and its practitioners of “black” magic, the racial assumptions surrounding zombies did not necessarily change. Yet in the spectacles of race presented in many early zombie fi lms, the zombie became a very real means of rendering race invisible. Slave-style zombification is all about slavery, but actual slavery, in its real, lived sense, is displaced onto a more abstract form. The slavery on display in slave-style zom-

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bie films is not the systemic slavery experienced in the United States or Saint-Domingue; rather, it is a localized fantasy of slavery, from which one can be rescued by breaking the “spell.” These films thus toyed with both colonial and anticolonial fantasies in presenting stories of slaves who woke up from their slavery. Just as white Americans once feared that the Haitian example could spread, in the face of a changing global landscape starting in the early 1930s, the spaces that came to house zombies became spaces in need of containing or sites for playing out a containment fantasy. Many slavestyle films were explicitly located in colonial or postcolonial regions like Haiti, Cuba, or Cambodia, and although colonial control was never as universally successful as colonizers would have liked, colonies could still offer the fantasy of control. These texts could thus be read as nostalgia for the colonial world and the order it represented. Plus, in films with “exotic” settings, where “black” magic was on display via black bodies costumed in feathers and animal bones, there is an obvious racial component to this containment. Not just anyone could defeat zombie masters. It took an American to do the job. Thus, the old refrains of tutelage and civilizing uplift that had justified the occupation of Haiti remained just under the surface in these films. For instance, in Revolt of the Zombies, an American archaeological expedition goes to Cambodia to eliminate a reported zombie spell before it falls into the wrong hands. The Cambodians, proven to be incapable of self-rule by their inability to keep their native secrets secure, need guidance, and not just any guidance. Cambodia was still a French protectorate when the film premiered in 1936. But Revolt of the Zombies nearly eliminates the French presence altogether. Instead, the French have left Cambodia, with its dangerous zombification spell, to the Cambodians, and only an American can best the native Cambodian magic and save the day. In Revolt of the Zombies, once the natives wake up from their zombification, they kill their former zombie master. This vengefulness was another trait of the zombie as it appeared in these works: it could potentially wake up and turn on its former master. More often than not, slave-style zombie fiction allowed white zombies to wake up as their former free-willed selves; if that couldn’t happen, the zombies would turn on their masters and destroy them. In Zombies on Broadway, for instance, the zombie potion eventually wears off. In Teenage Zombies, there is an antidote to the zombie formula. In Voodoo Man, when the good guys destroy the zombie master, they break the zombie spell.

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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. The ability to wake from the zombie state has a basis in tales of Haitian zombis. In The Magic Island, William Seabrook claims to have heard that there were zombies working at HASCO, the Haitian American Sugar Company, an American-owned enterprise that had been operating in Haiti since 1912. Seabrook was less shocked when he learned that HASCO supposedly employed zombies than he was by a story of what happened to a group of zombies working in HASCO fields in 1918. His informant told him that a group of zombies tasted salt, which, according to most lore in Haiti, will reverse the zombie spell, and that “as the zombies tasted the salt, they knew that they were dead and made a dreadful outcry and arose and turned their faces toward the mountain.”52 The zombies tasted salt, woke up, and left their slavery to return to the grave. Here we have a story of zombies escaping their oppression. Or better yet, a story that warns potential zombie masters to be careful—one misstep, and those you control will revolt. It is a true colonial nightmare.

The Power of the Living Dead

In many early zombie films, white citizens leave the safety of the United States and end up being threatened by zombie-making cultures abroad. Although these white Americans are susceptible to the influence of these cultures, their friends generally can rescue them from zombification. The implication was that not only did zombie making come naturally to some peoples and not to others, but also that zombihood was more fitting for some bodies than others: zombies of color were never the reason why a protagonist tried to beat a zombie master and save the day. Therefore, the zombie continued to work—just as the cannibals and Vodou sorcerers that preceded it had done—to define the limits of humanity. Given how commentators had used Haiti as a means to disparage postcolonial peoples and people of color more generally, it shouldn’t come as a shock that early zombie fiction likewise presented black culture as an agent of “black” magic—as suspect, potentially infectious, and defeatable only by white American resolve. The zombie was thus a continuation of the rhetoric used to maintain an image of Haiti as backward. Stories of unrest and cannibals in Haiti made it seem as if the nation were already full of zombielike peo-

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ple in need of a master to guide them, and the United States offered itself for this role. At the same time, US foreign policy attempted to contain these zombielike peoples, lest their influence spread. When the United States decided to give up its mastery, the idea of an overt threat (cannibalism) was traded in for a fantasy marking Haiti as a nation of eternal slaves. The zombies that writers and, later, filmmakers imported to American audiences as the occupation ended may not have been cannibals, but they sprang from a supposedly cannibalistic culture.53 In some ways, the earlier stories of cannibalism made it easy to believe that Haitians could create zombis, since early zombie films took up where sensationalist news stories of the nineteenth century left off. Previously, commentators tied the Haitian people to human sacrifice and witchcraft; now, they tied them to raising the dead. The logic that painted Haiti as the prime example of former slave excess gone wild could readily accept that the living dead inhabited Haiti: humans without humanity were a logical outcropping of the discourses surrounding the nation. In the nineteenth century, Haiti had to be demonized in order to create a situation where the civilizing forces of the white world could save it. Early zombie films only slightly reimagined this view. In early slave-style zombie films, filmmakers highlighted the pernicious influence of voodoo by depicting zombie-making cultures that threatened young white Americans; yet these films also showed that black bodies were acutely vulnerable to zombification, since their zombification, unlike that of their white counterparts, was often permanent and anonymous. The white world was no longer interested in saving Haitians but in making sure their influence—and especially their voodoo—didn’t spread. The earlier discourses about Haiti and Vodou hinged on imagining what would happen if Haiti’s influence expanded beyond the island, and stories about Haiti and Vodou implicitly warned against the barbarity of black bodies, the vulnerability of American blacks to Vodou’s influence, and Vodou itself. This warning was played out again and again in early zombie films. The beginning of this chapter describes the opening of the 1935 film Ouanga, which pitted the light, everyday lives of the natives of “Paradise Island” against the darkness just under their surface. Creating this kind of binary—light against dark, black against white— was nothing new. Stories of Haiti and Vodou had been helping produce these kinds of dichotomies for well over a century by the time Ouanga was first shown. Early zombie fiction continued the tradition,

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imagining zombie making as one more instance in a long line of practices—cannibalism, blood sacrifice, witchcraft—that marked off the world into black and white. In slave-style films, then, zombiism became loaded with racial significance. Zombification had the power to make one over as black, but for some, this metamorphosis was only a temporary corruption. For others—the nameless black zombies existing in the background—it proved that some bodies were a better fit for slavery than others. Yet at the heart of this binary and its racist connotations was a very real fear. Haitians needed to be painted as barbarians, and zombie masters needed to be contained, because they held some form of real power. The power of blackness and the revolutionary power of Vodou thus haunted early zombie fiction, just as they had haunted the white world since 1804.

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2 | Racialized and Raceless Race after Death and Zombie Revolution

O

n the animated television comedy series Ugly Americans (Comedy Central, 2010–2012), the zombie Randall Skeffington explains “zombie history” to a cohort of zombies at the New Paltz Zombieology Center, a pro-zombie cult he has recently joined in an attempt to embrace his forgotten zombie roots. He tells the others: “Unlike oxen, zombies never sleep, so the greedy skin-wearers put our brothers and sisters to work plowing 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.”1 Very rarely are the zombie’s roots in slavery and exploitation explicitly foregrounded, but here Randall does just that in his call for zombies to embrace their oppositional identity and stand up for themselves. While Randall’s call largely falls on deaf ears, zombies throughout history have stood up against their masters and revolted against exploitation. Haitian zombis can wake up, and as the last chapter showed, most white slave-style American zombies escape their zombie slavery. Yet it isn’t just in slave-style texts that zombies can experience rebellion; radical change is often at the heart of cannibal-style zombie texts, too. They are, after all, usually about postapocalyptic worlds, which means that the futures envisioned in most cannibal-style zombie texts are those where present-day institutions have fallen in the face of a zombie virus; to many, this is “one of the most salient threats in zombie narratives.”2 Implicit in this assumption is the belief that most people would want to keep current governments, religions, and cultures intact—that a zombie apocalypse would be a catastrophe. In this formulation, moving beyond the racist structures tied to those institu-

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50 | Not Your Average Zombie

tions would necessarily take a backseat to the need to try to revive what was lost in the apocalypse. This impulse may be why there is typically a very persistent drive on the part of living characters in these films to try to preserve pre-apocalyptic institutions, even when it makes no sense to do so. Mark Fisher argues in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? that we have reached a point where it is impossible to imagine an outside to capitalism. While we might be able to imagine apocalyptic scenarios, even our imagined apocalypses never seem able to move us into a postcapitalist world. As Frederic Jameson reminds us, “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.”3 In this understanding, zombie apocalypses are never going to offer us representations of true apocalyptic change—the zombies may seem to be ushering in something different, but capitalism and other pre-apocalyptic ways of being aren’t really going anywhere. But what if we stepped back and took these apocalypses as attempts to envision the death of the current capitalist world order—and its attendant forms of white patriarchy? To do this, I would suggest a change in perspective. If an apocalypse could fast-forward radical change and provide a fresh start happening instantly, without the years of collective social work that would be necessary to create it in real life, then many cannibal-style zombie films may be offering up visions of life outside contemporary ways of being. While Fisher and Jameson are focused on capitalism, my focus shifts to race, and I argue that we must look to the zombies rather than the living to see how this would be played out. The living are tied to pre-apocalyptic institutions and ways of being. Zombies, on the other hand, seem to offer a radically different way of existing, one that might be able to sustain a new world order. This chapter explores the undead revolt at the heart of George A. Romero’s 2005 film Land of the Dead in order to examine how zombies can bring change. In addition, it argues that the living often serve to limit the zombies’ potential to enact a paradigmatic shift in ways of being. In particular, I note that even with fundamental transformations in the zombie’s character with the move from slave-style to cannibalstyle zombies, the zombie remains raced and that the binary pitting black against white in slave-style films continues—albeit in new forms—in cannibal-style films.4 This continued racialization is most often tied to living survivors’ devotion to pre-apocalyptic ways of be-

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ing. Thus, these films offer a glimpse of something outside capitalism and racialized thinking in the form of the zombies, but such a revolutionary promise remains only a promise, because the living typically insist on mucking it up.5 As long as the living and the dead must coexist in postapocalyptic zombie worlds, zombies remain both racialized and raceless, and the changes that zombies might be able to bring about—the new kind of world they might be able to create—remains unfinished.

Whiteness and Death, Whiteness as Death

The transition from slave-style zombies to cannibal zombies started with George A. Romero’s 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, in which the undead come back to life, infected with a virus that makes them hungry for the flesh of the living. Night of the Living Dead reimagined the undead as cannibalistic adversaries ushering in postapocalyptic futures in which they constantly hunt the living. By the late 1970s, cannibal zombies were cropping up everywhere. Even today, this remains the most popular form of zombie. In the previous chapter, I argued that slave-style zombie films set up a binary between zombie-making and zombie-fighting cultures that had a racial basis, since these films often traded on a fantasy form of slavery—one that white Americans could try on, but that their friends could rescue them from. My argument about slave-style films centered on the ideas that zombie making carried blackness with it and that zombies thus were made over as black. In the last chapter of his book White, Richard Dyer discusses Romero’s “Dead” trilogy of films, and he sees its cannibal-style zombies as white, not only in a cosmetic sense (the zombies are pale corpses) but also in a symbolic sense in which whiteness becomes lifeless next to the far livelier living people of color. Dyer believes that Romero’s films show how white culture subsumes all others, effectively destroying or disavowing them: whiteness is the true zombie virus of these films.6 In many films of the cannibal style, zombies are the bringers of death. They can thus stand as the terrifying whiteness Dyer describes, since they remake the living over in the same zombified image. If whiteness is the center against which all else is compared and toward which everything else is encouraged to gravitate, then this observation makes sense. The zombie virus acts much as whiteness does in these

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instances: as that which everything is compared to and gravitating toward (even if the living try to keep it at bay). If we consider Dyer’s discussion of how the power of whiteness derives from its seeming invisibility (since we notice or mark other “colors” and not whiteness) and its simultaneous ability to act as center, signalizing anything not white as removed from the ideal, these films also act as tales of the center’s desire to either conscript or erase all difference. Although Romero’s films are deliberately obtuse about the causes of zombiism, many other contemporary cannibal-style zombie texts envision zombiism as locatable back to a source.7 Often a government or a large corporation creates the zombie virus, and corporate greed, governmental mismanagement, or technological sloppiness unwittingly releases it on an unsuspecting populace. In other words, in these films the system ushers in its own undoing: the corrosion that eats away at the center is, in fact, a product of that center. Pre-apocalyptic systems of domination need protecting from zombies even though they produced the zombies in the first place. As Elizabeth McAlister notes, “One clear message of most post-Romero zombie films is that the zombies are a logical result of the racism, corruption, greed, violence, and other flaws that already characterize Americans.”8 If we see the zombies as representatives of whiteness, as Dyer proposes, these films position whiteness (in the form of the zombie virus) as a force that tries to make over everything in its own image and, failing that, kills anything outside itself. This way of marking whiteness sets the racial logic of cannibal-style films apart from that of slave-style films.9 I maintain, though, that just as there is an inherent blackness to slave-style zombies, there is a way to see cannibal-style zombies as just as racialized as their slave-style counterparts. In cannibal-style texts, cultural connections to blackness that were part and parcel of slavestyle zombie films, through explicit or implicit links to Haiti or “black” magic, are gone. Cannibal-style texts still rely on the binary of the living versus the undead, though, and the majority of the living—even in the more progressive Romero films—are almost always white. Furthermore, while some slave-style zombies are physically marked as zombies, most of them look just like the living.10 Cannibal zombies, on the other hand, are almost always physically different from the living. In Night of the Living Dead, this physical marking is not pronounced, but by the time Romero made Dawn of the Dead in 1978 and Day of the Dead in 1985, clearly decomposing cannibal zombies were the norm, and the physical marking of zombies has become an easy way to sepa-

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rate the living from the dead—distinguishing one as not the other. This signification may not carry with it the same racial baggage that voodoo ceremonies and “native” costuming did for slave-style zombies, but a separation into “us” and “them” based on physical traits remains. In cannibal-style texts, zombiism is the result of an infection, and because infection carries connotations of uncleanliness, possibly aberrant sexualities, or deviations from the healthy norm, making zombiness the result of an infection necessarily positions the zombie outside whiteness. While we may see theories of racial hygiene, racial degeneration, racial hierarchies, and eugenics as vestiges of late-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century thinking—although they are certainly not extinct—the legacies of these modes of thought have left their mark. Whether it is contamination via infection or “contamination” of the gene pool, the racist connotations of contamination linger.11 And that metaphor is at the heart of cannibal-style texts: to become a zombie is to let a virus corrupt you, to lose your status as pure or normal or living. I would thus argue that living in cannibal-style films is a white state: if whiteness is the norm against which all else is judged, then in these films being a living human occupies that same role. Therefore, to deviate from the norm in a zombie film is to deviate from living whiteness. Thus, even if one is a white zombie, one has failed in one’s whiteness by becoming infected. As discussed in the next chapter, whiteness acquires its power, in part, from its ability to change and transgress without fundamentally losing its position as the center against which all else is defined. But many slave-style zombie films portray whiteness—especially the whiteness of women—as something that needs policing. White characters are in constant danger of becoming zombified. Slave-style zombification may not carry the same sense of infection that a zombie virus in a cannibal-style film carries, but it implies something similar: zombiemaking cultures, which are most often foreign or populated by people of color, can taint characters if they aren’t careful. Many slave-style fi lms thus expose whiteness as an impossible standard that few if any characters are consistently able to maintain. Rather, they are in constant danger of being compromised by zombie-making cultures. The same holds true for cannibal-style films. The truth of the matter is that most people do not survive a zombie apocalypse. Those who do, then, are superior to those who do not—they are the characters able to avoid zombie infection and retain their claims to normality as living humans. Some cannibal-style films and video games resort to

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slave-style logic to imagine zombiism as reversible; if one is industrious enough to find the cure, one can beat the zombie virus. Although the zombie, subdued by either magic or infection, works to undermine the notion of individual self-determination, it can also be employed to reinscribe the notion that individual industriousness, and not structural change, keeps one from remaining a zombie. As a status that someone can overcome (through access to wealth or, more commonly, by hard work to avoid zombies or obtain a cure), zombihood begins to resemble the neoconservative idea of race. The claim that there are no structural barriers to nonwhite progress in the United States, and that institutional racism is a thing of the past,12 leads to the assumption that nonwhite peoples remain in bad conditions because of a failure of will, and not because endemic structures keep them there. If zombihood is racialized (by virtue of its roots in Haiti and “black” magic or by virtue of its connections with infection and physical differentiation), then this parallel becomes clearer: we can imagine zombihood as something to be avoided or overcome.13 In other words, if you are zombified, you only have yourself to blame. The reasoning may not be the same straightforward racial logic seen in slave-style films, but it is a logic based on creating, maintaining, and policing binaries born of perceived physical difference and the fear of “contamination” by those seen as less human. Romero’s visions of the living in postapocalyptic futures have room for more than one race, but filmmakers who followed his zombie template did not automatically follow his racial one. In fact, the majority of zombie films made in the United States after Night of the Living Dead most often feature white protagonists. It was not until the new millennium that many filmmakers followed Romero’s example and began showcasing racially diverse living survivors in zombie films. And still, outside Romero’s films, a much less racially diverse view of living humans is presented, which means that there is very little outside to whiteness existing anywhere in zombie media to begin with. Some zombies of color roam the postapocalyptic worlds of contemporary zombie films, but most zombies tend to be white. Thus, if the living are white, and if we imagine the undead as representing whiteness (via Dyer), then these films exterminate not-whiteness, and race matters precisely in its structured absence. If whiteness is the true zombie virus, then we have to ignore the discourses of physical differentiation and the contamination of zombie infections. If we instead see cannibal zombies as associated with

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the contamination of whiteness, then we revert to the binaries that governed the earliest zombie texts, in which whiteness, under assault from blackness, needed white American males to rescue it. There is almost a racial catch-22 at play, then, in cannibal-style zombie films, since we can’t escape from the same sort of racial binaries that slave-style films participated in.

Night of the Living Dead

Even as zombies underwent a transformation into something far removed from their Vodou roots and stopped being slaves, the racialization of zombie culture did not necessarily disappear. Rather, there were new depictions of race for the living. For instance, Night of the Living Dead not only was radical in its departure from slave-zombie narratives, but also provided a black protagonist, Ben.14 In slave-style fi lms of the 1930s through the 1960s, black characters were almost always sidekicks, servants, or comic relief; they never saved the day. Yet in Night of the Living Dead, Ben is the hero. He represents the very best of what the living have to offer. Kyle William Bishop reads Ben as a link with the overtly racialized tensions of earlier slave-style films: “Ben’s determination to take charge of the situation early on and to bark orders with an almost arrogant impunity at the film’s white characters recalls the threat of the Other as depicted in the voodoo-zombie films. When he bosses around the glassyeyed and inert Barbara, even daring to slap her across the face, the parallels between Ben and the menacing black voodoo priests of White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie become abundantly clear.”15 Ben is certainly no wallflower in the film, and we can read this as threatening, but his actions are very different from those of black characters in earlier, slave-style zombie films. For instance, in both the films Bishop mentions, knowledge of Vodou may rest in black hands, but the zombie masters are decidedly white. In fact, in White Zombie, a black voodoo priest helps the two white men attempting to thwart the white zombie master Murder Legendre. In I Walked with a Zombie, while a black voodoo priest is in charge of the black zombie Carrefour, the film suggests that Mrs. Rand (a white woman) is the one who turned her daughter-in-law into a zombie. The threat posed by white zombie masters counterbalances (even negates) the menace from these black men— if there really is one. This hierarchy of dangerousness makes sense: in

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Fig. 2.1. Ben’s dead body awaiting removal (Night of the Living Dead, 1968)

slave-style films, black characters were usually secondary and worked only in service to their white masters. Therefore, as argued in the previous chapter, the threat in slave-style films is rarely from black bodies themselves but from black culture as it manifests through zombie production. So Ben is not like the voodoo priests of slave-style films, nor does he pose a physical risk to people like Barbra; Ben is threatening because he is under no one’s control but his own. Yet, Romero does not allow Ben to lead his band of survivors to safety and save the day. Resistance from one member of the group, coupled with stupid mistakes by others, leaves everyone but Ben dead during their first night together. Although Ben survives, he does not have a happy ending. At the end of the film, a zombie-hunting posse kills Ben, mistaking him for one of the undead. The film ends with images of the members of the posse using hooks to drag Ben’s body onto a pile of others to be burned (figs. 2.1 and 2.2). Robin Wood maintains that the posse functions “to restore the social order” and that the film ends by having contained the threat that both Ben—as a capable black leader—and the zombies represent.16 Under the system the posse is trying to protect, Ben is never a full member of the social status quo. An excerpt from the working script of Night of the Living Dead is telling in this regard: at the end of the film, after shooting Ben, the posse enters

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Fig. 2.2. The posse, ready to remove Ben’s body to a bonfire (Night of the

Living Dead, 1968)

the farmhouse: “The men look down at him, but step past him toward the cellar. They do not know he was a man.”17 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. Ben showed himself to be a competent survivor at the farmhouse, but the posse still couldn’t distinguish him from one of the undead. Romero thus makes a link between zombies and black bodies. The posse shuts down Ben, and the end of the film implies that the posse has the upper hand against the zombies, too. In both instances, the posse has the power to define the limits of life: who can live and who should die. The photos at the end of the film further equate Ben with the zombies and nod to the real-world implications of that identification through images that rather explicitly recall lynching photographs. Even though Night of the Living Dead divorces zombies from their Haitian roots, Romero still equates race with the zombie state: those who represent the status quo of the white male world do not allow either black men or zombies to survive. Night of the Living Dead, then, is a transitional moment: the “blackness” or, perhaps more aptly, the racialization of zombies is more ambiguous than in its slave-style predecessors, yet racialization still occurs. As death in the form of the vi-

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ral threat to living white bodies, this racialized zombiness is a corrupting force. But there is also Ben, whose blackness Romero positions as more adept at survival than whiteness. This is also the case in the other two films of Romero’s “Dead” trilogy, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead. In both, a man of color is one of the living to survive through the film’s closing credits, and these men are separate from the white society of the pre-zombie apocalypse. Robin Wood claims that the character Peter in Dawn of the Dead is noteworthy in this regard: “His color [is] used . . . to indicate his separation from the norms of white-dominated society and his partial exemption from its constraints.”18 Just like Ben, Peter exists as a visible indicator of an outside to white civilization. There is also something compelling about the end of Dawn of the Dead. Peter and Fran, a pregnant white woman, escape. Nothing indicates that they share a romantic relationship, and the baby she carries is decidedly white, but the promise of a postwhite civilization is made plausible. While that possibility 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 the white patriarchal society that produced zombies in the first place. If zombies (as products of white patriarchal society) and survivors who eventually become zombified are a part of the white patriarchy, then white women and black men exist in a nowhere land in these films. They become true liminal beings: they don’t fit in with living society or the living dead. Thus, even in cannibal-style films featuring protagonists of color and positioning white civilization as corrupt and undesirable (in the form of the posse in Night of the Living Dead, for instance), a racial binary remains.

The Utopian Thrust of Postapocalyptic Zombie Worlds

Cannibal-style zombie films are generally postapocalyptic in nature: a zombie virus has taken hold, and a group of the living tries to survive in a world overrun with zombies. On the surface, these worlds seem to be dystopian, but there can be a utopian thrust in imagining an environment radically different from our own. Steven Shaviro argues that because we have reached a point where there is no perceptible alternative to capitalism, an apocalypse in film could become a means of escape: “And so our only chance for release from the continuing soft

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disaster of our lives is for this disaster to become truly universal. If the world ends, then at least we will be freed from the rapacity of financial institutions, and from our ever-increasing burdens of debt.”19 Cinematic apocalypses, in this view, have the potential to be utopian in that they open up the possibility of fresh starts and clean slates. In many ways, this yearning for release from capitalism goes hand in hand with a desire for the reworking of the racial, gender, and sexual dynamics that capitalist systems have supported—a desire for something other than white patriarchal heteronormativity. These apocalypses, however, are based on the notion that people need not work toward the real-world change necessary to usher in a utopian fresh start, but can instead wait for it to happen instantaneously, no work necessary. Furthermore, the utopian fresh start is always defined by present-day social systems, envisioned as a reaction to them, a replacement of them, or a means of escape from them. A sudden apocalypse becomes a means of not having to deal with the messy details of figuring out how to reach a social reality wholly different from the one that exists today. Moreover, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter, survivors often never move beyond presentday ways of being; films simply show them operating under different circumstances. In many cannibal-style zombie films, the underlying utopian promise that an apocalypse could produce something new not only collapses, but is also seen to be impossible without the sustained kind of political work that these films can’t or won’t envision. Without that work, the living revert to pre-apocalyptic social structures and ways of being. Furthermore, when this apocalyptic change manifests in cannibalstyle zombie films, we are often meant to read the group ushering in the change (the zombies) not as bringers of a utopian upheaval but as monstrous bringers of destruction. In other words, many cannibal-style zombie films offer the promise of annihilating present-day institutions and ways of being, but filmmakers almost always present these apocalypses as horrific, in many ways treating present-day social structures as preferable to whatever a zombie apocalypse might bring. The apocalyptic fantasy that Shaviro points to is that rather than people building something new out of the current system bit by bit over time, an apocalypse will fast-forward the process—the old system will still produce the new, but almost instantaneously. Yet in most contemporary zombie films, we begin after the apocalypse has taken place, only to find that not much has really changed. The living tend to

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get stuck in familiar patterns, and the dead are adversaries. Gregory A. Waller notes that in Dawn of the Dead in particular, when the four protagonists start living in a mall while the zombies shamble about outside, the living “choose the type of roles that the mall caters to and helps to create and perpetuate, as if they are seeking in this way to reestablish normality.”20 The living are far too rooted in the past to enact change, so the rebirth promised by the end of the world takes a bit longer to accomplish than we might have thought. These films, then, may enact fears of radical change rather than offering hopeful visions of it. While we can see a utopian impulse in imaginings of the end of the world, the apocalyptic destruction of present-day society may also be a fantasy of returning to a black-and-white, traditional conception of the world. When survival is everything—as one might assume it would be after a zombie apocalypse—then gray areas disappear. It is kill or be killed, eat or starve, become a zombie or remain human. The world becomes much easier to discern. The apocalypse, then, isn’t so much forward thinking as it is nostalgic for a simpler world full of ready answers. But even if this yearning is the underlying fantasy of the apocalyptic, cannibal-style films often complicate that nostalgia by showing worlds where gray areas reemerge in the form of monstrous humans and extra-ordinary zombies. Contemporary zombie films don’t have to envision the complete collapse of the old system. The apocalypse can destroy the world while saving a small group of survivors, and this scenario can, as Elizabeth McAlister observes, “gesture .  .  . towards a new beginning.”21 This gesturing suggests that we can conceive of the kinds of collective political strategies necessary to enact change; their success simply requires the annihilation of most of the living. Furthermore, in those films that envision this sort of new beginning, in which a small group of survivors might be able to usher in a new way of being, free from the systemic barriers of the past, there is often some question whether this can really happen. Night of the Living Dead shuts down the possibility when Ben is killed; Dawn of the Dead leaves us wondering as Peter and Fran fly off into an uncertain future; and the ending of Day of the Dead, which leaves a multiracial group seemingly safe on an isolated beach, is sometimes read as a dying person’s fantasy rather than reality. Even in films outside Romero’s “Dead” trilogy, postapocalyptic success is often qualified. The Umbrella Corporation keeps returning with new zombies for Alice to battle in the Resident Evil films (2002– 2017), and Cherry Darling leads a group of survivors to the Mexican

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shoreline in Planet Terror (Rodriguez, 2007), but they still have to battle zombies. Groups of the multiracial living may survive to the end credits of these films, but their continued futures are anything but secure. Focusing on the identities of the living who survive until the end, however, assumes that zombies are the agents of destruction and that the mantle of building something new would fall entirely to living humans. Even if a zombie apocalypse could bring about change, and even if it were welcome, the undead don’t have a place in the new world order. Conventional wisdom tells us they are the opposing force that the living must overcome. Revolutionary potential is supposed to reside in the living. Dyer’s premise, after all, arises out of the assumption that the zombie state is one no person would ever willingly want to inhabit, that its deadness, decomposition, and craving for human flesh renders it completely abject. But what if this weren’t the case? What if we imagined zombies as beings able to create a new beginning? These questions require a shift in how we conceptualize zombies, and this shift is where the gap between the ordinary zombie and the extra-ordinary one makes itself felt.

They’re Trying to Be Us

If, at their most basic, our theories of the posthuman focus on how we can reconceive humanness and human being, then the zombie would seem to be an ideal candidate for just such reconceptions. In Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human, Sarah Juliet Lauro and Deborah Christie suggest this possibility: “The zombie may therefore be an apt icon for the post-human in its frustrating antipathy: Just as the post-human will always assert what the human is by that which it supposes itself to be beyond, the zombie both is, and is not, dead and alive.”22 Lauro and Karen Embry’s “Zombie Manifesto,” building off Donna Harraway’s seminal “Cyborg Manifesto,” notes that zombiness, as a representation of a state that inhabits seemingly opposed dialectics—being both “living and dead, subject and object, slave and slave rebellion”—becomes a means of troubling the limiting confines of identity as it is currently performed, inscribed, and experienced.23 If we approach posthumanity as a questioning of the boundaries of what it means to be human and likewise see contemporary definitions of humanness becoming more fluid and less tied to notions of

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a singular identity, then the zombie’s in-between-ness, its ability to occupy both/and, make it an ideal tool for interrogating what it means to be human. While not necessarily linking the zombie to the posthuman, Shaka McGlotten sees zombihood as a potential way to describe real-world ways of living outside the normative: “Zombie personhood, rather than represent the fearful antithesis of human self-awareness, emerges instead as a model for ontologies neither self-possessed nor self-coherent, thereby pressing against the constraints of what we imagine to be an enlivened life.”24 Zombidom thus becomes a sort of a solitary or lonely sociality that becomes a way of questioning what are supposed to be “normal” ways of being. Taking into consideration works that use the zombie state as a jumping-off point for considering the limits and assumptions of humanness and ways of being, I suggest that we can see zombies as losing their race when they become zombified. This is not to say that racial markers disappear when one becomes a zombie. Rather, race is no longer an identifying marker that matters to members of the zombie community. This loss of race makes sense if we conceptualize cannibal zombies as ordinary: as creatures that do not think or feel (at least in the ways the living do) but act only according to the drive to eat, it is probably much more important to zombies to be able to differentiate the living (potential food) from the undead. While one might posit that moving beyond race requires cognition and political consciousness, I disagree—at least regarding zombies. Cognition and political consciousness are vital for contemporary humans to move beyond identity, but zombies are not humans, at least not fully, and therefore, we cannot assume that they reason in the same ways (if they reason at all). Moreover, we cannot assume that zombies are incapable of complex thought—since most zombie texts do not provide us with the zombies’ point of view, it is impossible to know for sure.25 Zombies could have their own version of cognition and political consciousness, yet we, as humans, could be incapable of understanding it. My point is that one way to read zombies is to see them as beings moving beyond—in one way or another—identity markers such as race. But that move doesn’t necessarily mean that they are free from race. For the moment, though, assume that race doesn’t seem to matter to zombies. And because other identity markers such as class, gender, and nationality likewise seem to be beyond a zombie’s capacity to

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register or to care about, some see cannibal zombies’ ability to come together and act collectively as a manifestation of a new kind of political strategy that moves beyond bonds forged around individual identity. Phillip Mahoney states: “The zombie .  .  . challenges us to imagine collective life, not through the humanistic and psychological terms of sympathy and identification, but through the inhuman terms of .  .  . ‘contagious formation.’”26 Cannibal zombies come together based on no category of belonging other than zombiness—other markers of identity cease to matter.27 Tyson E. Lewis dubs this “swarm politics.”28 Mahoney’s “contagious formation” and Lewis’s “swarm politics” use zombies to imagine ways of coming together that transcend identity politics. I am not suggesting that Mahoney or Lewis wants us to become zombies, but rather that in zombie formations, they see something promising that real-world people might aspire to. In eschewing markers of identity beyond zombiness, zombie formation becomes difficult to locate or pin down. Zombies have seemingly moved beyond such things as race, and without a clear conception of what a group is or what it wants, it is difficult, even impossible, to counter it. For Giorgio Agamben, this notion of a group without reference back to a set of fi xed identities or principles is the ideal political form, because the most frightening opponent for the state is a coalescence that cannot be answered. Since the state cannot fi x or locate this grouping according to specific identities (and thus goals), there would be no way to attack them.29 According to this logic, if zombies do not coalesce around the kinds of identity markers most familiar to the living—race, class, gender, and so forth—then they become that much harder to combat. In this understanding, when the living are finally able to give the undead an identity, they are able to fi x them with a purpose, and then they can assuage the potential political power of the undead. The cannibal zombie thus becomes an idealized way of being on an individual level (as a sort of heterogeneous posthuman) and also at the social level, as part of the swarm—different from other zombies but still acting in concert with them. Yet the idea of zombies as posthuman or as a new political collective is contingent on a view of zombies in the abstract as both ordinary and as part of a swarm or horde. The more individuated that zombies become, the less they fit into these visions of zombie promise. And herein lies the heart of the problem: while there is nothing to preclude extra-ordinary zombies from being posthuman or part of some collective formation, these conceptions work

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better for ordinary zombies than they do for extra-ordinary zombies. The latter are humanized zombies; they are zombies, but they are zombies that are being pulled away from the abstraction that Lauro, Mahoney, and the others discuss. As I argue elsewhere, cannibal-style films such as My Boyfriend’s Back, Fido (Currie, 2006), and Warm Bodies (Levine, 2013) present extra-ordinary cannibal-style zombies as love interests for living women and use a trope I label the zombie-asproxy to provide a commentary on interracial relationships by having the male zombie lovers stand in for bodies of color.30 The zombie-asproxy trope works in part by humanizing the zombies—making them less physically differentiated than other zombies and giving them human emotions and goals. Thus, while zombies might provide an interesting entry into thinking about identity and ways of being, such an exercise works only as long as zombies are conceived of abstractly. If we start looking at zombies as they are typically represented in zombie texts, we find that zombies are not so consistently ordinary—the abstraction cannot hold—nor do zombies exist in a vacuum. The living are always lurking, trying to define and understand the undead. The first scene of George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead shows us an attempt at this kind of understanding. The scene focuses on zombies: we see a group of them with brass instruments trying to remember how to play; others wander aimlessly in a churchyard. Then, as two zombies hit the signal mechanism at a gas station, the zombified attendant stumbles out. Acting on a mechanical reaction learned in life, he is ready to pump some gas. This is Big Daddy, a tall black zombie, and as he lumbers to the pumps, two living spies watch him and marvel at his actions. One remarks, “They’re trying to be us.” To which the other responds, “They used to be us, learning how to be us again.”31 The first man scoffs at this notion, “It’s like they’re pretending to be alive.” The second man answers, “Isn’t that what we’re doing, pretending to be alive?” Romero thus makes a link between zombies and the living: our work, among other things, turns us into mindless beings trained to reply to stimuli with mechanical responses. We are the real zombies. This view is not only a fairly common reading of the film, but of most contemporary zombie media as well. What is more compelling is that in this exchange, the living are trying to fi x the zombies with some sort of identity in order to make sense of them (“They’re trying to be us”). And we see this sort of attempt across cannibal-style films: in the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, for instance, the residents of the mall play a game with the gun

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store owner across the street, writing the names of celebrities on a wipe board for the man to then spot among the zombie horde and shoot in the head. The zombies quickly become identified according to their resemblances to Jay Leno, Burt Reynolds, and Rosie O’Donnell. They are made intelligible. In the exchange at the beginning of Land of the Dead, we see the power that the living still have to define the limits of life. Just as the posse in Night of the Living Dead chose who lived and who died, here, the living are still making that call. In this sense, then, it doesn’t matter whether the zombies exist in some posthuman state or are part of a contagious formation. It does matter whether they are extra-ordinary or not—since that seems to be a sure way to get the living to recognize that “they are us.” And while this recognition might save the zombies, it also circumscribes the zombies’ abilities to move past such identifiers as race, gender, or class.32 In other words, race may not matter to the zombies, but it still very much matters to the living, who are trying to make sense of the zombies in any way they can. The zombies may have moved beyond socially constructed identities, but they are still being socially constructed.

A Postcolonial Zombie Revolt

Land of the Dead opens with a living human who sympathizes with the zombies and has the potential to see their right to existence. His sympathy may be based on the fact that the zombies are extraordinary. They act human—trying to pump gas or play instruments— which speaks to the notion that one’s rights to existence are tied to how human one can become. In many films, this humanization happens in one of two ways: the zombie is a person that the living people knew, such as a friend or a family member, or the zombie exhibits human qualities: for example, it tries to answer the phone or play the trombone, anything that marks it as other than mindless. Most of the zombies of Land of the Dead demonstrate these kinds of human qualities. In the film, the living have created fortresses in big cities. The fresh start made possible by the apocalypse did not happen, and they have rebuilt the past. Safe in these cities, the living send raiding parties out into small-town America—the land of the dead, as it were—for supplies. Focusing on the city of Fiddler’s Green, Romero presents a society where the rich live as if the zombie apocalypse never happened and

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Fig. 2.3. Big Daddy leading the zombies into Fiddler’s Green (Land of the Dead

© Universal, 2005)

the poor, who are a much more racially diverse lot, scramble to make ends meet.33 The raiding parties are made up of some of these poor. Not only is a clear colonial relationship established between Fiddler’s Green and the zombie countryside it exploits for supplies, but the film also makes a similar link between those used in these dangerous missions (the racially diverse poor) and those who exploit them (the much less racially diverse wealthy). The zombies seem content to stay in their own areas, but the living don’t, and early in the film, a raiding party goes into the zombie countryside. Since the zombies are potentially dangerous, the raiders use fireworks to distract them. As the fireworks go off, the zombies stare at them, rapt with attention, giving the raiding party a chance to come in and catch the zombies off guard. Big Daddy, however, who is onto the ruse, sees the fireworks for what they are. He tries to get his fellow zombies to protect themselves from the approaching raiders, but to no avail. As the raiding party kills zombies, Big Daddy becomes angry. He tries to force other zombies out of the way of a hail of bullets, and when he fails to protect a fellow zombie, resulting in it losing its body, he commits a mercy killing, destroying its head. As the raiders leave town, Big Daddy finds a gun and starts marching toward the city. The other zombies follow his lead. Over the course of the film, Big Daddy gains more zombies as he slowly heads toward the city fortress. Eventually, the zombies penetrate the stronghold of Fiddler’s Green and lay waste to this bastion of the pre-zombie world (fig. 2.3). It should come as no surprise that Big Daddy is quite humanized in Land of the Dead. He displays emotions, communicates with other zombies, and strategizes against the living, and he is far less gruesome

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in his appearance than many other cannibal-style zombies. Thus, Big Daddy may not have a conception of himself as raced or gendered or even different from ordinary zombies, but his “humanity” remains all the same, and it is not lost on the living. This recognition is vital: Big Daddy’s status as more human than zombie—largely defined by the living—is what most likely saves him at the end of the film when a group of living raiders decides to let him be. Beyond Big Daddy’s humanity, though, there is the fact that he is black. Often in cannibal-style films, the racial identity of the zombies doesn’t seem to matter. The living don’t comment upon it, and the zombies don’t seem to care. But Romero foregrounds Big Daddy’s racial identity, so being postliving does not mean that Big Daddy has entered a postracial state. Rather, this film envisions a life after death where race does not disappear, at least not completely, because it still matters to the living. None of the living characters remark on Big Daddy’s race, nor are the racial divisions within Fiddler’s Green explicitly mentioned, but the living are largely separated along racial lines. The upper classes, who live lives of luxury, are mostly white, and those who have to forage for food or risk their lives to raid for supplies are a wide mixture of races. Even among the characters who speak and have names in the film (versus the unnamed extras populating the background), nearly all—rich or poor—are white,34 so yes, race still matters. Thus, Big Daddy’s race is hard to ignore. This may be because he follows in the steps of Romero characters like Ben and Peter—which speaks not only to a racial pattern in Romero’s films but also to a patriarchal streak. But the zombies that Big Daddy leads are not uniformly male nor, more importantly for our discussion, of one race. The undead represent a variety of races and ethnicities, and unlike Ben or Peter, Big Daddy is willing to become a part of a larger community; the fact that it is an undead community brings us full circle. If Ben’s death in Night of the Living Dead served to draw a link between black (male) bodies and zombies, this film underlines the same association by having the black male hero be a zombie and by having his community, the first to which one of Romero’s black male heroes truly belongs, be a community of the undead. Big Daddy leads an undead revolt against the living that the film positions as both justified and righteous. The corrupt, exploitative system that Fiddler’s Green tries to maintain hurts both the living and the undead. Therefore, Big Daddy’s undead revolt promises what the zombie apocalypse failed to deliver: some sort of true social change. In a perfect world, the zombie apocalypse should have erased racial,

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gendered, and class distinctions, among other things, but they are still rampant in Fiddler’s Green. Big Daddy does not necessarily aim his revolt at upending racism or classism; rather, the film implies that it is a reaction to the city’s exploitation of the zombie countryside and, in particular, the killing of zombies that prompts him. As an unintended side effect, the revolt destroys the physical space of Fiddler’s Green while also killing the city’s most privileged residents. Big Daddy’s zombie revolt attempts to eradicate the colonial relationship between Fiddler’s Green and the surrounding zombie countryside and fortuitously manages to destroy the people and spaces most responsible for that exploitation. One way to eradicate classism and racism is to get rid of the rich white people, and Big Daddy’s revolt does just that. Thinking about the colonial relationship that exists between the living and the dead sheds light on the “They’re trying to be us” speech in another way: if the objective of the colonizer is to assimilate or eradicate the colonized, then this equating of zombies and living humans could be a nod toward a possible colonial assimilation of the zombies. In destroying the physical space of Fiddler’s Green, the zombies shut down their potential absorption into the system exploiting them. They have also removed part of the mechanism that supported their exploitation, making it that much harder for Fiddler’s Green’s system of raiding to continue. If the rich—whose needs, in part, mandated that there be a system of exploitation—are gone, and so is the physical infrastructure that supported colonial raiding, then the colonial system whereby the rich could enjoy themselves in a walled city while the poor scavenged the zombie countryside for supplies and whereby the living exploited the undead is no more. Big Daddy and his zombies appear unconcerned with what will replace it; they march back to their countryside, seemingly satisfied that the destruction was enough. At the end of the film, the zombies attack Fiddler’s Green and devour many of the wealthy living. Many of the living poor are killed, too, but some survive to scatter or to rebuild a new kind of world. It may be a problematic world, and the zombies are still technically the living humans’ adversaries, but the old system is gone, and the film hints that there may be room in the future for more than just the living. At the very end of the film, when the attack is over, one of the former members of the raiding party spots Big Daddy and some of his zombies making their way back into the zombie countryside. As another survivor prepares to shoot the zombies, he says, “No. They’re just looking for a place to go, same as us.” This exchange is a bit problematic, since it can be read as a living white male deciding the fate of Big Daddy and

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the zombies, but it also points to this particular white male’s recognition that the old system has failed, at least for his group, which decides to leave the zombies alone and head to Canada. Cory James Rushton and Christopher M. Moreman read the scene thus: “The heroes flee their city, eschewing the opportunity to attack and possibly destroy the zombie horde; in doing so, they circumvent the class struggle at the heart of Romero’s films. Crucially, they do not solve that problem, the central political or social dilemmas of class conflict and human alienation.”35 Yet this interpretation assumes that the humans are the only beings capable of solving those problems. The zombies, on the other hand, have apparently put those issues aside. No clear line seems to separate rich zombie from poor zombie, or zombies of color from white zombies—although there is no way to know this for sure. Once the system of exploitation perpetrated by Fiddler’s Green is gone, they leave—without much interest in what the living are doing, so long as they leave the zombies alone. The zombies have enacted a social change for themselves by eradicating the system that was exploiting them. In the process, they destroyed a system that exploited many of the living as well. There is no circumventing of class struggle here; rather, it is a struggle beyond class (or race or gender) that the zombies enact. The future envisioned by the end of Land of the Dead has room for all kinds of bodies—both living and dead. The zombies have their space, and the humans have theirs, and there is no indication that the future of either group is guaranteed. Still, the zombies—as those who were able to act in concert for the greater good (of both the undead and the living poor and people of color)—are finally able to achieve what the cinematic apocalypse is supposed to provide: the promise of a new world order.

Nobody Living Can Ever Stop Me

In the introduction, I discussed how, despite many readings that would make it completely abject, we can see the Haitian zombi as both enslaved and powerful.36 One of the appeals of zombie making is that zombification allows those who might not otherwise have access to institutional recourse a means of gaining a spiritual or real-world advantage over their enemies. It isn’t just zombi (or zombie) masters who benefit from this reading; many fictional zombies have been able to undermine their slavery in order to act decisively when the living cannot.

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In fact, many slave-style zombie stories feature zombies that somehow manage to escape their oppression, and stories in which zombies are able to turn on those who would control them serve as warnings to potential zombie masters—one misstep, and the zombies might wake up. This potential for zombies to turn against their masters did not die with Night of the Living Dead and the films that followed it. In fact, in these films, the zombies are bodies that actively take to the streets, perhaps not consciously trying to take down systems of oppression, but doing a very good job of disrupting them nonetheless. The zombie as a rowdy (political) body is even the basis for several jokes in the Cuban film Juan de los Muertos (Juan of the Dead, Brugués, 2011). In the film, the Cuban government continually insists that the zombies attacking citizens and roaming the streets are “dissident groups” backed by the US government—the zombies are painted as political agitators trying to take the system down. In Land of the Dead, we see the zombies take on Fiddler’s Green and eradicate the entire system supporting those who would enslave them, the “zombie masters” raiding their countryside. Slave-style films are all about exploitation, but it isn’t necessarily portrayed as systemic. Rather, it is localized in the form of the zombie master, and a white American male can usually rescue one from zombie slavery. The lesson of these films is that some people are better suited to exploitation than others. There is no real need for fantasy projections of a future utopia in these films because—at least for white Americans—rescue and escape are available. Their degrading circumstances aren’t permanent. Cannibal-style texts flip this story—the overt focus on exploitation is gone, because if one is smart enough or rich enough or strong enough, one can keep oneself from falling prey to the zombie virus. Yet a film like Land of the Dead questions the logic in seeing the virus as an inherently negative thing. When a zombie bites the former raider Cholo DeMora, for instance, he elects to turn rather than have a friend shoot him in the head. He says, “I always wanted to see how the other half lives,” making both an oblique reference to his relative class position vis-à-vis the people he has been working for and a statement that suggests that, for Cholo at least, it may be apparent that the zombie way is preferable to the highly stratified life of Fiddler’s Green. This plays out when Cholo, as a zombie, is able to take down the architect of Fiddler’s Green, Paul Kaufman. Often, it isn’t the zombies that are the truly monstrous figures in zombie media; living humans tend to assume that role.37 Instead, the

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zombies lay bare the vulnerabilities of the social order, showing us that the ideal of normality is easily twisted and perverted and that it often masks the evils of exploitation, systemic discrimination, and social death. The zombies are able to show us this because, more often than not, they are foils to the living. Thus, racial identity, among other things, doesn’t immediately disappear as soon as the zombie apocalypse takes place—there are too many vestiges of the old system still around: namely, the living. This is the key to understanding why the futures imagined by Land of the Dead and other cannibal-style films are important. Land of the Dead does not provide a utopian vision of the future. It does not imagine a radically different state from the present, especially not after the initial zombie apocalypse. If anything, at that point, it reimagines the capitalist past and present: the living exploit the dead for their resources, some live lives of luxury while others barely scrape by, and one’s identity (as a raced body, as a classed body, or as a body that is either living or undead) largely determines whether one luxuriates or scrapes by. Even with the second “apocalypse” of the film—Big Daddy’s revolt—nothing is completely upended. If anything, the lesson of the film is that the utopian promise of the apocalypse doesn’t work: jumping over the sustained collective political work needed to effect true social change will give us only more of the same. Perhaps the zombies have that collective work figured out. We can’t know for sure. The film doesn’t present a new social system or end with the living humans simply rebuilding Fiddler’s Green. It isn’t the easy fi x of other apocalypses, and perhaps that is what makes it hopeful: it affirms that those quick fi xes are fantasy while it offers a vision of what substantive change might look like, even if the vision is partial and unfinished. Thus, the film ends with more than one option available, and it imagines more than one way of being. And yet the ending of the film also serves to reaffirm the binary relationship between the living and the undead, and rather than having them join forces and do the tough political work of figuring out how to make the changes stick or even having the undead eliminate the living (and with them, presumably, systems of prejudice and discrimination), there is a forking path. We aren’t left with an ending or a new beginning, but with the messy, uncertain middle of change. If we can’t truly imagine an outside to the way things currently are, then this may be as close as we can get—imagining a future of not quite utopian possibilities, both living and undead.

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3 | “You Can’t Hurt Me, You Can’t Destroy Me, You Can’t Control Me” White Women in Zombie Films

O

n a second-season episode of the television show Supernatural, “Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things,” a man named Neil raises his friend Angela Mason from the dead.1 As a living girl, Angela was a bit of a pushover, but as a zombie, Angela is strangely empowered. Unlike most zombies, she does not crave flesh, but revenge. Angela kills her cheating ex-boyfriend, tries to murder the girl he cheated with, and eventually kills Neil. Within the framework of the show, in which the brothers Sam and Dean Winchester rove the United States protecting citizens from supernatural threats, Angela is clearly a monster that needs to be destroyed. She is, after all, a zombie who kills without remorse. As Dean notes as he stabs her through the chest, pinning her in a casket, “What’s dead should stay dead.”2 Angela’s story is a common one in zombie fiction: the white woman who gains agency through her encounter with zombie-making culture. As in many slave-style texts, Supernatural finds a way to contain her threat. In many ways, it isn’t Angela’s zombiness that makes her monstrous, but her insistence on revenge—in enacting her desires, Angela becomes dangerous. To the end, though, Angela insists on her humanity. Facing off with Sam and Dean in a graveyard, Angela laments, “I didn’t ask to be brought back, but it’s still me. I’m still a person!” Angela as zombie is more assertive than the living Angela was—too assertive, in fact. She becomes the villain of the piece, and in stopping her, the Winchester brothers not only rid the town of a zombie, but also reestablish themselves, instead of Angela, as the ultimate arbiters of who should live and who should die. Whether it was Angela as overactive white woman or Angela as overactive zombie that prompted such policing is largely beside the point; either way, she needed to be stopped.

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Angela is not the only female zombie who acts out in zombie texts. Nor is she the only white woman who becomes empowered when dealing with zombie culture. Rather, she is one in a long line of white women who illustrate how race and gender intersect in zombie texts. In the previous two chapters, I claimed that zombihood carries with it an inherent racialization, but there is also a gendered dimension to zombihood. It isn’t that zombies explicitly perform gender per se, but it is hard for a zombie to escape its living gender. In slave-style texts, this carryover happens because the zombie state is not necessarily permanent: a zombie can be rescued. For these films to work, gender has to be maintained when one becomes a zombie, because it matters very much to those trying to rescue one from zombidom—and, we can assume, to those in the filmgoing audience. Gender remains legible through clothing and in differences in how labor is performed: zombie masters tend to use male zombies for physical labor (plantation work, building, transporting) and female zombies as potential replacements for wives or girlfriends. Many of these films rely on the idea of white males rescuing white female zombies, so even as zombies, white women have to be intelligible as white women. The gendered dimensions of zombies do not necessarily change when zombies move from being slaves to cannibals. If we assume that gender is not solely performative, but consider costume and dress as well as how a body may be read by others, cannibal-style zombies of the late 1960s, 1970s, and even today can be read via gender. These zombies may not perform gender via gendered divisions of labor, as slavestyle zombies often did, but the vestiges of their living gender are still often readable on their bodies. One assumes that particular ways of dressing have some sort of gendered meaning to the living in cannibalstyle films, and as argued in the previous chapter in regards to race, while identifiers like race and gender may cease to have meaning for the zombies themselves, we can’t assume that the living who encounter them suddenly regard zombies as beings lacking those identifiers. White men are also a part of this equation, but white women seem to be one of the few constants throughout different iterations of the American zombie tale. Whether cast as victims, easily corrupted by zombie blackness, or as saviors holding the key to the survival of white civilization, white women are crucial to understanding a variety of zombie texts. I address the role of nonwhite women in zombie texts in the next chapter, but filmmakers have often rendered female bodies of color invisible. White women, on the other hand, are hypervisible, and

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it is the rare zombie text that doesn’t feature them as potential victims, lovers, or stalwart soldiers defending the living against the undead. Still, in any kind of zombie text, white women have a difficult time living up to expectations of ideal femininity and ideal whiteness. In fact, it is the white woman’s propensity to misbehave and become aligned with zombies in one way or another that disrupts her claims to both whiteness and femininity in zombie texts.3 Like Angela, many white women in both slave-style and cannibal-style zombie texts are dangerous, but unlike Angela, many of these women are not destroyed for their destabilization. In fact, as we will see, some films allow these “bad girls” to exist and even thrive as active, extra-ordinary white women.

The Failures of White Masculinity

In slave-style zombie texts, young white Americans face off against black magic. In cannibal-style texts, the racial coding is less explicit, and yet groups of largely white living survivors often face off against contaminated zombies. Most zombie texts thus rely on a strict binary separating the world into those enmeshed in zombie culture (zombies, zombie masters, and their lackeys) and those fighting against it; in most texts, whiteness is the norm, but whiteness is also associated with masculinity, heterosexuality, and US citizenship. These are what one strays from as one becomes more aberrant and threatening, as one becomes more enmeshed in a zombie-making culture. To stray from the norm in slave-style texts usually means becoming a villain, who needs to be stopped, or a victim, who needs to be rescued. Cannibal-style texts simplify this: once you become a part of zombie culture, there is usually no coming back, and the only rescue comes via death. We might assume that given the racial politics of slave-style films— and the blackness of zombie-making cultures—that the villains of most of these films are people of color. But slave-style zombie masters are most often white males. These men become dangerous in several ways: most obviously, by threatening the protagonists of the film with physical or psychological violence or zombification. As participants in zombie-making culture, these men are tainted by blackness. Many also display an inappropriate (sexual) desire for a white female who is in a relationship with or attracted to someone else. This desire can also work to code the zombie masters as black, as James Snead notes: “Instances of the endangered woman pervade the history of the

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Fig. 3.1. The hands of a black male zombie grasp Eve as she is abducted (Ouanga

© Terwilliger Productions, 1935)

Hollywood film. The agents threatening the woman are often, if not always, black, then coded as representatives of darkness.”4 As an unwarranted and unwanted (sexual) threat to a white woman, zombie masters in many slave-style films follow this kind of pattern. The visual imagery of early zombie texts illustrates this transposition of blackness onto white villains through a hypersexualized threat to white female bodies. In the 1935 film Ouanga, the mulatto zombie master Clelie raises two black male zombies to do her bidding—in this case, to kidnap her white rival, Eve. While the zombies themselves are ordinary and technically aren’t a threat to Eve, the imagery of black hands grasping a shrieking white woman (fig. 3.1) or of black male zombies carrying her body across the landscape suggests a black male threat to a white female body and seems to temporarily elide the fact that the threat to Eve actually comes from a half-white woman. Yet this was a black-cast film, and in many ways the exception that proves the rule. Similarly, in one of the earliest zombie texts in the United States, the 1932 stage play Zombie, the threat of a white villain is made over as literally black, but only in promotional materials: in response to the play, Ben Cohen created a cartoon in the Chicago Sunday Tribune that illustrated a black zombie reaching for the star, Pauline Starke, as other members of the cast looked on. The zombie master of the piece was

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Fig. 3.2. Advertisement for Zombies of Mora Tau (© Columbia Pictures,

1957)

played by the Greek American actor George Regas, but he only looked on while the black figure actively reached for Starke: Regas’s threat was thus shifted onto a black body.5 Typically, though, black bodies weren’t necessary for this transposition to take place. Rather, as ads for other early zombie films suggest, white zombie masters or zombies leering at or manhandling frightened female figures were enough to communicate unnatural desires. This is why a film such as Zombies of Mora Tau (Cahn, 1957) could take place in Africa and forgo black zombies altogether (fig. 3.2). Gary D. Rhodes argues that in White Zombie, when a shot of Murder Legendre’s eyes is superimposed over a shot of Madeline in bed, “Penetration is suggested, though far more implicitly

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than in some . . . advertisements” for the film, many of which depicted a scantily clad white female body lying powerless before the control of the zombie master or a zombie.6 I would add that threats of sexual slavery play out across the genre—as seen in the ad from Zombies of Mora Tau in figure 3.2—although it perhaps never again reached the explicit sexual connotations of the White Zombie ads. For instance, in one ad for White Zombie, the (white) zombie master is looking at a zombified white woman next to a tagline that reads: “She was not dead . . . nor alive. Yet she walked . . . breathed and performed his every wish!” Further down, the ad tells us: “A white girl . . . torn from her lover on her wedding night . . . turned into a zombie and made slave to a fiend’s passion!” (fig. 3.3). As representatives of zombie-making culture, the zombie masters and their zombies thus represent not only the peril of possible racial contamination but a sexual threat as well. These zombie masters also pose a national hazard. Many of these zombie masters are foreign nationals, or they speak in heavy accents.7 The Hungarian American actor Bela Lugosi, for instance, played a zombie master in four films between 1932 and 1945. Lugosi’s zombie masters, as well as most others, deviate from the white heterosexual American norm in their foreignness. Yet they do not inhabit the same blackness that zombies inhabit—because they are the figures in control of zombie making, at least for a while. Their ability to wield zombiemaking power makes them a hybrid form. They enmesh themselves in black culture through zombie making; they are foreign; and they try to possess a virtuous white woman against her will. Even though they are physically white men, they cannot inhabit a white American masculine ideal; rather, their behavior calls that ideal into question. These men become safe tools for dealing with the implied miscegenation at the heart of many zombie tales. If the white women who are zombified or threatened with zombification in fact performed a zombie master’s “every wish,” then it would be far less dangerous to have the zombie master played by a white actor than an actor of color. Furthermore, in associating the master with blackness via his sexual desires and, more importantly, his connections with zombie-making culture, the film can code him as black while he remains “white.” Slave-style zombie films thus employ the kinds of coding that Snead observes while removing any questions of racial mixing. At the end of most slave-style films, the white male hero usually halts the zombie menace, but his whiteness and masculinity are nonetheless far from secure, which fits with the generic practices of classi-

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Fig. 3.3. Advertisement for White Zombie (© Halperin Productions, 1932)

cal horror films. Rhona J. Berenstein identifies the problem with most male heroes in horror: “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.”8 Berenstein explains that although the films feminize the hero by making him inept, by the film’s conclusion, “his prior failures are seemingly forgotten and he takes his place as a real man.”9 Thus, with the monster destroyed, the films

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bring gender under control as well. This pattern is on display in many slave-style films. In White Zombie, for instance, Neil Parker is unable to rescue his fiancée from the clutches of the zombie master until he gets help from a local missionary, Dr. Bruner, but by the end of the film, the zombie master—as well as the zombified fiancée—is reined in. In several films, the white male heroes are ineffective to the point of becoming zombies themselves. All the male members of an archaeological expedition in Revolt of the Zombies come under the zombie master’s control. Similarly, this happens to men in King of the Zombies, Bowery at Midnight, Creature with the Atom Brain, and Zombies on Broadway. None of these men are able to inhabit a space of ideal white masculinity. They are constantly acted upon rather than being active agents within the narratives. They are unable to protect even themselves from contamination. For white males who become slave-style zombies, expectations are that they will behave according to dictates similar to those placed on idealized white womanhood: they will become docile, passive, and willing to follow the orders of a (white) man. Therefore, to zombify is to feminize. Take, for instance, the zombification of Charles Beaumont in White Zombie. Not only does the zombification process effectively feminize him and (racially) contaminate him, but there are also strong suggestions of the zombie master’s homosexual desire for Beaumont. He tells the slowly zombifying man, “I have taken a fancy to you, Monsieur.”10 Beaumont, as a zombie, eventually destroys the zombie master and, with him, all his nonnormative desires, but the damage has been done. It should come as no surprise, then, that at the end of the film, Beaumont dies as well.11 While I believe it is somewhat fitting to call the process that Beaumont and other zombified men undergo feminizing, it is more productive to step away from creating a binary between the masculine and feminine here, especially since the binary seems to pathologize the feminine. What I suggest instead is that zombification destabilizes apparently clear gender categorizations. In fact, I take this characterization a step further to argue that making one a zombie, in either slave- or cannibal-style films, is to render one as not only Other to masculinity, whiteness, and normative sexualities, but part and parcel of them as well. In other words, the zombie state is Other to all that white patriarchal heteronormativity says is rational and normal, even though it was produced by that system. The transgressive power of this reversal is tremendous.

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Most fi lms find a way to shut the transgression down. By the end of many slave-style films, someone other than the white male has performed the bulk of the heroic action, so the narrative tries to shore up his damaged masculinity by pairing him off with a white female. In Revenge of the Zombies, for instance, Scott Warrington and Larry Adams are mostly useless against the zombie master, Dr. von Altermann; one of his zombies kills him. Luckily, Larry is able to pair up with von Altermann’s secretary, Jennifer Rand, at the film’s end. White heterosexual coupling makes everything normal again: whiteness will continue, and since the man takes on the role of conventional lover or, more usually, future husband, patriarchy is reaffirmed as well.12 These films destabilize the gender of the zombified white men, disrupting their individual claims to conventional masculinity. But their masculinity largely relies on the notion of a contained, idealized white womanhood (cosmetically white, pure, and docile), which the films thoroughly disturb as well: zombie masters contaminate white women, those who should be most apt at performing this idealized white womanhood, either by making these women zombies or by lusting after them. These films disrupt masculinity from the very beginning; the fact that zombifying these men also disturbs their claims to whiteness (since they become racially contaminated) simply underscores the myriad other disruptions taking place.

Policing White Women in Zombie Films

White femininity—in becoming zombified or inciting zombification—is likewise found wanting in slave-style zombie films, but its restoration isn’t as secure as that of white masculinity. Encounters with black magic taint the women in ways it doesn’t their male partners.13 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 several fi lms, white women have only limited interactions with zombies or zombie masters, but many slave-style films enact fears that the white female body might fail to inhabit a space of perfect whiteness: if, for instance, a zombie master is able to zombify a white woman and place her under his control—making her a “slave” to his “passions,” as the ad for White Zombie reminds us. In one sense, then, these films set up women who are zombified or threatened with zombification as victims, but the films also implicitly castigate these

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women for their apparent sexuality. If they weren’t sexually attractive to the wrong sorts of men, then perhaps they wouldn’t find themselves in trouble in the first place. Besides trading in common tropes that link the monstrous with the sexual and uncivilized (in the form of the zombie masters), these films mark female sexuality as dangerous and tied up in the zombie master’s monstrous sexuality.14 The links between female sexuality and the zombie master’s sexual desires are perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in The Woman Eater (Saunders, 1958). The focus of this film is on the processes of creating a zombie-making elixir, which the zombie master can make only via a woman-eating plant. In the jungle, the white zombie master witnesses a ceremony for producing the elixir and then imports the plant and a “native” drummer to England to try to make the elixir on his own. The master finds attractive women, has his drummer hypnotize them with his drumming, and then feeds them to the plant. For some reason, the women must be dressed in the same “native” costuming as the woman sacrificed in the jungle ceremony, a one-shoulder tight-fitting dress. The film thus trades on the same “native” costuming (and drumming) tropes discussed in chapter 1, but also sexualizes these women in a way that directly links their sexual appeal with the “native” and with a discourse that implicitly blames the women: if they weren’t attractive and somewhat available, they wouldn’t be in danger of being eaten by a woman-eating plant. In other slave-style films, similar patterns of zombification as both punishment for being sexually attractive and as a way to bring a white woman’s latent sexuality to the surface are clear. In White Zombie, for instance, Charles Beaumont asks the zombie master Murder Legendre to zombify beautiful Madeline Parker so that he can have her. In Voodoo Man, the zombie master Dr. Richard Marlowe zombifies pretty coeds as a way to find a replacement for his dead wife. The zombification of Jessica Holland in I Walked with a Zombie is not necessarily related to her sexual attractiveness, but does revolve around her adultery. In some films, the women don’t even have to be zombified in order for their sexuality to become the driving force of zombification: in Revolt of the Zombies, the zombie master Armand Louque zombifies an entire archaeological expedition as a way to blackmail Claire Duval into marrying him. There is a push and a pull in these films, then, between holding white women up as virginal and questioning that purity by making them over as sexual objects. As a result, their whiteness becomes un-

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reliable. These women are desirable as symbols of purity but repulsive because they become sexualized beings who may not maintain that purity. In some slave-style films, white female sexuality thus becomes positioned much like stereotypical black female sexuality—as a threatening sexual space easily trespassed against—and therefore becomes monstrous. Scholars such as Linda Williams and Rhona J. Berenstein suggest that classical horror films most often link women with the monster, but in slave-style films, these women generally don’t share the same relationship with zombies that they do with the zombie master: he is the one who recognizes their sexuality, who brings it out. White male desire dominates the supine white females in the ads for White Zombie, Zombies of Mora Tau, and other zombie films, who often appear as objects of a zombie master’s gaze or in a zombie’s sinister clutches. But it is a very particular, threatening desire—one with the power not only to render these supposedly pure, virginal women over as sexual creatures but to render them racialized as well. These women become the embodiment of a type of whiteness whose purity must be questioned: it is a little too close to zombie culture for comfort. With all the zombies and zombie masters running around, temptation is plentiful, and that could lead to the total breakdown of whiteness in the form of miscegenation. Therefore, the whiteness of these women cannot be trusted until each one is in a stable heterosexual relationship with a white male, which often happens only at the very end of the film. These women also enact a paradox when the zombie master zombifies them: on one hand, as zombies, they perform idealized white womanhood perfectly—they are docile, quiet, and obedient. On the other hand, though, becoming a zombie is a transgression against this ideal. It flies in the face of free will, and the racial contamination and suggested sexual compromise implicit in zombification strip the woman’s whiteness from her.15 This is why the woman’s ability to transgress is important, because these white women sometimes get to behave quite badly as zombies, without real fear of social retribution. Hence, zombified Madeline Parker can try to kill her husband in White Zombie, and Barbara Winslow can start to give away US war secrets to Nazis in King of the Zombies. It wasn’t really them, you see, it was the zombie part of them. And this transference—it was the zombie, not me—illustrates the power available to these women via this monstrous destabilization of sexuality, gender, and race. This monstrous power, as something al-

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together different from white heteronormative patriarchal power, is threatening, which is why generic conventions often circumscribe it by making the woman over as helpless. Berenstein, in her exploration of classical horror films, suggests of these 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.”16 Zombification is usually only a temporary transformation: films discipline bodies or bring them back to their “natural” state in the end. For some women, this disciplining means their destruction. Jessica Holland, the titular zombie in I Walked with a Zombie, is an adulteress, so she isn’t allowed to wake up from her zombification, but must die for the disruption her body has caused. In other films, a transformation back to “normal” is all that is needed, and this usually goes hand in hand with heterosexual coupling, which serves to restabilize white men as well. Although some scholars claim that whiteness acquires its power, in part, from its ability to change and transgress without fundamentally losing its positionality,17 these films, in showing the whiteness of these women as something that needs policing and in showing the destabilization of masculine whiteness, demonstrate that whiteness is an impossible standard—no one in these films is able to consistently achieve or maintain it. Whiteness is always a less-than-stable secondorder manifestation of its own ideal, which leaves it vulnerable.

“She Goes Her Own Way”

As a zombie, a white woman in slave-style films can act in ways that defy ideals of white womanhood, but these mini rebellions are highly policed. These women often wake up from zombihood, and the films pair them off with a white man—the nightmare (or dream) of their zombification over. Sometimes, however, the rebellious nature of these white female zombies is a bit more pronounced and a bit harder to shut down. In Revenge of the Zombies (1943), Dr. Max Heinrich von Altermann murders and zombifies his wife, Lila. He is trying to create a zombie army for the Third Reich, and zombifying his wife in this quest makes perfect sense to him. As he says, “And what greater destiny could my wife have achieved than to serve me?”18 Beautiful, zombified Lila von Altermann, who doesn’t feel quite the same way,

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Fig. 3.4. Mammy Beulah leads Larry Adams to the zombified Lila von Alter-

mann (Revenge of the Zombies © Monogram Pictures, 1943)

turns out to be a very free-spirited zombie. As the family housekeeper, Mammy Beulah, remarks, “When the dead walks of its own will, no telling what they’ll do next.” This line applies perfectly to the zombified Lila. Lila disappears from her husband’s house, sending him into a tizzy, since her brother and Larry Adams, a detective, have just arrived for her funeral. When Larry asks Mammy Beulah what Dr. von Altermann has done with Lila’s body, she laughs and says, “He ain’t done nothing with her. That’s what gets him so panicking. She just walked away.” Trying to explain to Larry about von Altermann’s zombies, Mammy Beulah adds, “Always he tells them what to do and they does it, but not Miss Lila. She goes her own way, living or dead.” The implication is that even in life, Lila didn’t play by the rules. She certainly doesn’t play by the rules after she dies: not only can Lila wander the grounds at will, evading the call that is supposed to summon von Altermann’s zombies, but she is able to speak. Meeting Larry and Mammy Beulah in the darkness, Lila asks them to guard her brother until she is ready to act (fig. 3.4). Larry asks what he can do for her, and

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she replies with a plan to strike out at her husband: “No one can help me so long as he lives. Only his death can release the zombies.” Lila has figured out how to call von Altermann’s other zombies to action and use them against him. When Lila’s brother and friends corner von Altermann just before midnight, he hears his zombies and thinks they will provide his rescue, but he is shocked to learn that Lila now controls them. She enters his laboratory, telling him, “This is finished. All the powers of life are ranged against you.” He is aghast, demanding, “You dare to set your will against mine?” She replies, “I do. You can’t hurt me. You can’t destroy me. You can’t control me.” Von Altermann tries to run away, but he is no match for Lila. Cornering her husband in a swamp, Lila ensures that she and her husband will both die: she pushes him into the wet muck, drowning him, and then following him in as the other zombies watch. When Lila kills herself, she effectively polices her own transgressions against gender and race. Still, she is one of the most compelling of all slave-style zombies, for several reasons. First, she is an extraordinary zombie in every sense of the term: she has managed to retain her free will, and she can communicate with both the living and the undead. Second, she is able to wrest control of the other zombies from her husband and use them to help destroy him, thereby freeing them from his domination. She is a zombie who figures out how to become a zombie master—the slave who turns the master-slave relationship on its head and, in essence, starts her own slave revolt. Third, many films position white women as the objects of a zombie master’s desire, thus allowing them to transgress against expectations of white womanhood as pure and docile, but Lila is different. Most of the zombified white women in slave-style films transgress against the ideal of pure, docile white femininity through their sexualization. These are, after all, films from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, when cultural mores—especially in film—encouraged women to remain pure.19 Yet the film does not objectify Lila in the same way. She is an attractive woman, but her husband shows little sexual desire for her—his interest is in using her to “sell” his zombie army to the Nazis. She is also one of the most active characters in Revenge of the Zombies; she comes up with the plan to kill her husband and orchestrates it, outsmarting him at his own game and effectively shutting down his Nazi laboratory. Unlike most zombies, she is an active force for good—or as she states, the “power of life”—and she is therefore able to do what none of the living white males in the film are able to do: stop her hus-

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band. The white woman here is both beautiful and deadly, the physical manifestation of the monstrous body (she is a zombie, after all) and the agent that will bring that body under control through death. When Lila tells her husband, “You can’t control me,” the line works on two levels—neither Lila the woman nor Lila the zombie recognizes his command any more. Females and zombies are supposed to be passive creatures, but Lila is an active female and an active zombie. Since the film isn’t trying to radically upend white patriarchy, though, it halts Lila’s transgression. The film cannot allow her to live if whiteness and gender are to be restabilized. Still, Lila is able to control the manner of her demise: she dies by her own hand, taking her husband with her. It may be a small gesture, but Lila is able to shut down at least a small piece of patriarchal culture in the form of her husband. Again, 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. Whiteness, even in transgression, is safe from total disruption: the white person can always return to whiteness. This ability to transgress without fear of losing one’s whiteness plays out in zombie narratives: one may be racialized by becoming a zombie but be rescued from zombification by the film’s end. Lila, while never losing her white appearance, nevertheless is one of the very few white female slave-style zombies who is never technically “rescued” from zombification. Lila remains a zombie to the end, so she isn’t rescued, at least not conventionally, from zombification and the racial contamination it represents. Rather, she finds power in the zombie state and uses it to take down her husband. She uses the racial contamination of zombihood to her advantage. If, as Barbara Creed maintains, feminine sexuality is often made monstrous in horror films by showing the female body to be “that which does not ‘respect borders, positions, rules,’ that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order,’” then the zombie is both destabilizing and threatening because it represents the “clean and proper body” that has become a “body which has lost its form and integrity.”20 The ambiguity of white female bodies that can either simultaneously inhabit blackness as a zombie and whiteness in appearance or inspire “blackness” in white peers (who either desire the white women or fail to protect them) must cause anxiety. They expose whiteness as a fiction. 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, is able to challenge binaristic thinking.21

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Thus, even if the films circumscribe their gender disruptions, the white women of slave-style zombie films offer a progressive challenge to conventional racial thinking. As both/and—both living and dead, both black and white, both sexualized and pure—the women of slavestyle films enact the conflicts between dominant normativity and anything seen as Other relative to that state. They exist between normal and abnormal. In other words, they exist in much the same discursive space as the zombie, whether they are one or not. The white female in zombie films exists as hybrid in her own right and, most importantly, as hybrid in her connections with the zombie itself, and this hybridity is dangerous to white heteronormative patriarchy. Removing the explicit connections between the white woman and the zombie at the end of the film often shuts this down, but in a film such as Revenge of the Zombies, the connections—and hence the danger of the white female, zombie or not—remain even as the film ends.

“I Just Don’t Hack It as Normal”

With the introduction of cannibal-style texts, zombie tales began dispensing with the return of the status quo, and the formerly inevitable pairing of white women with white men slowly disappeared as well. Thanks to Night of the Living Dead and its nihilistic influence on the zombie genre, zombies generally survive at the end of a film. Cannibal-style films do not rein in their zombies’ transgressions. They carry on making more zombies because there is no zombie master to be stopped—the zombie virus simply continues. The zombies don’t represent a reproductive future—theirs is at best a viral future—but as the end of Land of the Dead suggests, this viral future may have potential. It isn’t utopian, but there is the promise of a continued existence in it—something that rarely seems assured for the living in cannibal-style zombie fiction. These films give zombies more freedom to exist, but zombie films did not radically change in their depictions of white women overnight. George A. Romero’s “Dead” trilogy of films shows the evolution of white women in this regard. Barbara in Night of the Living Dead is passive and practically catatonic. Fran in Dawn of the Dead is more active, but ambiguously so—surrounded by three living men, it takes her a while to come into her own. Regarding Sarah in Day of the Dead, Robin Wood argues, “The woman had become, quite unambigu-

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ously, the positive center around whom the entire film is structured.”22 Sarah, a scientist, is often the most rational person at the compound where she lives. Wood sees Day of the Dead as capturing “the hysteria of contemporary masculinity” in an era full of Rockys and Rambos, but I argue in addition that this shift toward a more rational, empowered female heroine in zombie films accompanies a reinscription of the cannibal zombie as more human and extra-ordinary.23 Still, this shift belies a tremendous amount of continuity in the genre, since the empowered heroines of cannibal-style films and the “victims” of the slave-style films both exist in worlds where white women are key— the center of femininity is white, and any other kind of femininity disappears. Although as the next chapter discusses, black femininity does play a role in these films. The white female of slave-style films was often a double for the zombie—not quite white, but not quite nonwhite either. As discussed in the previous chapter, Ben in Night of the Living Dead takes over this space of the not quite living and not quite living dead. The white posse at the end of the film can’t see him as “living”—he always existed outside their norm. Fran and Peter occupy this role in Dawn of the Dead, and Sarah does the same in Day of the Dead. They all exist outside the norm of living society. In this way, these white women occupy the same sort of narrative space as Ben and Peter. The interplay between Ben and Barbara in the remake of Night of the Living Dead (Savini, 1990) makes clear this connection between black men and white women in their inability to fully integrate into white patriarchy. For the film, George A. Romero radically rewrote the character of Barbara. Whereas in the 1968 version, Barbara is passive and nearly catatonic in her fear of the zombies, the new Barbara is anything but a wilting flower. In fact, she seems to be taking over Ben’s role in the original film as the one person in the farmhouse who seems worthy of surviving the night. Barry Keith Grant sees this version of Night of the Living Dead as much more progressive, an attempt “to reclaim the horror genre for feminism,” and he argues that in this film— as in other Romero films—men fail at survival because they get caught up in phallocentric power or fail to work together.24 Thus, they live up to the classical generic expectations presented by Berenstein, except that these films don’t reinscribe the men as masculine via the monster’s death, because the zombies don’t die, nor are they able to get the girl in the end. Two things temper the 1990 version of Night of the Living Dead’s

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ability to play with the classical generic expectations of zombie films. First, to become the active heroine who survives the night, Barbara must strip herself of signs of femininity and take up traditional symbols of masculinity: she removes her skirt and puts on pants and picks up a shotgun and begins shooting. More importantly, 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 in a state of shock and has trouble speaking. It takes Ben’s arrival and his instruction to rouse her. He tells her, “I don’t need you falling apart on me, you understand? . . . I know you can fight when you have to.”25 Later, when Barbara formulates a plan of escape—to run past the slow zombies—Ben scoffs, and she forcefully tells him, “You told me to fight. Well, I’m fighting.” The black male unlocks the white female’s power. Barbara escapes the farmhouse and survives the night. The next day, we find her with a posse of mostly white men, and the white patriarchal society she encounters after her escape from the farmhouse horrifies her. Barbara is repulsed by what Grant dubs a “monstrous” society, but she is still entrenched within it to a degree.26 She has to play along with it, if for no other reason than to enjoy some protection from the zombies. Therefore, the victory Grant sees in the film is a bit qualified. Barbara escapes the zombies, only to become part of a society that may be, in its own way, just as hostile to her. Barbara’s uncertain “victory” is illustrative of many cannibal-style films, especially those that contain white female warriors. They may be ostensibly defending white civilization against zombies, but white female warriors don’t inhabit that space as unambiguously as white men in slave-style films did. The most prominent of these female fighters—Sarah in Day of the Dead, Regina in Night of the Comet (Eberhardt, 1984), Lieutenant Melanie Ballard in Ghosts of Mars (Carpenter, 2001), Alice in the Resident Evil series of films (2002–2017), and Cherry Darling in Planet Terror—do not actively seek out zombies to fight. Rather, these films thrust the women into circumstances in which they must defend themselves against a zombie onslaught, and unlike their white male counterparts in slave-style films, almost all their victories, like 1990 Barbara’s, are qualified: Sarah waits out the zombie apocalypse on a desert island;27 Regina and her sister find themselves as two of the remaining six people in an empty Los Angeles; Melanie faces a court-martial; Alice is left still trying to destroy the ever-resourceful Umbrella Corporation; and Cherry is in Mexico with

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her back to the ocean, 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 pairs with a Latino man; Melanie is alone; Alice is usually unattached at the end of any particular film of the Resident Evil series; and Cherry’s boyfriend is dead.28 These women can’t offer the promise of a continuation of white civilization in the ways their slave-style counterparts could. Their romantic pairings (or lack thereof) negate that. In the case of Alice from Resident Evil, not only is she single, her relationship to the zombie virus unsettles her connections to whiteness. Stephen Harper claims that Alice is “super-white,” using her heroism (compared with others’ lack of heroism), her costuming, and her place within the miseen-scène to make his point.29 I argue that Alice’s whiteness is never secure, since the film does not contain her via heterosexual pairing at the end of a fi lm,30 and the sequels directly implicate her 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. Alice is not only contaminated; she is part of the contamination. The white female warriors may be the stabilizing figures of these films—in that they help defeat the zombies—but the nihilistic influence of cannibal-style zombie films has left its mark. On one hand, these films are somewhat reactionary in their positioning of the white female as the bearer of civilization. But in none of these narratives does pre-zombie white American civilization survive intact.31 Furthermore, none of these women are likely to restart that civilization reproductively. So again, just as in slave-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 white civilization. They are, rather, inheritors of its afterlife. This is not to say that these zombie films participate in some sort of racialized feminist utopian vision of life after white patriarchy; rather, they largely leave it to a white female to decide what her “civilization” will now look like. Another way of reading these zombie heroines can prove useful. If we reconsider how power is generally conceived—seeing physical power as not only a masculine trait but a feminine one too, or reading power as something beyond the violent or physically aggressive altogether—then we open up possibilities for how these women can be read. In cannibal-style zombie films since 1968, some female warriors inhabit stereotypical feminine characteristics—they are conventionally

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beautiful or perform a maternal role, for instance—and are also physically powerful, such as Regina in Night of the Comet and Cynthia in Night of the Creeps (Dekker, 1986). Melanie Ballard in Ghosts of Mars, for instance, is physically attractive, but she is also a tough police officer in a matriarchal society, and like many male action heroes, she is never presented as in search of (or in need of) a romantic pairing. Furthermore, if the concept of power extends beyond physical strength and the ability to commit violence—if we can conceptualize it as the power to choose, for instance—then, we should consider many other women of cannibal-style zombie films as well. For instance, even though in My Boyfriend’s Back townsfolk tell Missy McCloud, “Good girls don’t hang around with dead boys,” she chooses a zombie boyfriend, Johnny.32 Her choice of Johnny is a nod to interracial dating: as a zombie, Johnny is set up as Other to the living (white) townsfolk, one of whom tells him, “We don’t like your kind.”33 Beyond the power to choose her dates, though, 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. There is power in Missy’s act— both to choose an undead boyfriend over any living (white) suitor and to face down those who would kill her zombie love. The film largely sidesteps the transgressive power of her actions by revealing that it was all a dream in the end. Other white women aren’t so easily corralled as Missy. The Cycle Sluts of Chopper Chicks in Zombietown (Hoskins, 1989) may best encapsulate what reimagined feminine power in contemporary cannibalstyle zombie films looks like. The Cycle Sluts are a leather-clad multiracial all-female biker gang, and they begin the film already outside heteronormative patriarchy. An unapologetically aggressive lesbian leads the group. They curse and fight, and they are vocal in their desire for sexual partners of the moment: for many of them, sex, and not romantic love, is on their minds when they stop in the town of Zariah at the beginning of the film. Soon after, a horde of zombies rambles into town. Since townspeople refuse to defend themselves because the zombies are former loved ones, the Cycle Sluts step up to do battle (fig. 3.5). They can be easily aligned with power as defined by physical aggression, violence, and the ability to wield weapons. They use guns, dynamite, and whatever other weapons they can find lying about, and they also manage to outsmart the zombies and the person controlling the

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Fig. 3.5. The Cycle Sluts step up to battle the zombies when no one else will (Chopper Chicks in Zombietown © Troma, 1989).

zombies by blowing up the town’s church with most of the zombies inside—which in and of itself can be read as a subversive act. They then set the remaining zombies on their creator. But the Cycle Sluts are far more compelling in how they take up alternative forms of power. The Cycle Sluts do not subscribe to patriarchal proclamations about a woman’s proper place. They aren’t as beholden to traditional familial bonds as are the townsfolk—and the lack of these bonds helps the Cycle Sluts face the zombies, whereas the townspeople become helpless victims. These women not only exist without 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—these women operate within a system that would label them as abnormal or unfeminine, but they do so largely according to their own rules and desires, without caring what the world thinks of them. Two exchanges are noteworthy in regard to the Sluts’ claims to al-

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ternative 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, “Kids in school say good mamas .  .  .” before moving onto another subject.34 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, all right, it’s me. There’s something wrong with me. I just don’t hack it as normal. And homes and families and husbands are for normals.” Her husband responds by asking whether she has “dyked out” on him, and she answers by kneeing him in the groin and giving him the dog’s order to “stay!” Dede may see herself as wrong for wanting to exist outside patriarchal norms, and she even considers leaving the Cycle Sluts at one point, but she never considers remaining in Zariah to take up her former, “normal” 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. The Cycle Sluts raise issues of the pathologization of certain ways of being. If “good mamas” or “good wives” or “good girls” are supposed to act in a certain way, then they were most likely taught to act that way in opposition to “bad” women. In its own strange way, this binary opposition gives some credence to the bad: it makes it a necessary part of the good—since all those good girls can’t exist without the bad ones there to define them—but it also opens up a space where those who cannot meet the definition of good might be able to seek out new modes of affiliation based on their outsider status. One of these new modes of affiliation might look very similar to the Cycle Sluts— a lesbian-led nomadic gang that exists largely outside heteronormative or capitalist reproductive time and space. At the beginning of In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, Judith Halberstam suggests, “Queer uses of time and space develop .  .  . in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction.”35 Halberstam attempts to reconfigure queerness by divorcing it from sexuality. If we consider the lives of the Cycle Sluts, we have something that seems to fit Halberstam’s model: the bikers are nomads who—at least for the duration of

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the film—aren’t engaging in any regular work. They (mostly) eschew motherhood and monogamous heterosexual relationships for “alternative methods of alliance” in the form of the gang itself and in the casual sexual encounters they search for in Zariah.36 Of course, this new mode of affiliation comes at a price—the film still holds up the Cycle Sluts as different from the townsfolk, those leading “good,” normal lives. By the end of the film, though, the Cycle 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 inhabit the role that a woman would traditionally inhabit in a male biker gang. White patriarchal heteronormativity may survive in Zariah (or it may not), but the town has felt the Cycle Sluts’ influence. The Sluts may continue to live within a system that treats them as nonnormative—as a female-led multiracial group of nomads—but they are not stuck within their disciplined place, so to speak: they use their nonnormative status as a means to gain power and kill zombies. These women choose how to live within dominant structures. 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 thrust, since the nonnormative group succeeds where the “normals” failed to act, and this group rides off, possibly to save another town, with two new initiates tagging along.

White Women and Extra- Ordinary Zombies, White Women as Extra- Ordinary Zombies

The Cycle Sluts are zombie fighters, but there are also women who use their status as zombies to undermine the system that created them. Lila von Altermann in Revenge of the Zombies might be the earliest example of this sort of zombie woman, but she is not the only one. In the low-budget film Zombie Nation (Lommel, 2004), we know very little about the lives of a group of white women before they become zombies, but the black priestesses who raise them make it clear that being a zombie means something else. The priestesses (discussed in the next chapter) tell the zombies that they are going to have to start new lives because their friends and families will probably not be able to accept them in their new zombie forms. One of the newly initiated zombies reflects, “We must meet new people who will accept us the way we are now and not the way we were then.”37 Becoming a zombie introduces

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a radical change in how these women interact with the world: they are explicitly told that they can no longer engage with society in the ways they did as living white women. Becoming zombies also presents these women—murder victims of a psychotic policeman whose corrupt department swept his crimes under the rug—with the means to seek vengeance against their killer. The fi lm implies that the policeman targeted these women, at least in part, because they were pretty and white—so again, the old slave-style refrain of chastising white women for being attractive remains. But unlike slave-style films in which the power of whiteness meant one’s friends would rescue one from zombification, Zombie Nation shows white women being saved by a group of black priestesses using voodoo. Besides raising the white women from the grave, the priestesses instruct them on how to act. It helps that the only true change to the zombies’ appearance is dark circles under their eyes—something easily covered up by the right sunglasses. But the new zombies still seek guidance on how to live in the world, and in essence, the priestesses instruct them on how to pass as white and living in order to get what they want: namely, revenge. These women get their revenge, and later find empowerment as law enforcement officers. They thus move from being passive victims of a psychotic policeman to being active police officers, and zombihood is what allows these women to reach their full potential. It also permits them to seek redress from a corrupt system—the legal system that trained and protected their murderer—by infiltrating it and taking it over. The end of the film may reinscribe law enforcement as a valid institution, but only because these zombies are part of it. It is still disengaged from patriarchy, since the zombie policewomen have made the police department their own: at the end of the film, they are the only bodies seen at the police station. Unlike the zombie policewomen of Zombie Nation, the zombies in Zombie Strippers (Lee, 2008) are not able to pass as living. They are visibly decomposing corpses, which makes their conscious decision to become zombies seem counterintuitive, at least at first. In the film, set in an imagined ultraconservative future in which the government forces stripping literally underground, a group of strippers find out that becoming zombies will give them more paying customers and more power over those customers. After one stripper is accidentally zombified, others choose to become zombies. Overtly playing on the desire and repulsion that zombies have traditionally inspired—and not forgetting that there is a real-world subgenre of zombie-themed porn—

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these zombie strippers manage to turn the tables on their customers and to undermine the government that confined them underground in the first place. Unlike the women of Zombie Nation, these zombies make a choice to become zombified. There are certainly some problems with the film’s heroines being strippers—their occupation is embroiled in heteronormative, patriarchal dictates that women should be sexually or visually appealing—but the film turns this convention on its head, since the strippers become more attractive to their customers as zombies. This attraction is the overt expression of what was implicit in so many slave-style films. Those films racialized zombiism. It was a form of cultural contamination (and perhaps sexual contamination) that troubled gender norms, and someone had to rescue characters from it so that they could regain their places as normative. But this contamination was not inscribed on the body so much as it was enacted, in both the zombie’s slow mannerisms and in its inability to think or act for itself. In Zombie Strippers, the performative takes a backseat to how the body is marked as a zombie. These women are very easily read as “contaminated” by the zombie virus: there is no way to mistake them for normal, living women, and that is part of the point. In this film, zombie flesh is attractive in that it is not the typical, normal, white, living flesh that society usually valorizes. The departure from that norm is what makes one attractive. These zombie strippers’ tastes run almost exclusively to male flesh, so private lap dances come to involve castration and the satiation of the female zombie’s appetite instead of her customer’s sexual desires. The zombies eventually run amok, and the film pathologizes them (returning us to slave-style conventions), but it also implies that the strippers’ disruption will spread—that the conservative patriarchal culture of the film is going to fall as a result of the zombie virus—and it is perhaps nowhere quite as clear as it is in this film that what white patriarchy holds up as abnormal will eventually bring it down.

The Dreams of White Zombihood

In slave-style zombie texts, white women have a propensity to misbehave and often become aligned with zombie-making culture in some way, and this disobedience disrupts their claims to stereotypical (white) femininity. Of course, part of the fantasy of slave-style films in-

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volves watching people “try on” and flirt with black magic as an escape from patriarchal whiteness: as a zombie, one is not bound by the same dictates as the living. Therefore, while these are horror films, there is something alluring about the disruptions these films display. Madeline in White Zombie compares the experience of being a zombie to dreaming. She doesn’t call it a nightmare; she calls it a dream. The dreamlike quality doesn’t extend to the white men in slavestyle zombie texts. They seem to be having nightmares that need to be reined in: as villains, they become a “safe” means of exploring sexual desire without fully dealing with the overtones of miscegenation in these films, and as heroes, they continually fail until the end of the film redeems them. Whether as dream or nightmare, these films destabilize whiteness. Yet most of them do not permanently upend. True to generic conventions, the “good” guys win in the end, and the films bring everything back to the norm. We must eventually wake up. Still, there is the lingering specter of Lila von Altermann, an extraordinary zombie who perhaps doesn’t upend anything, either, but she gets closer than any other white woman in slave-style zombie texts. Lila acts when the living humans around her can’t or won’t; she battles a Nazi and wins on her own terms. If we expect zombies and women to be passive and inert, Lila defies those expectations on two levels— and it is through aligning with zombie culture that she is able to do this. When Lila, as a zombie, tells her husband, “You can’t hurt me. You can’t destroy me. You can’t control me,” she could be speaking as either a woman or a zombie—and either way is threatening to white patriarchy. Lila illustrates the profound challenge that white women offer up in many zombie texts, and she is far from the only woman to do so. The Cycle Sluts, the policewomen of Zombie Nation, and the strippers of Zombie Strippers all exist within dominant structures that read them as nonnormative, but these women choose how to live (and die) within these structures. Thus, while a character such as Supernatural’s Angela may be destroyed in order to shut down the challenge she offers patriarchy, with the white women of Zombie Nation, Zombie Strippers, and Chopper Chicks in Zombietown, the dream or nightmare hinted at in films like Revenge of the Zombies finds overt expression. Our cultural expectations of zombies and white women are so similar that all these women—even the Cycle Sluts—are extra-ordinary zombies; they defy our expectations of passivity by being active agents in their own lives.

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4 | A Proud and Powerful Line Women of Color and Voodoo

I

n the 1974 blaxploitation film Sugar Hill, a young woman finds herself in the middle of a swamp with a mambo and a Vodou loa, or spirit intermediary, as part of a plan to avenge the death of her boyfriend.1 The loa, Baron Samedi, calls forth an army of zombies to aid her in her quest, summoning all who are pledged to him: “Slave and master, master and slave, arise!”2 It is one of the few slave-style zombie films that acknowledge the real-world referent for zombie lore plainly. These zombies are unequivocally slaves, and when they arrive, wearing little more than shackles, the film makes a clear visual connection between zombidom and slavery. This visualization of slavery is rare in zombie films, in which spectacle usually subsumes slavery: lumbering zombies offer quick scares but manage not to comment on the realworld effects of the slave trade. However much these films may shy away from the realities of slavery, many slave-style films manage to reinforce notions that some people are naturally fitter than others to become slaves. Still, we cannot discount slave-style films entirely, especially the ones that elevate voodoo to something beyond mere sideshow spectacle. US popular culture has translated Vodou as a caricature, voodoo, that has often traded on the worst sorts of tropes—wild native dances, the constant beat of tomtoms, a bloodlust for human sacrifice—to tell audiences that those who believe are, at the very least, superstitious fools or, at worst, evildoers dabbling in the occult. Vodou is a complex syncretic religion based on beliefs from Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean, but popular culture often reduces voodoo to black magic practiced by uncivilized heathens far removed from American rationality. Using hundreds of years of reports of dancing, trances, incessant drumming, blood sacrifice, and cannibalism, commentators outside

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Haiti have often portrayed Vodou as excessive when compared with an elitist notion of “civilized” and subdued Western Christianity. Some films present it as something more legitimate, though. These films still generally trade on ideas of voodoo as exotic, foreign, and mysterious, but they also present it as a logical means for people to seek protection from and justice against those who would exploit them, especially in situations where these people may not have the ability to seek justice using traditional, institutional means. These people may be the colonized in a neocolonial space, or people of color in a whitedominated world, or zombies trying to make their way in a space full of the living. Many slave-style films show voodoo endowing some with the power to raise the dead—a power most often accessible to nonwhite or foreign believers. Even though these films tend to rely on connections with nonwhite cultures to create a black magic for white protagonists to battle, the focus of slave-style films is almost always on white bodies. Yet in some films, when women of color appear, the focus shifts a bit. These women become more visible than they typically are in the genre. In comparison, in contemporary cannibal-style films, increasingly diverse groups of the living battle the undead, but as seen in the previous chapter, the saviors of these films are often white women; women of color remain largely absent. Thus, contemporary cannibal-style films might seem, on the surface, more progressive than slave-style films because of the wider diversity of living humans showcased and the more active roles available for white women, but these films tend to render women of color invisible. Rather, it is slave-style films, with their problematic depictions of race and slavery more generally, that have been the greatest avenue for more compelling portrayals of women of color and voodoo itself. Since the 1930s, a handful of slave-style films have employed black housekeepers, black female zombie masters, and powerful black zombies to undermine the singular concentration on white bodies in zombie films. These films do not necessarily radically upend the genre; rather, they subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) shift the focus onto the desires and fates of bodies of color as well as those of white ones. These films embrace voodoo or Vodou culture and zombie making, and those who align with this culture become empowered to fight and subvert white heteronormative patriarchy. Moreover, in some of these films, black zombies step out from the background and become much more powerful players than they are in other slave-style zombie films. On one hand, we can see these zom-

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bies as technologies of opposition, used to fight racism and misogyny. They offer a means of seeking justice outside the law. Yet these zombies also begin to point toward a zombification that is about not just sexual submission or slavery, but also the reanimation of those who were marginalized in life but who come back from the dead to enjoy power over those who rendered them powerless in life and contributed to their deaths. Examining two blaxploitation zombie films from 1974, Sugar Hill and The House on Skull Mountain, as well as the independent race film Ouanga (1935) and several other films, this chapter concentrates on the black female presence in slave-style zombie films.3 It shows that if we approach voodoo as a technology of the oppressed, then we can see how it operates in neocolonial situations to provide marginalized women with the means to dismantle the systemic racism that strives to render them powerless and invisible.

White Women as Zombie Masters

As noted in the previous chapter, while one might assume, given the real-world ties between Haiti, Vodou, and blackness, that most of the zombie masters in slave-style films are people of color, this simply isn’t the case. Zombie making is most often the purview of white men whose foreignness, connections with voodoo or other alien cultures, and inappropriate sexual desires render them Other to normative white masculinity. Most zombie masters in slave-style films fit this mold. Zombie making is largely a (white) male occupation. In fact, of the slave-style zombie films made between 1932 and 1968, only two had white female zombie masters.4 Dr. Myra, from Teenage Zombies (1959), is a communist agent working in the United States. Mrs. Rand, in I Walked with a Zombie (1943), is fully immersed in the voodoo community of Saint Sebastian in the West Indies. Thus, these women upend traditional gender roles that position men as the victimizers of women in most slave-style zombie films, and their assumed political ideology or embrace of voodoo customs and culture further removes them from any kind of normative identity. Being in control of zombie making somewhat removes white male zombie masters from the blackness of zombie-making cultures, but neither of the two white women is ever in a true position of power. Their positions are contingent on the men in their lives, and they are vulner-

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able to constraints imposed by men. Dr. Myra is the scientific mind behind a zombie-making pellet (and later, gas) that enemies of the United States are developing, but she operates under orders from others; in fact she has to change her research based on a new time line that her bosses implement. These higher-ups even threaten to scrap her research and go to their backup plan, dropping a hydrogen bomb on the United States, to which she responds, “Fools! . . . What good is land that you can’t use or go near for years?”5 She notes how her research would produce worker zombies like her test subject Ivan: “The perfect slave: desire to work, perfect health, and obeys every command. With half the people on earth in his condition, we’d have the epitome of civilization.” Dr. Myra has the better plan, but bureaucratic shortsightedness hampers her research. Even though this perturbs her, she pushes forward. In fact, when the local sheriff, who has been helping supply her with prisoners and drunks as test subjects for her experiments, complains that their secret base of operations may be compromised, Dr. Myra tells him, “I understand thoroughly what we’re all expected to do. I’m doing my job under the same conditions as you, only I don’t complain about every problem I run into.” Dr. Myra remains the consummate professional, but she is also an easy target when a group of four teenagers turns the tables on her and her two male handlers. The teenagers, who happened upon her island, have become her prisoners; the two boys manage to escape, but the two girls become Dr. Myra’s latest test subjects. When two more teenagers show up, they are able to help the two boys wrest control from Dr. Myra’s zombie and her handlers. The teenagers need to find an antidote to the zombie gas in order to save their two zombified friends. When Dr.  Myra won’t offer it up, the teenagers zombify her, hoping they will be able to order her to give it to them. As a zombie, Dr. Myra still won’t disclose the antidote, so the teenagers threaten one of the handlers with zombification. He immediately points to a beaker filled with liquid that he thinks is the antidote. The teenagers test it on Dr. Myra; she wakes up and breaks the beaker, but not before the boys get some of the liquid to their zombified friends. In the chaos of the teenagers’ escape, Dr. Myra and one of her handlers try to flee, but the teenagers easily overtake them and hand them over to the authorities. While Dr. Myra is something of an obstinate zombie—refusing to follow the orders of her masters—her eventual failure, once she wakes up, is a generic given. The fact that she is a communist compounds it, but unlike many of her male zombie-master counterparts, Dr. Myra

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fails because she is competent only when it comes to science. She relies on her handlers and the zombie Ivan for physical protection, and she is overconfident about kidnapping the teenagers—not worrying that their friends (and one must assume, families) will come looking for them. Furthermore, she leads one of her handlers to a boat after the teenagers have escaped her lab, but she must wait for him to try to start it (which he can’t), and the teenagers easily subdue her when they arrive. While her scientific abilities may give her limited power over zombies and zombie making, her dependence on the men around her limits what she can do otherwise. Mrs. Rand’s situation in I Walked with a Zombie is even more complicated. The film focuses on Betsy Connell, a nurse who travels to the fictional Caribbean island of Saint Sebastian to care for a woman who is in a strange kind of trancelike state. As Betsy learns, a complex family history is at work: she has been hired by the plantation owner, Paul Holland, the husband of her patient, Jessica Holland. Before falling into a trance, Jessica was having an affair with Paul’s half brother, Wesley Rand. Over the course of the film, Betsy decides that if Western medicine can’t help Jessica, then perhaps the island’s voodoo believers can. Mrs. Rand—Paul and Wesley’s mother, who works at the island’s dispensary—can be heard dismissing voodoo as “native nonsense.”6 And when Betsy asks Mrs. Rand whether she should consider a voodoo cure for Jessica, Mrs. Rand warns against it. Later that night, however, Betsy takes Jessica to the hounfort—the center of voodoo worship on the island—and there she learns that Mrs. Rand has been posing as a spokesperson for the voodoo loa Damballah. Mrs. Rand tells Betsy that she “discovered the secret of how to deal with” the natives by using voodoo to trick them into using Western medicine and hygiene. As she relates, “It seems so simple to let the gods speak through me.” On the surface, Mrs. Rand is simply another Westerner using “voodoo” to dupe the islanders. But the film soon reveals that matters are not quite that straightforward. Mrs. Rand learns that there is to be an inquest into Jessica’s condition. Worried about the family secrets that will come out in court, Mrs. Rand tells her sons, Betsy, and the physician Dr. Maxwell that she is ready to turn herself in. Mrs. Rand begins by telling them, “Jessica is not insane. She is dead. Living and dead.” Dr. Maxwell, incredulous, asks, “Mrs. Rand, you’re not seriously trying to tell me that my patient is a zombie?” Mrs. Rand says, “I’m not mad. It’s true. I did it.” She calls on Betsy to explain her work at the hounfort, but Maxwell

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dismisses this, saying, “I’ve often talked a little voodoo to get medicine down a patient’s throat.” Mrs. Rand counters, But it was more than that, Doctor. I entered into their ceremonies. I pretended I was possessed by their gods. It’s what I did to Jessica. It’s when she wanted to go away with Wesley. That night I went to the hounfort. I kept seeing her face smiling because she was beautiful enough to take my family in her hands and tear it apart. Drums, the chanting, the lights. I heard a voice speaking in the sudden silence. My voice. I was speaking to the houngan. I was possessed. I told him the woman at Fort Holland was evil and asked him to make her a zombie.

That night, Mrs. Rand explains, Jessica came down with the fever that made her a zombie. Dr. Maxwell scoffs at the idea: “You were tricked by your own imagination, Mrs. Rand.” The whole room seems against her, so Mrs. Rand eventually concedes, walking away defeated. Later that night, it becomes clear that Wesley believes his mother’s story. Still, Paul is defiant, chalking it all up to suggestion, telling his brother, “You’re thinking just as they want you to think,” effectively implying that only those without the ability to rationally weigh the facts would believe in the power of voodoo. The film ends ambiguously, without definitively saying which brother—or view of voodoo—is correct, and thus leaves Mrs. Rand’s power up to the audience’s interpretation. She may have been the cause of her daughter-in-law’s zombification, or she simply may have convinced herself that she caused the woman’s trance. Dr. Maxwell and Paul believe that Mrs. Rand has let the island get the best of her. Robin R. Means Coleman believes that the film makes blackness, in the form of voodoo, “so infectious that it imperils Whites, particularly White women.”7 In her estimation, we can see how infectious blackness is both in Mrs. Rand’s obsession with voodoo and in how Jessica Holland seemingly becomes infected with voodoo when she becomes a zombie. I think this reading is apt, but I would add that if we look at both the racial and gendered aspects of Mrs. Rand’s life on the island, we can read her embrace of voodoo not only as infection but also as a way for someone otherwise rendered powerless to gain some agency within the power structures of the island. Given her age and her gender—and the typical ageism of Western culture, especially toward women—Mrs. Rand is at a disadvantage vis-à-vis her sons, and she does not have control over them. She has to ask Betsy to ask Paul

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to remove a decanter from the dinner table so that Wesley won’t be tempted to drink. Mrs. Rand is frustrated that her patients at the dispensary won’t take her advice, which led her to the hounfort in the first place. Plus, she didn’t feel as if she had any power to stop Jessica Holland from tearing her family apart. Voodoo—but also, especially regarding Jessica, zombie making—offers Mrs. Rand a sense of control over her life. The film undercuts this sense of control, though, by having Dr. Maxwell and Paul dismiss her investment in voodoo and then by leaving the end of the film ambiguous. Instead of showing abnormal sexual desires, as their male counterparts do, female zombie masters are overly invested in suspect cultures. Dr. Myra is a communist, but she is also single-mindedly devoted to her science, to the point of being unable to take care of herself. She is even zombified—a fate that rarely befalls white male zombie masters. Mrs. Rand buys into the voodoo beliefs of Saint Sebastian. Many white male zombie masters use voodoo to create zombies, but few of them are genuinely invested in voodoo beyond that. Some don’t even learn voodoo but employ proxy voodoo experts, as in King of the Zombies or Voodoo Man. Thus, Mrs. Rand’s belief in voodoo goes far deeper than that of many of her male counterparts, and it is this belief that is her undoing—dismissed by one son and the island’s white male doctor, she must look on as her other son decides to act, killing Jessica and himself as a means of ending the zombie curse. White female zombie masters are thus far more neutered than their male counterparts. Strangely enough, they also fare far less well than the black women who use voodoo in slave-style films.

The Power of Voodoo

Not many women of color become zombie masters in their own right, but like Mrs. Rand, many of them find their embrace of voodoo culture empowering. Unlike her, they are not as easily shut down. The first instance of a black female zombie master comes early in the zombie’s tenure in film—the second feature-length US zombie film, Ouanga (1935). This race film tells the story of a West Indian mulatto woman named Clelie.8 In the film, Clelie’s white lover of the past two years, Adam, has just dumped her. He has been on vacation in the United States, and upon his return to the fictional Paradise Island in the West Indies, he decides to marry his white fiancée, Eve.

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Fig. 4.1. Clelie accepts a protective charm from her houngan (Ouanga ©

Terwilliger Productions, 1935)

Implicitly gesturing at so many real-life white male–black female colonial relationships, he tells Clelie: “You were wonderful during those two lonely years, and I liked you immensely, but . . .”9 To which she responds, “Oh, I know. I’ve heard it often enough. The barrier of blood that separates us can’t be overcome.” As he later notes, “You belong with your kind.” Clelie doesn’t take this rejection well and vows to regain Adam’s affections. She has a hard time accepting that her black blood taints her, but a friend reminds her that she can’t marry a white man, because she is black, even if she has white skin. Clelie retorts, “I’m white too, as white as she is.” But after Adam continues to spurn her, Clelie decides to own her blackness: “Black am I? Alright, I am black. I’ll show him what a black girl can do!” Clelie takes advantage of her knowledge of voodoo—her houngan has taught her well (fig. 4.1). She raises two black zombies to abduct Eve.10 But Clelie’s plans fall apart as Adam rescues his fiancée, and Clelie inadvertently causes her own death. Clelie’s death undercuts her effectiveness as a zombie master and an agent for any real change in the racial dynamics that govern the island. But what is noteworthy is that unlike Eve, who is prized for her (white) beauty, Clelie is not passive or docile. She is a wealthy woman— as shown by her clothing, her ability to travel freely, and her command

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of servants throughout the film—and an active agent in her own life, and even in her own death. Owning her blackness empowers Clelie. It is her access to black culture, specifically voodoo, that makes her attempt to destroy Eve possible in the first place. Clelie doesn’t turn to colonial culture to empower herself; rather, she turns to a native institution, which is far more effective than the white forces that try to counter it. It is, after all, voodoo that ultimately topples Clelie: after she loses a protective ouanga over which she once said, “Should I lose this, may evil and death come upon me,” a jealous black ex-lover attacks and kills her. This man is her undoing, but he is strongly aided by Clelie’s loss of her voodoo charm. Adam has nothing to do with her defeat. The actress Fredi Washington played Clelie. She specialized in tragic mulatto roles, and Clelie definitely inhabits the tragic mulatto stereotype: she is as much a victim of circumstance as anything. A friend reminds her that while she may look white, she is at heart black, and by implication, this blackness dictates how her life can be led. Clelie is thus never completely vilified in the film—the “tragic” part of her tragic mulatto status precludes that. Clelie may be the villain, but she is also the character the audience spends the most time with, and she is far more captivating than either Adam or Eve. Clelie rallies against the neocolonial system on the island, the one that tells her, both implicitly and rather explicitly, that she should stay with her own kind while never acknowledging that in order for her to have been born, someone must have ignored that dictate. Since zombie making carries blackness with it, Clelie’s decision to use voodoo and raise zombies reinforces her newfound commitment to her own blackness. Coleman notes, however, of the zombies that Clelie raises: “They are still reanimated empty vessels under someone else’s control. However, [Ouanga] removes from the audience’s memory colonial and occupation discourses in favor of . . . a new idiom dismantling the US’ culpability in forced labor.”11 In Coleman’s estimation, this structuring absence makes it seem as if blacks are wholly responsible for the exploitation of native labor on the island. Coleman’s reading is apt, but we must remember that Clelie turns to zombie making because the neocolonial situation on the island exploits her. She is stuck in a space that cannot see anything other than her black blood. To try to level the playing field, she turns to voodoo and raises zombies. Yes, technically, she is exploiting the bodies of her fellow islanders, and the film obscures any overt mention of a US role in colonizing the fic-

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tional island, which we may assume is a thinly veiled stand-in for Haiti, but if we focus on which avenues to gain agency are open to a mulatto woman on the island, we can see that voodoo and zombies are Clelie’s most logical recourse. She acts much as Mrs. Rand acts in I Walked with a Zombie. In George Terwilliger’s other foray into zombie screenplays, the race film The Devil’s Daughter (Leonard, 1939), he removes a white presence from the film altogether and deals with a pair of squabbling half sisters. Half-Haitian Isabelle stayed on the family’s banana plantation in Jamaica while Sylvia went to the United States and became educated. Upon Sylvia’s return, Isabelle becomes jealous of Sylvia, both because Sylvia inherited the plantation and because a local landowner named John is in love with her. A binary at play between the sisters further contrasts island life with American culture. The film positions Sylvia as the “good” sister, but also implies that her absence from island culture has put her at a disadvantage. Coleman observes, “Isabelle is depicted as the rough and tumble sister doing the hard work of running the plantation . . . Sylvia is depicted as having returned bourgeois . . . However, even this contrast is recast through a caution about the dangers of leaving home, becoming uppity, and losing touch with one’s people.”12 For much of the film, a con man hoodwinks Sylvia, and Isabelle seeks revenge on her half sister by accessing her knowledge of Obeah and pretending that she can turn Sylvia into a zombie.13 Isabelle has Haitian blood and Sylvia does not, and Isabelle also has a firm grounding in local culture and religion, which Sylvia does not. So although it is much ado about nothing in the end—the sisters reconcile, and Sylvia gives Isabelle the plantation—the woman with stronger roots in West Indian culture has more power to enact her desires than the woman who has been gone so long that she doesn’t “understand the folks down here anymore.”14 In many slave-style zombie films, one can read blackness as aligned with agents of evil or villainy; however, these two films suggest a reappraisal. Clelie and Isabelle are both positioned as bad, and yet both films also position the women as victims of circumstances outside their control. Clelie is one of many characters enacting the tragic mulatto stereotype, and although she must die at the end for generic conventions to work—so that we may have, in other words, the white heterosexual pairing classical horror films tend to give us—Clelie has been wronged because she has black blood. Similarly, Isabelle, the daughter who stayed home and did not leave, is the loser when the family will

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is read; everything goes to Sylvia, the daughter who abandoned the island for life in New York. Again, as with Clelie, Isabelle’s anger might be justified. Access to nonwhite culture, then—in these films explicitly, and implicitly in other films—means access to forms of power that exist outside dominant institutional systems in neocolonial situations. It also tends to render women of color as visible and active agents in their own lives in a genre that typically renders them invisible. In some slave-style films, native institutions, voodoo in particular, offer the only means some people have for redressing their problems. Clelie, for instance, can’t go to the local authorities to complain about Adam’s treatment of her; neither can Isabelle, but they both can turn to voodoo (or Obeah, in Isabelle’s case). It is something they know, and it offers them a sense of control in a space where they might otherwise have none. Voodoo isn’t available only to black women, though. In I Walked with a Zombie, both Mrs. Rand, the would-be zombie master, and Nurse Betsy seek out voodoo when the imported (white) institutions of the colonizers fail to yield a satisfying solution. Thus, the film makes clear a dissatisfaction with the efficiency of dominant institutions like Western medicine.15 In the case of Jessica Holland, Western medicine does nothing other than explain away her condition—it offers no means of altering her state. Voodoo, on the other hand, offers not only an alternative explanation for Jessica’s state, but also potential solutions to her problem. In I Walked with a Zombie, voodoo is a technology used by the colonized to oppose the colonizer’s worldview. Not only do the natives of Saint Sebastian go to the hounfort to seek their answers, but Mrs. Rand and Dr. Maxwell also admit to using voodoo to help administer Western medicine. Paul Holland even suggests that the island’s voodoo practitioners have designed the voodoo ceremonies at the hounfort in part to scare nonbelievers like him and his brother. Even if Paul and Dr. Maxwell ultimately dismiss the real-world efficacy of voodoo, both of them admit that it has tremendous symbolic power as something the “natives” use to push back against white civilization. In Voodoo Island (Le Borg, 1957), white entrepreneurs try to purchase and develop an unnamed South Pacific island where they plan to build a luxury hotel. The first expedition to survey the island disappeared except for one man, who returned to the mainland zombified. The developers wonder what happened to him. Rumors abound of vicious natives and malicious witchcraft, so the developers send a second expedition. It discovers that there are, indeed, natives who are

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none too happy with the planned encroachment on their island. Their spokesman relates how outsiders have forced his people to move from island to island throughout their history. He says, “Your world moved in to crush ours.”16 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 second expedition’s crew become zombified, their leader begins to believe in the power of voodoo. He 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, through the use of voodoo. It is a technology of the oppressed that provides these natives a means of countering the Western world. Perhaps it is too much to suggest that just the depiction of voodoo in a film offers a sort of oppositional stance. But it is apt to do so for those films in which voodoo is the only, or one of the only, means of resistance available to a particular group. In many slave-style films, those who operate outside normative ideas of race, ethnicity, nation, gender, or class often turn to voodoo, and in particular to zombie manufacture, to beat the system that would otherwise disenfranchise them. Even in White Zombie, voodoo offers the white zombie master Murder Legendre a means of economic gain (until he decides to focus on seducing and zombifying beautiful Madeline Parker). Voodoo grants all these people the means to get ahead, but their use of voodoo is nonetheless vilified in the films, since voodoo is typically presented as the recourse of the morally corrupt. Voodoo and access to voodoo culture are sometimes transmitted through a black woman in slave-style films. For instance, Dr. Sangre in King of the Zombies must rely on his maid, Tahama, and her knowledge of voodoo rites in order to try and gain US military secrets via zombiism. Tahama is aligned with the forces of evil, but the point is, they couldn’t operate without her knowledge. In Revenge of the Zombies, Scott Warrington learns that his sister, Lila von Altermann, has died. Suspecting foul play, he takes Detective Larry Adams to her home in the Louisiana bayou to investigate. They learn that Lila’s husband, Dr. von Altermann, has zombified her. Even though his black housekeeper, Mammy Beulah, still works for him, the film makes clear that she is not in league with the doctor. What is remarkable about Mammy Beulah’s place within the film is that, true to the mammy stereotype, she knows more about what is going on than anyone else. When the zombified Lila disappears and

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Dr. von Altermann questions Mammy Beulah and his other servants about it, he acknowledges that his black servants know more about what is going on in his household than he does. The black maid Rosella snaps at Dr. von Altermann’s accusations that she is always eavesdropping, and Mammy Beulah plays dumb in the face of his questioning. Still, Mammy Beulah is the only one who knows how to find Lila. She uses a voodoo call that Lila responds to. Mammy Beulah’s observational prowess gives her power within the household—and it is a power that the good guys rely on to fortify their position. Mammy Beulah is a master at influencing events to her advantage; the stereotypical mammy is usually loyal, but Beulah’s loyalty isn’t immediately comprehensible to outsiders. She continues to work for Dr. von Altermann even after realizing he has murdered his wife and zombified her. Beulah knows Dr. von Altermann is a bad guy, but since he can directly influence her livelihood, she plays dumb with him. In addition, Beulah knows Scott and the others are trying to take down Dr. von Altermann, so she puts them in positions to learn what they need in order to accomplish that. Thus, Beulah does not enact any change on her own; rather, she manipulates members of the household in order to ensure a positive outcome. In the film, zombies and the servants both say, “Yes, master” to Dr. von Altermann, which effectively makes the two groups equivalent. On one hand, Lila’s zombification becomes all the more about reducing her to both servitude and blackness. But there is also a way to read Lila and Beulah as doubles for each other, given the equating of servants and zombies. Most of the servants and zombies seem to know their place, but Lila, as discussed in the previous chapter, and Beulah both act beyond the parameters of what their station should allow, even while they fulfill the servant or zombie role. The portrayal of Beulah might be an example of an actress trying to battle a stereotype from within. Madame Sul-Te-Wan, who played the character, might have been seeking to find a way to stretch the stereotypical mammy role into something more nuanced. Still, Beulah also illustrates the kind of power that stereotypical mammies have— they are usually imagined as surrogate mothers within white households and are often put in charge of other servants. Donald Bogle sees black servants of films of the 1930s and 1940s as being “always around when the boss needed them,” but notes that this readiness to help isn’t necessarily entirely negative, since it points to the endurance of these characters.17 In Mammy Beulah’s case, endurance means playing along

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with the Nazi Dr. von Altermann long enough for Scott, Larry, and Lila to get the upper hand and defeat him. Thus, in this film, as in Ouanga and The Devil’s Daughter, black femininity is active and knowledgeable and can’t be rendered as invisible as it is in most slave-style films. In all these cases, black femininity stands as a threatening challenge to white patriarchy. Mammy Beulah may not strike down Dr. von Altermann herself, but she makes sure that Lila—in many ways, her double—is eventually able to do so.

Blaxploitation Zombies

Black femininity’s power is perhaps nowhere as strangely illustrated as in The House on Skull Mountain (1974). This blaxploitation film centers on the gathering of Pauline Christophe’s four greatgrandchildren after her death. Just before she dies, Pauline, the black matriarch, sends letters to these four cousins, who have never met, so that they may gather and learn more about their family. As the letter tells them: “Yours is no common ancestry but a proud and powerful line.”18 Complicating matters, at least for some of the cousins, is the discovery that one of the four, Andrew Cunningham, is white. After a series of accidents, two of the cousins end up dead, leaving Andrew and his beautiful cousin Lorena Christophe to figure out what is going on at the Christophe estate. In the beginning, Lorena is quick thinking and verbally aggressive, but the film soon positions her like a white heroine in a slave-style zombie film—as a female in jeopardy from the sexual advances of a zombie master. Lorena undergoes a quick transformation into a passive victim, and her entire look changes as she comes under the spell of a houngan. In the beginning of the film, Lorena’s hair is up, and she wears a pantsuit (fig. 4.2). As the houngan’s influence takes hold, her hair comes down, and she ends up in a frilly white nightgown (fig. 4.3). Lorena’s behavior mimics this cosmetic change. At the beginning of the film, she is quick witted and active in trying to bring the cousins together to figure out what is going on, but as the houngan takes over, she becomes passive and nearly voiceless. At that point, it is up to Andrew to act in the role traditionally given to young white males in earlier slave-style films: he becomes her rescuer. There is a sexual element to the houngan’s desire for Lorena, but part of the reason this man, Thomas Pettione, wants her is because of

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Fig. 4.2. Lorena Christophe at the beginning of The House on Skull Mountain

(© Twentieth Century Fox, 1974)

Fig. 4.3. Lorena Christophe later in the film, under the control of the voodoo houngan Thomas Pettione (The House on Skull Mountain © Twentieth Century Fox, 1974)

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. Plus, the use of the name Christophe is no accident. As the film explains, the Christophes are supposed to be descendants of Henri Christophe, the real-life Haitian revolutionary who later became the country’s president. A link to Haiti and to revolutionary power is thus made. During the film’s climactic battle, Thomas tries to kill Andrew as they vie for

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Lorena’s life. Remembering Pauline’s letter, Andrew calls on a voodoo loa and the spirit of Henri Christophe to save him, and it works. Andrew is a bit of an enigma. As a white male hero facing off against a black houngan to protect a damsel in distress, he would seem to be problematic, especially in a blaxploitation film. Andrew is, after all, enacting all the generic conventions that serve to reestablish white patriarchy in the face of black monstrosity. 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. 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 be enjoying his privilege as a white male hero, although he does not get the girl in the end. There are some implicit suggestions of an interracial relationship between Andrew and Lorena early in the film, but the story shuts down that possibility in the end, perhaps because she is his cousin and more visibly black than he is. Yet seeing Andrew as a white male hero complicates the film’s position as a blaxploitation film—even with their problems, many of these films paid lip service to the idea of a black hero or heroine.19 Alternatively, Andrew could be read as embracing his blackness—a stretch, perhaps, but it is his black ancestry that gives him the power to protect himself and spurs him to take on the task of delving into the Christophe family’s history. But it isn’t actually Andrew who defeats Thomas. It is Pauline Christophe. Early in the film, we learn that Pauline was a powerful mambo. Her former maid relates: “That old woman had more power than we ever dreamed.” Thomas Pettione dismisses her: “Pauline is dead . . . and the dead have no power. Only the living have power.” Not only is Thomas overestimating his strength—Pauline trained him, after all—but he ignores the power of the dead and of one’s ancestors in a way that Andrew does not. At the film’s climax, Thomas tells Andrew, “While Pauline Christophe was alive, you were protected, but now, your death will please me much.” He then raises Pauline from the dead as a zombie to kill Andrew. But when Andrew calls on the goddess Erzulie and his Christophe blood to protect him, the zombified Pauline turns on Thomas and kills him: great-grandma protects her own, and

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black femininity proves to be the most powerful agent at work on Skull Mountain.20 The film may not make a direct assault on white patriarchy, but it does challenge it. The white male (who is really black and who calls on his black blood and voodoo loas to protect him) is destabilized, and black femininity in the form of Pauline Christophe is valorized: she turns potential slavery as a zombie on its ear. The blaxploitation film Sugar Hill (1974) makes a more direct assault on white patriarchy. Diana “Sugar” Hill wants revenge on the white men who killed her boyfriend, Langston. Langston owned a profitable club—called, appropriately enough, Club Haiti—and wouldn’t sell to the local white mob boss, Morgan, so Morgan had him killed. Sugar inherits the club and quickly surmises who must have killed Langston. She turns to a voodoo priestess, Mama Maitresse, for help in seeking vengeance for Langston. Morgan takes over the role traditionally inhabited by white zombie masters in earlier slave-style films: his whiteness—ostensibly standing in for all (corrupt) whiteness—is suspect from the beginning. First of all, he is a mobster, so he operates on the wrong side of the law. Second, he distorts capitalism—instead of letting market forces dictate things, he kills his rival to take over his club. Finally, in his attraction to Sugar, he is the one living character to openly admit to interracial desires. His desire for Sugar could work much like earlier zombie masters’ desires for virginal white women, but because Sugar Hill is a blaxploitation film, it doesn’t demonize his attraction to Sugar; rather, it paints him, as a representative of the corrupt white establishment, as inherently bad. Blaxploitation films had a number of problems, not least being a largely white-produced genre intended to make money off African American audiences. But in many ways, the films spoke to the realities of systemic disenfranchisement and to fantasies of rising up against white hegemony. To this end, Ed Guerrero notes that while these films didn’t necessarily allow for any “real political consciousness” to awaken in spectators, they still harked back to the African American oral tradition, in which “the sly victories of the . . . trickster persona were one of the few ways that African Americans could turn the tables on an unjust racist society.”21 In many films, the hero or heroine adopted this persona when rallying against injustice, but in Sugar Hill, there is a very real trickster figure in the form of the real-world Vodou loa Baron Samedi. At the first meeting between Sugar and Mama Maitresse, Mama

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Maitresse is a bit hesitant to help her young friend, asking Sugar, “You have always been a disbeliever. Why do you now believe?” Sugar answers, “Because I want revenge!” Her answer satisfies Mama, who agrees to help Sugar. Thus, in both this film and The House on Skull Mountain, entry into Vodou or voodoo culture comes via a maternal figure. Convinced of Sugar’s willingness to go forward, Mama Maitresse has Sugar call on Baron Samedi. He is the logical choice, being the loa of the dead and the loa of resurrection. He is also a logical choice because he is something of a trickster; he has quite a reputation as a rapscallion—he is charming but also fond of drinking, smoking, women, and dirty jokes. Dressed in a top hat and tails—which adheres to traditional depictions of Baron Samedi—the character is almost comical, but his seeming buffoonery belies his power: he is the first indicator that none of those who use voodoo in the film are quite what they appear to be. Mama Maitresse looks like a fragile old woman, not a mambo. Baron Samedi seems like a prankster, not a powerful loa. Sugar is ostensibly a fashion photographer mourning the loss of her boyfriend, not a vindictive heroine slowly eliminating the white mob in town. What the white world might see is not what is lurking underneath the surface. Part of the incantation to call forth the Baron includes Mama Maitresse asking, “Where does the power come from?” and Sugar answering, “The living among the dead.” Mama Maitresse then asks, “Who can use the power?” and Sugar replies, “The dead among the living.” As with The House on Skull Mountain, we have a direct call to those who have gone before; here, that is literally the dead, but as with The House on Skull Mountain, the call is also a plea to one’s ancestors and, hence, to one’s past and one’s culture, meaning that both films see the importance of a connection with one’s past for being able to seek redress in this world. In both films, a community grounded in voodoo belief includes not only the living but also the dead, and this community is strong. Baron Samedi likes Sugar, and he agrees to help her seek vengeance. He gives her an army of the undead ready to do her bidding. Black zombies, wearing slave shackles and armed with machetes, rise from the ground. We learn that these men were intended for the American slave markets but died during the crossing; their owners dumped them in the swamps upon arrival. Baron Samedi and Sugar send them to kill the white bad guys in a perfect reimagining of a slave uprising. Here, black zombies are no longer background material; they are the

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hypervisible weapon that a black woman uses to seek her own form of justice, and their status as slaves is not sublimated but worn on their bodies and heard—through the clinking of chains—when they approach their intended victims. These are zombies who won’t let you forget the real-world traumas that created them. They are zombies who don’t make invisible the specter of slavery as most (safer, sanitized) versions of zombies do. This film not only shines a light on the real-world referent for the zombie, but also locates the power to effect change in traditional Vodou belief—in acknowledging one’s ancestors and past and not shying away from the realities of that past. Sugar can avenge Langston because she has access to voodoo. She uses it to circumvent the ineffectual, plodding legal system and seek justice. The black policeman assigned to Langston’s case suspects that Morgan killed Langston and that Sugar may be behind the deaths of Morgan’s crew, but he can’t prove it. When this policeman, Valentine, suspects a connection between the deaths and voodoo, he goes to a white expert on the religion, further undercutting his ability to act. Sugar went to a black believer rather than someone who studies the religion from a distance. Valentine never does more than show up after the fact and tell Sugar to be careful. As a policeman, he is always one step behind. Sugar, however, is ahead of the game. She can pretend she is interested in Morgan’s offer to buy Langston’s club while she methodically uses her zombies to kill off his men. Plus, as Sugar’s zombies kill Morgan’s men, Morgan’s men become zombies who serve Sugar. She thus outwits both the legal system and an organized crime syndicate, turning mobsters into zombies. All the men in Sugar’s life appreciate her savvy, along with her good looks. Baron Samedi makes his attraction to her clear, and the policeman, Valentine, likewise seems interested. And as mentioned above, she piques Morgan’s interest. After a visit from Sugar, Morgan comments on how classy she is. His white girlfriend responds: “That ain’t class; that’s color,” to which he replies, “Well, whatever it is, you could use some of it.” Baron Samedi agrees; in payment for use of his army of the undead, Sugar gives him the white girlfriend. Baron Samedi says he would have preferred Sugar. These interactions set up a dichotomy between black and white femininity that replicates the notion that ideal (white) femininity is passive and pure in contrast to overly sexualized (and frighteningly active) black femininity. But since this is a blaxploitation film, it turns that racial logic on its head: not only is Sugar more intelligent, more refined, and more attractive than Morgan’s girlfriend,

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Fig. 4.4. Diana “Sugar” Hill in her nonthreatening attire (Sugar Hill © AIP, 1974)

but Morgan’s girlfriend is by no stretch of the imagination pure—her association with Morgan largely negates that; she exists mostly as arm candy, while Sugar is the most active character in the film. Sugar’s ability to trade on her attractiveness becomes part of her arsenal, and in this she provides a stunning contrast to Lorena Christophe and any number of white heroines from earlier slave-style zombie films. Lorena begins The House on Skull Mountain competent and dressed in a smart pantsuit, but she ends up passive, dressed in a frilly white nightgown. This costuming follows generic tropes fairly closely: Madeline in White Zombie, Barbara in King of the Zombies, and the teenage girls of Teenage Zombies, to name just a few, all end up as damsels in distress by the climax of the films. They do not all undergo the same transformation in clothing (although Madeline certainly does), but each of them is made passive in her transformation into zombie. Sugar, on the other hand, is never in danger of becoming zombified, since she wields the power to control zombies herself. Sugar’s costume transformations are all about pretending to be the damsel in distress. She uses her femininity as a tool or ruse almost from the beginning. When she tries to appear passive and less threatening, she tends to wear dresses and contemporary suits, and her hair is straight or tied in a scarf (fig. 4.4). When she attacks Morgan’s men, though, she wears her hair in an Afro and wears a white spandex

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Fig. 4.5. Sugar’s costume when she is a threat as a zombie master (Sugar Hill ©

AIP, 1974)

one-piece suit, trimmed in red (fig. 4.5). She uses one look when she wants the police or her enemies to think of her in a certain way, and another when she is ready to take her revenge. Her appearance thus signals when she is finished playing the passive victim. Harry M. Benshoff suggests: “Sugar’s Afrocentrism, like her use of voodoo, is a sign of her power but also of her monstrosity and violence.” He believes that the film relies on stereotypical tropes of voodoo—the use of drums and zombies, for instance—in order to produce a “lingering racist discourse of Negro bestiality.”22 This reading assumes that Sugar Hill, like so many slave-style films, couldn’t offer up a more nuanced picture of Vodou or voodoo, one that was both stereotypical and respectful. Sugar does take on a more Afrocentric look when she is threatening (or killing) her enemies, and her actions could align her with the monstrous—she is, after all, a zombie master. Yet Sugar has no other way to seek justice. The police are ineffective, and while the voodoo of the film may retain the stereotypical and racist qualities of classical depictions, the narrative nevertheless presents voodoo as a rational and effective means of seeking justice. The legal system may fail to protect Langston and Sugar, but voodoo provides her with an agency she can’t find elsewhere. From the beginning, the film positions Sugar and the voodoo she wields as right in comparison with Morgan and the mob— it may be simplistic to reduce everything to good guys versus bad guys,

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but the film clearly marks Sugar and voodoo as good, and Morgan and his men as cruel, racist murderers. As the film reaches its climax and Morgan faces Sugar near the swamps where Baron Samedi raised his zombies, Sugar knows she has the upper hand. She waves a torch in Morgan’s face, taunting him, “Show us. Show us what a big man you are.” Morgan runs away from her, screaming, only to find himself falling into the swamp and sinking to his death. Even with the problems of the contrasting of black and white femininity, or Sugar’s need to seek the help of a male-identified loa, the film presents black femininity as both attractive and destructive. Sugar embraces earlier stereotypes of black femininity, turning negatives into something positive—yes, black females can wield voodoo power; yes, they can be sexual beings; yes, they can take down white patriarchy, and yes, they are the good guys for doing so. Zombie Nation also gives us black females who use voodoo power to make the world a better place. The film’s empowered female zombies are white, but a group of black voodoo priestesses raises and guides them. As discussed in chapter 3, embracing their status as zombies enables the zombie women to seek justice against their killer and the corrupt system that trained and protected him. This attempt to redress past wrongs would be for naught if not for the black female priestesses who bring the zombies back in the first place. In an inversion of the real-world master-slave relationships so often mimicked in slave-style zombie films, here black women serve as masters of their white female zombies—benevolent masters who lead the white women to a place of empowerment and fulfillment as zombies. Rather than being pitted against each other, black and white women work together to take down white patriarchy. Empowerment, in each of these films, then, comes from embracing zombie culture, and for white women this means embracing black femininity. Black women are at their most able when they are using voodoo. White women, perhaps because of the privileges of whiteness, have more options, but their access to voodoo culture is limited and must be channeled through people of color.

That Voodoo That You Do So Well

In cannibal-style films, the links with voodoo culture, whether positive or negative, are usually nonexistent. Zombiism is the result of an infection whose causes are rarely supernatural. As discussed in

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chapter 2, with the films of George A. Romero, notably Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead, many scholars have treated the introduction of black protagonists as a turn in racial depictions in zombie films. Most slave-style films envision people of color as sidekicks, villains, or zombies, and many cannibal-style films envision much more diverse groups of the living. Those who argue that the diversity in the films of Romero and in other cannibal-style films is a sign of a more progressive racial stance may have missed the handful of slave-style films that treat Vodou with at least a modicum of respect. Romero created strong black male characters, and many other contemporary filmmakers have followed suit, but women of color are almost nonexistent in contemporary cannibal-style films, and thus the few films that render women of color visible today stand out even more. The fact that any slave-style film would make women of color visible, let alone grant them a position of relative power is extraordinary and points to the ways in which the use of voodoo in these films could become empowering for those otherwise marginalized. The voodoo on display in these films isn’t necessarily the voodoo so often seen in US films. It is a bit more respectful. It doesn’t quite approach a thoughtful depiction of Vodou, but it shows that the Americanized form of voodoo can sometimes represent the power of Vodou and not just present a derogatory bastardization of it. Slave-style films often posit Vodou the belief system as voodoo, the sinister and strange caricature, but films such as Sugar Hill and Zombie Nation create a space where this voodoo caricature begins to reapproach Vodou. In these films, access to this hybridized Vodou-voodoo helps marginalized people seek redress: the islanders of Voodoo Island, Clelie in Ouanga, and certainly Sugar in Sugar Hill are all able to seek revenge against those who wronged them via voodoo, and voodoo is really the only viable option these people have. Clelie can’t go to the island police to complain about Adam’s shoddy treatment of her. Likewise, the islanders of Voodoo Island can’t turn to some governing body to make the developers stop, and Sugar knows that the police are going to prove ineffective in solving Langston’s murder. In these films, power to enact change comes from being able to access one’s home culture or family knowledge via voodoo. In Ouanga, Clelie executes her plan because she has learned the secrets of voodoo from her houngan. In Voodoo Island, the story of the times the Western world pushed their ancestors out of their homes has emboldened the islanders to act. In The House on Skull Mountain, Andrew saves

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himself by evoking the names of his ancestors and a Vodou loa. And in Sugar Hill, Sugar, seeking vengeance, returns to what she had turned her back on. In spaces where they might be rendered powerless or invisible, the people able to call on their culture have access to an alternative technology of resistance in the form of voodoo. With the exception of Andrew, who faces a black voodoo priest, the Vodouists in each of these films face a threat from a white male, and the films present voodoo as an efficient, although not always successful (in Clelie’s case), means of countering white male hegemony. Voodoo in these films also helps women of color render themselves un-invisible: these women exist outside normative whiteness, and when they embrace voodoo culture, they become empowered to fight the white patriarchal systems that would otherwise keep them out of sight and out of mind. It is no coincidence that almost all these films deal with the theme of vengeance. Films with white zombie masters, such as White Zombie or Voodoo Man, might deal with sexual desire (as well as vengeance), but the films discussed in this chapter almost all spring from a place where a person of color is trying to right a wrong. Clelie wants to take revenge on the man who spurned her (and by extension, the cultural logic that says they can’t be together because of her race); the islanders want to keep the developers out of their ancestral land in Voodoo Island; Sugar is avenging Langston’s death; the priestesses of Zombie Nation are likewise helping the zombies avenge their deaths; even Thomas Pettione in The House on Skull Mountain seeks revenge for the prosperity of the Christophes relative to the Pettiones, and Mrs. Rand wants to stop Jessica Holland from destroying her family. In each case, voodoo offers a person in a disadvantaged position a means of redressing the imbalance in their lives. We could say that the use of voodoo renders these people as monstrous—they are accessing voodoo, after all. But that works only if one assumes that voodoo is inherently monstrous or malignant, and I would suggest that these films don’t position voodoo in that way at all. Voodoo isn’t intrinsically monstrous; these films show that it can be used for good or evil—everything depends on who uses it. Thus, Pauline Christophe’s voodoo is protective, while Thomas Pettione’s is destructive. Even in White Zombie, when Neil Parker and his friend Dr.  Bruner go off to face the zombie master Murder Legendre, they talk to a voodoo houngan first. Voodoo is thus not a malignant force; rather, what is important is that each of these films treats it as a force that has real power to effect change in the world.

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In films that make women of color who use voodoo and zombies over as monstrous, their monstrosity has less to do with voodoo itself than with their relative position in the cultural logic in which they find themselves: black women are always already monstrous under the logic of white patriarchy. In using voodoo to circumvent white male control, in making themselves visible in spaces and places where they are supposed to remain out of sight and out of mind, these women aren’t made monstrous—they are exposing the system that would make them over as monsters for merely existing, let alone for pushing back. If, as I have argued, zombie making—and, by extension, voodoo—carries with it blackness, then this blackness makes women of color hypervisible in a genre that otherwise renders them nonexistent. Besides allowing women of color to step out of the shadows, these films alter the representation of zombies. In Ouanga, the zombies are fairly stereotypical: slaves taken from the grave to help Clelie do what she can’t do by herself. At a time when most black film zombies were consigned to the background, it is noteworthy that the only zombies in this film are black. Regarding the ones in Sugar Hill, Coleman suggests, “The zombies are heroes. Identifying with the monsters .  .  . makes for ‘a pleasurable and a potentially empowering act’ as the zombies come to represent a pro-Black cadre of Black men doing away with ‘Whitey.’”23 Still, the zombies’ positioning as a positive force for change has more to do with Sugar’s positioning as good than with anything else—her actions to raise zombies closely mirror Clelie’s actions in Ouanga, and those zombies aren’t touted as heroes. In both instances, the zombies become the means by which a black woman can act in the world. Even the white zombies in Zombie Nation aren’t typical cannibals. They are a force for good, directed by their masters to hunt down a killer and root out sexism in the local police department. In each case, the film sidesteps the social death that these zombies would be expected to experience. The zombies of Ouanga become active agents within Clelie’s voodoo community; she cannot act without them. The zombies of Sugar Hill show this even more, and the zombie women of Zombie Nation not only find and destroy their killer but take over his police station as well. In the introduction, I outlined how some Rara bands in Haiti use zombi astral, or zombies of the spirit, as a form of power during their performances. In these films, we see a very similar use of zombies—they may still be slaves (although that is certainly debatable in Zombie Nation), but they are also powerful figures within the community: agents of change and tools of opposition.

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These films represent another way of living and being in the world via voodoo, and this depiction alters the very meaning of voodoo-based zombification. Some contemporary critics have lauded the racial presentations in contemporary cannibal-style zombie films as superior to those in slave-style films, but the praise ignores a trend. Certainly, many slavestyle films center on master-slave relationships and treat black culture as synonymous with black magic. But much more complex masterslave relationships are presented in some of these films, and voodoo is not always represented as a monolithic concept. When black women come into the frame, they are the most likely characters to recognize and take full advantage of the power that Vodou or voodoo has to offer. In several films, the destabilization offered by black women proves that women of color, in embracing voodoo and zombihood, are a very proud and powerful line indeed.

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5 | “Be Safe, Have Fun, Eat Brains” Playing the Zombie in Video Games

People understand zombies, but not everyone can answer the question, “What does it mean to play the zombie?” A l e x Seropi a n, v ideo ga me de v eloper

There is a point in the game Left 4 Dead (Valve South, 2008) that I always dread. Inevitably, my character becomes separated from those inhabited by my fellow players. I am someplace cramped and dark, and I cannot see far beyond my immediate surroundings. That is when I hear it: the sound of mouthy, wet shrieking. I know zombies are somewhere nearby, but I can’t see them, yet. Notwithstanding the arguments made in the previous chapters of this book, playing games like Left 4 Dead makes it easy to imagine the zombie as something malicious. When we talk about the zombie apocalypse, after all, most people aren’t picturing zombie hordes as heroes; in fact, the zombies are positioned as being at odds with the living—and that is putting it nicely. Even in slave-style films, unscrupulous zombie masters sometimes used armies of the undead against living interests; in cannibalstyle iterations, the dead are literally trying to eat the living. Zombies made a relatively easy transition from films to video games in the 1980s and 1990s. Game designers assumed that most players were familiar enough with the conventions of zombie cinema to understand the basic logic of facing off with cannibal-style zombies: aim for the head and kill them before they kill you. That makes zombies fairly easy adversaries to program; you don’t have to spend a lot of time explaining to players what to do. Yet video game zombies come in all shapes and sizes, and although most are mindless, bloodthirsty killers, some are thinking zombies, slave-style zombies, and even zombie heroes.

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This chapter explores zombie video games to ponder the question asked by Alex Seropian in the epigraph: what does it mean to play the zombie?1 On one hand, this question is relatively simple to address: if one takes the zombie character as a set of abilities that a player has access to, then the zombie character’s zombiness is relatively unimportant; it is simply the skin that the character wears while the player gets things done. But assuming for a moment that zombiness carries some sort of deeper meaning with it, playing as a zombie affords the player the opportunity to try on zombiness and use it. Given the active and sometimes rebellious extra-ordinary zombies that this book has pointed to in other media, the idea that zombiness could be beneficial—that it could help one win a fight—suggests that zombies in video games are most likely always already extra-ordinary: they push past narratives of victimization to posit the zombie state as one with agency. One might want to play as a zombie in a video game for a variety of reasons—because of the zombie’s associations with gross-out culture or because it offers one the chance to play as a “bad” guy or to perform unruly behavior—but taking up the zombie identity in this way necessarily alters what zombiness means. By putting playable zombies into conversation with ordinary—or at least what we might call more expected—zombies, a troubling binary becomes apparent. Much of the symbolic power of the zombie is predicated on expectations of typical zombie behavior: zombies are supposed to be mindless slaves or unthinking cannibals. Yet, as shown in previous chapters, American media has repeatedly tempered ordinary zombiness with extra-ordinary zombies who defy these expectations. This perceptible contrast between cultural expectations of zombiness and actual representations of zombies serves, in part, to underscore just how extra-ordinary the zombies who think, act, and speak really are. Becoming an ordinary zombie is literally dehumanizing. To be an extra-ordinary zombie is to reclaim at least some of one’s humanity. Both ordinary and extra-ordinary zombies people video games. Those games that imagine ordinary zombies as killable things necessarily differ from those that offer players extra-ordinary zombie characters, and in many games that present the opportunity to play as a zombie, other examples of ordinary zombies within the game will highlight the extra-ordinariness of one’s zombie character. In games such as Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel without a Pulse, World of Warcraft, and Planescape: Torment, ordinary zombiness becomes a foil to measure against extra-ordinary zombiness. The games that rhetorically justify the killing of ordinary zombie

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hordes reinforce the notion that there are beings who have lost their rights to life (by losing their status as human). Surprisingly, games with extra-ordinary zombies—those zombies we might imagine being the best argument against such thinking—end up doing much the same work. And that means that the question of what it means to play as a zombie takes on a chilling new dimension. My premise so far has been that some representations of zombies in US media have consistently pushed back against victimization and degradation, but what we have here are those very same extra-ordinary zombies being used to underscore how that victimization is appropriate for some bodies and not others. Some argue that video game players are often little more than zombies themselves, mindlessly pushing buttons and automatically reacting to visual and physical stimuli without much conscious thought, but I would contend that playing as a zombie in a video game never allows one to approach the ordinary zombie state. Although a player’s free will as a character goes only as far as the game’s design will allow it, even in playing as a zombie, one is never truly zombified. Extraordinary zombies might confront our expectations of what zombiness really is by giving us thinking, active zombies, but video games with inhabitable zombie characters overlay the extra-ordinary zombie with thinking, active, living players who are never in danger of being permanently dehumanized by their zombie state and whose loss of agency comes from submitting to the parameters of the game. Yet in playing as a zombie, one often plays as an extra-ordinary zombie in a gameworld that makes sharp contrasts between extraordinary zombies and the ordinary zombies who are forever trapped in their state. The extra-ordinary zombie becomes even more so: extraordinary to the second degree, as it were. Rather than reinforcing the zombie’s humanity or calling into question the logic that would mark some as inhuman and worthy of killing, the video game zombie’s extraordinariness further emphasizes the idea that some have full claims to human status and some exist outside the bounds of humanity. As we will see, to play as a zombie in a video game often means playing much more like a zombie master than a zombie.

“Thingified” Zombies

To answer the question of what it means to play the zombie, we first have to examine what it means to play as zombie killer. Zombies

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have been characters in video games since the 1980s, but a watershed moment in the genre came with the release of Biohazard (Resident Evil) in 1996. Besides cementing the survival horror genre, the game inspired a host of sequels, and many consider it to be the root of the zombie renaissance in the 2000s. The game’s creator, Shinji Mikami, cites George A. Romero’s “Dead” trilogy, among other films, as an inspiration for the game.2 In Matthew Weise’s essay “The Rules of Horror: Procedural Adaptation in Clock Tower, Resident Evil, and Dead Rising,” he details the links between Romero’s films and the Resident Evil games, noting that what we find in the Resident Evil games—and many games patterned after them—is an adherence to the basic rules of the cannibal-style film genre coupled with alterations based on the medium specificity of video games.3 Resident Evil, and the titles it has spawned, gives us fairly typical cannibal-style zombies. They are the undead, hungry for living human flesh, and they are adversarial in nature. These games position the player as a zombie killer, so these zombies usually exist as little more than cannon fodder. Zombies of this sort are ordinary, creatures of the mass. Moreover, they are hungry, infected creatures of the mass. By the logic of these games, zombies must be stripped of any individuality or any humanity, two factors that significantly play into the construction of extra-ordinary zombies. Conventional zombie-themed video games almost exclusively set up players to identify with (and inhabit the bodies of) zombie killers facing off against zombies. This setup mimics what one might expect with a cannibal-style film: in the war between the living and the living dead, a spectator would, presumably, identify with (and root on) the living. But as previously discussed, the living in several cannibal-style fi lms are, for the most part, not presented as wholly heroic. Romero’s own films—with their bickering families and trigger-happy soldiers— bear this out. Nonetheless, many zombie video games do not present such gray areas. Part of this lack of gray areas is built into the mechanics of the games. If the goal is to kill adversaries in order to win, then a player’s primary objective is to kill—and whether one’s adversaries are zombies, aliens, or unicorns is largely beside the point, since the games render death and killing in abstract terms. Amanda Phillips observes that in this way, games “encourage gamers to play with dying and killing.”4 Killing becomes a goal and affords the player’s character extended survival and other benefits. It is a means to a (pleasurable) end,

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which means that players might simply kill adversaries in order to accrue points or level up, but they might also experiment with how they kill adversaries or how they allow their character to be killed.5 The latter is another way in which games abstract the act of killing: one’s own death—except in very few situations—is largely without much consequence. The player simply has to start the level or fight over again. Games often trade on stark dichotomies of good and evil, positioning the player on the side of good and encouraging the player to deal with evil through violence. Thus, killing is built into the mechanics of the game, which the game justifies by making over adversaries as evil and threatening to the character’s life. In the Resident Evil or House of the Dead series, for instance, games position the player as a force for good who is encouraged—by their sheer number and ferocity—to kill zombies without thinking, let alone feeling remorse. The assumption is that the zombies are less than human, and this follows the logic of most zombie-killing games, which facilitate killing adversaries without thinking about it by stripping the undead of their humanity. The balance between the human and the nonhuman is vital for many video games in which what or whom one targets is often based on a binary that justifies the killing of the nonhuman—whether a zombie, an alien, or something else—in part because it is nonhuman. The nonhuman is the embodiment of something or someone existing in a state of exception, and killing the nonhuman, at its most basic, means going beyond the law for the sake of the greater good. This killing most often manifests in legally enforcing lawlessness toward some bodies in the name of protecting others. Thus, some forms of killing become acceptable, since the bodies considered worthy of death are deemed threatening to society’s existence, marked as lying beyond the law’s protection.6 Those beings in a state of exception have lost (or were never recognized as having) human status—or more to the point, they are considered expendable in the name of society’s continuing survival. As Gastón Gordillo observes, society deems some populations, such as zombies, so dangerous that whether they actively pose a threat is largely beside the point—they are threatening by their very existence and are thus killable.7 In this case, the killing isn’t murder; it is social preservation. According to our cultural expectations of zombiness, to be a zombie is to be the mute and impotent victim of either a malicious zombie master or a virus. This conception of zombiness easily parallels that of a being existing in a state of exception. Therefore, extra-ordinary zom-

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bies not only give us tales of individuals who are able to rise up from their victimization and defy dehumanization, but also point to a form of zombiness that doesn’t easily fall into the state of exception. Extraordinary zombies problematize the marking of some as expendable for the well-being of others. Yet most video games traffic in ordinary zombiness. The zombies don’t have names; they don’t have personalities. They are hungry monsters trying to kill the living, and this characterization (or more aptly, lack thereof) makes them easy to kill. Think about it: if hordes of shrieking, decomposing corpses were running toward you in a video game and your character had a gun, would you stop to think about whether shooting them would be murder? Probably not. Making the zombies justifiably killable is part of the logic of many games. Chris Suellentrop remarks on this when he notes the parallels between zombies and Nazis in video games: “Each is presented as a dehumanized enemy that won’t make players feel guilty for all the exultant violence they inflict.”8 By effectively negating a zombie’s humanity and linking the zombie state with aggressive behavior, many video games create a space where it is acceptable to kill zombies and such killing is not seen as murder. The games make over zombies as nonhuman, as things, and players generally aren’t encouraged to think about what or who they are killing when they are killing zombies. The games set up a hierarchy, positioning the living as those whose bodies do not exist in the state of exception and the zombies as those who do. To continue to justify this premise over the years, games have made zombies more and more threatening to the living. In early games, most zombies tended to move slowly, but games introduced faster zombies over time, and in games such as Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 5 (Capcom, 2005; 2009), zombies became smarter.9 Some games have extended the idea of zombiism to produce mutated animals and “zombies” that may have started off as human but have become something else entirely. For instance, in Left 4 Dead, besides garden-variety human zombies, there are special kinds of “infected,” including Boomers, Hunters, Smokers, Tanks, and Witches, each with its own morphology and special abilities.10 Whether fast or slow, smart or dumb, recognizably “human” or something else, the zombies of these games are meant to be read as monstrous—and expendable—adversaries. The assumption is therefore that almost any player encountering a zombie game for the first time will come with preconceptions about

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what a zombie is, how it will behave, and how it can be countered. These games assume that players are familiar with cultural expectations of zombiness, in particular that cannibal-style zombies are justifiably killable. In fact, this assumption of the zombie’s monstrosity is so ingrained in the expectation of ordinary zombiness that to question the killing of rampaging cannibal zombies seems ludicrous. This logic is essential for most of these games to work. Just as classical slavestyle zombie films had American heroes swoop in and save the day in order to generically reinscribe white male heteronormative thinking, these games use the killing of zombies to teach players that problems are solvable and that they can meet and defeat threats to the status quo and normalcy. For players to feel comfortable playing the game, then, they must feel comfortable killing zombies. This sense of comfort may account for the reconceptualization of space in some video games back toward what one would find in slavestyle texts. In cannibal-style zombie films, zombies attack and try to get into a living space; these are invasion stories. But many slave-style zombie films are about containing a zombie menace, and many video games incorporate this logic of containment. Thus, the games replace the trapped feeling of watching zombies try to get into protected spaces with the more powerful position of a player trying to keep zombies corralled in a specific space. In the former conception of space, one is confined; in the latter, one is in charge of keeping zombies trapped in a particular area. As noted in the introduction, these games envision the space currently occupied by zombies as limited; it is the player’s job to keep it that way. These contrasting presentations of space illustrate a difference between cannibal-style and video-game-style zombie texts that works to empower the player. Another is that in most games, while a player can expect to be killed by zombies at some point during gameplay, the experience is different from being killed by zombies in other media, for two reasons. First, most video games allow one to be reborn, again and again, as one learns, and eventually beats, the game. In some games one’s character can suffer permanent death (permadeath), but most allow characters to be reborn or to regenerate after their demise. Second, and most likely tied to this, in most zombie-themed games, even if a zombie bites or kills one’s character, one does not reanimate as one of the undead.11 The mechanics of the games do not adhere to that logic. Sometimes, what works in films simply wouldn’t make sense in video games. For instance, giving zombies extended moments of act-

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ing “human” is one of the ways in which films render zombies extraordinary, as, for instance, when the zombie Big Daddy tries to save his fellow zombies from human raiders in Land of the Dead. This kind of characterization wouldn’t be possible in a video game without some sort of prolonged interaction that allowed a player to see a zombie’s humanity. If the goal of the game is to kill zombies, the likelihood of having one of these moments is slight, especially if the zombies are fast or exist in a mass. Shooter games, for instance, often reward players for dispatching a threat quickly and effectively. Waiting around to see whether a zombie will act human makes no sense under that game logic. In many games, therefore, humanizing zombies would serve no purpose other than to make the killing of them more morally difficult. Sometimes, game features other than prolonged interaction with a zombie raise questions of the zombies’ humanity. For instance, in the video game Resident Evil 5, the game’s protagonists hunt black African zombies. Imagery from preview trailers of the game sparked intense online debate when they were released, especially because in viewing some trailers, it was hard to tell the difference between zombies and “normal” African civilians. In at least one trailer, it appeared that the only difference between “normal” citizens and zombies was the zombies’ red eyes. Some asked whether the game was promoting racist imagery that played into colonial desires to control or destroy Africa; others asked whether Africa was a random setting that carried no deeper meanings; and still others wondered whether the attention paid to black zombies in Resident Evil 5 elided the fact that Capcom had used white zombies as prey in previous Resident Evil titles.12 Many players insisted that the race of the zombies did not make the game racist, pointing out that no one raised much of a fuss when Resident Evil 4 cast Spanish villagers as its zombies. Others responded to that claim by pointing to the loaded history of images of white soldiers engaging with African peoples. I would add that Resident Evil 4 participates in a disturbing Othering of white Europeans: the Spanish villagers in question belong to a secretive religious sect and speak an unintelligible language. Given these traits, it is safe to assume that their whiteness is much more akin to the whiteness of white male zombie masters in slave-style films than to normative whiteness. In Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 5, then, we have examples of zombies that, for one reason or another, push back against total thingification. Some players recognize a humanity in these zombies that makes it problematic to kill them. In his piece on The Walking Dead:

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Season One video game (Telltale Games, 2012) for the New York Times, Chris Suellentrop noted that this game, in particular, tried to complicate the notion of zombies as things by introducing the player to either nonplayer characters who were bitten and were going to become zombies or zombies with a former relationship to the player’s character.13 In other words, the game humanizes some zombies, allowing their thing-ification to go only so far. But a zombie’s humanization or thingification often rests largely in the eyes of the beholder. For instance, the creators of the game No More Room in Hell (Kazan, 2011; 2013) faced an onslaught of criticism when news leaked that the survival horror game allowed players to kill zombified children. The game’s project manager addressed the criticism: “Part of our goal was to create a zombie game not based on killing and action, but on tension and fear and moral and ethical choice. We are attempting to simulate a real-world collapse of society . . . If you cannot handle it, do not play the game.”14 It seems, then, that there are lines that many players won’t cross, even when killing zombies. Strangely enough, though, what makes zombies extra-ordinary, and hence humanizes them, in other media doesn’t necessarily humanize them in video games. Almost across the board, intelligence in video game zombies is manifest in their ability to take up weapons, use them, and swarm as a coordinated mass. It doesn’t humanize them as much as it makes them powerful adversaries. Some video game zombies are able to communicate with one another—for example, the unintelligible zombie-speak of the Resident Evil 5 zombies or the bile that infected Boomers in Left 4 Dead can spit onto players, attracting other zombies. Again, this ability to communicate doesn’t humanize the zombies, as it might in a film like Land of the Dead. Rather, it makes them more effective killers. Even “cute” zombies support this contention: while the zombies of Plants vs. Zombies (PopCap, 2009) are, technically, decomposing corpses hungry for human brains (and plants), the game humanizes them via costuming and behavior. There are disco zombies that dance, football-playing zombies wearing their uniforms, and even zombies in party hats. The cuteness is part of the lure of this strategy game: zombies that are family friendly. These zombies are also smart. In most modes of the game, players oppose incoming zombie hordes, which involves planting a special army of plants that will stop or slow down the zombies. Some of the plants can shoot at zombies; others can block their path or cause them to turn on their fellow zombies. The zom-

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bies have developed defenses against these plants. Some carry newspapers to deflect hits; others tie balloons to themselves to float above the action; still others carry pickaxes to tunnel under attacking plants. As with the more grotesque zombie adversaries of many zombie video games, while their costuming and actions may make the zombies adorable, it doesn’t remove them from the state of exception. Thus, what works to humanize zombies in many zombie films merely serves to differentiate risk in many video games. If I see a zombie with a screen door in Plants vs. Zombies, I know what to plant to best destroy it; likewise, in Left 4 Dead, if I see a female infected with long claws that is crying, I can assume it is a Witch and avoid it. What makes zombies extra-ordinary—and, by extension, humanized and less likely to fully occupy a state of exception—in films is what allows a player to strategize against them in video games. These zombies, then, don’t seem extra-ordinary—even if they are “intelligent.” Rather, games render zombies as adversaries that players should avoid or kill, and their intelligence, weaponry, and costuming merely reinforces this point.

Exploiting Things

Adversarial zombies might be the most intuitive fit with a state of exception, but they are far from the only kind of zombie that video games thing-ify. In Voodoo Kid (Infogrames, 1997), players inhabit a character actively trying to save slave-style zombies. The player’s character reads a story about Baron Saturday, a rendering of the name of the Vodou loa Baron Samedi. Saturday is an evil Vodouist who has turned his ship’s crew into zombies and holds their souls captive. The character falls asleep and visits Captain Saturday’s ship in a dream. There, with the help of the captain’s butler, the character tries to defeat Saturday and free the zombified souls. Some of the game’s graphics and the constant tom-tom drumming on its soundtrack hark back to the stereotypical depictions of voodoo in slave-style films, but the game is noteworthy in its attention to real-world Vodou fact and its presentation of zombies as exploited workers.15 The game does not imagine the player’s power coming from exploiting zombie labor, but nonetheless positions its players as saviors, not unlike the multitude of white American males who saved the day in slave-style films. Thus, the zombies of Voodoo Kid remain solidly zombified and unable to free them-

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selves from their servitude. There is little difference between them and the unindividuated masses of zombies in other video games. Instead of being things that players kill, these zombies are just things that players rescue. In the role-playing game (RPG) Planescape: Torment, one’s relationship to zombies is far more ambiguous. The protagonist, The Nameless One, wakes up in a mortuary, and is soon told, “The mortuary keepers use dead bodies as cheap labor.”16 These zombie workers aren’t fast, capable of speech, or necessarily intelligent, but they can provide crucial information. Some have notes or artifacts hidden on (or in) their bodies. Others serve useful functions. For instance, one acts as a post for attaching flyers and other important information in the town of Sigil, where most of the game takes place. Still, these zombies are pitiful characters. For instance, the post zombie (named, aptly enough, “Post”) has graffiti on it—and it is clear that the people of Sigil have treated it like a literal post and not a former living being. Also, The Nameless One sometimes must open up a zombie to retrieve a trinket or note hidden inside it. Throughout the game, everyone tries to avoid the dehumanized thing status of these worker zombies. In a game where death is not necessarily a permanent state, a player learns fairly quickly that waking up in the mortuary as a worker zombie is one of the worst of all possible fates. This becomes a game, then, that makes abundantly clear the true horrors of slave-style zombidom, not necessarily from the experience of playing a particular character but from encounters with worker zombies throughout the game. Unlike Voodoo Kid, which replicates the slave-style notion of swooping in and rescuing zombies at the end, Planescape: Torment does not make saving the zombies one of The Nameless One’s goals. In fact, he may kill them if he needs or wants to. They are objects that players can use and abuse as needed— true ordinary zombies. Similarly, some games allow one to become a zombie master. In the puzzle game Corpse Craft: Incident at Weardd Academy (Three Rings Design, 2008), the games Zombie Tycoon (Frima Studio, 2009) and Zombie Wranglers (Frozen Codebase, 2009), and the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) City of Heroes (Cryptic Studios / Paragon Studios, 2004–2012), players can strategically command groups of zombies.17 These games aside, the lingering notion—born in slave-style zombie fiction—that those who make or control zombies are somehow “wrong” remains. Ron Scott, in his discus-

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sion of players who play as the undead (Forsaken) in the MMORPG World of Warcraft or as Necromancers (zombie makers) in the action RPG Diablo II (Blizzard, 2000), notes that Blizzard, the company that developed both games, originally assumed that players would not want to play as “bad guys,” and in the case of World of Warcraft, “Blizzard even tried to stack the deck by making the undead difficult to play.”18 Contrary to expectations “many chose to play the undead instead of one of the other, more heroic races.”19 Still, at least in the case of the Necromancers in Diablo II, playing on the side of the undead wasn’t without its drawbacks, since being a zombie master necessarily meant relying on zombies to carry out one’s plans. Games in which one can become a zombie master update the colonial relationship between zombie slaves and their masters on display in slave-style films to include cannibal-style zombies. In these games, one succeeds by exploiting zombie labor, and since zombies are imagined largely as faceless hordes—things, really—they become highly expendable. In most zombie video games in which a player hunts zombies, making human bodies into zombie things obfuscates the ethical concerns about killing humans. By the same token, turning human bodies into zombie things and positioning players as powerful only to the extent that they exploit zombies elides ethical concerns one might have about using slave labor.20

Go Forth and Zombify

In a small number of games, one can play as a zombie. In the multiplayer online mode of Resident Evil Outbreak (Capcom, 2003), for instance, one can die and be reanimated as a zombie. There are modes in Dying Light (Techland, 2015) and Left 4 Dead that allow players to assume the role of zombie as well. In the logic of these games, playing as a zombie is not fundamentally different from playing as a zombie killer: as a zombie killer, one tries to destroy zombies; as a zombie, one tries to destroy zombie killers. The point is to kill what is placed in opposition to the player’s character. Zombification changes one’s targets, but the gameworld still operates under the presumption that zombies are bad. Playing as a zombie, then, means only temporarily flipping the script. On first glance, the game Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel without a Pulse seems to inhabit this kind of space. The game is set in a retro-

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Fig. 5.1. Stubbs the Zombie waving to his sweetheart (Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel

without a Pulse © Wideload Games, 2005)

futuristic 1950s town called Punchbowl, Pennsylvania, “a city built for the space age,” where friendly robots do menial work and where crime and poverty have been eliminated.21 As its founder, Andrew Monday, extols, Punchbowl offers life “free of all unpleasantness,” life as it was meant to be. A player plays as the character Stubbs, who suddenly pushes up from the ground on Punchbowl’s opening day and quickly eats a nearby resident, thus beginning his reign of terror.22 Yes, Stubbs is a zombie out to attack the living, eat their brains, and turn them into an army that will destroy Punchbowl, but this is no conventional tale in which the zombie is the bad guy, at least not completely. While wreaking havoc on the town, the player learns that Stubbs was a traveling salesman during the Great Depression. He bedded a local farm girl, and her father killed him. He rises two decades later to seek revenge and find his former sweetheart (fig. 5.1). Stubbs is a conventional cannibal-style zombie—he is visibly decomposing, eats brains, and groans unintelligibly—but the game also positions him as a man on a righteous mission. In Stubbs the Zombie, then, being bitten by a zombie has real consequences. The bitten return as zombies, providing the player with resources for Stubbs’s ongoing battle: Stubbs is a zombie master. He creates zombies with his bites; he can then call the zombies to him and send them off to attack other living residents, who, once bitten, can in turn infect and create even more zombies. Stubbs can also detach his arm and send it scurrying on reconnaissance missions, during which, if he can attach it to a living character’s head, he can “possess” that character, gaining the use of guns and machinery that would other-

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wise be off limits to him. Stubbs’s ability to control both the living and the undead mark him as not only an extra-ordinary zombie but a fairly extra-ordinary zombie master as well. Stubbs relies on a rather unconventional set of weapons to battle living humans. He can use his flatulence to stun others; he can use his guts as grenades; and he can detach his head and send it bowling into his adversaries, at which point it explodes. Thus, the cannibal-style zombie body, typically imagined as an impediment because it is decaying and falling apart, actually empowers Stubbs—the processes of decomposition grant him the ability to outmaneuver his opponents, who have no similar recourse. At the same time, because Stubbs can “possess” the living via his body parts, he has access to all their weaponry. It is the best of both worlds; Stubbs can exploit both living and “dead” technologies to his advantage. At the end of the game, if the player has managed to keep Stubbs “alive” and vanquish his enemies, he is reunited with his sweetheart, Maggie Monday, whom he promptly bites and zombifies. In addition, Stubbs learns that he has a son—none other than Punchbowl’s founder, Andrew Monday. Andrew is none too pleased with this revelation, incredulously asking his mother, “Are you telling me my daddy was a traveling salesman .  .  . who eats brains?” He sends his goons to kill Stubbs, but 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 drops. As Stubbs and Maggie lean in for one last kiss, a nuclear explosion sounds and the image fades to black. The game makes over Maggie’s transformation into a zombie and the subsequent annihilation of the town as the culmination of normative heterosexual desire. Love conquers (and destroys) all. The bombing of Punchbowl ensures not only that Stubbs’s zombie menace cannot spread, but also that the menace of Punchbowl is contained. Punchbowl may be a paradise of clean living, but it is quickly revealed to be a fascist state. In his effort to destroy Punchbowl, Stubbs becomes a force for social good. The game wraps a very conventional premise around cannibal-style nihilism; the good-versusevil binary logic that underscores so many games is still on display. To make the good-evil binary effective, the game often poses living humans in the worst possible light: a former Nazi doctor created the technology that runs Punchbowl, a redneck farmer rants about communists, and a young woman goes out with a new date only a few hours after her boyfriend was turned into a zombie.

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Attacking humans is necessary (it is how you have to play in order to win), and the game characterizes them in ways that make attacking them and eating their brains ethically easier than it might normally be. As thing-ified adversaries, humans can be justifiably turned into zombies, even if not killed. The game thus doesn’t just flip the script in having one play as zombie. In a game like Left 4 Dead, one might play as a zombie in a gameworld that positions zombies as adversarial to the (good) living, but Stubbs makes over the living as targets worthy of destroying, and this difference is important. Playing as Stubbs thus also allows one to enjoy the pleasure of transgression—eating human brains and inhabiting the space of the living dead—balanced by the sense of being morally in the right: Stubbs is the good guy. The game underscores Stubbs’s relative goodness by displaying the corruption and small-minded behavior of the living, and by rewarding Stubbs for his actions: he gets the girl and destroys the Nazi-created conformist world of Punchbowl. Because both Stubbs and Punchbowl are destroyed, the transgression that either one could represent is contained. The world is safe from both fascists and zombies. And that is the true reversal of Stubbs the Zombie. The ending replicates the logic of the state of exception, but doesn’t allow either side—those with the right to exist (the zombies) or their adversaries— to survive. The game is a carnivalesque inversion of the state of exception that does not return things to the status quo. Without the ending, Stubbs is antiestablishment, and he leads a righteous rebellion, but in many ways he is, ironically enough, like a number of zombie killers in other games. Playing as Stubbs is quite similar to playing as Jill Valentine in Resident Evil or Frank West in Dead Rising (Capcom, 2006). Jill and Frank do not eat brains or use their guts to make things explode, but their basic goals are the same—destroy the enemy and stay alive while doing it. To end in destruction, though—to show how the logic of the state of exception eventually leads to the annihilation of everyone—challenges the binary thinking that reinforces the state of exception in the first place. Similarly, in other games in which one can play as a zombie, the motivation to do so may stem from a desire to stand outside traditional binary conceptions of good and evil. In World of Warcraft, if one is playing as the Forsaken, who are undead, one is playing for the Horde, which was initially imagined as the “bad” guys in relation to the Alliance’s “good.” But this good-bad binary was largely abandoned when Blizzard discovered that players were choosing to play Horde races,

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including the undead. The good-versus-bad binary that underscores many games did not work in World of Warcraft, since who was good or bad greatly depended on a player’s particular point of view. Therefore, Blizzard stopped presenting the game in traditional binary terms. This flexibility presents a major difference between a MMORPG like World of Warcraft and a fi lm or even other video games. Blizzard can incorporate player and fan feedback into updates and later releases of the game in a way that a filmmaker or other video game designers cannot. Unlike a character such as Stubbs, who comes to the player already designed, the Forsaken in World of Warcraft are player crafted, meaning one has far more resources available to individualize one’s character. Of course, this freedom operates within the parameters of the game: in creating a character, one first chooses a faction (Alliance or Horde) and then selects a race from those available to that faction (Humans, Night Elves, Forsaken, and so forth). One then crafts a character in keeping with the limitations set for that particular race. Each race has certain temperaments, abilities, and physical characteristics that define it. Certain classes and abilities are available only to certain races, and each race has a unique backstory. The Forsaken, for instance, are former humans, victims of a plague that killed them and then raised them from the dead as slaves to wage war on every other race in Azeroth, the world of the game. Although the Forsaken eventually broke away from their master, the Lich King, they still carry the stigma of having been in his service—this is the standard backstory presented to each new undead player. Even with a high degree of personalization, there are still limitations to what a character can do and be. Stubbs was fashioned after cannibal-style zombies, but the Forsaken share basic characteristics with both cannibal- and slave-style zombies. They are the dead reanimated, and they were slaves to a zombie master at one point. They can replenish their health by eating bodies. But as characters that players can direct in ways we wouldn’t associate with conventional zombies, the Forsaken are very un-zombielike, and this makes it difficult to compare them with the zombies found in more conventional narrative fictional texts. The Forsaken aren’t static, and each one is different. This kind of specificity is rare in zombidom. Even though the Forsaken as a race have particular traits, strengths, and weaknesses, each player inhabits the race differently. The idea that players could mistake the playable undead in World of Warcraft for mindless slaves or infected cannibal drones becomes less likely than it is in other video games. These are zombies with personalities.

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The Forsaken also stand in contrast to the many undead nonplayer characters found throughout the world of Azeroth.23 Though undead, the Forsaken are characterized as humanoid, which sets them apart from the rest of the undead (which the game categorizes simply as undead). Unlike the Forsaken, the rest of the undead are typically mindless and hostile. Thus, a hierarchy of undeadness becomes apparent. Yet in at least one instance, this hierarchy was—at least temporarily— problematized. During one week in October 2008, a promotional event before the release of the “Wrath of the Lich King” expansion saw a disease spread throughout Azeroth.24 After becoming diseased, a player had ten minutes to find a cure or else become a zombie. Once turned, the player as zombie could then attack and infect other players and nonplayer characters throughout Azeroth. In fact, zombies needed to kill to keep their health levels high enough to survive. As zombies, players had zombie-specific abilities they could use instead of their usual abilities. These included Retch! which would slow down enemies and heal fellow zombies; Beckoning Groan! to attract other zombies to one’s position; and Zombie Explosion! which as you might expect, caused one’s zombie character to explode. There were, of course, players who wanted to play as zombies. As Dustin Quillen reported during the event, “Driven by the novelty of the experience, many players are actively seeking out infection, often with the intent of attacking their own faction.”25 Some players enjoyed being able to play as a zombie, but the “plague” annoyed others, who noted that it disrupted normal gameplay. Some players found being a zombie monotonous. On a 2009 thread discussing possibly petitioning Blizzard to bring back the zombie plague, a player named Shirash notes, “The invasion—was—fun for the first day or two, and then it started to get boring.”26 Still others avoided becoming zombies and instead used the event as an excuse to play the “good guy” by killing zombies and curing the infected. Although Blizzard has made a point over the past several years of lessening the degree to which the two main groupings of Azeroth, the Alliance and the Horde, could be read as a singular good-bad binary, the Lich King plague played into just such a binary. The Lich King is a figure of evil in the mythology of the game, and the game tied becoming a zombie both to him and to infection. Plus, remaining a zombie required one to kill, even if that meant killing members of one’s clan. Unlike cannibal-style zombies in fiction, zombies had to show active intentionality during the promotion. A player had to log on and participate (word of the infection spread quickly online, so chances were

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good that the promotion would not surprise a player after the first few hours of the event); there were opportunities to cure oneself of zombiism, meaning one could opt out of it fairly easily; and zombie players, who needed to kill to remain healthy, could choose their victims. Given the number of players who found the entire experience disruptive or who opted out or who battled the zombies, it seems that the event served to make over zombification as something perhaps temporarily fun—act out, do bad things, eat your friends—but ultimately not sustainable. It served to underscore just how un-zombified the Forsaken of the game really are.27 It highlighted that there are different classes of undead within the world of the game. This isn’t the only game in which there are gradations of the undead. Planescape: Torment, for instance, is also peopled by varieties of zombies. Based on advanced Dungeons and Dragons rules, in which one’s “alignment” determines one’s ethical and moral perspective,28 the game tries to destabilize the notion of a clear-cut good-evil binary by eliminating the premise that a player is automatically positioned on the side of good, or at least on the side of normalcy instead of chaos. Diane Carr notes that this game “is not set in a place where ‘normality’ has gone wrong: there was no normality to begin with.”29 Thus, there isn’t a “good” side the player must defend. The Nameless One does not enter the world of the game to save it; rather, he tries to regain his lost memories in order to piece together who he is. The game’s zombies are thus largely neutral characters. But as previously noted, they are exploited workers who often hold clues for The Nameless One sewn into or carved onto their bodies. The game thus assumes a world not unlike those envisioned in slave-style zombie films in which the dead work for the living. Besides doing the menial labor of the Dustmen—one of the factions in the world of the game— the zombies serve as useful objects for The Nameless One, especially when he awakens in the mortuary at the beginning of the game. These zombies are mute figures who shamble about while following orders or blankly staring as The Nameless One tries to engage them. They are as dehumanized as any zombies ever were. The game reinforces this dehumanization when it reveals that these zombies can become a sort of costume one can wear. Early on in the mortuary, the player can discover a “zombie” who isn’t really a zombie at all but is using the zombie look to infiltrate the space. The Nameless One can, should the player choose, have this character make him over as a temporary zombie. One must then have The Nameless

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One shamble slowly and refrain from talking—perform zombiness, in other words—in order to infiltrate otherwise hostile spaces. But for Tanya Krzywinska, The Nameless One, by virtue of dying and coming back to life, is already himself a zombie.30 Within the game, The Nameless One tries to reconstruct his past by regaining lost memories, and he therefore has to “learn” himself from scratch. Clues and memories are scattered throughout the game space, but for much of the game, The Nameless One remains a mystery to himself. There is thus a zombie quality to him—he is always already removed from his true identity. The Nameless One is, technically, undead, but one can’t really mistake him for a worker zombie. Just as in World of Warcraft or Stubbs the Zombie, the zombie state a player inhabits as The Nameless One in Planescape: Torment is quite different from ordinary zombiness, and quite different from the zombie state that the worker zombies present. Besides not looking like the typical worker zombies of the mortuary, The Nameless One can speak. He goes on quests, and as the player learns, he is currently immortal, destined to die and awaken in the mortuary over and over again until he can piece together the puzzle of his true identity. If he is a zombie, he is an extra-ordinary one. The zombie workers who typify ordinary zombiness serve to emphasize his extra-ordinary state: they are mute, locked into the work set forth for them. The Nameless One is able to use them and abuse them, even kill them, as the player wishes. Thus, a hierarchy of zombiness becomes apparent as The Nameless One’s zombie state stands in contrast with the state of the zombie workers. Planescape: Torment, World of Warcraft, and Stubbs the Zombie are quite different in their conceits and their treatment of zombies and zombiness, but in each game, the notion that one’s character will never be truly zombified but is rather wearing zombiness colors how one plays as a zombie. The mechanics of the games bear this out—as characters that players control, these zombies exhibit some degree of autonomy as players decide what actions to take and where to go within the game. There are also ready comparisons available with other, ordinary zombies. In Planescape: Torment, there are the worker zombies. In World of Warcraft, there are undead nonplayer characters. In Stubbs the Zombie, there are the zombies that Stubbs creates. These are all ordinary zombies. The game creates a binary between a player’s zombie character and the other zombies of the gameworld. This binary reinforces the extra-ordinary character of the playable zombie by con-

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trasting its abilities with the limited behaviors of the ordinary zombies, and it works to reinforce the thing-ification of the ordinary zombies. The extra-ordinary zombies, as playable characters, have the agency to act; the ordinary zombies, which do not, are typically acted upon. Especially in Stubbs the Zombie and Planescape: Torment, the extraordinary zombies use the ordinary zombies as tools—the ordinary zombies are slave-style zombies in the truest sense. Thus, all three of these games complicate the good-bad binary at the heart of many video games, but manage also to develop a troubling hierarchy that positions ordinary zombies as less worthy than their extra-ordinary counterparts. Many representations of zombies in American media defy cultural expectations of zombiness in presenting extra-ordinary zombies, and these texts illustrate the problematics of such portrayals. The extra-ordinary zombies are always already removed from a true zombie state because a living, thinking player controls them. Either the extra-ordinary zombies are thinking, feeling humanized characters who stand in contrast to mindless, inhuman undead—as in Planescape: Torment and World of Warcraft—or the games position them like the humans in other games, as happens in Stubbs the Zombie: as a force for good destroying that which is bad or killable. Extra-ordinary zombiness, then, does not defy the state of exception but rather works to reinforce its logic.

Playing the Zombie

There are many reasons why one might choose a zombie character in a video game. Playing as a zombie could afford the chance to experiment with being the “bad” guy or to experience a game “from the other side,” so to speak. Some players might choose to play as a zombie in order to test boundaries, as a way to try on zombiness—and its attendant blackness—without fear of losing one’s real-world positionality. Choosing to play as a zombie might be a strategic choice (to the extent that it is a choice and not merely an effect of the game’s design). Many players choose avatars or characters with an eye toward what they can do: playing as a zombie may mean nothing more than getting a chance to explore the sets of in-game abilities associated with that particular character. Trivial as it might sound, then, even if one could play as an ordinary zombie in a game and experience ordinary zombiness while do-

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ing so, one would still not be in any danger of becoming permanently zombified. That obvious point indicates how the games automatically shut down the extra-ordinary zombie’s symbolic power to potentially move past systemic barriers to full belonging by defying its status as nonhuman. Playable zombies are always already extra-ordinary, and there is no way to inhabit them that can truly approach the ordinary zombification on display in other types of texts. Just as the cultural expectations of zombiness imagine that zombies are mindless and perhaps even hostile, the expectations of zombies in video games are predicated on them being inherently ordinary and adversarial. Tanya Kryzwinska observes that “the exaggerated style and fantastical form of zombies in video games means that they rarely achieve” the state of ambiguity often reached in film that lets us consider the creatures philosophically—as something both “radically other” and disquietingly similar to ourselves.31 Instead, Kryzwinska argues, these zombies “are more conventionally monstrous.”32 In games in which the goal is to kill zombies, game mechanics reward killing in part by using a rhetoric of good versus evil to position zombies in just this way; the games create a logic whereby the zombies slip easily into a state of exception that makes killing them, if you will pardon the pun, a no-brainer. Yet there are zombies that don’t fit easily into the monstrous mold. Plants vs. Zombies, for instance, presents its zombies as family friendly. It softens their differences through costuming and behavior that connects them with the human: disco zombies dancing across a backyard or scuba diving zombies riding dolphins. This softening may be why, instead of explicitly battling living humans, they face off against plants (who protect the humans we never really see): it becomes hard to reconcile their cuteness with their life-threatening nature. The playable zombies of games such as World of Warcraft or Planescape: Torment are not radically Other, either. In fact, these zombies are so similar to the living that it can be hard to distinguish one from the other. Thus, the cultural assumptions that all zombies are created alike, which feeds off the stereotypical view of ordinary zombies as mindless beings of the mass, does not adequately account for representations of zombies in video games. The assumptions that zombies are largely indistinguishable and monstrous or hostile are useful in games in which killing zombies is the goal. In fact, for the binary assumptions that undergird the logic of killing in these games to work, dehumanizing the zombies—whether through seeing them as bad, as something

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less than human, or as all the same—is essential to gameplay. Stopping to ponder a zombie’s humanity would most likely get a player’s character attacked and killed by zombies. Even some games that allow a player to play as a zombie operate under a version of this logic: the living become the threat that must be exterminated. This flip of the script exposes the logic of the state of exception for what it is: a means of justifying the continued survival of some at the expense of others who are rhetorically positioned as less worthy in order to make killing them morally easier. These games show that the targets are largely interchangeable. It is noteworthy that in Stubbs the Zombie, Planescape: Torment, and World of Warcraft, the goals of gameplay aren’t necessarily killing. Stubbs comes the closest to replicating zombie-killing logic, but Stubbs is biting and infecting living humans in order to produce zombies. It may be quibbling to try to mark out a difference between killing and zombifying bodies, but those zombified in Stubbs don’t disappear or become corpses strewn over the game space. They become part of an army taking over Punchbowl. The game takes the abstraction of death one step further by rendering it obsolete. In neither Planescape: Torment nor World of Warcraft is killing adversaries the primary goal; it may be part of gameplay, but it isn’t the only part. These games disrupt the goal of killing to win, but also challenge the binary good-bad rhetoric that often accompanies the game mechanics that encourage killing. In Stubbs the Zombie, the game appears to merely swap out adversaries, zombies for humans, but its ending— in which both sides are annihilated—destabilizes the notion of the survival of the good by rendering it impossible. Blizzard deliberately moved to change the good-versus-bad premise of World of Warcraft when the company realized that many players were circumventing or rejecting that logic. Planescape: Torment ignores the good-bad binary from the outset, focusing instead on allowing players to choose their alignment while searching for The Nameless One’s identity. Thus, playing as a zombie—at least in these games—offers a potentially different experience from playing as a zombie killer and then simply flipping that script. Yet in all three games there is a gradation of undeadness on display. The Nameless One exists in stark contrast to the worker zombies in Planescape: Torment. Undead nonplayer characters are very different from the Forsaken in World of Warcraft. Even in Stubbs the Zombie, the game makes a distinction between what Stubbs can do and what

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the rest of the Punchbowl zombies can do—they are under his control, after all. In each game, playing as a zombie underscores how extraordinary one’s character is by offering up a host of ordinary zombies who cannot act in the same ways. The logic of these games reifies a position that splits the world into ordinary and extra-ordinary zombies— into those who exist in the state of exception and those who do not. For all the ways in which playing as a zombie might disrupt the logic of good versus evil or of placing groups in a state of exception, these games return to that logic in the positioning of the extra-ordinary zombie vis-à-vis the ordinary zombies. Strangely enough, then, these games, which would seem to offer a progressive vision of zombiness, reinforce the radical Otherness of ordinary zombies. Rather than flipping the script regarding adversaries, the games flip the script regarding who has the rights to existence: extra-ordinary zombies. In the introduction, I suggested that extra-ordinary zombies produce discourses about the desire to be seen as worthy of life. With zombies such as the Forsaken, Stubbs, and The Nameless One, the vulnerability of being the ordinary undead wouldn’t make sense, given the logic of gameplay. In these instances, playing as a zombie makes sense only if one can play as an extra-ordinary zombie; yet to further solidify the extra-ordinary zombie’s position within the gameworld, these games make ordinary zombies into necessary foils. The extra-ordinary zombies thereby become little better than humans in zombie costuming. Some argue that the act of playing video games itself can induce a sort of zombielike state in players.33 I suggest instead that in these games, one is a zombie master in almost every sense of the term. A player controls the actions of a zombie character, and given the explicit comparisons available to other undead within the games, gains a sense of control over other zombies. In World of Warcraft, as one of the Forsaken, a player may encounter hostile undead nonplayer characters that need to be vanquished. In Planescape: Torment, one can choose to use the zombie workers as one will. Stubbs controls a zombie army. Thus, the hierarchy of zombiness is contingent on extra-ordinary zombies being able to exploit ordinary zombies during the course of the game; the extra-ordinary zombies seem to move into an entirely new realm as extra-ordinary zombie masters. The player thus trades the zombie’s very zombiness in for the ability to win the game.

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6 | I Walked with a Zombie Performing the Living Dead

F

ive teenage girls sat on a curb in Newhall, California, late one October 2009 afternoon.1 Their faces were pale, their clothing was ripped, and they were covered in blood. Out of context, it would have been a disturbing sight, but 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 makeup tent where others—teenagers, grandparents, people of all ages—were waiting for volunteers to transform them into equally bloody messes. In a few minutes, these girls and hundreds of other “zombies” were set to ramble through Old Town Newhall on a zombie walk. Born in the early 2000s, zombie walks are gatherings at which people dress as zombies and travel through public spaces.2 These events, which are also known as zombie marches, zombie crawls, and zombie shuffles, enact what the Toronto Zombie Walk website tells us zombies do best: “Besides eating brains, they lurch shamble and drag barely hinged limbs down the street.”3 The formula is simple enough: walkers meet at a designated time and place in costume and then walk a prescribed route while pretending to be zombies. The walks are filled with all sorts of people performing zombiness, and while I think it is important to discuss the demographics of the participants of the walks, doing so is difficult, since organizers generally do not keep track of those sorts of statistics, and participants in walks vary from place to place. There are zombie walks organized solely around the idea of enacting zombiness for the fun of it, but many organizers plan walks with some sort of guiding principle in mind. Organizers may design walks to align with a holiday (Halloween being a particular favorite); they may help promote a certain

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store, product, or local function; they may link them with a food drive or other charitable event; or they may be more political in nature. Thus, it is hard to pin these events down. Some see them as akin to flash mobs, and others as performance art. They aren’t exactly cosplay, or costume play, which is the staging of the body in a costume representing a specific media character. Nor are they LARPing, or liveaction role-playing, which is a form of real-world role-playing in which one physically embodies and enacts one’s character. Therefore, it becomes difficult to make blanket statements about zombie walks: they happen across the globe in groups ranging in size from a few friends to over ten thousand people, and each walk has its own avowed purpose and history.4 The aim of this chapter is not to pin down exactly what zombie walks are and give them a definitive meaning. Rather, it is to explore how zombie walks illustrate the clash between our cultural expectations of zombies—as mindless automatons—and the many representations and performances of them that defy these expectations. In zombie walks, we see a problematic form of extra-ordinary zombiness that emerges when living people attempt to mimic the living dead. In the walks, part of the tension between ordinary and extraordinary zombies derives from the zombie’s use as a political metaphor. Zombies are at their most useful, metaphorically, when we imagine them as ordinary, mindless slaves or ever-eating consumers. But extra-ordinary zombies—at least in fiction—become useful for discussing how bodies can resist dehumanizing circumstances. In the first chapter, I showed how early slave-style zombie tales often reproduce racist logic about some bodies being more exploitable than others; these tales rely on expectations of ordinary zombiness. I then argued that the extra-ordinary zombie often shows us a zombie that defies its designation as less than human and rises up against dehumanizing circumstance. Thus, Lila von Altermann defies society’s expectations of a docile, compliant wife and zombie and kills her Nazi husband in Revenge of the Zombies, and Big Daddy leads an undead revolt against Fiddler’s Green in Land of the Dead. As discussed in the last chapter, in the move toward making the zombie a character one can try on in video games, extra-ordinary zombies become almost extra extra-ordinary, and their usefulness as a tool for talking about exploitation, thoughtless conformity, and degrading circumstances shifts significantly as a result. When playing as a zombie in a video game, one cannot truly inhabit ordinary zombiness, so there is no dehumanizing circumstance to rise out of. Rather, one plays

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the zombie as always already extra-ordinary, and given the sorts of zombies available to inhabit, one is more likely to be a zombie that is not only active but is able to exploit other, ordinary zombies. This inability to reach ordinary zombiness is likewise the case when one performs as a zombie in zombie walks. One does not start a zombie walk from a position of powerlessness and escape into becoming an extraordinary zombie; living zombie walkers are never in danger of being dehumanized. Rather, they can play at it: it becomes a costume to try on and then take off, and this is crucial. Scholars have debated the political potential of these events, often drawing on work about (ordinary) zombies that imagines them as representations of a posthuman state or coming community and making assumptions that zombiness is a constant, stable category. Again, cultural (and scholarly) expectations clash with depictions of the zombie. In zombie walks, living participants may attempt to enact ordinary zombiness, but the ways in which zombiness is often performed in walks and the fact that participants are never in danger of slipping into an ordinary zombie state complicate their status as ordinary zombies. It might seem intuitive—of course, we can’t really become zombified when we play at being zombies!—yet this gap between the political work that either the ordinary or the extra-ordinary zombie can do and the inability to approach zombiness in a zombie walk means that these events, rather than challenging discourses that separate the world into dehumanized things and those worthy of life, illustrate how the impulse to create extra-ordinary zombies might work to reinforce those binaries.

Zombie Walking

Dressing as zombies and taking to the streets might sound like a purely contemporary manifestation. Yet early in the zombie’s tenure in American pop culture, people dressed as zombies were part of the ballyhoo used to promote films. Sarah Juliet Lauro observes, “The New York premiere of the . . . film White Zombie orchestrated the publicity stunt of having people dress like zombies” in 1932.5 As Film Daily reported in August of that year, at the Rivoli theater in New York City, three zombies stood in front of the building “almost continuously,” going “through slow motion with their wax features and mechanical movements.”6 Exhibitors used this tactic to promote the film

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across the United States for at least two years.7 The tradition of people dressing up as zombies in public is thus a long one. But zombie walks are something of a unique phenomenon in that fans of cosplay and other forms of costume activity rarely take to public streets in the way that zombie walkers do. The reasons for walking are highly varied. Some organizers use walks to promote zombie-themed merchandise or media events, such as the release of a zombie video game or film. Many organizers connect zombie walks with charity fund-raisers or food drives. Other events that aren’t technically walks encourage participants to dress or act as zombies, including zombie proms, zombie pub crawls, and events like Thrill the World, a global celebration in which groups reenact the famous zombie dance sequence from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. There are also zombie-themed fun runs that use zombies as motivators: participants attempt to outrun zombies trying to “eat” them. Some zombie walks are explicitly intended to be read as political acts. As part of “Buy Nothing Day” protests, zombie walkers sometimes converge on local malls and shopping districts.8 Often, political zombie walks are one-off events. Elizabeth McAlister reports: “In 2007, a zombie flash mob invaded a San Francisco Apple Store to stage an anticonsumerist performance piece where zombies pretended to eat the computers on display.”9 The BBC mentions that in Leicester, England, in June 2011, about 150 “zombies” shuffled through the city after a “‘concerned citizen’ had used a Freedom of Information request to ask how the [local city council] would tackle a zombie attack.”10 Sarah Juliet Lauro lists examples of zombie-themed protests at universities in Wisconsin; Edinburgh, Scotland; and Santa Barbara, California.11 Zombies showed up as part of the initial phase of Occupy Wall Street as protesters in Zuccotti Park in New York City staged a zombie walk that went past the New York Stock Exchange on October 3, 2011. In the next few weeks, Occupy protestors held zombie-themed events in several other locations. But why zombies? The zombie’s popularity in video games spurred on a resurgence in zombie media during the early 2000s that put zombies back into the spotlight, which was further strengthened by the release of films like Resident Evil and 28 Days Later. The zombie’s renewed popularity in other media might explain why enacting it also suddenly became popular. Many commentators have remarked on the appropriateness of the zombie metaphor for this particular social moment: Tavia Nyong’o notes, “It hardly strains credulity to un-

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derstand the phenomenon against the backdrop of awful carnage of the post-9/11 world, and in particular the War in Iraq.”12 The rise of zombie walks has coincided with growing post-9/11 reservations about the war on terror as well as global economic insecurity. The fact remains, though, that while we can draw lines between the rise of zombie walks and post-9/11 anxieties over terrorists, fears of global pandemics, anger over the dead soldiers of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and sympathy with the victims of contemporary economic recessions, most walkers aren’t necessarily making these links when they participate. The BBC supported this observation in a report on zombie walks in 2011: “Cultural critics have variously suggested the phenomenon may be linked to economic austerity or a critique of consumerism. But participants usually say they are doing it for fun.”13 After experiencing a 2006 zombie walk in Hollywood, California, Lucinda Michele Knapp felt comfortable identifying zombie walks as a form of “art-protest-prank,” but noted their limitations: “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.”14 For Knapp, just getting people out into the streets was enough to make the event political. One of the participants in the walk, though, posted a message taking issue with Knapp’s observation: “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 [sic] very appropriate place, and to have some harmless fun. Please don’t take the fun out of it by making me feel like it had to mean something.”15 There is thus a tension between wanting to see zombie walks as manifestations of ordinary zombiness—and in particular, a politicized zombiness that means something—and as an opportunity for fun without explicit political commentary. In some zombie walks, especially those with an avowedly political purpose, dressing up as a zombie is essential because it does, in fact, mean something. Thus, Rebecca Schneider reads the walkers associated with Occupy Wall Street as being able “to bounce zombieness back onto those who, classically, live off living labor without care for infrastructural means of accountability.”16 Her reading is a

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far cry from the usual association of zombies with the working class and historical associations with slavery and exploitation. Alternatively, Nyong’o noted of his experience of the Wall Street zombies that they reminded him of his temp job in New York banking and “the zombified state I felt myself enter in each morning, persist in all day, and linger in long into the night.”17 Therefore, even when organizers intend zombies to be read as political metaphors, their meanings can be up for interpretation.

Standing Out in the Zombie Horde

Vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and other monsters may or may not be part of a group. Zombies, however, are usually conceived of as being part of a mass.18 As the Toronto Zombie Walk website asks, “What other monsters have such unity as a mass in death?!”19 One might assume, then, that zombie walks are full of nondescript hordes of zombies, since in films or video games in which swarms of zombies attack the living, the focus is typically more on the mass than individual zombies. In fact, most commentators remark on how unthreatening a single zombie would be—cannibal-style zombies amass their power to terrorize from their numbers. Yet the cultural expectations of a zombie horde do not necessarily comport with how zombies are performed in walks. One reason for this is that walkers rarely go to zombie walks as a particular popular zombie, because there isn’t one canonical character or set of characters to emulate. Rather, walkers use the idea of “zombie” to generate a specific personalized character. In this way, walks can provide insight into the walkers’ fantasies of their lives and deaths: in reinventing themselves as corpses, many participants move beyond the self and choose to be a zombie-something. There are zombie brides, grooms, nuns, priests, soldiers, clowns, and any other kind of identity the walkers wish (fig. 6.1). And organizers usually encourage walkers to become a zombie-something. As an invitation to the 2009 Newhall Zombie Walk put it: “Prepare your 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.”20 Walkers also often turn media characters into zombies. There can thus be zombie Waldos, zombified Harry Potter characters, zombie Disney princesses, and zombie Ronald McDonalds (figs. 6.2 and 6.3). Many walkers use cannibal-style zombie conventions as a starting

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Fig. 6.1. Zombies, including a nurse and a soldier, at the World Zombie Day Zombie Walk in Detroit, MI (photograph by author, October 13, 2013)

Fig. 6.2. Zombified

Waldo at the World Zombie Day Zombie Walk in Detroit, MI (photograph by author, October 13, 2013)

Fig. 6.3. Zombie Alice in Wonderland, Costa Mesa, CA (photograph by author, October 23, 2010)

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point for their zombie look: almost all walkers perform as decomposing corpses, for instance. Many walkers then embellish the cannibal-style zombie to produce something highly individuated. Steven Shaviro argues that cannibal-style zombies in films such as George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, “preserve the marks of social function and selfprojection in the clothes they wear, which identify them as businessman, housewife, nun, Hare Krishna disciple, and so on.” But such apparent individuation is misleading: “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.”21 For Shaviro, costuming that humanizes by marking a zombie body as an individual within the crowd is not really enough to render a zombie extra-ordinary. That is true from the zombie’s point of view, but much as I argued in chapter 2, if the living humans who interact with such a zombie treat it differently based on such markers, then a personal identity is present. It is entirely socially constructed rather than personally inscribed.22 In zombie walks, we can assume that walkers choose their costumes with an eye to standing out in some way or making a statement. Thus, personal identity is never really in dispute—it is readily on display throughout a walk. Several scholars see the individual personalities of zombie walkers as secondary to the group element of walks. If ordinary zombies are typically creatures of the mass, then on one level, walks duplicate that element of cannibal-style zombiness faithfully. Seeing walkers as reenacting a cannibal zombie mass becomes one of the entry points for reading zombie walks as political events, but this view often abstracts the walks. As events predicated on large groups of people participating, and made even more pointedly “political” by the fact that walkers enact zombiness, the walks come to represent the symbolic power of zombies as creatures of the mass while also symbolically representing the political power of mass public gatherings more generally. Even as part of a swarm, a zombie walker is different from other zombies, but still like them in their coming together. Lauro notes this duality: “One can see how well these zombie gatherings epitomize (and even literalize) fantasies of the unattainable community. The zombie swarm emphasizes the difference of its various participants (zombie mail carrier, zombie jock) at the same time that it equalizes all of them. The zombies are immediately legible as belonging to one community, despite differences in gender, age, race, or tax bracket.”23 A reading like this is contingent on a view of zombies in the abstract: one might assume that the coming together of the zombies in Land of the Dead fits this kind of

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mold, in part because those zombies truly inhabit zombiness, but one has to question whether zombie walkers ever attain this sense of community in real life. Since walkers mirror and mimic the zombie hordes of fictional texts, it becomes easy to conflate what happens on the streets with what happens in fictional stories of the zombie. This surface-level similarity tends to obfuscate both the lived realities of walks and the fact that zombiness may not be a sufficiently unifying concept: there are many ways in which a community may not come together during a walk. First, there are living personalities behind the zombie costumes: during a walk, some walkers are on their cell phones, and others are taking pictures; some take their performances seriously, and others talk to passersby and friends. Many walkers dress to stand out from the mass; there may even be a sense of competition as some try to be the best dressed. Simply put, some walkers may not subscribe to the notion that they are participating in any sort of zombie community. Finally, for the utopian promise underlying ideas of swarm communities to come to fruition, a mass event should be open to all comers. Most walks are open to all in theory, but there are still ways in which membership is qualified. One must be aware that the walk will take place (which usually means having access to social media or the spaces where walk promotion is highest—conventions, comic book stores, etc.), and one must have the ability (physical, geographic, financial) to attend. As Elias Canetti warns of crowds and masses and the feelings of equality and camaraderie that are built up within them: “It is based on an illusion; the people who suddenly feel equal have not really become equal; nor will they feel equal forever.”24 Eventually, one takes off the zombie costume and goes home. So although zombies in fiction may attest to the promise of swarm communities, zombie walks offer this promise only if we abstract them as concepts; they don’t function that way if we think of them as concrete gatherings of living participants.

Taking It to the Streets

Perhaps the political potential of these events does not lie in the zombies. In discussing the wave of political protests that swept across the globe in 2011, Judith Butler notes, “We miss something of the point of public demonstrations, if we fail to see that the very public character

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of the space is being disputed and even fought over when these crowds gather.”25 Few zombie walks take on the kind of political work that Butler describes, and yet the observation is still apt. The walks disrupt the normal expectations of the public spaces where they occur: these performances of zombiness force shoppers, pedestrians, motorists, and passersby to reassess their assumptions of certain spaces when they find “zombies” within them. Even if one stops for only a moment to take in a group of zombies walking down the street, the zombies have changed one’s expectations of that space, and this is where the political potential of the walks could lie. The zombies transform the experience of public spaces from one focused on encountering the spaces as spectacles of capitalism to one in which specific bodies are able to provide spectacle and be available for visual consumption. Even in those areas given to music festivals, parades, and other public gatherings, encountering an organized group of zombies tends to be unexpected. Knapp describes such an 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.26

Instead of offering spectacles that can be visually mastered, zombie walks are made up of living people that pass onlookers by. And it is almost impossible to ignore a group of nearby zombies. Zombies can change one’s experience of a space: hundreds of “zombies” on a sidewalk make it fairly difficult to traverse, and large hordes of them may block traffic. Even spectators that aren’t close by may want to stop and watch a parade of zombies, which alters their experience of the space, even if only for a moment. Zombie walks thus provide participants and observers with a time and space of social upheaval through performance and celebration, which is one of the reasons that some have linked them to the carnivalesque.

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160 | Not Your Average Zombie

Yet the potential for social upheaval in most walks is circumscribed from the start, since most not only tend to be law-abiding but in fact aim to be so. As Knapp noted of the Hollywood zombie walk in 2006: “It ended up being the most well-behaved mob I’ve ever seen.”27 Indeed, most zombie walks occur without incident, and few incur the ire of law enforcement.28 Many organizers design walks as family-friendly events, and many occur with the assistance of local government and law enforcement agencies. Almost all organized zombie walks have websites and informational bulletins that contain rules of conduct covering such things as requests to stay in character and warnings against touching nonparticipants. For instance, the information packet for the 2009 Newhall Zombie Walk warned walkers: “While zombies may defy the rules of physics, they are still citizens and thus can and will be held legally responsible for their actions.”29 Organizers want to make sure that these events are seen not as disruptive but as welcoming. As Mark Menold said in planning a zombie walk in 2006, “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.”30 The entire idea of making a zombie look bad is well worth considering: if zombies, at least as walkers perform them in zombie walks, are supposed to be cannibals bent on devouring humanity, what could possibly tarnish their image? If these events are supposed to approach some sort of political meaning, based in part on the fact that zombiness is what walkers enact, rules about being respectful and law-abiding would seem to cut into the revolutionary potential of the events. The zombies of zombie walks are, then, in some ways expected to behave like the mindless, conforming masses they are performing. Rather than being an instance of the powers that be co-opting zombie walks to tame them, this neutralization comes from organizers themselves, who see the support of law enforcement and local businesses as key to the survival of the walks. This domestication of any potential radical nature at work in the walks speaks to how these events may be full of revolutionary potential—in the public gathering of a mass of people, in the use of the overdetermined zombie figure—but shut it down for legally sanctioned play. The previous chapter discussed how one might conceive of zombified characters as existing in a state of exception that would justify killing them in the name of preserving the well-being of another group. Some see zombies as existing in a similar, but not quite as extreme,

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space of social death. In its simplest form, social death is the exclusion of an individual or group from the “living” norm. Social death affects people whom, for one reason or another, society considers less than human; they are thus not eligible for the same rights of belonging as fully “human” citizens. This state sounds like the state of exception, but the socially dead often still have the right to life (theoretically), which is stripped from those in the state of exception. Society may allow the socially dead to die, but the outright killing of them would be illegal. Migrants, slaves, and the homeless are often identified as socially dead, and many see zombies as fitting metaphors for this state. For some, one of the zombie’s strengths as an abstract concept is that the zombie can make visible social death. The extra-ordinary zombie identity, then, also works as a representation of the socially dead who refuse to remain marginalized and invisible. To see zombie walks as shining a light on social death would, however, assume an abstraction of the events that typically does not correspond to what happens. The costumes and playful nature of the events serve to reinscribe death as something that happens to all equally. The promise of ordinary zombies—that zombihood renders gender, race, class, and age meaningless—is a double-edged sword. Rendering those facets of identity meaningless in the fun of a zombie walk could be liberating. But that effacement doesn’t really happen, and if it did, it could serve to cover up the real and unequal vulnerabilities to death that factors such as race, gender, and class create. As stated in chapter 2, the utopian promise of a zombie community where individuality disappears or ceases to matter obscures the real-world impact of identity. The privilege of being able to enact zombiness—of having the free time and materials to construct a costume and go to a zombie walk, and perhaps pay an entrance fee or donate goods to a charity—suggests that one is probably in no danger of being made over as socially dead. In addition, the walks draw attention away from the realities of the spaces in which they exist. For several years, the Monroeville Mall zombie walk took place in the mall that served as the setting for 1978’s Dawn of the Dead and was an homage to that movie. Yet the walk tended to gloss over the film’s meditations on the dangers of rampant consumerism via the metaphor of that very mall. The film presents a critique of US consumer culture—both with the zombies’ literal consumption of human flesh and the living humans’ desires to consume the mall’s goods—but the goal of the walk was to set a world record for the largest zombie gathering and to celebrate the mall both as

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space and as symbol. Similarly, in a walk that I attended in 2013 at Detroit’s Hart Plaza, it was hard to forget the racial and economic politics of the place where I was performing zombiness. A performance of figures who could be made to stand for the socially dead elided the reality of the situation—the space pointed to, ironically enough, the very real social deaths of many of the bodies within it. The juxtaposition of hundreds of zombie walkers alongside people enjoying downtown Detroit and vagrant people along the route underlined that the zombie-asliberatory metaphor will only travel so far. And while zombie walks are somewhat carnivalesque, they are so only for some; others can’t escape their everyday lives quite so easily. Some scholars see zombie walks as fulfilling the promise set forth by zombies in other media. Simon Orpana, for instance, suggests, “These events can be read as real-life social enactments of the ideological critiques posited by zombie cinema.”31 Others are more conflicted. Lauro classifies some walks as art practice, but she isn’t sure that walks in and of themselves are revolutionary.32 Still, she believes the true power of the walks might be in their potential; as she notes, “For this would seem to be the only definite message that one might take from the zombie walk movement: that other movements might yet be possible . . . they attest to the possibility of organized rebellion, giving us the form but not the substance of insurrection.”33 If just getting people out into the streets as a group in this digital age is enough, then zombie walks fulfill a political purpose, but one, I might add, that seems largely divorced from the zombies themselves.

The Living as Dead

As I have argued throughout this book, zombies carry with them a racialized identity: even when zombies became cannibals, we cannot cleanly divorce them from their associations with Otherness and contamination. Zombies may not literally be beings of color, but they exist in the same ideological space. What, then, does it mean to dress up as a zombie? If the zombie carries all the positive attributes that scholars and fans might ascribe to zombihood in the abstract, shouldn’t it also carry with it the negatives? Zombie narratives aren’t just about zombies coming together under a shared zombie identity; they create a binary, situating zombies as enemies of the living. Zombie narratives separate the world into “us” and “them,” which can be countered in

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film, television, and video games by the appearance of extra-ordinary zombies, who are beings who refuse to be dehumanized and who resist their easy designation as Other. Yet the extra-ordinary zombie is not unproblematic. Extra-ordinary zombies nod to the desire to remain outside the state of exception, to challenge social death. To do this, they reify those human characteristics—namely, speech, signs of intelligence, relationships to the living, and physical attractiveness—assumed to make one worthy of life. Extra-ordinary zombihood is essentially an assimilationist fantasy that speaks to the strong desire to hold onto one’s individuality. In many ways, extra-ordinary zombies suggest a profound fear of losing identity markers, a sense of not wanting to move beyond them into a posthuman state or a swarm community, and this is alluded to in zombie walks by the numerous walkers who dress to stand out from the crowd. Rather than challenging discourses that would separate the world into dehumanized things and those worthy of life, zombie walks smooth over such binaries by producing a zombiness that can never be the same as the theoretical zombiness that many scholars expect. Zombie walks—at least those without an avowedly political goal that gives the zombies a metaphorical purpose and identity as part of the walk—most often exist in a space where reading them politically would require divorcing real-world action from what zombie crowds could mean more generally. Unlike the video games discussed in chapter 5, zombie walks don’t offer an explicit contrast between ordinary and extra-ordinary zombies, nor do walkers exploit ordinary zombies to reproduce the logic of the state of exception. Rather, these events undercut the logic of the extra-ordinary zombie, the zombie that somehow overcomes degrading circumstances. In a walk, all the zombies are always already extra-ordinary: a walker does not start from a position of powerlessness and escape from it, because living zombie walkers are never in danger of being dehumanized. Just as zombie apocalypses in film jump over the real-world work needed to create communities that rise above identity, zombie walks jump over the abject qualities of ordinary zombiness—what makes zombies attractive to scholars and theorists—in order to “save” the zombie from its subhuman state. Because there was no ordinary zombie state to begin in, the extra-ordinary zombie in the real world functions much differently from the extra-ordinary zombie in films or video games: it doesn’t show how a body can resist degrading circumstances, but rather how bodies are able to avoid them altogether. It of-

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fers up a fantasy whereby the state of exception or social death can be completely elided and ignored. It produces a kind of zombie, in other words, that is never in any danger of true zombification. Thus, zombie walks show us that while the zombie might be a useful tool for thinking about the ways in which society codes certain bodies as worthy or unworthy of life, there is a gap between how that moral binary plays out in fictional texts and how it comes to be enacted in the real world.

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Conclusion | “I Think I’m Dead”

Well, I got a new theory. I say that when zombies try to eat people, that’s just the first stage. You see, they’ve just come back from being dead, so they’re gonna do all the things they missed from when they were alive. So first, they’re gonna eat. Then, they’re gonna drink. Then, they’re gonna dance and make love. Fox Mu l der, The X-Files (2000)

Throughout this book, I wrestle with the fact that despite our cultural expectations of what zombies are, the zombies that appear in film, television, and video games, even out on the streets, often don’t fit those assumptions. Extra-ordinary zombies have been staples of American media from the very beginning. The zombie, in theory, may be the perfect interstitial figure—never quite one thing or another, existing in a space that mocks stable binaries and boundaries—but what we have seen in US media depictions of the zombie is often a way of defying categorization that also defies our expectations of zombiness. Many zombies are thus not in-between because of their status as living and dead; they are in-between because of the ways in which artists and producers take what should be monstrous and abject and make it over as something humanized, sympathetic, and, at times, even heroic. In other words, we rarely let the ordinary zombie simply be. Rather, we find a way to make it fit more comfortably with a conception of humanity that rescues it from total zombification. The ordinary zombie follows orders blindly or is driven only by the need to eat. It is the perfect representation of the in-between, and as both living and dead, human and animal, black and white, it becomes a means of interrogating those categories and speculating about

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how it might be to live without them. The ordinary zombie, as mindless and automatic, is also the perfect adversary and threat. We can’t reason with it, and as something no longer human, it does not enjoy the same rights to life as a living human. It is inherently killable. By the same logic, extra-ordinary zombies become that much harder to kill. They aren’t fully zombie, after all; there is still too much human in them. Throughout much of this book, my focus is on the extra-ordinary zombie, but here I turn to real-world evocations of the ordinary zombie. In particular, I examine how government agencies, police, and even regular citizens have used the zombie as a means of thinking about disaster preparedness and military training: what happens when we take up the zombie to try to teach real-world behaviors? Vital to the logic of using the zombie as a training tool is the ability to see it as both ordinary and dangerous. For these scenarios to work, the zombies in question can’t be pitiful slaves or misunderstood cannibals; they can’t be thinking, political zombies, or zombies meant to stand in for a posthuman state or a swarm community; they must be unthinking threats. These sorts of exercises don’t use ordinary, threatening zombies to try to teach us about marginalization or interstitiality. Rather, they use zombies as stand-ins for real-world populations that have been made over as so threatening that they lose their status as fully human. In chapter 5, I discussed Gastón Gordillo’s observation that some realworld populations are painted as no better than ordinary zombies—as beings so dangerous that they become part of what he terms the “killable horde.”1 Gordillo sees this kind of rhetoric at work in the positioning of groups like terrorists as permissibly killable, but also notes that it can be extended to other groups, including Palestinian people in Gaza and African Americans in the United States. This kind of dehumanization allows police or pundits to justify the deaths of people such as Eric Garner or Michael Brown by painting them as threats to the normal running of society.2 I am not saying that those who use zombies to teach the military, the police, and civilians how to respond to real-life disasters and dangers are training people to kill certain real-world populations. I am saying that the use of zombies as stand-in targets for abstract but realworld bodies suggests a way in which the virtual zombie body comes to have possible repercussions in the real world. The zombie as standin seems innocuous, but the lessons it teaches reach beyond simple exhortations to be ever ready in the face of natural disasters, and in-

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stead create a space—via ordinary zombiness—where the perceived (or taught) value of different kinds of bodies and ways of being in the world has life-or-death consequences. These zombies indicate that one reason we may be producing numerous humanized, extra-ordinary zombies in fiction is because of the ways in which the zombie metaphor already potentially zombifies people in real life.

“These Are Our Fellow Citizens!”

In 2011, just before hurricane season, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began an emergency-preparedness campaign that used the threat of zombies as its inspiration. With tweets, a blog post, and a graphic novel, the CDC hoped to use a fictional zombie apocalypse to highlight how citizens should prepare for emergencies and natural disasters. And the novelty of the idea paid off: the initial blog post created so much traffic that it crashed part of the CDC website.3 A year later, in the wake of a string of drug-related assaults that mimicked zombie attacks, including one in which a man tried to eat the face off a homeless man in Miami, and a subsequent rise in Internet chatter on a possible zombie apocalypse, the CDC released an official statement denying that zombies exist.4 The government’s use of the zombie to teach citizens what to do in a crisis lent just enough credence to the zombie myth that the CDC felt compelled to reassert the zombie’s fictional status. The CDC campaign didn’t just open the door for people to believe in zombies; it potentially taught people the relative value of some lives in relation to others. Part of the CDC’s campaign was the graphic novel Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic, which follows a young couple, Todd and Julie, and their dog, Max, through a zombie attack in which they must gather supplies and, later, evacuate to a shelter.5 The zombies fit the typical cannibal-style look: they have grotesque, pale green faces and yellow eyes; their mouths are perpetually open, ready to eat unsuspecting victims; and they are inarticulate and slow. They aren’t completely thing-ified, though, because they aren’t completely ordinary—some lingering traces of humanity make it difficult to mark them off as things. When Todd must push his zombified neighbor, Mrs. Clements, out his front door, he seems genuinely dismayed at having to rough up the old lady. As he and Julie drive through a crowd of zombies, she implores, “Do me a favor and try not to hit any [of] them?”6

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When zombies start to overrun the local evacuation center, one of the soldiers at the guard post laments, “We can’t just shoot them. These are our fellow citizens!”7 In fact, we never see the end result of a zombie attack on any of the living; there is a lot of grabbing and growling, but we do not see more than that. The zombies are a threat, but one that never fully enacts itself. That the zombies play on conventions of cannibal-style texts in many ways helps spell out their threat: the assumption is that readers have seen a zombie film or television show and understand the dangers that cannibal-style zombies pose to the living. The graphic novel therefore doesn’t have to show those dangers. This omission allows the CDC to sidestep the thorny issue of having zombies attack living humans, which would necessitate trying to kill them as a preventive measure. In addition, the humanization of the zombies (giving them names, showing people’s reluctance to kill them) puts these zombies in a gray zone. They may not be fully extra-ordinary, but the ways in which the graphic novel humanizes them allows them to approach it. The CDC intends for us to read them as cannibal-style zombies, but they never act as the sort of threat expected of that kind of zombie, and as a result, the living characters are reluctant to fully zombify them. The living humans don’t seem able to view these zombies as ordinary, as things, so the zombies retain just enough humanity to resist easy killing. In 2013, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) used zombies as part of a public service campaign to aid in crime prevention. In an attempt to remind Los Angelenos to lock their cars and secure their valuables, the department produced a short YouTube video, Invasion of the Zombie Bandits, which paints zombies as thieves breaking into unlocked cars.8 Much like the zombies of the CDC campaign, the LAPD zombies follow cannibal-style conventions—they are inarticulate, slow-moving, decomposing corpses—and much like the CDC’s graphic novel, Invasion of the Zombie Bandits imagines zombies who never pose a true threat to human life. They are much more interested in stealing iPads than in eating people. In fact, when facing the police, the zombies are compliant and easily arrested. So another government agency saw the appeal of using zombies in trying to reach audiences, trading on an assumed familiarity with what a cannibal zombie is while downplaying the inhumanity of the living dead. Zombies become a neutered threat in these scenarios. Both of them imagine zombies as adversarial, but both counter this characterization by produc-

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ing unkillable zombies, which is mainly achieved by appealing to the zombies’ lingering humanity. Other organizations don’t imagine their zombies as quite so toothless—or human. In 2012, the HALO Corporation, a security firm, hosted a zombie-themed training exercise for “military, law enforcement and medical personnel” in order to facilitate “emergency response training” during a multiday counterterrorism summit.9 The zombies imagined for the exercise were what we might expect: dangerous adversaries much like those found in any number of zombie-killing video games. Describing the exercise, the company’s president, Brad Barker, noted, “No one knows what the zombies will do in our scenario, but quite frankly no one knows what a terrorist will do.”10 Loren Thompson, a defense analyst, echoed his sentiment: “The defining characteristics of zombies are that they’re unpredictable and resilient. That may be a good way to prepare for what the Pentagon calls asymmetric warfare.”11 There is no qualifying or abstraction here: both statements imply that terrorists and enemy combatants are no better than zombies; they are unpredictable, inhuman threats to be countered and killed. Gordillo grounds his argument about the “killable horde” in the state of exception and sees zombies in films such as World War Z (Forster, 2013) as “the fictionalized embodiment” of real-world populations made over as expendable.12 In the HALO scenario, the zombies may still be fictional, but HALO intends their presence to stand in for real-world populations. There is no metaphor or approximation; it is a one-to-one equivalence. The zombies are the terrorists or whoever the Pentagon is facing off against. Or more to the point, the terrorists and other enemies are zombies, and are therefore not only killable but also abstracted as less than human and less than real by being made over into fictional characters. If zombies are killable in part because they aren’t real, then making the terrorists over as zombies similarly reduces them. Thus, the equivocation between ordinary and extra-ordinary zombiness on display in the CDC and LAPD examples wouldn’t work for HALO, since it would problematize the black-orwhite thinking necessary to justify killing the zombie terrorists in the exercise. The HALO exercise uses zombies to justify and normalize a rationale for the state of exception in the real world. The idea of using zombie apocalypses as contexts for military training exercises had borne fruit before the HALO exercise. In early 2014, news broke that in April 2011 the Department of Defense (DoD)

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had created a training exercise that asked participants “to come up with a blueprint to ‘preserve non-zombie humans from the threat posed by a zombie horde.’”13 The department designed the exercise to use a “completely-impossible scenario that could never be mistaken as a real plan” but would still allow military commanders to practice reacting to a highly volatile global emergency.14 In the documents released, the exercise—CONPLAN 8888-11 “Counter-Zombie Dominance”—identifies eight possible types of zombies, largely based on existing tropes of zombidom in US pop culture. They are “Pathogenic Zombies,” born of a virus; “Radiation Zombies”; “Evil Magic Zombies” (closely akin to zombies born of voodoo); “Space Zombies,” which are alien zombies or earth beings contaminated by toxins from space; bioengineered “Weaponized Zombies”; “Symbiant-Induced Zombies”; “Vegetarian Zombies,” which eat only plant life; and “Chicken Zombies,” which are, according to the report, “the only proven class of zombie that actually exists,” since they are chickens that are “incorrectly euthanized” on large-scale chicken farms.15 Except for the chickens, the evil magic zombies, and the vegetarian variety, all the zombies imagined loosely conform to ordinary cannibal-style zombiness. They differ only in how they come into being. Throughout the report, the writers draw a clear line between zombies of any kind and “‘non-zombie’ human life,” which is later simply taken to mean “humans.”16 Since the purpose of the plan is to “preserve the sanctity of human life,” the zombies have to be explicitly read as both a threat to that sanctity and as wholly dehumanized and ordinary so that the killing of them can be justified. Early on the report notes: “Zombies are horribly dangerous to all human life and zombie infections have the potential to seriously undermine national security and economic activities that sustain our way of life.”17 But in laying out the threat to our security and way of life, the report provides very little detail about how the zombies are dangerous to these things. As with the CDC, LAPD, and HALO scenarios, there is an assumption of prior knowledge of zombies—we already know what kinds of threats they pose—and of this knowledge being fairly consistent among people. The writers take into consideration the legal ramifications of killing zombies: “U.S. and international law regulate military operations only insofar as human and animal life are concerned. There are almost no restrictions on hostile actions that may be taken . . . against pathogenic life forms, organic-robotic entities, or ‘traditional’ zom-

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bies.”18 Later, the writers underscore the legality of the action by noting that we can’t prevail upon the zombies: “Zombies are not cognizant life-forms. As such, they cannot be deterred or reasoned with in any way.”19 The report then concludes, “There is no known medical cure for a zombie pathogen. At this time it can be assumed that once a human turns, they cannot be cured or reverted to human status.”20 The report adds, “Zombies are undead and thus feel no pain or fear of death.”21 In this scenario, zombies cannot be reasoned with or cured, the law does not protect them, and they are a threat to the survival of US society, which is almost a textbook means of rendering a group as justifiably killable. The report makes the zombies out to be a threat to “our way of life” without explicitly foregrounding how that threat manifests or what exactly our way of life is. It presents zombies as existing outside the law. Further, since we can’t reason with zombies, and they don’t feel things the way we do, the report can push them outside the bounds of human thought and feeling. And in case a reader is still on the fence about zombies, the report assures us that they “feel no pain,” so killing them won’t cause suffering. As with the HALO scenario, here we see a shift from the CDC’s and LAPD’s logic of using zombies to make a point but still having them retain their (former) humanity, to scenarios that envision zombies as completely inhuman and as stand-ins for real-world populations—these are, after all, military training exercises. The Defense Department exercise departs from the HALO one in putting forward a much more elaborate justification of zombie killing because allowing the zombies vestiges of their humanity would problematize that killing. The writers of CONPLAN 8888-1 seem worried that because the zombies are former humans who were unlucky enough to be infected with zombiism or to come under the spell of malevolent forces, enough of their humanity will remain to complicate the killing of them. Hence the need for repeated justifications of the zombies as not human—in a training exercise, let’s not forget—and repeated assurances that the killing of them is ethical, legal, and painless. The HALO scenario operates under the assumption that “zombie” is a stable category, and while the CDC, LAPD, and DoD examples might as well, each of them blurs the lines of zombiness somewhat. The CDC and LAPD promotions humanize zombies and take killing out of the equation. The DoD report goes to elaborate lengths to spell out the zombies’ inhumanity, which, strangely enough, lets their humanity seep back in a bit. Thus, even in real-world deploy-

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ments of zombies—in which cultural expectations of ordinary zombiness are most likely what the producers intend—these expectations are still somewhat defied as the humanity of zombies manages to peek through. Imagining zombies as embodied threats is not solely the province of the military or other government agencies. A number of groups across the United States use zombies for disaster-preparedness campaigns or to justify personal defense strategies. Within the larger group of survivalists, or “preppers,” who actively prepare for apocalyptic eventualities, including widespread economic collapse or pandemics, some use potential zombie apocalypses to help organize their plans. Peter Dendle observes, “While most of these zombie fans state explicitly that zombies do not really exist . . . they admit that zombie outbreaks are a possibility or at the very least represent a useful model for general emergency preparedness.”22 This use of the zombie as metaphor in these instances, then, is not unlike how the CDC or LAPD took up zombies and is likewise at the heart of groups like ZombieDefense.org and Zombie Squad, which use zombies “to promote volunteerism and self-reliance.”23 The groups recognize the fictional nature of cannibal-style zombies, but know also that zombihood needs to be unequivocally ordinary and adversarial for the zombie as metaphor to work. Christopher Zealand observes that the film Land of the Dead “was widely criticized by [Zombie Squad] members for overemphasizing residual zombie humanity and group identity.”24 Thus, preparedness based on zombies works only if the zombies are an inhuman threat, and the often tonguein-cheek nature of using zombies in this way is tongue-in-cheek only so long as the zombies remain inhuman. Once we humanize zombies, even as fictional creatures, the preparedness starts to sound mean, even prejudiced, which is why the CDC and LAPD exercises had to find a way around killing their zombies. The basis of most civilian prepping—as well as the other scenarios previously discussed—is that zombies aren’t real. They thus easily fit into thought exercises structured around potential uses of violence because they supposedly negate the tricky issue of imagining real-life criminals, enemy combatants, or other humans as potentially expendable. Cultural assumptions of ordinary zombiness are vital to this. If the zombies’ humanity begins to show through, deadly force has to be taken out of the equation lest the scenarios begin to look like plans for killing other humans. Zombie Squad members recognized this in

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their discomfort with Land of the Dead’s extra-ordinary, humanized zombies. Zombies can teach us how to behave—prepare for the zombie apocalypse by learning how to shoot a gun and by stocking up on survival equipment, for instance—but their usefulness as a metaphor works only if they remain ordinary cannibal-style zombies. When the zombies begin to approach any level of extra-ordinariness by reclaiming some facet of their humanity, or when it becomes clear that the zombies are simply stand-ins for real-world human bodies (as in the HALO and DoD exercises), the zombies have the potential to teach us not only how to behave but also how to behold as well, by showing us that when the chips are down, not all people retain their rights to full humanity. The real-world implications of invoking the zombie in these exercises and preparations are tremendous. Behaviors that we would frown upon in normal everyday life (killing others, scavenging, and stealing) are made part and parcel of how one trains to encounter zombies, and the zombies, though not real, invite the contemplation and the normalization of behaviors intended for use in real life, as well as a state of exception that can easily be transferred from the zombies onto real-world bodies. In these training and preparation scenarios, those involved know that zombies aren’t real, so the logical question becomes, exactly what—or who—are these people training and preparing to combat?

Let ’s Dance

In the film Night of the Creeps (Dekker, 1986), J.  C. Hooper is a geeky college student and best friend of the film’s protagonist, Chris. J. C. and Chris find themselves up to their necks in an alien invasion of slug-like creatures that kill humans and use their corpses as hosts. Unfortunately, J. C. doesn’t make it to the end of the film. He becomes a casualty of an alien slug. But before the alien completely takes over his body—while he is both living and dead—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.25 It is a chilling moment—J. C.’s realization that he exists in between, that he can never go back to what he was before. J. C. is, for a little while, an extra-ordinary zombie, but he realizes he will soon become an ordinary one. Typically, we see extra-ordinary zombies escaping from ordinary zombiness, not entering into it, and J. C.’s trajectory highlights the point that extra-ordinary zombiness is mainly

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about being a zombie but not fully one. In media representations of zombiness, we are often confronted by zombies that can’t inhabit the zombie state unambiguously. Like J. C. in those moments of transition, they are too human for that. In the first part of this book, I argued that the preponderance of extra-ordinary zombies pointed to a defiant zombie state, one that often allowed both zombies and those aligned with zombie-making culture to resist exploitation and subordination. The inability to stay put in one’s (zombified) place, it would seem, is contagious—even living humans, like Sugar and the Cycle Sluts, are unable to stay quiet and docile. If we expect zombies to be mindless slaves or unthinking cannibals, then deviations from those conditions are noteworthy because they undermine the notion of a stable, fi xed zombiness and also show how binary designations such as human or inhuman, living or dead, and master or slave are constructed assumptions based on criteria that can easily change. In the last few chapters, I have shown that the gap between ordinary and extra-ordinary zombies exposes the logics that set up such binaries. Video games craft extra-ordinary zombies in part through a hierarchical comparison with ordinary zombies, who can be used and abused without worry. Training exercises using zombies are contingent on zombies being inhuman threats to humanity, on forgetting that extra-ordinary zombiness is even an option or in sidestepping it. Ordinary zombiness, then, despite how it gets taken up theoretically, is not in-between or interstitial at all. It is fi xed and stable. It is extra-ordinary zombiness, the state that J. C. finds himself in when he says, “I think I’m dead,” that is truly interstitial. Once he becomes an ordinary zombie, there will be no more gray areas. J. C. will become a zombie and, hence, justifiably killable, no longer what he was. But until then, as an extra-ordinary zombie, he stands outside the state of exception: not fully human or fully zombified either. This conclusion assumes that J. C. will eventually become the type of zombie belonging to what Gordillo labels the “killable horde.” The “killable horde” kind of zombie is justifiably killable and completely inhuman, but it is not in-between. It may exist in a state of exception, and the state of exception may describe someone who is biologically a living human but who is nonetheless killable. But in zombie form, the killable are those bodies that are completely dead. They may be animated, but they aren’t supposed to be read as something whose execution would elicit any remorse. They exist beyond the limits of living; they are, for all intents and purposes, always already dead.

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Conclusion | 175

Fig. 7.1. Happy extra-ordinary zombies dancing the night away (“Hollywood,

A.D.,” The X-Files © Twentieth Century Fox, 2000)

The extra-ordinary zombie is the zombie too human to be killed— or at least too human to be killed without some questions or remorse. It is also the zombie too human to be quiet or too human to be enslaved. It is the zombie that troubles zombiness, and as this book has shown, American media is full of these kinds of zombies. At the end of their essay examining literature and folklore of the zombi, Hans-W. Ackermann and Jeanine Gauthier express surprise that some of their interviews with Vodouists produced a picture of the zombi that they had rarely encountered in other academic sources: “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.”26 The zombi, according to these interviews, was “a normal part of a human” from the very beginning.27 In essence, this is the logic of the extra-ordinary zombie in reverse, in which every zombie has humanity lurking in it from the start. If, in essence, we “rescue” zombies from a state of exception by humanizing them, do we then zombify real-world bodies by having zombies stand in for them? In the crafting of an easily killable zombie adversary in training exercises, there is a sense of being able to write off the process as harmless because zombies aren’t real, and yet the zombie stands for someone. In this way, Ackermann and Gauthier’s observation that in the Vodou worldview, every human contains some zombi takes on a chilling character. If extra-ordinary zombies illustrate how

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one might be able to rise up from degrading circumstances, it follows that ordinary zombies could work to show how easily one might fall back into them. In this case, the numerous examples of extra-ordinary zombies in US media make sense: the media show zombies that are worthy of life and all that entails, and these zombies offer the promise that while real-world discourses may work to make some of us over as “zombie,” there is still a chance that we can be counted as human as well. As the epigraph for this chapter notes, there is the possibility that we profoundly misunderstand zombies. Maybe all they really want to do is drink and dance and make love. The “Thriller” zombies of my childhood certainly seemed that way: when my friends and I reenacted the music video, none of us wanted to be Ola Ray, the woman whom Jackson sings to and who the zombies end up chasing—we wanted to be the zombies. Those zombies could dance! The X-Files episode that supplied the epigraph ends with a group of zombies rising from the grave to dance (fig. 7.1). Watching it, I think Agent Mulder was right. We might expect zombies to be no more than ordinary, but there is a lot of humanity in them (just as there is a lot of zombie in humanity). If discourses that teach us some lives are more expendable than others in fact make us over as “zombies,” then the zombies that resist— Big Daddy, Stubbs, J.  C. Hooper, and even the dancing zombies of “Thriller”—may very well be showing us that we have profoundly misunderstood the living dead all along.

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Notes

Introduction

1. The zombie’s pedigree in US popular culture is definitely Haitian, but folklore throughout the Caribbean and Africa is full of similar creatures. Perhaps the best documented of these creatures is the Jamaican duppy. For an extended discussion of the zombie’s roots, see Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie. Throughout this book, I use the term “Vodou” to refer to the religion and “voodoo” to refer to the sensationalized depiction of Vodou in American media. 2. Bishop, American Zombie Gothic, location 205. 3. Seabrook, The Magic Island, 93. 4. Elizabeth McAlister, “Slaves, Cannibals, and Infected HyperWhites,” 459; Haiti became an independent nation in 1804. 5. Hurston, Tell My Horse, 179. 6. Dunham, Island Possessed, 184. 7. Ackermann and Gauthier, “Nature of the Zombi,” 473. 8. Ackermann and Gauthier point out that zombis of the body are by no means exclusive to Haiti, making reference to similar creatures in Africa, other parts of the Caribbean, and South America (“Nature of the Zombi,” 478–479; 482). 9. Hurston, Tell My Horse, 189; Edna Taft also makes this assertion in A Puritan in Voodoo-Land (257). Alfred Métraux, on the other hand, makes no differentiation between bokors and houngans and associates zombi making with both (Voodoo in Haiti, 281). 10. McAlister, Rara!, 105. McAlister’s preferred term is “zonbi” rather than “zombi.” 11. Here, slavery is understood both as it was experienced under French colonizers and during the American occupation. 12. I do not want to digress into an argument over whether non-Haitian

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178 | Notes to Pages 6–9

authors’ choosing to read zombis only as slaves reinscribes conventional stereotypes of Haiti and the Haitian people. First, I don’t think that is the intention of any of the authors I have thus far mentioned, and second, there are several authors—particularly Joan Dayan and Ackermann and Gauthier— who discuss the possibilities of seeing the zombi as something more than a slave. It is worth noting, however, that anthropological studies and scholarly writings about the zombie in US culture most frequently examine the zombi through the lens of Haitian fears and memories of slavery. 13. Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods, 37; in “A Zombie Manifesto,” Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry also tie the zombie to revolutionary ideas. 14. Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods, 37, 38. 15. McAlister, Rara!, 103. 16. As McAlister notes, this view may be much more benign than the way in which community members may imagine zombi of the body—there seems to be an assumption that some Vodouists would be willing to have their spirits, but not necessarily their bodies, work for the community after death (Rara!, 105–106). 17. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 67. 18. “Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan,” Time, 57. 19. This parallels some of the anecdotal evidence concerning zombis in Haiti. Several sources mention that when given salt, zombies will wake and return to their graves; see, for example, Hutter “Salt Is Not for Slaves.” 20. Peter Dendle, Elizabeth McAlister, and Jamie Russell, among others, bring up this fact; see Russell, Book of the Dead, and Dendle, The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia. 21. Haining, introduction to Stories of the Walking Dead, 11. 22. Susan L. Carruthers notes that at the height of the Cold War, fears of brainwashing or mind control were seemingly “more terrifying than the threat of atomic annihilation” (Cold War Captives, 5). Brainwashing was a concept that entered popular consciousness during the Korean War, and as Carruthers notes elsewhere, US fears of brainwashing were often tied to anxieties about Chinese and North Korean treatment of POWs (“The Manchurian Candidate”). Matthew Frye Jacobson and Gaspar Gonzalez further note how the brainwashing in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), in particular, plays off Orientalist discourses of the Yellow Peril (What Have They Built You to Do?, 46–47, 119–121). Thus, what we have is in many ways a set of fears very similar to those seen in zombie fi lms—the loss of free will attached to fears of racial contamination—but with a clear racial hierarchy still in place: Cold War brainwashing denotes a laborious process of indoctrination (and possibly torture), but zombification is quasi-magical in nature; one is the result of industriousness (no matter how nefarious), while the other is the result of evil religious practices.

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Notes to Pages 9–21 | 179

23. Some might cite The Walking Dead (Curtiz, 1936) as the first zombie fi lm set on American soil, but I see that fi lm as more in the tradition of fi lms about Frankenstein’s monster. In that case, Bowery at Midnight (Fox, 1942) was the first zombie fi lm set on US soil. 24. The novella has been made into a fi lm three times: The Last Man on Earth (Ragona/Salkow, 1964), with Vincent Price; The Omega Man (Sagal, 1971), with Charlton Heston; and I Am Legend (Lawrence, 2007), with Will Smith. 25. Rushton and Moreman, “Introduction,” location 136. 26. Perhaps the most notable mainstream portrayal of zombies during the decade was in the “Pinkeye” episode of South Park in 1997. 27. Romero’s original trilogy consists of Night of the Living Dead (1968); Dawn of the Dead (1978); and Day of the Dead (1985). He later added to it with Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007), and Survival of the Dead (2009). 28. Each of these found a wide audience, and they were subsequently made into fi lms, with varying degrees of box-office success: World War Z (Forster), starring Brad Pitt, came out in 2013, and Cell (Williams) and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Steers) appeared in theaters in 2016. 29. One might wonder why I am not addressing The Walking Dead (in either form) in this book. The simple answer is that while the comic book and the television show are compelling, the focus of both is on the interpersonal relations of living survivors. The zombies are mostly a plot device to help story lines move along; the zombies therefore don’t fit the parameters of this project. 30. In “Zombies as Internal Fear or Threat,” Kim Paffenroth acknowledges that there can be a link between the zombie hordes of the twenty-first century and terrorists, yet he still believes that there are deeper fears on display, noting that in many fi lms (especially those of George A. Romero), the zombies tend to be the protagonists’ neighbors and loved ones and not purely outside threats. 31. In discussing definitions of the zombie, Sarah Juliet Lauro and Deborah Christie observe, “The zombie has evolved so much over the course of the twentieth century that, at the beginning of the twenty-first, it is nearly unrecognizable,” suggesting the need for a fluid approach to definitions of zombiness (introduction to Better off Dead, 2). 32. Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie, 3–4. 33. Hurbon, “American Fantasy and Haitian Vodou,” 195; here, Hurbon is referring to Faustin Wirkus, a US marine stationed in Haiti during the occupation who later wrote of his adventures there; “Seabrook” refers to William Seabrook, and Wade Davis is an ethnobotanist who wrote about Haiti and zombies in the 1980s, most famously in The Serpent and the Rainbow. The book was later turned into the Wes Craven fi lm The Serpent and

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180 | Notes to Pages 25–29

the Rainbow (1988), which presents a fictionalized (and highly sensationalized and stereotypical) account of an anthropologist’s run-in with a voodoo sect in Haiti.

Chapter 1

Parts of this chapter appeared in my earlier work “‘They Are Not Men . . . They Are Dead Bodies’: From Cannibal to Zombie and Back Again.” 1. Ouanga, DVD, dir. George Terwilliger (George Terwilliger Productions, 1935; Something Weird Video, 2008). 2. Martin, “Zombie!,” 14. 3. This was a common nickname for the nation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 4. I understand that I am collapsing all colonial spaces and peoples into one broad category. Not all colonies were the same, and colonial experiences differed widely, even when the same colonizers were in charge. But the structures that separated the world into colonizer and colonized, while much more fluid than might have been expected, served a role worldwide in dividing peoples into the broad categories “us” and “them.” I use the terms “colonizer” and “colonized” here for a similar purpose—to illustrate the power relations at play in the racist imagination of the time, which, broadly speaking, divided the world into white, civilized peoples and everyone else. 5. Spain kept the other two-thirds of the island, which is today the Dominican Republic. 6. Kukla, A Wilderness So Immense, 147. 7. See James, The Black Jacobins. 8. Quoted in Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution, 328. Popkin further clarifies that “Mary Hassal” was a pseudonym for Leonora Sansay, “the wife of a Saint-Domingue planter” (317). 9. James, Black Jacobins. 10. Senn, Drums o’ Terror, 14. 11. Hurbon, “American Fantasy and Haitian Vodou,” 183. 12. Rhodes, “White Zombie,” 72. St. John’s book and its assertions were widely believed, but there were some skeptics. James Anthony Froude remarked that while he found it hard to believe that someone of St. John’s standing would make up charges of cannibalism and child sacrifice, he suspected that the Haitians were being demonized with these charges just as European Jews previously had been (The English in the West Indies, 126–127). See also Spencer St. John, Hayti. 13. St. John, Hayti, 188. 14. This is not surprising, given a rather long history in the West of using accusations of cannibalism against indigenous and colonized peoples as a

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Notes to Pages 29–33 | 181

means of “proving” their barbarity. In these cases, cannibalism was most often a behavioral substitute for race—a trope intended to paint people of color as barbaric without explicitly referring to their race—and there was typically little real proof to back up these claims. For a compelling discussion of the ways in which cannibalism has been deployed in US culture since the Civil War, see Berglund, Cannibal Fictions. 15. Ober, In the Wake of Columbus, 190. 16. Prichard, Where Black Rules White, 94. 17. According to a Navy Department memorandum in 1921, before the occupation, the United States was concerned enough at rising instances of disorder that it intervened in Haiti in 1857, 1859, 1866, 1868, 1869, 1876, 1888, 1889, 1892, 1902, 1903, 1904, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1908, 1909, 1911, 1912, and 1913 (US Congress, Senate, Inquiry into Occupation and Administration of Haiti, 1:63). 18. For a measure of the colony’s economic importance: according to Jon Kukla, French trade with the colony in 1789 “was valued at £11 million a year,” and “St. Domingue provided 64% of the French export trade, 2.2 times the value of Britain’s exports to its remaining colonies” (Kukla, Wilderness So Immense, 147; 383n29). 19. The United States didn’t officially recognize Haiti until 1862, and even as late as 1920, commentators were remarking on how little Americans knew about Haiti; see Osterhout, “A Little Known Marvel of the Western Hemisphere.” 20. Harvey, Sketches of Hayti, vii. 21. Quoted in Lawless, Haiti’s Bad Press, 48. 22. St. John, Hayti, xi. 23. James, American Civilization, 202; this is precisely what happened to most post-Reconstruction blacks, especially in the South. 24. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 151. 25. Johnson, Third Annual Message to Congress. 26. LaFeber, The Panama Canal, 40. 27. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 209–10. 28. Austin, “The Worship of the Snake,” 170. 29. Foner, Reconstruction, 134. 30. For instance, its interventions in Cuba, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Nicaragua, and parts of Mexico during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 31. MacCorkle, The Monroe Doctrine, 77. 32. Commentators used similar rhetoric during the construction of the Panama Canal—tales of barbarism in Panama helped justify the US presence there. 33. So called, according to Craige, because a gunrunner friend of his described the nation as such; Craige reports that his friend said, “This . . . is

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182 | Notes to Pages 33–39

black Bagdad. These people are still living in the days of the Arabian Nights” (Craige, Black Bagdad, 1). Craige’s second book, which was also about Haiti, was titled Cannibal Cousins (1934). 34. Craige, Black Bagdad, 98. 35. Ibid., 99. 36. US Congress, Senate, Inquiry into Occupation and Administration of Haiti, 2:1688. 37. See US Congress, Senate, Inquiry into Occupation and Administration of Haiti and Santo Domingo, vols. 1 and 2, and Seligmann, “The Conquest of Haiti.” 38. Taft, A Puritan in Voodoo-Land, 162. 39. Quoted in Millspaugh, Haiti under American Control, 185. 40. Esselle Parichy, “Marine Sergeant Turns Adventurer,” 5. 41. Gwynne, “Yesterday in New York,” 3. Some of this sensitivity was due to the fact that Vodou was periodically criminalized in Haiti throughout the twentieth century (in part because some saw it as an embarrassment); Vodou wasn’t recognized as an official religion in Haiti until 2003. 42. H. Phillips, “Drums in the Jungle,” 79; papaloi is another term for houngan, and an ouanga is a charm or talisman used in Vodou. Practicioners can use ouanga for either positive or negative purposes, but the implication in the article is that this ouanga was meant as a curse of some sort. 43. Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods, 249. 44. Dendle, Zombie Movie, 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, but this is a bit misleading (Russell, Book of the Dead, 9). Hearn uses the term “zombi,” but he is technically talking about Martinique, and the creature he describes is something of an all-purpose bogeyman and not necessarily a dead body returned from the grave. The Oxford English Dictionary lists four examples of the word in English-language texts before Seabrook— from 1819, 1872, 1886, and 1900—but my point remains that the word was not in wide use (nor was it consistently used to indicate the living dead) before Seabrook popularized it. 45. At the beginning of his 1912 article on voodoo, Henry Austin mentions rumors of “exhuming and reviving supposedly dead bodies” (Austin, “Worship of the Snake,” 170). 46. Seabrook, The Magic Island, 93. 47. Ibid., 94. 48. Ibid., 101. 49. Besides Seabrook and Hesketh Prichard, Spencer St. John called the drum a “favourite instrument” of the Haitians (Hayti, 156), and Henry Austin’s report on Vodou in the New England Magazine in 1912 opened with a description of voodoo drums in the distance. Henry A. Phillips’s essay on the fi lming of Ouanga (which eventually took place in Jamaica) also links Vo-

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Notes to Pages 41–53 | 183

dou with constant drumming. A connection can also readily be made with the use of tom-toms in jungle fi lms and fi lms featuring Native Americans. 50. Perhaps the most notable exception to this is the zombie Carrefour in I Walked with a Zombie (1943). 51. Snead, White Screens / Black Images, 19. 52. Seabrook, The Magic Island, 98. 53. Actually, the fi lm King of the Zombies (1941) makes a reference to zombies’ preference for human flesh; see King of the Zombies, DVD, dir. Jean Yarbrough (Monogram Pictures, 1941; Alpha Video, 2001).

Chapter 2

1. “Better Off Undead,” Ugly Americans, written by Jeff rey Poliquin, dir. Devin Clark (Comedy Central, October 6, 2010). 2. Nick Muntean, “Nuclear Death and Radical Hope in Dawn of the Dead and On the Beach,” 81. 3. Jameson, “Future City.” 4. I am not trying to exclude other peoples of color in my wording here; rather, I am using this conventional piece of phrasing to point to the binary of racial thinking that sets up “white” in contrast to everything else. Similarly, while throughout this chapter I refer to the “blackness” of zombiness, I am using that term to acknowledge a binary contrast to whiteness. 5. My contention is that in moving past capitalism, there would be a move past racism, sexism, and other forms of systemic prejudice tied to capitalism as well. 6. See Dyer, White. 7. See, for instance, Return of the Living Dead (O’Bannon, 1985), the Resident Evil series of fi lms (2002–2017), and Warm Bodies (Levine, 2013). 8. McAlister, “Slaves, Cannibals, and Infected Hyper-Whites,” 475–476. 9. There is some historical precedent for linking zombihood with whiteness. In A Puritan in Voodoo-Land (1938), Edna Taft tells the story of a Haitian man given roiry seed for an illness, which caused a loss of skin pigmentation that made the black man look white; the man “said for months after his strange cure his relatives and friends shunned him like the plague, believing him to be a zombie” (258). 10. For examples of physically marked slave-style zombies, see the zombies in The Ghost Breakers (Marshall, 1940), I Walked with a Zombie, and I Eat Your Skin. Richard Hand remarks that zombies in radio plays were often described as decomposing (Hand, “Undead Radio”); the zombies of EC comics were often shown in this way, too. 11. Racial hygiene refers to official policies that demarcate which groups or individuals are allowed legally to procreate, and the most infamous of such policies were enacted in Nazi Germany. These policies were,

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184 | Notes to Pages 54–63

in part, influenced by the study of eugenics, which was based on the work of the British scientist Francis Galton’s interest “in ‘improving human stock’ through scientific management of mating; his explicit goal was to create better humans” (Goering, “Eugenics”). As Goering notes, while many eugenicists may have started with the best of intentions, “racist, sexist, and classist assumptions pervaded the discourse.” 12. I am not making this claim; rather, I am acknowledging that it exists. For a thorough dismantling of this logic, see Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness. 13. It is worth nothing that in fi lms and video games clearly identifying the source of a zombie contagion, the text at least tacitly acknowledges systemic problems as being at the heart of the epidemic. Still, in most of these texts, the government or corporation in question is almost always aberrant— the exception—and therefore individual actions, not systemic ones, create zombies. 14. The black actor Duane Jones played Ben, but Romero and his fellow fi lmmakers have admitted on several occasions that it was simply a matter of casting the best actor for the role; his race was a secondary consideration, and the role was not originally written for a black actor. 15. Bishop, American Zombie Gothic, location 2213. 16. Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Regan, 103. 17. Russo, The Complete “Night of the Living Dead” Filmbook, 36. 18. Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Regan, 107. 19. Shaviro, “Melancholia.” 20. Waller, The Living and the Undead, 314. 21. McAlister, “Slaves, Cannibals, and Infected Hyper-Whites,” 475. 22. Lauro and Christie, introduction to Better off Dead, 2. For further discussions of the zombie as posthuman, see Christie, “A Dead New World,” and Lauro and Embry, “A Zombie Manifesto.” 23. Lauro and Embry, “A Zombie Manifesto,” 91. 24. McGlotten, “Dead and Live Life,” location 4050. 25. In the skit “Suburban Zombies,” the comedians Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele turn this thinking on its head as they envision a zombie apocalypse in which white zombies refuse to bite black living survivors, effectively creating a situation where black people are free to enjoy the afterlife of the current world without fear of being turned. See “Suburban Zombies,” Key and Peele, written by Rebecca Drysdale et al., dir. Peter Atencio (Comedy Central, October 31, 2012). 26. Mahoney, “Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Zombie,” location 2416. 27. The inverse of this plays out in Dawn of the Dead (1978) when a commentator on television notes that because of the zombie apocalypse there are no more divisions between living humans, the implication being that the only division that matters now is between the living and the dead (Dawn of

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the Dead, DVD, dir. George A. Romero [Dawn Associates, 1978; Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2004]). 28. Lewis, “Ztopia,” location 2039. Lewis is explicitly referencing Land of the Dead here. 29. See Agamben, The Coming Community. 30. Kee, “Good Girls Don’t Date Dead Boys.” 31. Land of the Dead, DVD, dir. George A. Romero (Universal Pictures, 2005; Universal Home Entertainment, 2005). 32. I was once asked whether zombies are capable of having abilities, to which I would reply yes—again, the assumption behind this question is that zombies are simply mindless humans, but we have no idea what happens in the transition to zombiness, so I am not going to speculate on their mental capacities; moreover, extra-ordinary zombies certainly have abilities and some form of thought processes. In Land of the Dead, for example, zombies communicate with one another, pick up weapons, and use them. 33. Kim Paffenroth notes the significance of the name “Fiddler’s Green,” which comes out of Irish folklore and refers to an afterlife of perpetual happiness; Paffenroth compares this ironic naming with the name of the zombies’ space, Uniontown, which connotes group solidarity and an understanding of class that is in stark contrast with what goes on in Fiddler’s Green (Gospel of the Living Dead, 127, 130). 34. Cholo DeMora (John Leguizamo) is the notable exception. 35. Rushton and Moreman, “Introduction,” location 184. 36. The title of this section is from Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” The entire stanza states: “Nobody living can ever stop me, / As I go walking that freedom highway; / Nobody living can ever make me turn back. / This land was made for you and me” (Guthrie, “This Land Is Your Land”). 37. In American Zombie Gothic, Kyle William Bishop argues that beginning with Night of the Living Dead and increasing with Romero’s subsequent “Dead” fi lms, the director positions living humans as the true monsters, and there is certainly an element of this in the fi lm, which structures the zombies as far more sympathetic than many of the living humans. I would add that this element of monstrous humanity has always been a facet of American zombie texts. In the slave-style texts, the living zombie master was usually the true monster of the piece; the zombies were merely there to do his (or her) bidding.

Chapter 3

1. The title is a nod to the 1972 Bob Clark zombie fi lm of the same name. 2. “Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things,” Supernatural, written by Raelle Tucker, dir. Kim Manners (CW, October 19, 2006). 3. Steve Jones makes an argument that female bodies are “metaphor-

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186 | Notes to Pages 75–83

ically aligned with the zombie” (Jones, “Porn of the Dead,” location 880). This would parallel similar arguments made by Rhona J. Berenstein, Judith Halberstam, and Linda Williams about the relationship between females and monsters in horror more broadly; see Berenstein, Attack of the Leading Ladies; Halberstam, Skin Shows; and Williams, “When the Woman Looks.” 4. Snead, White Screens / Black Images, 22. 5. Due to his coloring, Regas often played a variety of nationalities and ethnicities, so from the very start, zombie masters in American fiction were played by men whose whiteness was somewhat flexible. 6. Rhodes, “White Zombie,” 41. 7. Examples include but are not limited to White Zombie, Revolt of the Zombies, King of the Zombies, Bowery at Midnight, Revenge of the Zombies, and Voodoo Man. 8. Berenstein, Attack of the Leading Ladies, 4–5. 9. Ibid., 5. 10. White Zombie, DVD, dir. Victor Halperin (Halperin Productions, 1932; Screen EDG, 2011). 11. This same process happens in some contemporary versions of white male cannibal-style zombies on television, but with different results. These zombies, like the character Randall on Ugly Americans or Brian from the Angel episode “Provider,” are rendered as stereotypically masculine in dress or behavior while still being symbolically castrated as the undead: Randall cannot get a date with the object of his obsession, Krystal, and Brian is hopelessly under his love interest Allie’s thumb. But these men, rather than needing rescuing from their zombie state, try to initiate stable heterosexual relationships with living women as zombies; see “Better Off Undead,” Ugly Americans, and “Provider,” Angel, written by Scott Murphy, dir. Bill Norton (WB: January 21, 2002). 12. There is considerable scholarship on the stabilizing function of (white) heterosexual coupling in horror; one of the best discussions occurs in Berenstein, Attack of the Leading Ladies. 13. There are some notable 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 help restore him. 14. For a sampling of longer discussions of the links between monstrosity and sexuality in American horror fi lms, see Berenstein, Attack of the Leading Ladies; Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures; Wood, “An Introduction to the American Horror Film”; and Zimmerman, “Daughters of Darkness.” 15. Robin R. Means Coleman suggests that some fi lms presented the notion that voodoo or Haiti were infectious threats to white women (Horror Noire, 54–55); this possibility makes for an interesting comparison with later zombie fi lms in which zombiism became literally infectious. 16. Berenstein, Attack of the Leading Ladies, 107.

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Notes to Pages 83–91 | 187

17. See, for instance, bell hooks, Black Looks. 18. Revenge of the Zombies, DVD, dir. Steve Sekely (Monogram Pictures, 1943; BijouFlix Releasing, 2004). 19. While there are any number of works on representations of women in American fi lm at this time, Molly Haskell’s observation at the beginning of From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies is apt: in speaking of coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s and the pressures to remain a virgin, she observes, “We were as terrified of being labeled ‘fast’ as girls today are of being labeled ‘square’ by not making love” (xiii). 20. Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, 8, 11. 21. See ibid. Creed’s work draws from psychoanalytic theory and from the work of Julia Kristeva—in particular, The Powers of Horror. 22. Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, 292. 23. Ibid., 290. 24. Grant, “Taking Back Night of the Living Dead,” 210. 25. Night of the Living Dead, DVD, dir. Tom Savini (Columbia Pictures, 1990; Sony Pictures, 1999). 26. Grant, “Taking Back Night of the Living Dead,” 210. 27. Or as some interpret the end of the fi lm, zombies kill her, and this is her final, dying fantasy. 28. Cherry is pregnant, so there is a sense of continuation in that. 29. Harper, “‘I Could Kiss You, You Bitch.’” 30. Of course, the argument could be made that since cultural expectations of femininity in fi lm have changed, none of these women are expected to be coupled off at film’s end. Yet even if this expectation reflects changing cultural mores, it is a significant transition within the genre itself, especially since these women do not fit within the mold of the “final girl,” a concept introduced by Carol J. Clover in Men, Women, and Chain Saws to describe the female characters left standing at the end of slasher fi lms. The final girl—in Clover’s estimation—has some degree of gender fluidity: she is often a tomboy with a boyish name who is a virgin. At the end of the fi lm, this girl will resort to using a phallic weapon in dispatching the killer. She thus embodies both masculine and feminine traits. My argument, however, is that these women aren’t necessarily taking up some sort of masculine identity or phallic weapon so much as pushing back against conceptions of femininity that would paint them as ideally virginal or in need of a romantic pairing to be complete. 31. Regina is the only one who tries to hold onto it—by quickly trying to form a nuclear family and obeying the rules of the old system, such as traffic signals, even though there is no one around to enforce them. 32. My Boyfriend’s Back, DVD, dir. Bob Balaban (Touchstone Pictures, 1993; Walt Disney Video, 2002). 33. For a longer discussion of Johnny’s racialization as a zombie, see Kee, “Good Girls Don’t Date Dead Boys.”

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188 | Notes to Pages 93–107

34. Chopper Chicks in Zombietown, DVD, dir. Dan Hoskins (Troma Entertainment, 1989; Troma Team Video, 2002). 35. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 1. 36. Ibid. 37. Zombie Nation, DVD, dir. Ulli Lommel (Heidenheim Films, 2004; Working Poor Productions, 2005).

Chapter 4

1. In Vodou belief, a loa is a spirit intermediary between Bondye (the Creator) and the human world. 2. Sugar Hill, DVD, dir. Paul Maslansky (AIP, 1974; MGM Limited Edition Collection, 2011). 3. Blaxploitation fi lms, at their most popular in the first half of the 1970s, used exploitation strategies to attract audience interest through sensationalist images of sex, violence, and racy topics. They specifically targeted black audiences with the use of black casts, a focus on elements of black culture (such as funk and soul music), and the use of black power messages to drive their narratives. In these fi lms, black heroes and heroines fight back against systemic racism and corrupt whites. 4. In slave-style radio shows, white female zombie masters were a bit more plentiful; see Hand, “Undead Radio,” and Vials, “The Origin of the Zombie in American Radio and Film.” 5. Teenage Zombies, dir. Jerry Warren (GBM Productions, 1960), uploaded to YouTube by drelbcom (May 4, 2009), https://youtu.be/45TX5E zPIvM. 6. I Walked with a Zombie, DVD, dir. Jacques Tourneur (RKO Radio Pictures, 1943; Turner Home Entertainment, 2005). 7. Coleman, Horror Noire, 68. 8. Some sources list the name as “Klili” or a variation of that. The fi lmmakers may have borrowed this name directly from Seabrook, who reported that one voodoo priestess he worked with was named Clelie. 9. Ouanga, DVD, dir. George Terwilliger (George Terwilliger Productions, 1935; Something Weird Video, 2008). 10. According to Chris Vials, a similar story plays out in the episode “The Mysteries of the Zombie” on the Unsolved Mysteries radio show. This story tells of a jealous black servant who tries to win over the white plantation owner who employs her—when he rejects her advances, she turns his fiancée into a zombie (Vials, “Origin of the Zombie,” location 993). 11. Coleman, Horror Noire, 58. 12. Ibid., 60.

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Notes to Pages 107–132 | 189

13. Obeah, a belief system practiced throughout the Caribbean, shares many similarities with Vodou. 14. The Devil’s Daughter, VHS, dir. Arthur H. Leonard (Sack Amusement Enterprises, 1939; Timeless Video, 1994). 15. In “The Cinema of Difference,” Gwenda Young argues that the fi lm seems ambivalent about the power of Western institutions. 16. Voodoo Island, DVD, dir. Reginald Le Borg (Oak Pictures, 1957; MGM Home Entertainment, 2005). 17. Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, 36. For more on the mammy stereotype, see McElya, Clinging to Mammy; Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?; and Collins, “Mammies, Matriarchs, and Other Controlling Images” in Black Feminist Thought, 69–96. 18. The House on Skull Mountain, DVD, dir. Ron Honthaner (Chocolate Chip, 1974; Twentieth Century Fox, 2007). 19. Many critics have noted that white fi lmmakers often made these fi lms, which profited white-owned companies, so some see them as trying to cater to and exploit a demographic in order to take its money and sell it stereotypical and sometimes harmful images of itself. 20. “Erzulie” is probably a reference to Erzulie Dantor (Ezili Dantor or Erzulie D’en Tort), a loa of, among other things, protection, who is often associated with the Catholic Madonna. 21. Guerrero, Framing Blackness, 93–94. 22. Benshoff, “Blaxploitation Horror Films,” 42. 23. Coleman, Horror Noire, 139.

Chapter 5

The chapter epigraph is quoted in Leone, “Stubbs the Zombie.” 1. Zombie games exist in a number of genres. You can find zombies in first-person shooters, light rail games, massively multiplayer online roleplaying games, and survival horror games, among others. In each type of game, players’ interactions with the zombies are necessarily different. 2. Weise, “How the Zombie Changed Videogames,” location 2786. 3. Weise, “The Rules of Horror,” 252. 4. A. Phillips, “Shooting to Kill,” 3. 5. Phillips details how some gamers work to exploit the ragdoll physics of dead bodies in video games in order to produce a variety of results. 6. See, for instance, Agamben, State of Exception. 7. Gordillo, “The Killable Horde.” 8. Suellentrop, “Putting the Guilt Back in Killing.” 9. In these games, a parasite causes zombiism, and the thinking goes

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190 | Notes to Pages 132–143

that the parasites leave some of the victim’s humanity intact, hence producing smarter zombies. 10. Some might be quick to note that according to the mythology of Left 4 Dead, the “infected” are produced via a rabies-like virus and therefore might not be zombies. But given my working definition of zombies (laid out in the introduction) as well as the fact that the game has been widely marketed and accepted as a “zombie” game, I am confident in saying the infected are zombies. Again, this is another example of how slippery the concept “zombie” can be. 11. Matthew Weise points out this feature and discusses a notable exception, the 2003 online shooter Resident Evil Outbreak (Capcom), which allowed players to die and come back as zombies. The reanimation is, in Weise’s opinion, largely tied to being able to play the game in a multiplayer online mode: players that get killed during the game can still have something to do while the others in their groups continue to play (“How the Zombie Changed Videogames,” location 2936). 12. “Resident Evil 5: Tokyo Game Show Extended Alternate Trailer”; see also Pham, “Racism in Resident Evil 5?”; Brophy-Warren, “‘Resident Evil 5’ Reignites Debates about Race in Videogames”; and John, “Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal on the ‘Resident Evil 5’ Trailer.” 13. Suellentrop, “Putting the Guilt Back in Killing.” 14. Hernandez, “Zombie Game Creator Defends Allowing Players to Kill Undead Children.” 15. Also in its use of spirit jars and its references to loa and Baron Saturday. 16. Planescape Torment, Black Isle Studios (1999). 17. This was a feature of the City of Villains (2005) expansion. 18. Scott, “Now I’m Feeling Zombified,” 172. 19. Ibid., 173. 20. One could argue that a 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 is to sacrifice certain plants so that others can survive and fight the zombies. In fact, some plants are useful only for slowing down zombies while the zombies eat them. 21. Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse, Wideload Games/Aspyr Media (2005). 22. The title of this section comes from the final line of Yonzon, “[Updated] I Was a Teenage Zombie.” It would also be an apt way to describe what the player is encouraged to do in Stubbs the Zombie. 23. Technically, zombies are only one kind of undead that can be found within the world of the game; I am collapsing all the undead into a single category that fits within the parameters of what I deem a zombie to be.

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24. This was not the first time an “infection” ran wild through the world of the game. The Corrupted Blood Incident of 2005 saw a glitch cause a virus to run rampant throughout Azeroth. The difference being that the Lich King expansion virus was intentional and under Blizzard control, while the Corrupted Blood virus was not. 25. Quillen, “World of Warcraft Players React to Zombie Plague.” 26. Shirash, response to “Zombie Invasion?” 27. The Forsaken could be zombified during the event, just as any other race could. 28. Dungeons and Dragons alignments exist as a grid moving from Lawful Good, Lawful Neutral, and Lawful Evil to Neutral Good, Neutral, and Neutral Evil, to Chaotic Good, Chaotic Neutral, and Chaotic Evil. 29. Carr, “Play Dead.” 30. Krzywinska, “Zombies in Gamespace,” 162. 31. Kryzwinska, “Zombies in Gamespace,” 165, 166. 32. Ibid., 166. 33. Reid, “Rhetoric Goes Boom(er),” location 4600.

Chapter 6

1. I witnessed the events described in this paragraph. 2. Since many organizers did not document the earliest events, it is hard to pin down with any precision when the first zombie walks took place. A zombie parade in Sacramento in 2001 may have been the first; others date a small walk in Toronto in 2003 as the first. Much of it depends on how you define a zombie walk. 3. Toronto Zombie Walk and Halloween Parade, http://torontozombie walk.ca/about-tzw.html. 4. The Guinness Book of World Records lists a Minneapolis Zombie pub crawl in October 2014 as the largest zombie gathering in the world, with 15,458 documented participants (“Largest Gathering of Zombies,” Guinness Worlds Records Online). 5. Lauro, “Playing Dead,” 209. 6. “Using Novel Theater Fronts to Ballyhoo Broadway Films,” Film Daily, August 1, 1932, 6. 7. Eichberg, “Why the Press Agent?,” 39; “Mechanical Figures Plug ‘White Zombie,’ Film Daily, October 4, 1932, 4. 8. “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 on the following day throughout the rest of the world. 9. McAlister, “Slaves, Cannibals, and Infected Hyper-Whites,” 460. 10. “Zombie Attack,” BBC News: Leicester, June 18, 2011.

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192 | Notes to Pages 153–166

11. Lauro, “Sois Mort et Tais Toi,” 289, 290. 12. Nyong’o, “The Scene of Occupation,” 147. 13. “Mexico City Claims Zombie Walk World Record,” BBC News: World, November 21, 2011. 14. Knapp, “Hunting for Brains in Hollywood.” 15. “Melissa,” comment in response to Knapp, “Hunting for Brains in Hollywood.” 16. Rebecca Schneider, “It Seems as If . . . I am Dead,” 152. 17. Nyong’o, “I Was a Wall Street Zombie.” 18. While a great deal of this book focuses on zombies that would seem to go against this observation, it is still true: expectations are that zombies will be a part of a large group. Furthermore, this is played out even in films with extra-ordinary zombies. There are the faceless zombie laborers of White Zombie, the zombies who follow Big Daddy in Land of the Dead, and the other zombies that Lila von Altermann ends up leading against her husband in Revenge of the Zombies. 19. Toronto Zombie Walk and Halloween Parade. 20. Atom AtBnw, “SCV Main Street Zombie March.” 21. Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, 85–86. 22. Although one could argue that it is somewhat personally inscribed, since it was, most likely, part of the identity of the living person before zombification. 23. Lauro, “Did Zombie Flash Mobs Help Pave the Way for Occupy Wall Street?” 24. Canetti, Crowds and Power, 18. 25. Butler, “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street.” 26. Knapp, “Hunting for Brains in Hollywood.” 27. Ibid. 28. That isn’t to say that some don’t get out of hand; for instance, police were called out to a walk in Winnipeg in 2009 when walkers got unruly and started ignoring posted traffic signs and beating on cars; see Giroday, “Zombies Bit Too Lively for Event’s Organizer.” 29. Atom AtBnw, “SCV Main Street Zombie March.” 30. Heyl, “He Ain’t Drunk, He’s a Zombie.” 31. Orpana, “Spooks of Biopower,” 157. 32. Quoted in Kinnard, “Zombie Fads Peak When People Are Unhappy.” 33. Lauro, “Did Zombie Flash Mobs.”

Conclusion

The epigraph is from “Hollywood A.D.,” The X-Files, written and directed by David Duchovny (Fox, April 30, 2000). 1. Gordillo, “The Killable Horde.”

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Notes to Pages 166–175 | 193

2. Eric Garner died after being placed in a police chokehold in July 2014; police in Ferguson, Missouri, shot Michael Brown in August 2014. Both events—the police killing of African American men, especially in the wake of the killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African American teenager, in Florida in 2012—spurred public protests across the United States. 3. Marsh, “CDC ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ Disaster Campaign Crashes Website.” 4. Campbell, “Zombie Apocalypse.” 5. It is all revealed to be a dream at the end, but one that makes Todd immediately start planning his real-world emergency kit. 6. US Department of Health and Human Services, Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic. 7. Ibid. 8. Lapdnortheast, “LAPD’s ‘Invasion of the Zombie Bandits!’ ” 9. Watson, “Marines, Police Prep for Mock Zombie Invasion.” 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Gordillo, “Killable Horde.” 13. David, “The Zombie Apocalypse Is Nigh, and the Pentagon Is Ready.” 14. Ibid. 15. US Strategic Command, “CDRUSSTRATCOM CONPLAN 888811 ‘Counter-Zombie Dominance,’” 6, 7. 16. Ibid., 4. 17. Ibid., 5. 18. Ibid., 8. 19. Ibid., 11–12. 20. Ibid., 14. 21. Ibid., 15. 22. Dendle, “The Zombie as Barometer of Cultural Anxiety,” 53. 23. Zealand, “The National Strategy for Zombie Containment,” location 4847. 24. Ibid., location 5157n107. 25. Night of the Creeps, DVD, dir. by Fred Dekker (TriStar Pictures, 1986; Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2009). 26. Ackermann and Gauthier, “Nature of the Zombi,” 488. 27. Ibid.

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Films

The Birds (Hitchcock, 1963) Bowery at Midnight (Fox, 1942) Cell (Williams, 2016) Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (Clark, 1972) Chopper Chicks in Zombietown (Hoskins, 1989) Creature with the Atom Brain (Cahn, 1955) Dawn of the Dead (Romero, 1978) Dawn of the Dead (Snyder, 2004) Day of the Dead (Romero, 1985) Dead Heat (Goldblatt, 1988) Deathdream (Clark, 1974)

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The Devil’s Daughter (Leonard, 1939) Diary of the Dead (Romero, 2007) Fido (Currie, 2006) Get Along Little Zombie (Bernds, 1946) The Ghost Breakers (Marshall, 1940) The Ghost of Twisted Oaks (Olcott, 1915) Ghosts of Mars (Carpenter, 2001) House of the Dead (Boll, 2003) House of the Dead 2 (Hurst, 2005) The House on Skull Mountain (Honthaner, 1974) I am Legend (Lawrence, 2007) I Eat Your Skin (Tenney, 1964) I Walked with a Zombie (Tourneur, 1943) Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel, 1956) Invisible Invaders (Cahn, 1959) Juan de los Muertos (Juan of the Dead, Brugués, 2011) King of the Zombies (Yarbrough, 1941) Land of the Dead (Romero, 2005) Last Man on Earth (Ragona/Salkow, 1964) The Manchurian Candidate (Frankenheimer, 1962) My Boyfriend’s Back (Balaban, 1993) Night of the Comet (Eberhardt, 1984) Night of the Creeps (Dekker, 1986) Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968) Night of the Living Dead (Savini, 1990) The Omega Man (Sagal, 1971) Ouanga (Terwilliger, 1935) Plague of the Zombies (Gilling, 1966) Planet Terror (Rodriguez, 2007) Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Steers, 2016) Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960) Resident Evil (Anderson, 2002) Resident Evil: Apocalypse (Witt, 2004) Resident Evil: Extinction (Mulcahy, 2007) Resident Evil: Afterlife (Anderson, 2010) Resident Evil: Retribution (Anderson, 2012) Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (Anderson, 2017) Return of the Living Dead (O’Bannon, 1985) Revenge of the Zombies (Sekely, 1943) Revolt of the Zombies (Halperin/Yarbrough, 1936) Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski, 1968) The Serpent and the Rainbow (Craven, 1988) Shanks (Castle, 1974)

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Shock Waves (Widerhorn, 1977) Sugar Hill (Maslansky, 1974) Survival of the Dead (Romero, 2009) Teenage Zombies (Warren, 1959) 28 Days Later (Boyle, 2002) Unconquered (Reicher, 1917) Voodoo Island (Le Borg, 1957) Voodoo Man (Beaudine, 1944) Voodoo Vengeance (1913) The Walking Dead (Curtiz, 1936) Warm Bodies (Levine, 2013) White Zombie (Halperin, 1932) The Woman Eater (Saunders, 1958) World War Z (Forster, 2013) Zombie Nation (Lommel, 2004) Zombie Strippers (Lee, 2008) Zombies of Mora Tau (Cahn, 1957) Zombies on Broadway (Douglas, 1945)

Video Games

Area 51 (Mesa Logic, 1995) City of Heroes (Cryptic Studios / Paragon Studios, 2004–2012) Corpse Craft: Incident at Weardd Academy (Three Rings Design, 2008) Diablo II (Blizzard, 2000) Doom (id Software, 1993) Dying Light (Techland, 2015) House of the Dead (Sega, 1996–2013) Left 4 Dead (Valve South, 2008) No More Room in Hell (Kazan, 2011; 2013) Planescape Torment (Black Isle, 1999) Plants vs. Zombies (PopCap, 2009) Resident Evil (Capcom, 1996) Resident Evil 4 (Capcom, 2005) Resident Evil 5 (Capcom, 2009) Resident Evil Outbreak (Capcom, 2003) Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel without a Pulse (Wideload Games, 2005) Voodoo Kid (Infogrames, 1997) The Walking Dead: Season One (Telltale Games, 2012) Wolfenstein 3-D (id Software, 1992) World of Warcraft (Blizzard, 2004–present) Zombie Tycoon (Frima Studio, 2009)

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Zombie Wranglers (Frozen Codebase, 2009)

Television Programs and Music Videos

“Better Off Undead,” Ugly Americans (Comedy Central, 2010) “Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things,” Supernatural (CW, 2006) The Dead Don’t Die, TV movie (Harrington, 1975) “Hollywood A.D.,” The X-Files (Fox, 2000) Kolchack: The Night Stalker (ABC, 1974–1975) “Pinkeye,” South Park (Comedy Central, 1997) “Provider,” Angel (WB, 2002) “Suburban Zombies,” Key and Peele (Comedy Central, 2012) “Thriller,” music video (Landis, 1983) “The Very Important Zombie Affair,” The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (NBC, 1965) The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010–present)

Stage Plays and Radio Broadcasts

“The Mysteries of the Zombie,” Unsolved Mysteries, radio broadcast (n.d.) “Zombie,” stage play (Webb, 1932) “Zombie!” Thrills, radio broadcast (1938)

Short Stories, Novels, and Comic Books

Cell (Stephen King, 2006) “The Country of the Comers Back” (Lafcadio Hearn, 1889) I Am Legend (Richard Matheson, 1954) Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, 2009) “Salt Is Not for Slaves” (G. W. Hutter, 1931) Tales of the Zombie, comic book (Marvel, 1973–1975) The Walking Dead, comic book (Image Comics, 2003–present) World War Z (Max Brooks, 2006)

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Index

Page numbers followed by f indicate material in figures. Ackermann, Hans-W., 5, 175, 177n8, 177–178n12 Adam (Ouanga), 104–106, 108, 120 Adams, Larry (Revenge of the Zombies), 80, 84 (84f), 109, 111 Africa, 31, 36, 76, 98, 134, 177n1, 177n8 African Americans: fear of blacks owning land, 33; folk beliefs and tradition, 7, 114; Haiti’s self-rule as negative example for, 31–32; as permissibly killable, 166, 193n2. See also blaxploitation fi lms; zombies of color African slaves in Haiti, 28–29 Afrocentric appearance, meaning of, 117–118 (117f, 118f) Agamben, Giorgio, 63 agency: in extra-ordinary zombies, 3, 17; and humanity, 17; loss of, 2; and slavery, 7; of white female zombies, 72 Alice (Resident Evil), 60, 89–90 aliens as zombie masters, 8–9 American culture: Americans as heroes against zombies, 45–46, 74; early zombie masters as foreign,

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9; fear of black emancipation, 32– 33; fluid expectations regarding zombies, 8; horror movies, 10; interest in Haiti, 4; versus island life, 107; natural fear of zombis, 7; Puritan repression in, 21; slave revolts and Vodou, 28; “Voodoo menace” in South, 32; whites as capable of escape, 26; zombie as creation of, 3, 32 ancestors, power of, 6, 113, 115–116, 120–121 Anderson, Paul W. S., 13. See also Resident Evil (Anderson) Angela (Supernatural), 72–74, 97 Area 51 (Mesa Logic), 12 Article 249 (Haitian Criminal Code), 37 Balaban, Bob, 12 Ballard, Melanie (Ghosts of Mars), 89–91 Barbara (King of the Zombies), 117 Barbara (Night of the Living Dead and remake), 12, 55–56, 87–89 Barker, Brad, 169

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Baron Samedi: Baron Saturday (Voodoo Kid), 136, 190n15; loa, 114, 115, 136; Samedi, Baron (Sugar Hill), 98, 114–116, 119, 136 BBC, 154 Beaumont, Charles (White Zombie), 79, 81 Ben (Night of the Living Dead), 55–58 (56f, 57f), 60, 67, 88–89, 184n14 Benshoff, Harry M., 118 Berenstein, Rhona J., 78, 82–83, 88, 186n3, 186n12 Better Off Dead (Lauro and Christie), 61 Big Daddy (Land of the Dead), 64; as extra-ordinary zombie, 66–67, 134, 151, 176; leading non-extraordinary zombies, 192n18; leading zombie revolt, 67–68 (66f), 71; racial identity of, 67 binary thinking, 162–164, 174; black versus white, 47–48, 50, 51, 58, 183n4; destabilized regarding gender, 79; in gameplay, 147–148; “good” versus “bad” women, 93, 107; good versus evil, 140–144; human versus nonhuman, 131; living versus undead, 52, 71, 162; ordinary versus extra-ordinary, 128, 145–146, 174; “us” versus “them,” 162 Biohazard. See Resident Evil (Capcom) Birds, The (Hitchcock), 10 Bishop, Kyle William, 3, 55, 185n37 Black Bagdad (Craige), 33, 182n33 black magic. See voodoo/black magic black men, 120; considered inferior, 30–31; as drum-playing “natives,” 39; in hierarchy of dangerousness, 55–57; of mixed race, 113; in white patriarchal society, 58,

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122; and white women, 55–56, 75 (75f), 88–89; as zombies, 25, 75 (75f), 183n9. See also Ben (Night of the Living Dead); Big Daddy (Land of the Dead) black women: femininity of, 116, 119; and white patriarchy, 110–111, 114, 119, 121–122 blaxploitation fi lms, 188n3; opposing white patriarchy, 114; slavestyle zombies, 11; white males in, 113–114. See also African Americans Blizzard Entertainment, 138, 141–142 body, zombis of the, 5–7, 177n8, 178n16 Bogle, Donald, 110 bokor (sorcerer), 5 bones, feathers, and teeth, 38–39, 40f, 41, 45 Bowery at Midnight (Fox), 40, 79, 179n23, 186n13 Boyle, Danny, 13 brainwashing, 8–9, 178n22 Brenner, Professor (Bowery at Midnight), 40 Brian (Angel), 186n11 Brooks, Max, 14 Brown, Michael, 166, 193n2 Brugués, Alejandro, 70 Bruner, Dr. (White Zombie), 79, 121 Butler, Judith, 158–159 “Buy Nothing Day” protests, 153 Cahn, Edward L., 9, 76 Cambodia, 38, 45 Canetti, Elias, 158 cannibalism: accusations of, 180n12, 180–181n14; seen as tied to Vodou, 29, 33–34 cannibal zombies, 2; as bringers of death, 51; children as, 135; as a collective, 63; frequently surviv-

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ing at end, 87; infection causing, 53, 119; as love interests, 64; modern causes of, 52; physical markings of, 52–53; and postapocalyptic scenarios, 58–59; in Resident Evil games, 130; in slave-style fi lms, 11–12; as unthinking, 2 capitalism, 50–51, 58–59, 71, 114, 159, 183n5 Capitalist Realism (Fisher), 50 carnivalesque aspect of zombies, 11, 141, 159, 162 Carr, Diane, 144 Carrefour (I Walked with a Zombie), 55, 183n50 Carruthers, Susan L., 178n22 Castle, William, 11 Catholicism, 28 CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), 167–169 Cell (King), 14 censorship, 10 Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (Clark), 11 “Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things” (Supernatural TV series), 72 choice in zombification, 70, 96, 146 Chopper Chicks in Zombietown (Hoskins), 91–94 (92f), 97 Christie, Deborah, 61, 179n31 Christophe, Henri, 112–113 Christophe, Lorena (House on Skull Mountain), 111–113 (112f), 117 Christophe, Pauline (House on Skull Mountain), 111–114, 121 City of Heroes (Cryptic Studios/Paragon Studios), 137 Clark, Bob, 11, 185n1 Clelie (Ouanga), 75, 104–108 (105f), 120–122, 188n8 Clover, Carol J., 187n30 Cohen, Ben, 75

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Cold War, 8, 178n22 Coleman, Robin R. Means, 103, 106–107, 122, 186n15 colonialism, 105–106, 180n4; colonial and postcolonial spaces, 17, 34, 45–46, 65–66; colonial past, 6–7; Haiti and, 17, 26, 27–29, 45– 46, 177n11; and Land of the Dead, 65–66, 68; neocolonialism, 99– 100, 106, 108; nostalgia for, 26; video games and, 134, 138 Columbus, Christopher, 27 comedic zombie movies, 11–12 comic books, zombies in, 14 communists as zombie masters, 8 Connell, Betsy (I Walked with a Zombie), 102, 108 CONPLAN 8888-11 “CounterZombie Dominance” (USDOD), 170–171 contagion, zombiism and, 10, 13, 14, 49, 52–54, 70, 183n15 “contagious formation,” 63 containment: black leaders as in need of, 56; as goal in video games, 13, 133, 140–141; Haitians as in need of, 47–48; slavestyle idea of, 13, 45, 72, 133; white women as in need of, 80, 89–90 contamination of whiteness, 18, 53– 55, 74, 77, 79–82, 86, 90 Corpse Craft (Three Rings Design), 137 costuming: cosplay, 151, 153; and gender, 73; humanizing zombies through, 135–136, 147, 157; indicating heroism, 90; rendering bodies “native,” 38, 41, 45, 81, 118; as a ruse, 117–118 (117f, 118f); transformations signaled through, 117–118; zombie persona as form of, 144. See also zombie walks

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counterterrorism training, zombies used in, 169–171 Craige, John Houston, 33–34, 181–182n33 Creature with the Atom Brain (Cahn), 9, 41, 79 Creed, Barbara, 86 Cunningham, Andrew (House on Skull Mountain), 111–113, 120–121 Currie, Andrew, 64 “Cyborg Manifesto” (Harraway), 61 Cycle Sluts (Chopper Chicks in Zombietown), 91–94 (92f), 97, 174 Cynthia (Night of the Creeps), 91 dancing zombies, 1, 175f, 176 Dantor, Erzulie, 113, 189n20 darkness as danger, 25, 47, 75 Darling, Cherry (Planet Terror), 60–61, 89–90, 187n28 Davis, Wade, 21, 179n33 Dawn of the Dead (remake, Snyder), 13, 64–65 Dawn of the Dead (Romero): cannibal zombies in, 52, 157; mall life in, 60, 161; no divisions remaining among humans, 184–185n27; portrayal of black man in, 58, 120; portrayal of white woman in, 87; uncertain future in, 58, 60, 88. See also “Dead” trilogy Dayan, Joan, 6, 21, 36, 178n12 Day of the Dead (Romero), 11, 58, 60, 87–89, 120. See also “Dead” trilogy Dead Don’t Die, The (Harrington), 11 Dead Heat (Goldblatt), 12 Dead Rising (Capcom), 130, 141 “Dead” trilogy (Romero), 12, 51, 58, 60, 87, 130, 179n27. See also Dawn of the Dead (Romero); Day

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of the Dead (Romero); Night of the Living Dead (Romero) Deathdream (Clark), 11 death in gaming, 131, 133 Dede (Chopper Chicks in Zombietown), 91–93 (92f), 97 defiant zombie state, 174 definition of zombie, 4, 15 Dekker, Fred, 91, 173 DeMora, Cholo (Land of the Dead), 70, 185n34 Dendle, Peter, 36, 172 Department of Defense, US, 169–170 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, 30 Detroit, Hart Plaza zombie walk, 162 Devil’s Daughter, The (Leonard), 107, 111 Diablo II (Blizzard), 138 disaster preparedness using zombies, 166, 167, 172 disco zombies, 135, 147 “dissidents,” zombies as, 70 dogs as zombies, 13 Doom (id Software), 12 dreamlike quality of zombihood, 97 drums, 25, 38–39, 40f, 42, 81, 181–183n49 Dunham, Katherine, 4–5 duppy, Jamaican, 177n1 Duval, Claire (Revolt of the Zombies), 40, 81 Dyer, Jesse F., 34 Dyer, Richard, 51–52, 54, 61 Dying Light (Techland), 138 Eberhardt, Thom, 89 emancipation in United States, 31–32 Embry, Karen, 61, 178n13 empowerment in zombie encounters, 99; of black men, 120, 122; of black women, 104–106, 119, 121; against white patriarchy, 16, 19;

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of white women, 72–73, 88, 95, 119; of zombies themselves, 99– 100, 140 eugenics, 54 Eve (Ouanga), 75 (75f), 104–106 extra-ordinary zombies, 3, 15–22; agency in, 3, 17; in apocalyptic fi lms, 60–61; as assimilationist fantasy, 163–164; blacks as zombie heroes, 122; contrasted with ordinary zombies, 165–167; costume not sufficient to make a, 157; as defiant, 174; in disastertraining exercises, 168–169, 173; escaping binary thinking, 128, 145–146, 174, 175f; as humanized, 63–65, 128, 135, 175; Lila von Altermann as, 83–85 (84f), 97; Nameless One as, 145; and personal responsibility, 16; playable characters as, 140, 145–147, 149, 150–152; in slave-style narratives, 26–27; as socially dead, 161; softening/humanizing of zombie role, 12, 135, 147; Stubbs as, 140; too human to be killed, 166, 175; in transition, 173–174; trying to be human, 65–67; in video games, 128–132, 134–136, 140, 149, 151; white Americans as, 26–27; white women as, 98; and zombie walks, 151, 152, 163. See also Big Daddy (Land of the Dead) feathered costumes, 39, 40f, 45 female sexuality as dangerous, 81 femininity: black as attractive and destructive, 119; black versus white, 116 feminism and horror, 88 Fiddler’s Green, 65–69 (66f), 185n33 Fido (Currie), 12, 64 “final girl,” 187n30

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Fisher, Mark, 50 flash mob, zombie, 153 Foner, Eric, 32 Forsaken faction in World of Warcraft, 142–143 Fran (Dawn of the Dead), 58, 60, 87–88 France and Haiti, 27–28 Frankenheimer, John, 8 free will: and Cold War brainwashing fears, 178n22; extra-ordinary zombies retaining, 14–15, 85; Haitian zombies regaining, 6; ordinary zombies devoid of, 2, 9; white zombies and, 45, 82; in zombie gaming, 129 From Reverence to Rape (Haskell), 187n19 Froude, James Anthony, 180n12 Galton, Francis, 184n11 Garner, Eric, 166, 193n2 Gauthier, Jeanine, 5, 175, 177n8, 178n12 gender and zombies, 16, 73, 79–80 Ghost of Twisted Oaks, The (Olcott), 36 Ghosts of Mars (Carpenter), 89, 91 Gilling, John, 39 Goldblatt, Mark, 12 Gordillo, Gastón, 131, 166, 169, 174 Gordon, Stuart, 11 Grahame-Smith, Seth, 14 Grant, Barry Keith, 88–89 Guerrero, Ed, 114 Haining, Peter, 8 Haiti: African slaves in, 27–28; Article 249 (Haitian Criminal Code), 37, 38; colonization and revolution on, 27–31; early zombie fi lms set in, 38–39 (39f); fall in exports after independence, 30, 32; Hai-

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Haiti (continued) tian Revolution (1791–1804), 4, 17, 28, 30–31; legality of Vodou in, 182n41; local objections to fi lm crews, 35–36; as nation of eternal slaves, 47; seen as incapable of self-rule, 26, 28, 30–32, 46–47; US occupation of, 33–35, 38, 45– 47; Vodou associated with paganism, 35; Vodou associated with revolution, corruption, 28; zombies as enslaved but powerful, 6, 69, 100. See also Saint-Domingue; Vodou Haiti, History, and the Gods (Dayan), 6 Haitian Vodou. See Vodou Halberstam, Judith, 93, 186n3 HALO Corporation, 169–171 Harper, Stephen, 90 Harraway, Donna, 61 Harris, David (Creature with the Atom Brain), 41 Harvey, W. W., 30 HASCO (Haitian American Sugar Company), 46 Haskell, Molly, 187n19 Hassal, Mary, 27–28, 180n8 Hayti (St. John), 29, 182n49 Hearn, Lafcadio, 182n44 heroes: in blaxploitation fi lms, 188n3; female warriors, 90–92; female zombie masters, 116–119; feminized by failure, 78; Haitian rebels as, 28; white men in slavestyle fi lms, 77–80, 97, 113, 133; white women in slave-style fi lms, 88, 90, 111; women behaving independently, 83; women not needing men, 91; women taking on male symbols, 89; zombies as, 6, 12, 67, 96, 113–114, 122, 165 heterosexuality: in comparison to queerness, 93–94; as normative,

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140; in Resident Evil, 90; and tragic mulatto stereotype, 107; whiteness associated with, 74, 77, 80; women needing relationship with white male, 82–83; zombie relations with living women, 186n11 Hill, Diana “Sugar” (Sugar Hill), 114–122 (117f–118f), 174 Holland, Jessica (I Walked with a Zombie), 41, 81, 83, 102–104, 108, 121 Holland, Paul (I Walked with a Zombie), 102–104, 108 Hollywood Reporter, The, 35 homosexuality, 79 Hooper, J. C. (Night of the Creeps), 173–174, 176 Hoover, Herbert, 34 horror movies, American, 10 hounfort, 102–104, 108 houngan/papaloi (male Vodou priest), 5, 36, 103, 105 (105f), 111– 113 (112f), 120–121, 177n9, 182n42 House of the Dead fi lms, 13, 131 House on Skull Mountain, The (Honthaner), 11, 19, 100, 111, 112f, 114–115, 117, 120–121 humanized zombies: Big Daddy in Land of the Dead, 66–67; extraordinary zombies, 63–64; in Resident Evil (Capcom), 134–135; in slave-style zombie plots, 12 human sacrifice, 29, 33–34, 36, 48, 81, 98–99, 180n12 Humans vs. Zombies game, 14 Hurbon, Laënnec, 21, 179n33 Hurston, Zora Neale, 4–5 I Am Legend (Matheson), 10 I Eat Your Skin (Tenney), 9, 39, 42, 183n10 In a Queer Time and Place (Halberstam), 93

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infection causing zombification, 10, 13, 14, 49, 52–54, 70, 183n15 interracial relationships, 64, 91, 113–114 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Seigel), 8 Invasion of the Zombie Bandits (LAPD), 168 Invisible Invaders (Cahn), 9 Iraq War, 154 Isabelle (Devil’s Daughter), 107– 108 Ivan (Teenage Zombies), 101–102 I Walked with a Zombie (Tourneur): adultery and zombification, 81, 83; Haitian link in, 38; named zombie in, 41; physically marked zombies in, 183n10; unnamed black bodies in, 42; voodoo giving “natives” power, 108; white female zombie master in, 55, 100, 102–104, 107–108 Jackson, Michael, 1, 153, 176 Jacobson, Matthew Frye, 31, 178n22 Jamaica, 36, 107, 177n1, 177n8 James, C. L. R., 27 Jameson, Frederic, 50 Johnny (My Boyfriend’s Back), 91 Johnson, Andrew, 32 Jones, Duane, 184n14 Jones, Steve, 185–186n3 Juan de los Muertos (Brugués), 70 Julie (Preparedness 101), 167 justifiable killing, 131–133, 166, 169, 174 Kaufman, Paul (Land of the Dead), 70 Kelly, Pat, 33–34 Key, Keegan-Michael, 184n25 killable hordes: gamers choosing to play, 141–143; Gordillo on, 166, 169, 174; ordinary zombies as,

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19, 41–42, 43f, 127–128, 174; realworld populations as, 166, 169– 170; and state of exception, 174– 175; Suellentrop on, 132 killing: as goal in video games, 130– 131, 147–148; as justifiable, 131– 133, 166, 169, 174 King, Stephen, 14 King Kong (Cooper/Schoedsack), 41–42 King of the Zombies (Yarbrough), 39f; damsel in distress theme in, 117; feathers and bones in, 40f, 41; Haiti an implicit presence in, 38–39, 40f; proxy voodoo experts in, 104; white males as slave-style zombies, 79; World War II theme in, 9, 40–41, 82, 109; zombie knowledge from black woman, 109; zombies preferring human flesh, 183n53; zombies triumph in, 46 Knapp, Lucinda Michele, 154, 159– 160 knowledge as power, 120–121 Kolchack: The Night Stalker (ABC), 11 Krzywinska, Tanya, 145, 147 Kukla, Jon, 27, 181n18 Land of the Dead (Romero), 18, 66f, 185n28; colonialism in, 65–66, 68; humanized zombies in, 64, 66–67, 172–173, 185n32; living define life, 64–65, 68–69; racialization in, 50, 67; as slave-style zombie fi lm, 70, 192n18; uncertain ending of, 69, 71, 87; undead revolt as justified, 52, 67–68; as a video game, 134–135, 157; zombie society as classless, 69. See also Big Daddy (Land of the Dead) Langston (Sugar Hill), 114, 116, 118, 120–121

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LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department), 168–169 Lauro, Sarah Juliet, 15, 61, 152–153, 157, 162, 177n1, 178n13, 179n31 Lee, Jay, 95 Left 4 Dead (Valve South), 127, 132, 136, 190n10 legality of killing zombies, 170–171 Legendre, Murder (White Zombie), 40, 42, 56, 77, 82, 110, 122 Leno, Jay, 66 Leonard, Arthur H., 107 Levine, Lawrence W., 7, 64 Lewis, Tyson E., 63, 185n28 Lich King (World of Warcraft), 142– 144, 191n24 life and whiteness, 51, 53 loa/lwa (spirit intermediary), 6, 98, 114–115 Lommel, Ulli, 19, 94–95 Louque, Armand (Revolt of the Zombies), 40, 81 Lugosi, Bela, 40–41, 77 lwa. See loa/lwa lynching photographs, 56f, 57 MacCorkle, William A., 33 Madame Sul-Te-Wan, 110 Madison, James, 30 Maggie Monday (Stubbs the Zombie), 139, 140 Magic Island, The (Seabrook), 4, 8, 37, 46 Mahoney, Phillip, 63 malls, shopping: in Dawn of the Dead, 60, 64–65; zombies walkers and, 153, 161 Mama Maitresse (Sugar Hill), 114– 115 mambo (female Vodou priest), 5, 115 Mammy Beulah (Revenge of the Zombies), 84 (84f), 109–111 Mammy stereotype, 109–110, 189n17

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Manchurian Candidate, The (Frankenheimer), 8, 178n22 Man from the U.N.C.L.E., The (NBC), 9 Marceau, Marcel, 11 Marlowe, Dr. Richard (Voodoo Man), 41, 81 Martin, Trayvon, 193n2 Martinique, 182n44 Marvel Comics, 11 masculinity, 74–80, 88–89. See also white masculinity Maslansky, Paul, 11 Mason, Angela (Supernatural), 72– 74, 97 massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPG), 137, 138, 142, 189n1, 190n11 Matheson, Richard, 10 Maxwell, Dr. (I Walked with a Zombie), 102–104, 108 Mayo, H. T., 34 McAlister, Elizabeth, 5–7, 52, 60, 153, 177n10, 178n16, 178n20 McCarthy, James (King of the Zombies), 41 McCloud, Missy (My Boyfriend’s Back), 91 McGlotten, Shaka, 62 medicine, mixing voodoo with, 108 Menold, Mark, 160 Men, Women, and Chain Saws (Clover), 187n30 Métraux, Alfred, 177n9 Mikami, Shinji, 130. See also Resident Evil (Capcom) military training, zombies in, 166, 169–172 miscegenation fears, 77, 82 MMORPGs, 137, 138, 142, 189n1, 190n11 Monday, Andrew (Rebel Without a Pulse), 139–140

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Monroeville Mall zombie walk, 161–162 Moreland, Mantan (King of the Zombies), 39f Moreman, Christopher M., 11, 69 Morgan (Sugar Hill), 114, 116–119 mulatto: mulatto women as zombie masters, 104–108 (105f); tragic mulatto stereotype, 106–107 Mulder, Fox (The X-Files), 165, 176 murder versus killing, 131–132 My Boyfriend’s Back (Balaban), 12, 64, 91 Myra, Dr. (Teenage Zombies), 100– 101, 104 Nameless One, The (Planescape: Torment), 137, 144–145, 148–149 names, white zombies having, 41 Nazis, 9, 11, 83, 132 Neil (Supernatural), 72 neoconservative ideas of race, 54 New England Magazine, 32, 182n49 Newhall Zombie Walk, 150, 160 night as dangerous, 25 Night of the Comet (Eberhardt), 89, 91 Night of the Creeps (Dekker), 91, 173–174 Night of the Living Dead (remake Savini), 88–89 Night of the Living Dead (Romero): Ben neither dead nor living, 88; black protagonist in, 55–58 (56f, 57f), 67, 120; cannibal zombies hunting the living, 51; cause of zombiism unclear in, 52; inspired by vampires, 10; living as villains, 60, 65, 88, 185n37; new beginning dies with Ben, 60; no zombie master in, 10–11; passive female character, 87, 130; postapocalyptic nihilism in, 13, 18,

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50–51; strong black male characters, 120; zombies as creatures from outside, 12–13. See also “Dead” trilogy No More Room in Hell (Kazan), 135 novels, zombies in, 14 Nurse Betsy Connell (I Walked with a Zombie), 102, 108 Nyong’o, Tavia, 153–155 Obeah, 107–108, 189n13 Ober, Frederick A., 29 Occupy Wall Street, 153, 154–155 O’Donnell, Rosie, 65 Ola Ray, 176 Olcott, Sidney, 36 oppressed masses, zombies as, 71 ordinary zombies, 3; dangers of losing self, 16–17, 176; disaster preparedness and, 166, 167, 170–173; gamers/walkers unable to be, 61, 151–152, 154, 157, 163; illusion of gender, race, class equality, 161; and interstitial state, 165–166, 174; as killable hordes, 19, 41–42, 43f, 127–128, 151, 166–167, 174; as posthuman, 63–64, 128; in video games, 19–20, 128–129, 132–133, 139, 145–149; zombie masters and, 122, 145 Orpana, Simon, 162 Other (philosophical): as barbaric, cannibalistic, 21; black characters as, 55; foreigners as, 100, 133; foreign lands and, 9; zombies destabilizing concept of, 79, 87, 91, 147, 149, 162–163 Ouanga (Terwilliger): drums motif in, 39, 182–183n49; highlighting black threat to white woman, 75 (75f); light/dark juxtaposition, 47; meaning of ouanga, 182n42; mulatto woman as zombie master,

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Ouanga (Terwilliger) (continued) 75, 100, 104–107 (105f), 111; ordinary zombies in, 122; “Paradise Island” stand-in for Haiti, 25, 36, 38; voodoo accessible from ancestors, 120 ouanga (Vodou charm), 36, 105f, 106, 182n42 Paffenroth, Kim, 179n30, 185n33 Palestinians in Gaza, 166 Panama, 32, 181n32 papaloi, 5, 36, 182n42. See also houngan/papaloi Papa Nero (I Eat Your Skin), 42 “Paradise Island,” 25 Parker, Madeline (White Zombie), 40–41, 81–82, 97, 109 Parker, Neil (White Zombie), 79, 121 Parsons, Elsie, 36 patriarchy. See white patriarchy Peele, Jordan, 184n25 personalized zombies in walks, 155– 157 (156f) Peter (Dawn of the Dead), 58, 60, 67, 88 Pettione, Thomas (House on Skull Mountain), 111–113 (112f), 121 Philippines, 32 Phillips, Amanda, 130 Photoplay magazine, 36 Plague of the Zombies (Gilling), 39– 40 (40f), 46 Planescape: Torment (Black Isle), 19, 128, 137, 144–149 Planet Terror (Rodriguez), 61, 89 Plants vs. Zombies (PopCap), 135– 136, 147, 190n20 Polanski, Roman, 10 police: fighting zombies, 91, 95; as ineffective, sexist, 118, 120, 122; killings of unarmed black men by, 166, 193n2; using zombies in

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training, crime prevention ads, 166, 168; as zombies, 95 political metaphor, zombies as, 151–153 Polynice, 37 postapocalyptic scenarios: assuming a desire to reverse, 49–50; caused by American greed, corruption, 52; fast-forwarding to, 59; moving beyond race, 62–63; in Night of the Living Dead, 67–68; no gray areas in, 60; utopian thrust of, 58–61, 161 posthumans, zombies as, 61–63 post-zombie state as return to grave, 46 Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic (CDC), 167–168 “prepper” training using zombies, 172 pretending to be alive, 64 Prichard, Hesketh, 29–30, 182n49 Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Grahame-Smith), 14 Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Steers), 179n28 protagonists, zombies as, 12 Psycho (Hitchcock), 10 Punchbowl (town in Stubbs the Zombie game), 139–140 queerness, defining, 93 Quillen, Dustin, 143 race: black culture as exotic, 39; blackness as infectious, 103; black peoples as incapable of self-rule, 26, 28, 30–32; Haiti and black stereotypes, 25–34; neoconservative ideas of, 54; racial hygiene and eugenics, 53, 183–184n11 race and zombies, 16; blacks as nameless bodies, 41–42 (43f);

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blacks as survivors, 58; fear of “black” magic, 26; Haitian zombies in fi lm, 35–38; loss of race, 62, 65; in Night of the Living Dead, 56–57 (56f, 57f); in video games, 134–135; white American resistance to zombification, 26– 27, 44; whites as temporary zombies, 44, 48; zombies moving beyond individual identity, 62–63 Rand, Jennifer (Revenge of the Zombies), 80 Rand, Mrs. (I Walked with a Zombie), 55, 100, 102–104, 107–108, 121 Rand, Wesley (I Walked with a Zombie), 102–104 Rara music, 6–7, 122 Re-Animator (Gordon), 11 rebellion of white women zombies, 83–87 Regas, George, 76, 186n5 Regina (Night of the Comet), 89–91, 187n31 Resident Evil (Anderson), 13; Alice character in, 60, 89–90; popularity of, 153; temporary victories only, 60, 89 Resident Evil (Capcom), 12–13; ability to play as zombie, 138, 190n11; conventional cannibal zombies in, 130; Jill Valentine character in, 141; killing as justifiable in, 131– 133; racial issues in, 134; Shinji Mikami’s inspiration for, 130; zombies speaking unintelligibly in, 135 Return of the Living Dead (O’Bannon), 11 Revenge of the Zombies (Sekely): black servants in, 109–110; hero pairing with white female, 80; individuated white zombie in, 41;

Kee_6809-final.indb 219

Lila retaining free will, 83–86 (84f), 94, 97, 151, 192n18; Nazis in, 9, 151; plot of, 83–85; pushing back against stereotypes in, 110 Revolt of the Zombies (Halperin/Yarbrough), 8, 38, 40, 41, 45, 79, 81, 186n13 Reynolds, Burt, 65 Rhodes, Gary D., 76 Romero, George A. See “Dead” trilogy (Romero) Rosella (Revenge of the Zombies), 110 Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski), 10 “Rules of Horror, The” (Weise), 130 Rushton, Cory James, 11, 70 Russell, Jamie, 182n44 Saint-Domingue, 4, 27–29, 45, 180n18. See also Haiti salt used against zombies, 46, 178n19 Sangre, Dr. Miklos (King of the Zombies), 40, 109 Sansay, Leonora, 180n8 Sarah (Day of the Dead), 87–90 SARS virus, 14 Saunders, Charles, 81 Schneider, Rebecca, 154 scholarship on zombies, 2, 5, 163; and introduction of black protagonists, 121; and September 11, 2001 events, 14; and US introduction to zombies, 8; and zombie walks, 20, 152, 157, 162, 163 scientists as zombie masters, 8–9, 101, 104 Scott, Ron, 137–138 Seabrook, William, 179n33, 182n49; claims of HASCO zombies, 46; ideas of adapted by Hollywood, 7–8, 37–38; introducing tom-tom motif, 39; introducing zombies to Western world, 4–5; popularization of “the zombie,” 36–38,

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Seabrook, William (continued) 182n44; and Puritan culture, 21; as source of name “Clelie,” 188n8 Secret History (Hassal), 27–28 Senn, Bryan, 28 September 11, 2001 and zombies, 14, 154 Seropian, Alex, 127, 128 sexuality of white women, 80–83 sexual slavery threats, 77 Shanks (Castle), 11 Shaviro, Steven, 58–59, 157 Shock Waves (Wiederhorn), 11 Skeffington, Randall (Ugly Americans), 49, 186n11 Sketches of Hayti (Harvey), 30 slave rebellions, 28, 115–116 slavery and Vodou, 98–99, 177–178n12 slave-style zombie plots, 1–2; black characters in, 11, 99–100, 120; in blaxploitation fi lms, 11; causes of zombification, 8; contained in specific spaces, 13, 45; controlling gender in, 79; and dark/light binary, 47–48; depicting black “native” culture, 38–39; extraordinary zombies in, 26–27; humanization of zombies in, 12; in role-playing games, 137–138; slavery as “spell” to be broken, 44– 46; undead American slaves, 115, 123–124; using magical knowledge/powers against oppressors, 6–7, 109–110; whites coded as black, foreign, 41, 48, 74–75, 77; whites needing policing, 53, 83, 85; white women liberated in, 83–87; and white zombie masters, 77; zombies not always dead in, 8 Snead, James, 41, 74–75, 77 Snyder, Zack, 13

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social death, 20, 122, 161–163 socially sanctioned killing, 131 South Park, 179n26 space, conceptions of, in video games, 12–13, 133 Spain and Hispaniola, 27 spirit, zombis of the (zombi astral), 5–7, 122, 175, 178n16 stand-ins, zombies as, 166–167 Stanley, Henry M., 31 Starke, Pauline, 75–76 state of exception, 131; compared to social death, 161, 163–164; extraordinary zombies and, 132, 169, 174; justifying killing, 160, 169; logic of, 141, 146–149; as nonhuman, 131; not applicable to zombie walks, 163–164; not removed by adorable costumes, 136; and Stubbs, 141. See also killable hordes St. John, Spencer, 18, 29–30, 34, 182n49 Strager, Mike (Zombies on Broadway), 41 strippers, zombie, 95–96 Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel without a Pulse (Wideload Games), 190n22; both sides destroyed in, 141; humans portrayed as evil, 140–141; infected humans coopted, not killed, 148; killable beings in, 146; ordinary versus extra-ordinary in, 128; Stubbs as protagonist, 141, 176; Stubbs as zombie master, 138–139 (139f), 148–149; wearing zombiness, 145; zombie body parts as weapons, 140 Suellentrop, Chris, 132, 135 Sugar Hill (Maslansky), 11, 19, 98, 100, 114, 117f, 118 (118f), 120–122 Supernatural (television), 72, 97

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survivalist training using zombies, 172 “swarm politics,” 63 Sylvia (The Devil’s Daughter), 107–108 Taft, Edna, 34, 177n9, 183n9 Taft, William Howard, 32 Tahama (King of the Zombies), 109 Tales of the Zombie (Marvel), 11 Talleyrand, Charles, 30 Teenage Zombies (Warren), 9, 44, 100–101, 117 teeth, bones, and feathers, 38–39, 40f, 41, 45 Tell My Horse (Hurston), 5 terrorists compared to zombies, 2, 14, 169–170, 179n30 Terwilliger, George, 19, 25, 36, 108 Thompson, Loren, 169 “Thriller” (Landis), 1, 176 Thrill the World, 153 Todd (Preparedness 101), 167 tom-toms. See drums Toronto Zombie Walk, 150, 155 tragic mulatto stereotype, 106–107. See also Clelie (Ouanga) training exercises using zombies, 167–173, 175 Transatlantic Zombie, The (Lauro), 15, 177n1 transition to zombie, 173–174, 185n32 Treaty of Ryswick, 27 trickster persona, 114–115 Turner, Nat, 28 28 Days Later (Boyle), 13, 153 Ugly Americans (Comedy Central), 50, 186n11 Umbrella Corporation, 60, 89–90. See also Resident Evil (Capcom) Unconquered (Reicher), 36 Underground Railroad, 28

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United States: emancipation in, 31–32; occupation of Haiti, 33– 35, 38, 45–47. See also American culture Unsolved Mysteries, 188n10 utopia, 58–60, 70–71, 87, 90, 94, 158, 161 Valentine (Sugar Hill), 116, 141 vampires, 10, 155 Vesey, Denmark, 28 Vials, Chris, 188n10 video game zombies, 12; and conceptions of space, 133; “cute” zombies in, 135–136; gradations of undeadness, 143–144, 148–149; humans entering zombies’ space, 12–13; interchangeable targets, 148; as killer, 129–130; as legally enforced lawlessness, 131; playercrafted characters, 142; player’s free will, 129; players in zombie roles, 138–149; players killing without remorse, 131, 133, 147; presentations of space in, 133; reasons for choosing, 146–147; requires comfort in killing zombies, 133; trying on zombiness, 128; victory as possible, 13, 54– 55; zombies as things, objects, 132, 134, 136–137, 144. See also extra-ordinary zombies Vietnam veteran as zombie, 11 Villiers, Antoine, 37 viruses causing zombification, 49, 52–53, 170 Vodou, 177n1; associated with blackness, 26; as barbaric and corrupt, 29–30; caricatures of, 98– 99; connected with revolution, 28; depicted as cannibalistic, 29; early stories of, 3–5, 25–26; fi lming of staged ceremonies, 36;

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Vodou (continued) non-Haitian correlates to, 177n1; respectful treatments of, 120; and slavery, 6–7, 98–99; as technology of resistance, 100, 108, 121; two types of zombis in, 5–6 Vodouists, 7, 29, 36, 121, 175, 178n16 von Altermann, Lila (Revenge of the Zombies), 41, 80, 94, 97, 109–111; retaining free will, 83–86 (84f) von Altermann, Max (Revenge of the Zombies), 83–85 (84f), 109–111 voodoo/black magic: as corrupting for white America, 26; exoticism of, 45; positive uses of, 120–121; as source of master’s power, 8 Voodoo Island (Le Borg), 108, 120–121 Voodoo Kid (Infogrames), 136–137 Voodoo Man (Beaudine), 40–41, 46, 81, 104, 121 Voodoo Vengeance, 36 Wainwright, Admiral (King of the Zombies), 40 Walking Dead, The (Curtiz), 179n23 Walking Dead, The (Image Comics/ AMC), 14, 134–135, 179n29 Walking Dead, The (Telltale Games), 134–135 Waller, Gregory A., 60 Warm Bodies (Levine), 64 Warren, Jerry, 9 Warrington, Scott (Revenge of the Zombies), 80, 109, 111 Washington, Fredi, 106 Webb, Kenneth, 7, 75 Weise, Matthew, 130, 190n11 West, Frank (Dead Rising), 141 Where Black Rules White (Pritchard), 29–30 White (Dyer), 51–52, 54, 61

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white Americans: as capable of escape, rescue, 26, 44, 46, 70; maintaining identities when zombified, 41, 44; as protagonists, 54; white supremacist thought, 31 white masculinity: failures of, 74– 80; feminization of hero, 78–79; zombidom tainting with blackness, 74 whiteness: indicating zombihood, 183n9; as invisibility, 52; life and, 51, 53; living as a white state, 53; transgression not destroying, 86; as vulnerable, 83; as zombie virus, 54 white patriarchy, 18; versus black males, 99, 113–114; versus black women, 111, 113, 119, 121–122; versus extra-ordinary zombies, 18, 79; imagining world without, 50, 59; versus white women, 18, 86, 89–90; versus white women and black males, 16, 58, 88; versus women, 94, 96–97, 119 white women: allying with zombies, 72–73; as bearers of civilization, 90; becoming passive, voiceless, 111; and black men, 55–56, 88– 89; blame transferred to zombie, 82–83; contamination of, 80; empowered through zombification, 72–73; hybrid nature of, 87; hypervisibility of, 73–74; policing of, 80–83; punished for being attractive, 81; racialization of, 81–82; relationship of, with “blackness,” 86; saved by black priestesses, 95, 119; sexuality of, 80–83; as warriors, 89–91 White Zombie (Halperin), 152, 192n18; ballyhoo and, 152; black zombies a faceless horde, 42 (44f), 192n18; borrowing from

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Seabrook, 7; foreign zombie master in, 40; helpful black voodoo priest in, 56; set in Haiti, 38; sexual slavery in, 76–77 (78f), 80– 82, 121; voodoo not inherently evil, 121; voodoo offering economic gain, 109; white female becoming violent, 82; white zombie as individual, 41; zombification as dreamlike, 97; zombification as feminizing, pacifying process, 79, 117 white zombie masters, 56, 74, 100–104 Williams, Linda, 82, 186n3 Winchester, Sam and Dean (Supernatural), 73 Winslow, Barbara (King of the Zombies), 83 Wirkus, Faustin, 21, 35, 179n33 Wolfenstein 3-D (id Software), 12 Woman Eater, The (Saunders), 81 women, 16; black femininity, 116, 119; choosing zombification, 95– 96; Cycle Sluts, 91–94 (92f); female sexuality as dangerous, 81; feminism and horror, 88. See also white women Wood, Robin, 56, 58, 87–88 World of Warcraft (Blizzard), 19, 128, 138, 141–142, 145–149; Azeroth, 142–143, 191n24; Corrupted Blood Incident, 191n24; Horde and Alliance, 141–143; “Wrath of the Lich King,” 142– 144, 191n24 World War Z (Brooks), 14 World War Z (Forster), 169, 179n28 “Wrath of the Lich King” (World of Warcraft), 143–144 X-Files, The (Twentieth Century Fox), 165, 175f, 176

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Yarbrough, Jean, 8–9 Yellow Peril fears, 178n22 Zealand, Christopher, 172 Zika virus, 14 zombi: of the body, 5–7, 177n8, 178n16; salt and, 178n19; zombi astral (zombi of the spirit), 5–7, 122, 175, 178n16 Zombi, Jean, 6 Zombie (Webb), 7, 75 zombie-as-proxy, 64 Zombie-Defense.org, 172 “Zombie Manifesto” (Lauro and Embry), 61, 178n13 zombie masters, 2; absent in cannibal zombie genre, 10–11; aliens as, 8–9; black women as, 104– 108 (105f), 119; generally foreign, 40–41, 77; mixed race, 104–108 (105f), 113; Stubbs as, 138–139 (139f), 148–149; as threat to white women, 75; in video games, 13, 137–138, 149; whites as, 56, 74, 100–104; white women as, 100– 104; zombies becoming, 85 Zombie Nation (Lommel), 19, 94–97, 119–122 zombie role in gaming, 129–131, 146– 147. See also video game zombies “Zombies as Internal Fear or Threat” (Paffenroth), 179n30 zombies of color: assumed to be non-salvageable, 27, 46–47; challenging white patriarchy, 114; and power of nonwhite culture, 107– 108, 111; as protagonists, 55; visibility of women as, 99. See also African Americans Zombies of Mora Tau (Cahn), 76–77 (76f), 82 Zombies on Broadway (Douglas), 41– 42, 45, 79, 186n13

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zombie-speak, 135 Zombie Squad group, 172–173 Zombie Strippers (Lee), 95–97 Zombie Tycoon (Frima Studio), 137 zombie walks, 14, 20, 163; Detroit, Hart Plaza, 162; generally lawabiding, 159–160, 192n28; history of, 152–153; illusion of equality in, 158; as impersonal mass, 157; Leicester, 153; Monroeville Mall, 161–162; Newhall, 150, 160; as personalized zombies, 155–157 (156f); as political protest, 153–

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154, 157–159; as pranks, 154; and social death, 161–162; Toronto, 150, 155 Zombie Wranglers (Frozen Codebase), 137 zombification: associated with black culture, 41, 53–54; through contagion, 10, 13, 14, 49, 52–54, 70, 182n15; as feminizing process, 79; finding power in, 86 zombis of the body, 5–7, 177n8, 178n16

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