Undead Apocalypse: Vampires and Zombies in the 21st Century 9780748694921

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Undead Apocalypse

Undead Apocalypse Vampires and Zombies in the Twenty-first Century

Stacey Abbott

For Simon, Max and Lily

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Stacey Abbott, 2016 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in Monotype Ehrhardt by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9490 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9492 1 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 9493 8 (epub) The right of Stacey Abbott to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

List of Figures vi Acknowledgements vii Introduction – ‘Needing to Know the Plural of Apocalypse’ 1 1 The Legacy of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend 9 2 ‘Cancer with a Purpose’: Putting the Vampire Under the Microscope 39 3 The Cinematic Rising: The Resurgence of the Zombie 62 4 A Very Slow Apocalypse: Zombie TV 93 5 The Hybrid Hero 120 6 ‘Be Me’: I-Vampire/I-Zombie 142 7 How to Survive a Vampire Apocalypse: Or, What to Do When the Vampires are Us 177 Afterword – They Walk Among Us: Vampires and Zombies Popular Culture 198 Filmography 202 TV Guide 206 Works Cited 208 Index 221

Figures

1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 8.1

Under the microscope in Last Man on Earth 14 Zombie-like vampires in Last Man on Earth 17 Claustrophobic mise-en-scène in Night of the Living Dead 33 Bella’s transformation in Breaking Dawn Part 140 Mise-en-scène of science in The Hunger46 Fear of contagion in I Am Legend54 The scrutiny of the vampire in Perfect Creature 59 The memorial wall of the dead in 28 Days Later70 Zombie-child in Dawn of the Dead71 Mise-en-scène of viral paranoia in [REC]83 The unresolved ending in [REC]90 Walking among the zombies in ‘Guts’ The Walking Dead (1.2)97 The family that eats together in ‘Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid’ Supernatural (5.15) 102 The all-too-human zombie in ‘Type 4’ Being Human UK (3.3)104 Buffy as zombie in ‘Bargaining Part 1 & 2’ Buffy the Vampire Slayer (6.1/2) 110 The action vampire in Underworld128 Costume for the vampire cyborg in Underworld 128 Western camouflage for the desert in Resident Evil: Extinction130 Special Effects Action Cyborg in Resident Evil: Apocalypse138 Digital Effects in Resident Evil: Afterlife139 Composition of resistance in Byzantium154 I-vampire in Only Lovers Left Alive159 I-zombie in ‘Episode 1’ In the Flesh170 Queering the zombie in ‘Episode 3’ In the Flesh173 Zombie revealed in ‘Episode 3’ In the Flesh173 Feeding frenzy in Priest181 The monstrous vampire observed in Daybreakers 184 The zombie-like vampire in ‘Night Zero’ The Strain (1.1)188 The fundamentalist vampire film: Priest195 The pleasures of zombie face painting and cosplay 200

Acknowledgements

Despite its apocalyptic content, this book has been a joy to write and has brought me into contact with so many like-minded people with whom I have been able to share my love of vampires and zombies, as well as my fascination with the post-apocalyptic landscape. As such there are many people to whom I am indebted for sharing their ideas and for ­discussing mine. I would like to thank everyone at the University of Edinburgh Press for their support for this project. There are many scholars of the undead who have influenced me over the years, including Nina Auerbach, Simon Bacon, Brigid Cherry, Ken Gelder, Samantha George, Sorcha Nì Fhlainn, Maria Mellins, Catherine Spooner and Milly Williamson. In particular I am indebted to Gregory A. Waller’s The Living and the Undead: Slaying Vampires, Exterminating Zombies as this was a major influence on my work both in this book and my earlier Celluloid Vampires. I was delighted when Celluloid Vampires was acknowledged in the revised edition. I would, therefore, like to thank Gregory Waller for his influence, outstanding scholarship and generosity of spirit. This book began as two keynote papers, for the Open Graves Open Minds conference organised by the University of Hertfordshire and the Vampires: Myths of Past and Future conference organised by the Institute for Germanic and Romantic Studies, University of London. Thank you to Sam George and Simon Bacon for the invitations. I also delivered early versions of my zombie TV chapter at Ewan Kirkland’s Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! Symposium and for Aris Mousoutzanis’ research seminar series, both at the University of  Brighton. Thank you to the organisers of these events, as well as to all those delegates who made insightful comments and shared their work. Your feedback was invaluable. I am indebted to the University of Roehampton for providing the sabbatical in 2014 to begin this project and to my colleagues in the Department of Media, Culture and Language for all of their support and encouragement. You are a fantastic team with which to work. Thank you to Stan Beeler, as always, for supplying me with interesting new television series to watch, including Z-Nation and iZombie. Thank you, also, to Peter Bailey, for his enthusiasm for the undead, for his excited Facebook messages about The Walking Dead, and

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for sending me loads of fascinating links about zombies in popular culture. Your messages always made me smile. I would like to thank Dominic Mitchell and Max Brooks for speaking to me about their work and for their contagious enthusiasm for the zombie genre. Their work is an inspiration and I look forward to all of their future projects. I am still holding out hope for In the Flesh, as I am desperate to know what happened to two of my favourite zombies, Kieran and Amy. I would also like to thank Claire Eastham for introducing me to Max Brooks and to Daniel Fraser for introducing me to Claire – you are a wonderful couple, destined for great things. Thank you to Ed Lambert and Karen Myers of the British Board of Film Classification for their help in sourcing useful material from their archives and for allowing me to have access to such fascinating paperwork. As always thank you to the staff of the BFI Reuban Library for their assistance and for being one of my favourite places to research or simply to sit and think. During the writing process, I have been inspired and encouraged by so many friends and colleagues who are also writing books. Thank you to everyone who took part in the Summer Writing Club and the Autumn Writing Club on Facebook for all of your support during the final stages of this process. You helped in so many ways. Thanks in particular to Lorna Jowett and Bronwen Calvert for their scholarship and friendship, particularly as we all worked so hard to complete our individual books and gave each other much needed support. The Trio Rules! Thank you to Roger Luckhurst for letting me read a pre-published version of his book Zombies: A Cultural History, and for setting the bar so high. I would like to thank all of the students who have taken my Modern Vampire and Genre and Cultural Context classes for thoughtful and engaging discussions about vampires and zombies. As always, you ensure I keep looking at these films with fresh eyes. Thank you to Karis Searle for the engaging and thoughtprovoking discussions about masculinity and the post-apocalypse (and The Walking Dead) while supervising your undergraduate dissertation. Those talks definitely started my brain thinking about the apocalypse. Thanks to Ash Harkin for encouraging me to read graphic novels and play video games, basically pushing me out of my comfort zone. I’m not quite there yet but I do own The Walking Dead video game. As always a special thank you goes to my super-cyber sibs, Glenn, Leslie, Jeff and Joanne who always remind me of where I come from and who I am. Your encouragement and support of my strange fascination with the undead means so much. Finally, I cannot adequately express the debt that I owe to my husband Simon Brown who has done so much over the past two years to enable me to write this book. His contribution cannot

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ac kno wle dge me nt s ix be understated, including listening and talking through my ideas, reading draft chapters, devoting hours to watching an ever-growing number of vampire and zombie films and television series, not to mention undertaking more than his share of dog-walking as I completed the book. Thanks also to Simon for sharing our sabbatical in 2014. It was a delight working with you in this period, whether in our home – me at the table and you on the sofa – or in our writer’s retreat in North Devon. Thanks also to my dogs Max and Lily for their patience with me as I worked and for being the best distractions. It is ironic that this book about vampires, zombies and the apocalypse is bound up with the happiest memories of the four of us walking in crisp winter weather on Saunton sands. It is for this reason that I dedicate this book to the three of you.

Introduction

‘Needing to Know the Plural of Apocalypse’ In the television series Angel (1999–2004), the vampire with a soul encounters a group of lawyers-turned-zombies (‘Habeas Corpses’, 5.8) while trying to save his son Connor. Connor has never encountered  a zombie before and having been raised in a hell dimension, he has never seen a zombie movie either. As such when Angel explains that the lawyer who keeps standing up despite looking dead is actually undead, a zombie, Connor naturally asks ‘what’s a zombie?’, leading to the following exchange: Angel: It’s an undead thing. Connor: Like you? Angel: No! Zombies are slow-moving, dim-witted things that crave human flesh. Connor: Like you. Angel: No! It’s different. Trust me.

Angel not only emphatically distinguishes between himself and the zombie but seems to take offence at Connor’s suggestion that they are the same. Angel’s stance mirrors the position of many fans, writers, filmmakers and scholars who emphasise the distinction between the ‘undead’ and the ‘living dead’, two creatures that are rarely presented as existing in the same universe and that have both developed separate histories of folklore, literature, comics, videogames, cinema and television. In fact, many scholars emphasise strict definitions that separate the undead into class-divided social groups in which, as Ian Conrich argues, ‘vampires are the aristocrats’ and ‘zombies are the lumpen proletariat’ (Conrich 2015: 19). Conrich’s position is seemingly supported by Romero who has claimed that ‘the zombie for me was always the blue collar kind of monster and he was us’ (quoted in Simon 2000). Romero’s perception of this class distinction is driven home in his graphic novel Empire of the

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Dead (2014–15), in which both zombies and vampires exist and conform to this well-established hierarchical division. Max Brooks’ graphic novel Extinction Parade (2013–15) also brings the two creatures together with the zombies portrayed as the masses, overwhelming humanity and bringing the living to the verge of extinction. In contrast the vampires are presented as aristocratic monstrous children, weakened by the fact that they are, according to Brooks, at the top of the food chain and therefore have never had to fight to overcome adversity nor have they ever faced an equal opponent. As a result they take everything for granted and end up coming under threat by the ‘bottom feeders’, the zombies (Brooks 2015). In both Romero’s and Brooks’ work, the vampires are visually presented as beautiful, alluring, highly sexualised and individualised while the zombies consistently suggest decaying flesh and the loss of identity, gathering as they do in zombie hordes. These differences are fundamental and recur consistently within the genres. Angel’s desire to distinguish himself from the zombie is, therefore, understandable and yet Connor’s naïve response, grown out of his sheltered upbringing and a desire to take a dig at his father, is illuminating in terms of highlighting the similarities between the vampire and the zombie; they are both the dead reanimated and they must consume human blood or flesh. When stripped down to basics, they are more alike than different. Of course Angel chooses not to drink human blood, preferring to restrict himself to animal blood purchased from a butcher. His ability to make a choice is a notable difference from the zombie who generally does not possess the brain function to make choices but is driven by primal needs. Even this fundamental difference has begun to change however. In the television series iZombie (2015–)¸ Liv Moore, a med-student who is scratched by a zombie at a boat party-gone-wrong, finds, when she wakes up the next day, that she craves human brains but can maintain her mental faculties, rather than go ‘full-on zombie’, by sustaining this diet. Liv opts to abandon her medical career and take a job in the coroner’s office in order to satisfy her dietary requirements without killing anyone. Like Angel, she chooses to control her hunger and find meaning in her condition by using it for good when she discovers that she inherits the dead’s final memories when she eats their brains. As a result she is able to assist the police in solving their murders. Liv and Angel, therefore have much in common as they struggle to find meaning in their condition and also deal with social isolation, loneliness and regret for what they have lost and what they have become. Another factor that the vampire and zombie have in common is of course their popularity. Speaking in 2011, George Romero noted that ‘zombies

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are huge in popular culture’ but ‘vampires are hotter than zombies right now, and who would have thought ten years ago that vampires would be hot?’ (cited in Graham 2011: 59). In this interview, Romero was responding to questions about the popularity of the television series The Walking Dead (2010–), as well as referring to the elevation of the vampire genre to blockbuster status, particularly through the literary and cinematic success of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga. Since the publication of Twilight in 2005, Meyer’s series has sold over 100 million copies while the five films that comprise the franchise have earned a total of $1,363,537,109 at the box office (all figures are drawn from boxofficemojo.com). From the publication of the first book through to the release of the final film, Breaking Dawn Part 2 (2012), Meyer transformed the vampire into a global literary and cinematic phenomenon, with the books and films developing a highly visible and committed fandom and making international stars out of the films’ young cast (see Click 2009 and Jancovich 2014 for a discussion of the fan response to this franchise and the critical response to the fandom). In tandem with Meyer’s work was the publication of Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Mysteries (aka the Sookie Stackhouse Novels), a series that began in 2001 with the first book Dead Until Dark and went on to include a total of thirteen books, ending in 2013 with Dead Ever After. This series spawned HBO’s True Blood (2008–14). The high profile success of both of these texts across literature, film and television has ­contributed to the growing popularity of the genre of Dark Romance – a form of Gothic romantic fiction in literature, film and television that focuses upon the romantic relationship between humans and vampires, or other supernatural creatures such as witches and werewolves. The success of this strand of the vampire genre has meant that the vampire has never been more popular and visible than in the first fifteen years of the twentyfirst century. At the same time, as Romero points out above, the zombie genre, which emerged in the form we know it onto cinema screens in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead, and which enjoyed an internationally successful cinematic cycle through the 1970s and 1980s, has returned to our screens with a vengeance. Zombies populate our popular consciousness across media, including board games (Zombie Survival Board Game), videogames (Plants vs Zombies), comics (The Walking Dead/Marvel Zombies), literature (World War Z/Pride and Prejudice and Zombies), theatre (Generation of Z), film (Resident Evil) and television (The Walking Dead). They appear on our streets in the form of zombie walks and cosplay, and encourage us to get physically fit through zombie running mobile phone applications. Some argue that the simultaneous rise of the two genres of the undead are

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inherently linked. Angela Tenga and Elizabeth Zimmerman suggest that ‘vampires have lost much of the edge that once defined their monstrosity; no longer terrifyingly parasitic, vampires are often (sym)pathetic, or even palliative’ (Tenga and Zimmerman 2013: 76), raising questions about the perceived ‘defanging’ of the vampire through romance. As Brigid Cherry argues, ‘this particular monstrous figure has transcended the confines of the horror genre and mutated into a form that threatens, in examples of paranormal romance, to become not only bloodless but purely romantic’ (Cherry 2014: 173). As a result of this ‘defanging’, Tenga and Zimmerman suggest that there is now a need for ‘a counterpart who will look and feel like a monster. The zombie meets this need, voicing anxieties that many contemporary vampire narratives silence’ (Tenga and Zimmerman 2013: 76). As Cherry notes, however, while this shift in the vampire genre is prevalent, it is not entirely ‘straightforward, since at the same time horror cinema has encompassed a more violent and monstrous form of the vampire in films such as 30 Days of Night (2007, dir. David Slade)’ (Cherry 2014: 174), while the zombie has also emerged, as in iZombie, as a sympathetic creature with its own identity issues and conscience. With this in mind, I would propose that within the twenty-first century, the vampire and zombie are increasingly integrated and intertwined, engaged in a dialogue in which film, television and literature implicitly acknowledge their relationship and increasing influence on each other. They are two sides of an undead coin and it is this synergy between the two genres of undead that is the subject of this book. Furthermore, while critics rightly acknowledge the popularity of the genre of Dark Romance, I would argue that a dystopian sub-genre of vampire and zombie text has become equally significant, confronting audiences as much with horror and the threat of near annihilation as Dark Romance infuses the undead with promises of love and eroticism. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and Angel are two such millennial vampire television series that repeatedly confront their audiences with a pending apocalypse. In Buffy, the demonhunting soldier, Riley Finn, upon learning of Buffy’s secret identity and past exploits in saving the world, points out that he ‘suddenly find[s] [himself] needing to know the plural of apocalypse’ (‘A New Man’ 4.12). Buffy has, after all, ‘saved the world – a lot’ (‘The Gift’ 5.22). Similarly in Angel, undead lawyer Holland Manners agrees to take Angel to the head office of inter-dimensional evil law firm Wolfram and Hart (that is hell) so that Angel can finally face the firm’s evil (and somewhat mystical) Senior Partners. On the rather long elevator journey, Manners challenges Angel’s seemingly nihilistic, revenge-oriented attitude to his mission:

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intr o duc t io n 5 Holland: Be honest – you got the tiniest bit of ‘give a crap’ left. Otherwise you wouldn’t be going on this kamikaze mission. Now let me see, there was something in a sacred prophecy, some oblique reference to you. Something you’re supposed to prevent. Now what was that? Angel: The apocalypse. Holland: Yes, the apocalypse, of course. Another one of those. Well, it’s true, we do have one scheduled. And I imagine if you were to prevent it you would save a great many people. Well, you should do that then. Absolutely! I wasn’t thinking. [smiles] Of course, all those people you save from that apocalypse would then have the next one to look forward to, but hey, it’s always something, isn’t it? (‘Reprise’ 2.15)

In this scene Manners reminds Angel of his cosmic role in the battle between good and evil and his destiny to avert the apocalypse but also points out that, even if Angel were successful, there would just be another one to follow. These scenes highlight two key points. First, that the threat to the end of everything underpins both series and second, that we all need to know the plural of apocalypse as both Buffy and Angel face this threat repeatedly in their missions as heroes and champions. The notion of pluralising apocalypse is of course oxymoronic. The fundamental meaning of apocalypse is the end of everything. There can be only one apocalypse. But if averted, the implication of these shows is that evil will continue to try and bring about the end of it all – a cosmic death drive if you will. In this manner, both shows highlight a spirit of apocalypse that underpins our times. In the final season of Angel, this is articulated by former Wolfram and Hart lawyer Lyndsey McDonald when he explains that the apocalypse has actually already begun, telling Angel and vampire Spike: Lyndsey: It’s here. It’s been here all along. Underneath. You’re just too damn stupid to see it. Angel: See what? Lyndsey: The apocalypse, Man. You’re soaking in it. Spike: I’ve seen an apocalypse or two in my time. I’d know if one was under my nose. Lyndsey: Not an apocalypse. THE apocalypse. What’d you think a gong was gonna sound? Time to jump on your horses and fight the big fight. Starting pistols went off a long time ago. (‘Underneath’ 5.17)

Of course in these shows, the apocalypse is generally averted or delayed. And yet we live in a world that openly recognises a genre of post-­ apocalyptic literature, cinema and television. If the apocalypse means the end of everything then how can there be a post-apocalypse? In his analysis of the meaning of post-apocalypse, a phrase that is commonly used but is inherently contradictory, James Berger argues that the term apocalypse

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has multiple meanings. The first refers to Revelation, meaning an actual or imagined end of everything, an idea that precludes there being a postapocalypse. The second meaning, however, refers to ‘catastrophes that resemble the imagined final ending’ as they mark an end of something, if not everything. In these cases, such events ‘function as definitive historical divides, as ruptures, pivots, fulcrums, separating what came before from what came after. All preceding history seems to lead up to and set the stage for such events, and all that follow emerges out of that central cataclysm’ (Berger 1999:5). Looking back over the past fifteen years, 11 September 2001 can be seen as such a fulcrum, marking an apocalyptic moment through which so much of our experience of the twenty-first century has been shaped. In reality, however, its iconography has come to represent a broader climate of apocalyptic discourse. In an interview with Max Brooks, I asked him why the zombie was so much a product of twenty-first century culture and he pointed out that his first book, while published in 2003 was conceived and written in the twentieth century, emerging as his response to the anxiety and hysteria produced by the Y2K Millennium bug. In the years and months building up to 1 January 2000, Brooks explained that there was a growing culture of paranoia and survivalism, as scientists, governments and even the UN prepared for a pending apocalypse in which technology would cease to function, causing the electricity to go off, planes to fall out of the sky, and banks and global markets to collapse. This end-of-millennium apocalyptic anxiety, he argued, seemed to mirror his experience of growing up in Los Angeles in the 1980s, during the Reagan/Bush era marked by nuclear anxiety, the first Iraq war, problems with floods and other natural disasters, and climaxing in the 1990s with the Rodney King riots. This was a culture of apocalypse and one which has continued into the twenty-first century, fuelled by twenty-four-hour news reporting which draws heavily upon apocalyptic imagery. Above and beyond 9/11, the world has been bombarded with a series of pending apocalypses and a global culture that encourages notions of apocalypse or evokes a language of apocalypse through natural disasters [such as the Boxing Day Tsunami in Thailand (2004), Hurricane Katrina (2005), earthquakes in Haiti (2010) and Nepal (2015), the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan (2011)]; economic collapse (2008); climate change and the threat to natural resources; global pandemic [SARS (2003), Avian Flu, Swine Flu/H1N1 (2009), Ebola (2014–15)]; social unrest [London riots; Arab Spring; Race riots in the US]; global terrorism; and wars in the Middle East. While predictions of actual apocalypse , such as the Rapture in 2011 and the end of the Mayan Calendar in 2012, have failed to come to fruition, the coverage of these other global events, seems to suggest that,

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intr o duc t io n 7 as Lyndsay explains in Angel, we are indeed ‘soaking in it’ and we do need to know the plural of apocalypse. The aim of Undead Apocalypse is first to identify and analyse the intersection between the vampire and zombie within contemporary film and television, considering the significance and meaning of this generic overlap. It will begin with an analysis of Richard Matheson’s apocalyptic vampire novel I Am Legend (1954), a work that is the originating text for the zombie and vampire films and television that will form the subject of this book. Matheson’s novel not only established a framework for the modern apocalyptic vampire text by offering scientific explanations for vampire mythology, but it also served as the model for the modern zombie film by influencing George Romero in his conception for Night of the Living Dead. Chapter 2 will then consider how the twenty-first century vampire film has finally followed in Matheson’s footsteps by reimagining the genre through the lens of science and considering vampirism as an embodiment of contemporary concerns around global pandemic as well as countering this threat by envisioning the vampire as a product of a developing tissue economy in which the vampire embodies synergies between commerce and science. Chapter 3 will turn to the re-emergence of the zombie film at the turn of the new millennium, considering how the genre has evolved and become a fulcrum through which a range of apocalyptic discourses are funnelled. Chapter 4 considers the increasing popularity of television, previously a home for the vampire text, for the zombie. This chapter will explore how the zombie has been re-imagined to suit the narrative and aesthetic requirements for this domestic medium. Through these two zombie chapters, I will examine the shifting terrain surrounding the zombie and the many interpretive functions it offers within contemporary culture. While the previous chapters consider how these genres of the undead tap into post-millenial cultural and social anxieties, Chapter 5 will focus on the celebration of contemporary science and technology through its analysis of the hybrid hero, a human/vampire or zombie protagonist and cyborg who undermines our conceptions of ‘normality’ and encourages audiences to embrace and celebrate hybridity and difference within this changed world. Chapter 6 will then turn to the increasingly dominant trend of the sympathetic vampire and the role of first person point of view in shaping our contemporary perception of the undead; is this purely defanging the undead or offering a new perspective on how to understand and engage with these monsters? It will further consider the influence of the I-vampire upon the growing trend towards the I-zombie, a humanised and sentient zombie. While Chapter 6 considers the ­influence of the vampire upon the zombie in terms of championing an undead

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point of view, Chapter 7 will examine the reverse influence as it charts an increasingly apocalyptic and dystopian sub-genre of vampire text which sees the return of the monstrous vampire, embodying our worst fears for the infection and contamination of the population, coming full circle from Matheson’s 1954 novel. To conclude I will consider the role of the vampire and zombie more broadly within twenty-first century culture to question the social and aesthetic pleasures and meanings they offer. In the immortal words of Angel as he and his companions faced the coming apocalypse, ‘let’s go to work’ (‘Not Fade Away’ 5.22).

C H A PT E R 1

The Legacy of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend

On 1 April 2012, the Horror Writers’ Association, in conjunction with the Bram Stoker Family Estate, named Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend (1954) as the Vampire Novel of the Century, effectively declaring Matheson’s work as the best – or most significant – vampire novel to be published in the century since the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Horror Writers Association 2012a). The other nominees included oftendiscussed publications such as Salem’s Lot (Stephen King 1975), Interview with the Vampire (Anne Rice 1976), Hotel Transylvania (Chelsea Quinn Yarbro 1978), The Soft Whisper of the Dead (Charles L. Grant 1983) and Anno Dracula (Kim Newman 1992) (Horror Writers Association 2012b). This recognition for Matheson’s work, received just over a year before his death on 23 June 2013, acknowledges the significance and influence of the novel upon the horror genre. In 1957, just three years after its publication, Matheson was commissioned by Hammer Studios, responding to the success of their first foray into the horror genre with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), to adapt the work as a screenplay for their consideration. While the studio decided not to produce the film (more on that below), the book has been officially adapted three times: The Last Man on Earth (1964), The Omega Man (1971) and I Am Legend (2007). It has been unofficially adapted in the form of the mockbuster I Am Ωmega (2007), made by Asylum ­productions – the creators of Snakes on a Train – as a straight-to-DVD production. I  Am Legend has most notably been acknowledged as an influence on George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) but Chilean director Jorge Olguín also cites the novel as an influence on his film Descendents [Solos/ 2012]. Burr Steers describes his approach to the undead in his adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016) as ‘more I Am Legend . . . They’re more cognisant and have retained more of who they were. My whole idea was that the zombie now think of themselves as being a competitive race with humans . . . They’ve evolved’ (quoted in Berriman

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2016: 84). Stephen King and Anne Rice claim that Matheson’s work influenced their own writing, with King dedicating his zombie novel Cell (2006) to Matheson and George Romero, while Anne Rice posted on Facebook that she didn’t mind losing the Horror Writers award ‘to a man whose stories were inspiring me when I was still a kid writing everything with a ball point pen in a school notebook’ (cited in Flood 2012). These acknowledgements highlight the significance of Matheson’s work for key developments across multiple genres of undead. Despite these accolades, however, his novel has not received the level of mainstream attention as the  work of many other vampire writers. Furthermore, there has until recently been scant critical writing on the novel and its significance for, and influence on, the vampire genre even though there is a growing body of scholarly work on the vampire in popular culture, literature, film and television, particularly in the last twenty years. Nina Auerbach’s seminal book on the vampire in literature and film, Our Vampires, Ourselves (1997), only provides a cursory discussion of the novel, as does my own book Celluloid Vampires (2007). Only Gregory Waller’s The Living and the Undead (2010) offers a sustained analysis of the novel alongside texts such as Dracula, Salem’s Lot, Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. The critical neglect of I Am Legend, however, seems to have come to an end with the publication of a number of scholarly essays within the last four to five years, seeking to re-appraise Matheson’s influence on the genre (see Subramanian 2010; Christie 2011; Moreman 2012; Diehl 2013). The significance and impact of Matheson’s work, therefore, seems to have been most keenly felt in two key periods. The first is the peak period of his writing, namely the 1950s–1970s, in which he produced the body of his print publications while also maintaining a successful career as a screenwriter for film and television. Most notably he served as one of the central writers on The Twilight Zone (1959–64) and also collaborated regularly with Dan Curtis on a wide selection of TV horror series and films (see Jowett and Abbott 2013 for a detailed discussion of this work). It was also in this period that the first two adaptations of his novel were made, The Last Man on Earth and The Omega Man as well as Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Romero’s film stands as one of the most significant vectors of Matheson’s influence, for this film is considered to represent a transitional moment in the evolution of the horror film (Waller 1987/Wood 1986). The second period in which Matheson’s influence has been felt is the early twenty-first century, a period marked by the third adaptation of his novel (I Am Legend 2007), a significant re-emergence of the vampire and zombie in popular film and television, and the growth of this new body of critical work examining and exploring the complexities of Matheson’s

the le gac y o f i am legend 11 ­

foray into the vampire genre. This seeming rediscovery or reappraisal of I Am Legend by scholarly researchers, filmmakers and the Horror Writers Association marks a desire to reclaim the novel as a pivotal moment within horror and vampire writing but also suggests that it speaks to contemporary developments within the genre as well as cultural preoccupations within society itself. The novel’s post-apocalyptic narrative surrounding the last man on earth after the global spread of a germ that has transformed all of humanity into vampires, speaks to the past through a deconstruction of the vampire genre, as formalised by Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, through the language and conventions of science fiction. It engages with the novel’s present, evoking Matheson’s 1950s cultural milieu in which fears of the nuclear threat and germ warfare were prevalent. Significantly, it also speaks to the future, presciently reflecting upon a new world in which the iconography of the vampire would be re-imagined through the language of science, virology and global pandemic. Also through a chain of influences, his novel highlights a relationship between the vampire and the zombie that would become a significant marker of the twenty-first century. It is therefore the aim of this chapter to analyse how this novel prefigures  a key transition within the horror genre that would be fully manifested in the cinema in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and would shape developments in horror into the twenty-first century. Furthermore, it considers how Matheson’s novel and its many cinematic adaptations established the broad connections between the vampire and the zombie that have remained largely untapped until the emergence of the postapocalyptic sub-genre of the twenty-first century which is the subject of this book. I Am Legend may have been voted the Vampire Novel of the twentieth century but its impact has only been fully realised in the twentyfirst century.

How Matheson Reinvented the Undead In 1954, the novel I Am Legend offered a completely new and unique reimaging of the vampire at a time when the Gothic vampire on film seemed to have run its course. The Universal monster cycle, which began in 1931 with Tod Browning’s Dracula and is generally considered the birth of the horror genre within Hollywood, was coming to a comic end with the cinema release of the spoof Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein in 1948. In this film, Lugosi once again reprised his iconic role as Dracula (with Frankenstein’s monster and the wolfman in tow) but this time in a comedy in which he attempts to revitalise the monster by finding

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a s­uitable brain to implant -- that is the brain of the kind-hearted but bumbling Lou Costello. This self-conscious parody of Universal horror seemed to openly signal the natural end of the horror cycle. While a few vampire films were produced in the early 1950s, many of them were comedic parodies or pastiches such as The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters (1954) and Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (1952) – the latter also starring Lugosi in a very self-conscious nod to Dracula. Lugosi also made a series of comedic television appearances in the late 1940s and early 1950s, including the Texaco Star Theatre with Milton Berle (27 September 1949), The Spiedel Show (2 October 1950), and You Asked for It (27 July 1953), in which he performed in full Dracula costume, gently parodying his most famous role (Brooks).1 The priorities of the horror genre in the early 1950s seemed to have turned away from the Gothic toward a hybridised form of horror/science fiction with a series of alien-invasion or atomic-energy-out-of-control films such as the American Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Them (1954), and The Thing from Another World (1951) – itself a film that can be interpreted as an SF (science fiction) vampire film with a blood-drinking alien at its centre. These preoccupations were shared by other countries such as Japan, that grappled with its nuclear history via Godzilla (1954) and alien-invasion films like The Mysterians (1957). In Britain, films such as The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), Village of the Damned (1960) and The Day of the Triffids (1963) evoke anxieties about the threat from other worlds. This shift from individual to global threat is not surprising given the devastation of the Second World War. As David J. Skal points out, ‘World War II had claimed the lives of over 40 million soldiers and civilians, and had introduced two radical new forms of mechanized death – the atomic bomb and the extermination camp – that seriously challenged the mind’s ability to absorb, much less cope with, the naked face of horror at mid-century’ (Skal 1993: 230). Not surprisingly, the lone vampire seemed less of a threat compared with these forms of modern mass destruction. Similarly, Mark Jancovich argues that this rise in SF horror, particularly in the form of alien-invasion narratives, while often interpreted as reflecting the perceived dehumanisation of Soviet communism, can equally be read as the: logical conclusion of certain developments within American society itself. The system of scientific-technical rationality [Fordism] was impersonal, and it oppressed human feelings and emotions. It did not value individual qualities, but attempted to convert people into undifferentiated functionaries of the social whole, functionaries who did not think or act for themselves but were ordered and controlled from without by experts. (Jancovich 1996: 26)

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As a result the vampire haunted the periphery of the horror genre until the end of the decade when British Hammer Studios decided to follow up its successful colour and widescreen adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with an adaptation of Dracula, thus revitalising the Gothic horror film. Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend, therefore, reworks the vampire through the lens of the science fiction genre, which was tapping into ­contemporary concerns about the potential for global destruction at the hands of human-made technology. In particular it did so by situating the vampire narrative within the terrain of microbiology. At its most basic level, Matheson reduced the vampire from a lone Machiavellian monster from legend and literature, ‘musty and foul-smelling . . . encrusted with the corruption of ages’ (Auerbach 1997: 63), to a germ that indiscriminately infects and transforms the human body and with it the entirety of humanity. Initially the story’s protagonist Robert Neville resists this theory, the visible presence of vampires surrounding his house causing him to mock sceptical scientists who had died believing that the illness spreading across the world was caused by a germ. Later he questions his resistance: ‘Germs. Bacteria. Viruses. Vampires. Why am I so against it? Why throw out either theory? One didn’t necessarily negate the other. Dual acceptance and correlation, he thought. Bacteria could be the answer  to the vampire’ (Matheson 1987: 67).2 Bacteriology emerged in the nineteenth century to begin to explain how ‘microbes caused communicable diseases’ (Wald 2008: 13). By the 1950s, however, scientific preoccupation with what Priscilla Wald describes as ‘microscopic entities’ – atoms, genes, viral microbes – evoked both fascination and repulsion for the manner in which they ‘threatened potential catastrophe, but they also offered dramatic insights into the nature of life itself ’ (Wald 2008: 161). As Wald explains, these entities – invisible to the naked eye – had come to represent both the mundane and the mystical in their potential impact upon the human body and society. It is against this backdrop that Matheson transformed the vampire from monster to germ, trapped for all to see on a blood slide: . . . he put his thirty-seventh slide of blood under the lens, turned on the spotlight, adjusted the draw tube and mirror, racked down and adjusted the diaphragm and condenser . . . And there, fluttering delicately on the slide, was a germ. I dub thee vampiris. (Matheson 1987: 71 [emphasis in original])

In this moment, Neville recognises that vampire superstition and germ theory were not oppositional but rather that the germ serves as the origins of the superstition: ‘It was the germ that was the villain. The germ that hid

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Figure 1.1  Under the microscope in Last Man on Earth

behind obscuring veils of legend and superstition, spreading its scourge while people cringed before their own fears’ (Matheson 1987: 73) (see the depiction of this moment in Last Man on Earth Fig. 1.1). As a result of explaining the vampire through science, Matheson reworked the threat of the vampire from the invasion of one creature from the East, crossing borders and entering into the West, what Stephen D. Arata refers to as ‘the narrative of reverse colonisation’ (Arata 1990: 623), into a global threat as everyone across the planet becomes infected with the vampire germ and either dies as a result – only to rise again as a vampire – or is transformed into a living vampire who sleeps all day and must drink blood to survive. Everyone, that is, except for Neville who has developed an immunity. This narrative embodies that which Wald describes as ‘epidemiological horror’ (Wald 2008: 188) in which the horror is generated by the manner in which germs are able to spread through society at an accelerated rate, enhanced by the changing nature of society and modern technology. It is the speed with which humanity is brought to the brink of extinction that is particularly frightening. In I Am Legend, these changes come in the form of severe dust storms that repeatedly engulf the planet, brought on, it is implied, by war. This chimes with Wald’s claims that in the 1950s the threat of atomic and germ

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warfare had become increasingly intertwined within contemporary media and fiction (Wald 2008: 165). Finally, unlike Dracula who is thwarted by Van Helsing and his team of vampire hunters, the vampire germ succeeds in its global spread, resulting in the extinction of humanity in favour of the emergence of a new vampire society, invoking, in Wald’s words, ‘the terror of a species-threatening event’ in which ‘sudden devastation [is] caused by mysterious microbes and mismanagement’ (Wald 2008: 32). In  this manner the vampire shifts from a single monster to a collective threat and the vampire hunter is shown to be fighting an impossible war. As the novel’s final line suggests, the hunter has become legend: ‘A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend’ (Matheson 1987: 151). Matheson’s novel not only re-imagines the vampire genre in terms of plot but in the same way that he reduces the vampire to a germ on a blood slide, he also strips away the traditional Gothic and folkloric conventions associated with the vampire, replacing the supernatural with the pragmatic in order to relocate the genre to the familiar and the everyday. This action is quite self-conscious as Neville reads Dracula as a means of ­understanding the vampire only to dismiss the conventions developed by Stoker because they provide no answers. For instance, he systematically investigates the root causes for the vampire’s abhorrence of garlic and the crucifix, c­ oncluding that ‘garlic [is an] allergen causing anaphylaxis’ (Matheson 1987: 124) while the vampire’s reaction to the crucifix is, he argues, a psychological response reflecting its religious beliefs while living (Matheson 1987: 122). Through scientific reasoning and testing, he concludes that staking effectively destroys a vampire because of the nature of the germ. While in the blood system, it functions in symbiosis, feeding off the blood that the vampire drinks. When air enters the system, via the penetration of the wooden stake, however, the germ ‘becomes parasitic’, feeding off the body of the vampire and therefore reducing it to dust. The speed of the dissolution depends upon the length of time the vampire has been dead. As such, Neville deduces that the stake itself is unnecessary, a relic of folklore, and all that is required is a deep cut to the wrist, transforming Neville into a meticulous and efficient killer of vampires (Matheson 1987: 125–6). His efficiency makes Neville far more monstrous and dehumanised then his predecessors such as Van Helsing who embrace both science and faith in their pursuit of the vampire. Neville’s coldhearted and scientific approach to killing reflects the modernisation of horror as embodied in the concentration camps. Along a similar vein, the vampire hunter’s pursuit of the King vampire, as chronicled in Stoker’s novel and subsequently rendered a ­convention

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of the genre to this day, becomes translated in Matheson’s story into Neville’s obsessive preoccupation, first, with systematically hunting down and killing each individual vampire and, second, with finding and killing his neighbour-turned-vampire Ben Cortman who appears every night outside Neville’s house calling his name. In contrast to the pursuit of Dracula which is an achievable goal, the attempt to kill all of the vampires is futile as there are too many to destroy. It is a vain attempt to deal with the problem that serves largely to satisfy Neville’s hostility towards the vampires. Similarly, the hunt for Cortman is a meaningless pursuit as  it holds no key to the salvation of humanity. Both activities reflect Neville’s growing obsessive compulsive nature, defining his new existence  by his quotidian survival actions and routines. Furthermore, the seductive quality of the female vampire, that incites Jonathan Harker to confess when approached by Dracula’s brides, ‘I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips’ (Stoker 1996: 37),3 becomes female vampires ‘posing like lewd puppets’ outside his house in an attempt to draw Neville out of his fortress and subsequent enforced celibacy (Matheson 1987: 8). While Harker admits deep rooted feelings of desire and repulsion (Stoker 1996: 38), Neville is consumed by anger at their ability to arouse his flesh, ‘the realization making him sick. It was an insult to man’ (Matheson 1987: 8). All is reduced to pragmatic and base e­xplanations. By stripping the genre of its rituals, conventions and iconography, Matheson re-imagines the confrontation of the living and the undead from a meaningful opposition between notions of good and evil to a mundane and hopeless battle for survival. This approach to the vampire is visually reinforced in the first cinematic adaptation of the novel, Last Man on Earth, in which the dead vampires are introduced in a rather un-Gothic fashion. They shamble up to Morgan’s house (Neville is renamed Morgan in the film), weakly battering the windows and doors with bits of wood (See Fig. 1.2). Their eyes seem hollow, their faces are pale – enhanced by the black and white cinematography – and they wear dishevelled clothing, the suits, dresses, bathrobes in which they, presumably, died. When Morgan’s wife Virginia returns to him as a vampire, she enters through the door wearing a dishevelled bathrobe, her hair a mess and covered in the dirt from the grave out of which she has escaped. She approaches him slowly, intently, with her hands reaching out for him as she  repeats his name. This is not, however, the suggestive approach of Lucy in Dracula, attempting to seduce her fiancé, Arthur, but rather the slow approach of a revenant. Unlike Arthur who is drawn in by Lucy, Morgan is repelled by the horror of Virginia. These vampires are the

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Figure 1.2  Zombie-like vampires in Last Man on Earth

reanimated dead, presented as physically weak and remarkable in their unremarkable-ness. But they are many. The move from an individual threat to a collective one in the novel and subsequent film, not only tapped into apocalyptic anxieties but also introduced a more literal and pragmatic fear of hordes of vampires trying to kill you. Neville’s fight is to stay alive and systematically improve his odds for survival by reducing the numbers of vampire assailants he must face. Neville repeatedly justifies his systematic killing of vampires whether living or dead by pointing out that if he doesn’t kill them, they will eventually come to kill him. As such, Matheson repeatedly draws attention to the fact that Neville’s house is, every night, surrounded by many vampires, all trying to gain entry or lure him out. This image recurs throughout The Last Man on Earth. Equally, Neville must regularly fight the vampires in a very physical way. As such, at times the novel hybridises the vampire with the action/ adventure genre. This is not entirely new as in Stoker’s novel, Van Helsing’s more youthful vampire hunters pursue Dracula, trapped within his crate as he is being transported by Gypsies back to his castle, each side racing against the sunset (Stoker 1996: 373–7). This sequence seems to be reversed in I Am Legend in the passages when Neville’s watch stops and

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he inadvertently stays away from his fortress-like home too long and as a result must race home before the vampires catch him. As he drives speedily through the streets, he describes one vampire rushing out of the house and chasing his car up the street. Later he literally ploughs his car through the vampires as ‘their screaming white faces went by his window, their cries chilling his blood’ (Matheson 1987: 30). Here it is the vampires who madly pursue him before he can get to his place of safety. When he arrives at home, he must fight Cortman off as he claws at Neville through the car window. And when he rushes into his house and closes the door behind him, a vampire’s arm shoots through the gap, requiring Neville to ‘forc[e] the door against it with all his strength until he heard bones snap, then he opened the door a little, shoved the broken arm out, and slammed the door. With trembling hands he dropped the bar in place (Matheson 1987: 33; my emphasis). The imagery evoked in this sequence is violent and visceral in a way that was not in keeping with the vampire genre as it existed at this point, but alludes to another figure of the undead which would emerge subsequent to Matheson’s novel. Countless undead filling the streets and surrounding the protagonist; a car ploughing through their bodies; the undead clawing at the human protagonist through the car window; an arm jutting through the door, grabbing for the remaining human; these are images more commonly associated with the modern zombie. In 1954, the zombie was a very different entity, still primarily associated with voodoo origins, in which the dead are brought back to life to serve as slaves to a powerful witch doctor, as portrayed in such classic films as White Zombie (1932), The Revolt of the Zombies (1936), and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). These zombies do not run, chase, claw, or grab at their victims. Instead, they embody a fear of coming under the control of another and the loss of identity, as Peter Dendle explains ‘[t]he essence of the “zombie” at the most abstract level is supplanted, stolen, or effaced consciousness; it casts allegorically the appropriation of one person’s will by that of another’ (Dendle 2007: 47). In rewriting the vampire in a highly physical way and as a collective threat, Matheson was reimaging the vampire as a figure that is frightening, not because of supernatural powers or due to their inherent abjection but rather because of their strength in numbers. This anxiety is characteristic of other SF/horror literature/films of the period such as Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Master and Jack Finley’s The Body Snatchers, later adapted as The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In these stories, the earth is being taken over by aliens who gradually assume control of humanity, one person at a time, either through telepathic control as in the Heinlein novel or by replacing each person with an identical – but alien – replica.

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The anxiety is first about the inability to know who has been taken over and, in a tradition that echoes the voodoo zombie, who is controlling the humans. Later it is the fact that the number of aliens outweighs the number of humans. The Siegel film features extensive visual imagery of large groups of slow-moving but purposeful alien duplicates as they become an insurmountable force. Finney and Siegel’s collective threat of alien pod people are a modern SF reimagining of the Haitian zombie now ‘well poised to embody America’s worst fear: invasion from within . . . as intruders from other worlds have occupied the human bodies, annihilated their personalities, and modelled their outward behaviours on alien ideologies of homogeny’ (Dendle 2007: 49). Matheson’s groups of vampires become similarly unbeatable as they keep coming for Neville in ever larger numbers. Matheson’s vampires may have been transformed from their original selves and are driven by a new force, the thirst for blood, but in contrast to many of these alieninvasion narratives, they still retain elements of their own personality. Mary Y. Hallab argues for a distinction between the dead and the living vampires in the novel with the former having lost their identity while the latter maintain ‘normal human consciousness, self-awareness, and sensibilities’ (Hallab 2009: 63). Her argument about the living vampires is evidenced by the vampire Ruth, who pretends to be human in order to infiltrate Neville’s home to uncover what he knows about the virus. Ruth is articulate, thoughtful, mourns for her husband in the same manner that Neville mourns his wife and even forgives Neville for his misdeeds and crimes against her people. I would argue, however, that even Cortman, one of the living dead, retains his individuality, even if in a basic form. He speaks and recognises Neville from his living life. His identity has not been completely lost even if he is more driven by physical need than the living vampires who are able to control and live with their conditions. None of these vampires is controlled by any form of bokor (Voodoo witch doctor and zombie master) in the manner of the traditional zombie. So Matheson’s novel was not consciously reworking zombies of the past but, I  would argue, it does prefigure in many key ways the zombies of the future, as developed initially by George A. Romero with Night of the Living Dead.

I Am Legend: The Slow Birth of Modern Horror In her brief discussion of I Am Legend, Nina Auerbach argues that one of its key features is the gradual shift in sympathy from the lone human survivor of the vampire apocalypse to the new vampire society who must

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protect themselves from Neville’s ruthless and indiscriminate attack upon their new, emerging race. While initially the novel emphasises the horror of his situation, having to protect himself against the hordes of vampires, as the story unfolds, it is Neville who becomes the monster, efficiently and dispassionately hunting down and dispatching vampires with no consideration for whether they are living or dead. For instance, Ruth responds with repressed horror to Neville’s dispassionate explanation for why staking kills the living vampire, stating it is the result of ‘simple hemorrhage’ (Matheson 1987: 126 [my emphasis]). Horrified by his unemotional description, she turns away and refuses to reassure him that he is right in his assertion that he has no choice (Matheson 1987: 127). Later, Ruth reveals in a letter that her husband was one of the vampires that Neville cruelly dispatched in this manner, thus aligning the reader with her perspective and showing Neville’s actions to be violent and cruel. As Auerbach suggests, Neville’s ‘lone murderous forays against his neighbours makes him the vampires’ vampire’ (Auerbach 1997: 138–9). As a result, while the novel does not overtly provide the vampire perspective except via a letter from Ruth to Neville, I Am Legend does encourage the reader to change allegiances by the end of the story. This lends the novel a very dark and disturbing edge for as Auerbach argues, ‘I Am Legend blurred the demarcation between its vampires and its singular, nasty hero too ruthlessly to be widely popular in the 50’s, but later horror fed on its unsparing reversals’ (Auerbach 1997: 138). As Auerbach suggests, the novel prefigures many of the developments within 1960s/1970s horror cinema, a period that would mark the transition from ‘secure’ to ‘paranoid horror’, as described by Andrew Tudor (1995). According to Tudor, secure horror assumes ‘a secure world which can be protected against all manner of threats’ and where authority, knowledge and expertise are crucial to overcoming whatever monsters have been unleashed to threaten an accepted form of ‘normality’ (whether that be the heterosexual couple, the family or community) (Tudor 1995: 35). Most significantly, this form of horror is built around a ‘closed narrativ[e]; ending with the monster’s final elimination by judicious application of expertise and co-ercion’ (Tudor 1995: 36). In contrast, paranoid horror undermines security by suggesting that the world cannot be protected and that all attempts to restore ‘normality’ will fail, while expertise and authority are absent, misguided or ineffectual (36). Significantly, paranoid horror, according to Tudor, ‘presupposes a thoroughly unreliable world’ (Tudor 1995: 36), in which ‘our bodies, our minds, our homes, our basic social institutions are all subject to radical doubt’ (Tudor 1995: 37). Gregory Waller similarly describes ‘modern horror’ – films made post-

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1968 (demonstrating a similar temporal definition as Tudor) – as largely destabilising in their questioning of the status quo and undermining of authority. While Waller recognises that a key characteristic of modern horror is its diversity, the result of which is that the genre can be both progressive and reactionary in its use and presentation of violence, he also accepts that the post-1968 horror genre was marked by a resistance to the reassurance and restoration of traditional values exhibited by such classic horror films as Dracula and Frankenstein (Waller 1987: 1–13).4 Finally, Robin Wood argues that the 1970s was the golden age for horror,  precisely because it challenged the genre’s traditional formula – ‘normality is threatened by the monster’ – by questioning the nature of ‘normality’ itself. Within this period, the films fostered an ambivalence to  normality that catered to what he describes as the ‘nightmare wish to smash the norms that oppress us and which our moral conditioning teaches us to revere’ (Wood 1986: 80). While he argues that this ambivalence is always present, thus partially explaining the popularity of the genre despite its disreputability, he suggests that the films produced in the 1970s overtly celebrate this ambivalence, often presenting ‘normality’ as the monster. This, he argues, positions horror as ‘the most important of all American genres and perhaps the most progressive, even in its overt nihilism – in a period of extreme cultural crisis and disintegration, which alone offers the possibility of radical change and rebuilding’ (Wood 1986: 84). The 1970s was a period of great social upheaval, reflected in its horror cinema. It is interesting to note that while written in the early 1950s, I Am Legend is set between January 1976 and January 1979. Matheson’s choice to set the novel in the 1970s serves to locate his story within a not-toodistant future recognisable to his original readership upon which he could project the potential outcome of political and scientific events of the 1950s. Elsewhere I have suggested that this period turned out to be ideally chosen for the depiction of a world taken over by vampires, as this was a decade where vampires did seem to have taken over the world, at least through their prevalence within popular culture (Abbott 2007). Similarly, the period is ideal because Matheson’s story shares the decade’s preoccupation with critiquing the status quo through the depiction of its dissolution in favour of a new world order. In this manner, Matheson’s work seems to prefigure the cultural preoccupations that would come to dominate the genre in the 1970s. As Cheyenne Mathews argues: Written in an era that was both recovering from World War II and facing the escalating conflicts of the civil rights movements, Matheson’s novel is an indictment against

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national and racial antagonism, blaming man for his own destruction and criticizing the military-industrial complex as a disease of domination spawned by an imperial pursuit that has insidiously consumed global relations. (Mathews 2013: 92)

Matheson’s novel does conform to the key characteristics which Tudor, Waller and Wood identified as being the hallmark of modern, or paranoid, horror. It offers an apocalyptic vision of a future in which knowledge and authority have not only failed but are questioned throughout the story. Neville’s continued pursuit of an explanation for the cause of the plague does nothing to alleviate or change his situation. While the discovery of the vampire germ provides him with an explanation, it serves no useful purpose to his survival. Similarly, religion proves equally useless in this crisis. Flashbacks to the gradual descent into chaos as vampirism spreads out of control, reveal that a part of society had turned to revivalism for salvation, which Neville himself dismisses as nothing but a desperate attempt to find meaning within the chaos. This is an aspect of the narrative that becomes central to the book’s second adaptation The Omega Man. In this film, vampires are replaced by albino plague survivors who turn to religious fanaticism to explain their survival and subsequent deformities. Later in the novel, Neville deduces that it is religious fear when alive that creates the fear of the cross as a vampire. Both science and religion fail to provide answers or a solution. Societal rules are destabilised and comforts abandoned as tradition and ritual are replaced by the pragmatic requirements of this crisis. For instance, the dead are no longer allowed to be buried but must be disposed of by fire, as Neville explains: ‘everyone without exception had to be transported to the fires immediately upon death. It was the only way they knew now to prevent communication. Only flames could destroy the bacteria that caused the plague’ (Matheson 1987: 58). In the Last Man on Earth, Morgan returns home to discover that his daughter Kathy has died and is confronted with the image of the truck that is used to transport the dead to the fire parked outside his house. This is a cold and anonymous means of body disposal that calls to mind similar images in the 1970s horror film Rabid (1977), in which the vampire plague spreads across Montreal and the authorities use a convoy of garbage trucks to collect and dispose of the infected. The film concludes with the image of two men in biohazard suits throwing the body of Rose, Patient Zero of the vampire plague, into the back of the truck in slow motion. The credits roll as the mechanism of the truck closes around her, reducing a human body to waste. This focus on the abandonment of ritualised mourning that links Last Man on Earth and Rabid, highlights the way in which Matheson’s work prefigures developments in 1970s horror.

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Similarly, the search for a cure by Neville is revealed to be a futile attempt to restore a social order that has passed out of existence. In contrast, the living vampires use their knowledge and science to find a means of  living with the germ by taking a pill that feeds the blood lust. This enables them to begin to build a new society. The death of Neville, therefore, paves the way for the establishment of a new social order as the last vestiges of the past are destroyed. As Christopher M. Moreman argues, ‘Matheson’s writing moves from arguing against old authority structures to emphasizing how these might be replaced,’ although Matheson is ambiguous about what this new society will be like and ambivalent about its potential to improve upon humanity (Moreman 2012: 141). In this manner, Matheson marks the beginnings of a slow transition towards modern horror. While Waller argues that Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963) serve as key precursors towards this transition, through their respective focus upon familial and apocalyptic horror, I would argue that I Am Legend is equally significant – if perhaps not acknowledged because of the issues faced by Matheson in adapting the novel to the screen that delayed its successful transition to cinema. The resistance Matheson received to his script highlights the manner in which his work was out of step with 1950s cinema production and how the horror genre was perceived at this time, a perception that would begin to change by the late 1960s when Romero made Night of the Living Dead.

Adapting I Am Legend Richard Matheson has never concealed his dissatisfaction with the various adaptations that have been made of his novel. He was so dissatisfied with The Last Man on Earth, a film loosely based upon his own screenplay, that he had his name removed from it, choosing to use a pseudonym, Logan Swanson. In an interview with William P. Simmons, he explained that his disappointment with The Last Man on Earth was largely due to poor casting and direction, arguing that Vincent Price was not ‘right’ for the role of Neville (interview with Simmons 2004). His primary issues with the later adaptation, The Omega Man was that it was too removed from his book – which it was in many ways and while Francis Lawrence’s adaptation (I Am Legend 2007) came out after this interview, it equally diverts from the novel. While The Omega Man maintains Matheson’s focus on the ritualised existence of the ‘last man on earth’ and the root cause for humanity’s extinction being germ warfare, vampires are replaced by a religious cult of albino-infection survivors. Furthermore, Charlton Heston as Neville is hardly Matheson’s e­ veryman but rather

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a military scientist/action hero. I Am Legend (2007) is credited as being based both on Matheson’s novel and the screenplay for The Omega Man and does bring elements of both texts together as well as introducing its own twists to the story. It is telling that the one film Matheson considered to have come closest to his novel, although it was not a licensed remake, is George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Matheson explains how he came across the film on television and asked: ‘when did they make my novel into a film again?’ (cited in Brown and Scoleri 2001). For my purposes, I am less concerned with the fidelity to the original source material but rather the manner in which attempts to render Matheson’s modern approach to the vampire cinematic conflicted with notions of acceptability and legitimacy, particularly on the part of institutional forces such as critics and censors. This conflict highlights how cinematic horror was undergoing a slow process of change which coalesces around Night of the Living Dead. Close analysis of Matheson’s screenplay of I Am Legend, entitled Night  Creatures, is illuminating with regard to the changing nature of horror in the period. Matheson was commissioned by Hammer Studios in 1957, to adapt his novel to the screen, following the success of their first Gothic horror film, The Curse of Frankenstein, which was released earlier that year. The Curse of Frankenstein, according to David Pirie, ‘opened at the Warner in London on 2 May 1957 and immediately started breaking all records. Soon it was established in two West End cinemas and that summer began to play 24 hours a day across America, b­ reaking house records wherever it was shown’ (Pirie 2009: 33–4). Following this success,  Hammer Studios entered into negotiations with Universal Studios to secure the rights to film Dracula (Pirie 2009: 34), setting them on the path towards being a leading producer of British horror cinema. The script for Dracula (1958) was submitted to the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) on 8 October 1957 while Matheson’s script was submitted on 20 November 1957, suggesting that Dracula was intended to be the next production, with Night Creatures as a potential third feature. In fact, according to correspondence between Hammer Studios and the BBFC, production of Dracula was scheduled to begin on 4 November, less than three weeks before the submission of Night Creatures. Matheson’s completed film script was submitted to both the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the BBFC for consideration before the studio would green light the production. Both organisations responded that they could not pass the script as it stood. Geoffrey M. Shurlock of the MPAA explained that the script was ‘in danger of resulting in a finished picture which could not be approved by this office because of its over-emphasis

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on gruesomeness’ (reprinted in Dawidziak 2012: 46). The official response from the BBFC Secretary raised similar issues with tone and the degree of horror depicted, explaining: I am afraid we can hold out no hope of being able to give a certificate to a film based on this script, which, in gruesomeness, horror and violence, goes well beyond what we should feel justified in accepting for screen entertainment, even in the ‘X’ ­category. (correspondence from 12 December 1957. BBFC File Naked Terror/Last Man on Earth)

Both organisations emphasised the ‘gruesomeness’ of the screenplay as the factor which made it unpassable – although social factors such as some use of expletives like ‘damn’, ‘hell’, ‘Oh God’, and ‘bastards’, as well as the overt suggestion of an illicit affair between Neville and Ruth, were also contributing factors. These elements broke with established censorship guidelines and featured in the comments and notes of the examiners at the BBFC as well as in the letter from the MPAA to Anthony Hinds, Producer for Hammer Studios. While the MPAA provided Hammer with a list of recommended changes (reprinted in Dawidziak 2012: 46–7), the BBFC examiners’ reports suggest that the script went far beyond what was acceptable within the horror genre, rendering the film unpassable. In one of the reports, an examiner argued that a list of ‘offending scenes’ would not be of any use as the entire story was based upon a premise that was itself ‘unsavoury’ (Examiner’s Report 1 December 1957. BBFC File: Naked Terror/ Last Man on Earth), while a letter from the BBFC President to Colonel Carreras at Hammer Studios, after the resubmission of the script in 1958, explained that the script still could not be approved because it ‘passes the bounds of legitimate horror’ (correspondence 11 March 1958. BBFC File: Naked Terror/Last Man on Earth). The BBFC had previously expressed concerns over the scripts, and eventual films, of The Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula although both were passed and it is possible that their resistance to Night Creatures was a result of a perceived escalation of violence. As with Night Creatures, the BBFC were anxious about the ‘gruesomeness’ of the preliminary scripts for Frankenstein (correspondence to Hinds 19 October 1956. BBFC File: The Curse of Frankenstein), which seemed focused upon the visualising of the horror through graphic detail of ‘mutilated corpses’ and ‘eyeballs removed from the head’ (Examiner’s Report 19 October 1956. BBFC File: The Curse of Frankenstein). The reports on both Frankenstein and Dracula also note the impact of colour upon the perception and experience of horror, with concern that this was unnecessarily gruesome and in both cases, the examiners specifically asked to review

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colour prints of the films prior to giving the films their final approval and certificate. The BBFC rightly noted the impact of this transition to colour for the horror genre as it was repeatedly commented on by the British press. For instance, Milton Shulman stated: ‘The colour that Hammer Films are obviously so pleased about is red. It is drenched over the screen in the shape of luscious blood dripping from severed hands, gouged-eyes, decapitated heads. By comparison, an abattoir is a rather friendly place’ (Shulman 1957). Similarly, Donald Zec commented that Hammer’s Dracula ‘has so much blood in it you’d think all Wardour-Street had split an artery’ (Zec 1958). While the BBFC reports on The Night Creatures do not mention colour, they do echo the earlier reports in their discomfort with the graphic depiction of violence which is prevalent within the script and which seems to mark an escalation of the violence embedded within these earlier Hammer Horror films. The repeated attempts on the part of the producers to submit various versions of the screenplay to the BBFC for further consideration, resulted in it being looked at by numerous examiners between 1957 and 1963 when the film, which would become Last Man on Earth, was finally passed with an X Certificate. This extensive correspondence yields a fascinating array of documents that display an intense debate and renegotiation of the changing definition of cinematic horror in this period with the producers making detailed arguments for the importance of realism within the horror genre in a post-Hiroshima world while the censors argued against the transformation of the genre into the realm of the ‘horror-comic’. Many of the views expressed by the censors with regard to this emerging approach to horror would subsequently be reinforced by the critical reception to Hammer Horror as well as a series of modern horror films released in the late 1950s and early 1960s, most notably Les yeux sans visage (1959), Peeping Tom (1960) and Psycho (1960). Words such as ‘degrading’, ‘horrific’, ‘nauseating’ and ‘befowling’ are repeatedly used in reviews of these films and while some acknowledgement of how changes within the modern world indicated a necessary change to the horror genre, this is painted as a deplorable loss. For instance, Ivon Adams declares in his review of The Curse of Frankenstein in the Star: When ‘Frankenstein’ appeared in West End cinemas 25 years ago women fainted. Now, when ‘H’ stands for Hydrogen bomb as well as ‘Horrific’ and a cloud not much bigger than a man’s hand and mushroom shaped appears on the horizon, there comes to the West End The Curse of Frankenstein . . . If the daughters today can stand the sight of a man’s brains being prodded in an Eastman-coloured jar, or the codfish blue of the Cyclopean eye, there should be no need of the ammonia bottle. (Adams 1957)

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Yet it is precisely this cold-war cultural context that was used as a defence by Hammer for their approach to the genre in their correspondence with the BBFC. As such I Am Legend, Night Creatures and the controversy that followed the script, captures a key moment in the transformation of horror from classic to modern, secure to paranoid. The BBFC examiners quite rightly note that the script of Night Creatures is brutal in a way that was uncommon in 1950s horror cinema, with Matheson emphasising the physicality of pain and suffering as Neville murders and experiments upon the vampires. The screenplay is highly descriptive not only of plot points but of the visuals and sounds that convey physical violence. This was of concern to the censors with the MPAA twice noting a problem with the ‘brutality and gruesomeness’ of Neville’s various fights with the vampires or attacks by the vampires (cited in Dawidziak 2007: 46) while one of the examiners at the BBFC equally took exception to the attacks on Neville, in particular the moment when one of the vampires gets its arm caught in the door as Neville attempts to slam the door shut (Examiners’ Report 1 December 57. BBFC File: Naked Terror/Last Man on Earth ): ‘Neville presses on the door with all of his strength, we hear the bones snapping, hear the agonized scream of the vampire’ (Matheson 2012: 142–3; my emphasis).5 Here it is the implication of a sonic close-up, in which sound is used to convey the degree of physical violence, that makes this sequence so disturbing. The screenplay also includes numerous passages that graphically describe the physical decomposition of vampires as well as Neville’s cold and brutal treatment of them. For instance, when Neville discovers that the body of a vampire, which he had forcibly removed from his wife’s tomb, has partially decomposed, the script describes the body as looking as  if it had been ‘partially eaten away as if for days’ (Matheson 2012: 130–1). One of the examiners at the BBFC expresses concerns over the depiction of ‘rapidly decomposing bodies’ (Examiners’ Report 3 March 1958. BBFC File: Naked Terror/Last Man on Earth). Later Neville tests the theory that this decay was caused by sunlight by dragging a living vampire out of her bed, down the stairs and into the street and then watching the effect of the sunlight. In this sequence, Matheson highlights the suffering of the vampire as Neville pulls her out of bed, by noting the sound of her grunting ‘as her body hits the floor’ as well as the ‘tiny sounds in her throat as he drags her from the room’ (Matheson 2012: 133). Later he pulls her by the hair with Matheson describing her response as trying to ‘writhe out of his grasp’ (Matheson 2012: 133). The repeated use of the word ‘drag’ – ‘as he drags her from the room. He drags her down the stairs and across the living room . . . he drags her off the porch and onto the lawn

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where he drops her’ (Matheson 2012: 133 – my emphasis) – highlights the violence of the sequence as it is a word that connotes a physically abrasive process. Matheson continues to emphasise this graphic brutality in his detailed description of her death, ‘twisting helplessly on the dead grass, hands opening and closing, lips drawn back from her teeth. She seems to die, her hands uncurling like pale blossoms, the twisting and writhing ceased’ (Matheson 2012: 133). Such sequences of violence against the vampires, conveyed not through suggestion but through detailed exposition, caused concern in the BBFC examiners who commented that the film contained excessive brutality to creatures that look human rather than overtly looking like monsters (Examiners’ Report 26 November 1957 and Examiners’ Report 9 December 1957. BBFC File: Naked Terror/ Last Man on Earth). In these comments the examiners are picking up on a key aspect that would be a defining feature of modern horror which is the fact that the monsters and the humans are largely indistinguishable and thus their torture and murder by Neville seemed to be excessive. This  characteristic of Matheson’s work, however, makes a significant contribution towards his attempt to show the ‘hero’ becoming the brutal monster and is what signals this work as an example of modern horror in which the lines between normality and monstrosity become blurred. This is demonstrated earlier in the screenplay when Neville is depicted as coldly and methodically disposing of vampires by ‘toss[ing]’ their bodies into the city’s massive fire pit (Matheson 2012: 121) and then killing other vampires by hammering a wooden stake through their hearts, captured in a close-up of Neville described by Matheson as follows: ‘As he drives the stake, teeth clenched, face pale’ (Matheson 2012: 122). These sequences were commented on by the examiners as causes for concern. Similarly, Neville’s close calls with the vampires – such as the scene when he is chased home after sunset – contain a heightened level of visual, physical violence such as when Neville must shoot the vampires in order to reach the safety of his house: Their bodies jerk back under the crashing impact of bullets. The first shot man is already getting up, however. More men attack NEVILLE, he keeps firing but they grab him. Then he shoots one man in the face. The man staggers, blood spouting from between the fingers of the hand he has clapped across his features. Suddenly, NEVILLE is forgotten as the vampire men and women lurch at their wounded fellow. As NEVILLE watches, sickened, they start tearing at the wounded man like animals. (Matheson 2012: 144)

The graphic and seemingly casual depiction of violence in this screenplay was deemed to be excessive and distasteful by the censors at the BBFC.

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As negotiations continued over the years, the producers countered the examiners’ objections by emphasising the humanisation and emotion over gruesome detail. As a result, particular moments, such as the deaths of Neville’s daughter and wife and the depiction of their dead bodies, would be handled more sensitively and humanely. Furthermore the fire pits would be implied rather than shown. These were the changes that had led to the MPAA approving the script. The script was eventually approved by the BBFC as well and made by Ubaldo Ragona in 1963, now renamed The Last Man on Earth, submitted to the BBFC and passed with an X certificate subject to some minor cuts (Correspondence from BBFC to 20th Century Fox 30 July 1963. BBFC File: Naked Terror/Last Man on Earth).

From Legend to Night In comparison to Night Creatures the completed film The Last Man on Earth  is noticeably toned down in terms of its graphic violence. Most obviously, as compared to Hammer Horror, the film was shot in black and  white and thus lacks the graphic blood and gore that was their hallmark and would, undoubtedly, have compounded the realism of Matheson’s script if they had gone ahead with the film. Additionally, the film places greater emphasis upon Morgan’s emotional state (Neville has been renamed Morgan in the film) and his response to his circumstances and the loss of his family than to depicting their loss in any detail. While the fire pit remains, when Morgan chases the truck to the pit in order to reclaim his daughter’s body, her body is never shown. While many bodies, wrapped in black cloth are dumped into the smoky pit, it is impossible to know which is hers. As such the scene emphasises his emotional distress as he begs to be left free to find her, screaming ‘I want my daughter’ to which one of the guards points out ‘a lot of daughters are down there, including my own’. Similarly, the brutality of Morgan’s daily routine of hunting and staking the vampires is downplayed in favour of an emphasis upon the quotidian quality of these actions. Presented through a montage sequence, the film presents a series of shots of Morgan’s car driving from location to location, over which a medium shot of him wielding hammer and stake or sometimes noting his actions in a log book is repeatedly superimposed. There are two shots of vampires who he attacks with stakes but the staking is kept off screen and the sound of his actions is de-emphasised in favour of a dramatic musical score. This sequence highlights his systematic brutality but does not convey the horror of his actions in any detail. In fact, the film’s use of post-synchronized sound, a common technique in Italy where the film was shot, creates an emotional distance to the events being

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depicted. There is something disjunctive about the imagery and sound in this sequence that downplays the realism of Matheson’s script but which still highlights the deritualised, nearly bureaucratic quality to vampire slaying. This is not to say, however, that the film lacks any of the brutality that was inherent within the original script. In many ways the film remains quite shocking in its realistic depiction of death on a grand scale, particularly in terms of the images of bodies that litter this post-apocalyptic landscape. The film begins with a series of extreme long shots of the empty city, a hallmark of each adaptation of this novel, but as the camera moves in to the city, getting closer with each shot, the film reveals bodies strewn along the streets, on stairs, in doorways, visible evidence of the apocalypse that has made Morgan the ‘last man on earth’. Later, as he cleans up the debris from the vampire attack on his house the night before, he picks up two vampire corpses and dumps them into the trunk of his car, in order to take them to the fire pit. While the film refrains from showing Morgan’s daughter being dropped into the fire, there is no hesitation in showing Morgan lift the body of a female vampire and throw her into the flames. Her body is even shown in long shot as it rolls down the slope into the off-screen fire. Furthermore, when Morgan races home after having fallen asleep in his wife’s mausoleum, we still see some of the physical ­violence of his confrontation with the vampires, as he pushes them away and even drives over a few, although not depicted in the same level of detail as described in Matheson’s script and again without an emphasis on realistic sound. Similarly, the much contested shot of the vampire pushing through the door as Morgan tries to slam it shut, shows the arm being caught in the door in relatively graphic detail but without the sounds of the bones snapping. So while this film does present a more humanised version of Matheson’s script, it also includes some of the stark, violent and apocalyptic imagery that has come to be the corner stone of the genre after George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead as Joe Kane points out: Last Man on Earth arrives replete with slow-moving human corpses-turnedpredators, boarded-up windows with the creatures’ hands thrusting through them, an infected child, human bonfires, and many other key elements that would soon surface in Night. (Kane 2010: 7)6

Last Man on Earth seems to introduce visual tropes that facilitate bringing Matheson’s ideas to the cinema and which would be developed in Night of the Living Dead. In contrast to Last Man on Earth, Night of the Living Dead is not an adaptation of Matheson’s novel but an original script by John Russo and

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George A Romero. Romero, however, has always credited I Am Legend as the primary influence on the film’s initial conception. According to Romero, he was drawn to the ‘socio-political’ underpinning of the novel, in which human society collapses and is replaced by a new social order – vampires (cited in Yakir 2011: 47). Reading this novel inspired him to write a three-part short story in which the dead rise from the grave and gradually overturn what he describes as the ‘operative society’. Part One of this story became the template for Night of the Living Dead in which the dead rise ‘but [the] operative society seems to be staying on top of it, even though there’s a lot of chaos and people don’t know how to handle it’ (Romero cited in Yakir 2011: 47). This film was made by a group of young independent filmmakers for $114, 000 and went on to become a cult phenomenon when it became a midnight movie favourite in the 1970s (Hervey 2008: 7–8). The story of the production, release and subsequent elevation of this film to cult status is well-documented (see Abbott 2015; Hervey 2008; Kane 2010; Williams 2003). What I am interested in is how  the film functions as an interpretation of Matheson’s novel and also how Matheson’s central conceits are reinterpreted as the founding principles for the newly emerging zombie genre, which will – as I will discuss through the rest of this book – become a media phenomenon in the twenty-first century and feed back into the vampire genre. Of course, the creatures that populate Romero’s film are not vampires, nor were they necessarily intended to be zombies. The term is never used in the film. In Night of the Living Dead the monsters are described as ‘ghouls’. I would argue that the use of this term is less a clear indication of what they are or what we are supposed to believe them to be but rather reflects the inability of humanity to classify and understand them. This is particularly the case for figures of authority like the press and the military for whom these creatures are beyond their ability to explain and control. It is worth noting that none of the survivors describe the zombies as ‘ghouls’. It is the news reporters who use this term. The survivors resort to the simplest of language which is to refer to them as ‘things’, a term which is equally defined as ‘an object that one need not, cannot, or does not wish to give a specific name to’ and ‘an inanimate material object as distinct from a living sentient being’ (oxforddictionaries.com). In contrast, a ghoul is a person, creature or phantom that digs up graves and feeds upon the dead. Romero’s ghouls, however, rise from the grave and feed off the living. As a result, they have more in common with the folklore revenant or vampire – a creature recently risen from the grave, looking dirty and dishevelled (Barber 2010: 2). Most importantly these ‘things’ share the vampire’s insatiable need to consume humanity – albeit flesh rather than blood – as

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well as the manner in which their number grows through the transmission of their condition through their bite. Romero points out that in creating his creatures he ‘never called them zombies, though. I never thought of them as zombies. In Dawn I used the word because everyone was calling them zombies. People started to write about Night of the Living Dead and called them “zombies.” I said wow, maybe they are. To me they were dead neighbours’ (quoted in Keough 2011: 172). This reference to dead ­neighbours seems to evoke I Am Legend and Neville’s nightly encounters with Ben Cortman. While terminology may distinguish Romero’s zombies from Matheson’s vampires, at its heart, Romero’s film captures two central characteristics of Matheson’s book and screenplay. The first is the claustrophobia of Neville’s enclosure, trapped within a boarded-up house, surrounded by the undead from sunset to sunrise. While the zombies within Night are not affected by sunlight like vampires, the film’s narrative begins at twilight as the first zombie attacks and ends in the morning when the zombies seem to be dispersing, thus reinforcing the allusion to Matheson’s work. Furthermore, the human survivors enclose themselves within an abandoned farmhouse and set about, in Neville-fashion, securing it from zombie attack. While Matheson’s novel takes place over a period of years, confining the narrative of this film to one night serves as an emotionally effective microcosm of Matheson’s ideas, evoking claustrophobia and terror while also highlighting the mundanity of the siege narrative. A large proportion of the first half of the film involves the film’s nominal hero Ben systematically breaking-up furniture within the house in order to secure the necessary wood to board up the windows and doors, highlighting the mundane actions required for survival as opposed to the more ritualised conventions of the vampire genre. Romero also intersperses lengthy periods during which the characters watch the news with dramatic action set pieces such as the failed attempt to fill the truck with gas which results in the deaths of the film’s heterosexual couple, Tom and Judy. Romero’s use of hand-held camera work, oblique angles, and tight close-ups, often accompanied by expressionistic lighting, enhances the claustrophobia of the film particularly as the zombies begin to break into the house at the film’s climax (see Fig. 1.3). In this sequence, Romero uses very tight close-ups to film the survivors, Ben, Helen and Barbara, as they are forced to lean against the door to hold  it and their make-shift barricades in place as the zombies reach through the gaps, grabbing and clawing at them. These shots seem to trap the survivors between the camera and the zombies, further restricting their movements and enhancing the claustrophobia. With the power out, this sequence is shot expressionistically with shafts of light criss-crossing

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Figure 1.3  Claustrophobic mise-en-scène in Night of the Living Dead

the mise-en-scène, fracturing the composition and fuelling the sense of hopelessness within the scene. This climatic sequence has subsequently become a standard trope of the zombie genre, recreated and parodied in zombie texts from Michael Jackson’s Thriller music video (John Landis 1983) to ParaNorman (2012) to The Walking Dead (2010–). The second characteristic that Romero draws from Matheson’s work is  the broader narrative theme about the overturning of social order, in which human society is gradually replaced by the undead. The film charts the beginnings of this revolution in which humanity’s place at the top of the food chain is challenged when the dead rise and begin attacking the living. While the film begins with one zombie attacking Barbara and her brother Johnny as they visit their father’s grave in an isolated cemetery, once Barbara escapes to the farmhouse – after her brother has been killed – the numbers of zombies increase until the house is surrounded in the film’s climax. While Ben seems to be able to keep one or two zombies at  bay, it becomes apparent that en masse the zombies are a formidable force, easily able to overpower the living. The futility of humanity’s ability to stand against such an onslaught is conveyed by Ben’s monologue to fellow survivor Barbara when he recounts his, presumably, first encounter with the undead:

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A big gasoline truck came screaming right across the road with, it must have been, ten or fifteen of those things chasing after it, grabbing and holding on . . . The truck went right across the road . . . right through the guard rail. I guess the driver must have cut off the road into that gas station by Beatman’s Diner. It went right through a billboard; ripped over a gas pump and never stopped moving. By now it was like a moving bonfire. I didn’t know if the truck was going to explode or what. I can still hear the man – screaming – those things just backing away from it. I looked back at the diner to see if there was anyone there who can help me. That is when I noticed that the entire place had been encircled. There wasn’t a sign of life left except – By now there were no more screams. I realised that I was alone with fifty or sixty of those things just standing there staring at me.

This narration is reminiscent of Neville’s narration throughout I Am Legend, highlighting the hopelessness of humanity’s ability to combat a  foe  that is ever growing in number and unresponsive to their attack. When Ben explains how he drove through the zombies to get away, he notes that they didn’t move out of his way or run away but rather ‘just stood there staring at’ him, inciting his disgust and horror, explaining that he ‘just wanted to crush them’ and that as he hit them, they ‘scattered in the air like bugs’; again an aspect of the narration that evokes the scene in Matheson’s script in which he ploughs through the vampires in order to get home. Furthermore, as Mr Cooper points out, their numbers are only going to get larger, declaring ‘there’s not going to be five or even ten. There’s going to be twenty, thirty, maybe a hundred of those things and as soon as they know we’re here this place is going to be crawling with them’. Their growth in number escalates the revolution which, while not completed by the end of the film when the human militia seems to have stayed the flow of zombies, the revolution continues through the series of films that mark the franchise. The flow of the narrative from Night of the Living Dead to Dawn of the Dead (1978) in which the zombie uprising continues, contributed to the developing concept of the ‘zombie apocalypse’. James Berger, in discussing the nature of apocalypse literature, argues that ‘the study of post-apocalypse is a study of what disappears and what remains, and of how the remainder has been transformed’ (Berger 1999: 7). Matheson’s vampire apocalypse in which humanity becomes legend is reworked as a zombie apocalypse that charts the slow demise of humanity, in which every living person is destined to feed, or become, the living dead. I Am Legend and Night of the Living Dead are further unified in their fundamental desire to deconstruct genre. As I’ve discussed above, Matheson’s book strips away the conventions of the vampire story, element by element, which is something Romero also does in his vampire film Martin (1977) (see Abbott 2007 for a detailed discussion of Martin), in

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which there is ‘no magic’ and the vampire is reduced to a serial killer who must sedate his victims before slitting their wrists with a razor blade in order to drink their blood. Similarly, in Night of the Living Dead, Romero also strips away traditional horror conventions by reducing the undead to revived corpses driven to eat human flesh. Gone is the personality of Matheson’s vampires as well as the two-tiered hierarchy between living and dead vampires. Romero’s zombies in Night lack individual identity, voice, or any indicators of intelligence. They are instead driven by hunger and while they are drawn together by the presence of humans, they do not function as a unified group (not until Land of the Dead that is); nor do they kill each other as in Matheson’s novel and the film Last Man on Earth, although the human survivors do, a trope that remains a key component of the zombie genre. Notably the film possesses much of the graphic imagery that Matheson included in his script and which was deemed inappropriate for ‘legitimate horror’ by the censors in 1957. With attitudes towards screen violence slowly changing within contemporary culture and the perception within the film industry that the restrictions of the MPAA’s Production Code were outmoded, independent filmmakers like Romero, Russo and their friends possessed greater freedom to make a horror film that was physically graphic and gory.7 First the zombies bear the scars and signs of their death and decomposition. Second there are key scenes that detail the zombies’ cannibalistic tendencies, in particular when they set about devouring Tom and Judy after the truck has blown up. The film features close-ups of zombies fighting over intestines, tearing through flesh, and gnawing on bones. While the film was shot in black and white like Last Man on Earth, by 1968 the effect of using monochrome was quite different. The choice of black and white was largely economic due to the significantly reduced cost of film stock, and black and white also concealed the limitations of their special-effects budget. As Romero has explained, however, this choice lent the film a greater sense of realism, in keeping with Matheson’s script. In this period colour cinema was largely associated with big screen spectacles such as the Technicolor musical Funny Girl (1968) and, in terms of horror, the Gothic excesses of Hammer Studios and Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. Where Hammer’s use of colour in 1957 and 1958 realistically emphasised the blood and gore previously withheld from earlier adaptations of Frankenstein and Dracula, by 1968 it had become a staple component of a Gothic style. In contrast, Romero argues that in 1968 the news on television was in black and white so it had come to embody representations of realism (quoted in Simon 2000), reinforced by the repeated use of television ‘news’ footage within the narrative.8

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Most significantly, Night of the Living Dead captures and exceeds, in its own way, the modernity of Matheson’s conclusions to the novel, a factor that stands the film in contrast to its official adaptations. While I Am Legend ends with Neville’s suicide in which the last of humanity fades into legend to be replaced by a new society of vampires, each of its adaptations have suggested the possibility of a cure. In The Last Man on Earth and The Omega Man, Morgan/Neville’s blood is discovered to be the source of a cure so while he dies in both films’ conclusions, his death and blood offers the potential salvation for humanity. The Christ-like reading of this ending is driven home in The Omega Man in which Neville is literally crucified at the end of the film. In a variation of this ending in the 2007 adaptation of I Am Legend, Neville discovers a cure for the virus and then sacrifices himself to allow two other survivors to escape with the antidote. As they escape through a hidden tunnel, Neville sets off an explosion in his lab, killing himself and all of the attacking vampire/zombies. As Anna, one of the survivors entrusted with the cure, arrives in a haven for the remnants of humanity, her voice-over concludes: In 2009 a deadly virus burned through our civilization, pushing humankind to the edge of extinction. Dr. Robert Neville dedicated his life to the discovery of a cure and the restoration of humanity. On September 9th 2012, at approximately 8.49PM, he discovered that cure. And at 8.52, he gave his life to defend it. We are his legacy. This is his legend. Light of the darkness.

Rather than embodying humanity fading into legend as in Matheson’s original title, the legend in question is of Neville’s miraculous rescue and restoration of humanity. In all three cases, Neville is re-imagined as the potential or actual saviour of humanity rather than the last vestige of humanity in the face of a new social order. Night of the Living Dead, and the zombie genre that followed in its wake, restores Matheson’s bleak ending in which the fate of humanity is doomed. Night does not, of course, end with the extinction of humanity. In fact, by the end of the titular night, the zombies seem to be dispersed and the human militia are on the horizon as the sun comes up, moving through the countryside shooting each zombie they come across. The film’s lone survivor Ben emerges from the basement, into which he had retreated once the others were all dead and the house was overrun by the undead. As he cautiously looks out of the window, he is shot in the head by one of the militia who assumes he is a zombie. The arbitrariness of this conclusion in which the hero survives the undead but is killed by the humans who are meant to be his saviours, not out of intent or malice but rather with a systematic disregard for any life, signals the unavoidable

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decline of humanity. This is reinforced by the Sheriff’s oft-cited last line ‘another one for the fire’ followed by the montage of grainy photographs of Ben’s body being picked up with hooks, treated as meat or waste and dumped unceremoniously onto a bonfire. At this moment, the film shifts from still photographs to moving image once more as the bonfire takes light and Ben’s body is burned. This ending is far more nihilistic then Matheson’s, in which Neville recognises that his death marks the end in  the face of a new society, for in Night humanity simply slips slowly towards its own demise, the cause of its own destruction. Matheson’s novel I Am Legend prefigured significant developments of the horror genre that would manifest in 1970s cinema, fuelled by the success of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. His work also operates as a useful template for the reconfiguration of both the vampire and the zombie within twenty-first century film and television. Two elements in particular emerge from his work that have become regular tropes within recent vampire cinema: the debunking of literary and folkloric beliefs in favour of a scientific explanation and the re-conception of the vampire through the science of virology and in so doing, introducing the notion of the global viral outbreak to the genre which is the subject of the next chapter. Matheson’s preoccupation with the apocalyptic collapse of human society has equally become a defining characteristic of the zombie apocalypse genre through its influence on Romero’s first zombie film, Night of the Living Dead. The zombie apocalypse has undergone a renaissance in the new millennium and as a result it has become a defining presence in c­ ontemporary film and television, the subject of Chapters 3 and 4. Through these ­elements, Matheson’s I Am Legend provides a foundational framework for approaching genres of the undead in the twenty-first century, as it highlights the close kinship between the vampire and the zombie rather than their difference; this kinship becomes increasingly apparent upon closer examination and so it is time to place the undead under the microscope.

Notes 1. See Andi Brooks’ blog Bela Lugosi On TV for a full listing of his television appearances as well as clips of many of these television moments 2. All references to I Am Legend are to this edition. 3. All references to Dracula are to this edition. 4. While I agree that pre-1968 films are generally marked by a tendency to reassure and restore traditional values, recent scholarship has begun to flesh out this period of the genre, exploring its many production, reception and textual complexities. See Abbott (2013); Jancovich (2009); and Peirse (2013).

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5. All references from the script are to this edition. 6. Kane also notes that the Hammer horror film, Plague of the Zombies (1966) ‘represents the first film to show ghouls rotting before viewers’ eyes’ (Kane 2010:7). 7. In fact the film was released before the MPAA’s new ratings system was in place and so the film, which possessed no sex and little nudity, was allowed a very liberal initial release and even programmed, like most horror films of the period, as a matinée for children and adolescents (Ebert 1969). 8. It is worth noting that while the film was released without censorship in the US, the BBFC agreed to give the film an X-certificate but subject to cuts. In particular the BBFC examiners took exception to the sequences where Tom and Judy are killed, and subsequently dismembered and eaten by the zombies, and where a young girl eats her father and kills her mother (Examiners’ Report 28 May 1969/Letter from BBFC President 20 June 1969. BBFC File: Night of the Living Dead). These scenes were cut and the film was granted an X-certificate. The film was eventually released uncut in 1980 (Examiners’ Report 13 November 1980. BBFC File: Night of the Living Dead ).

C H A PT E R 2

‘Cancer with a Purpose’: Putting the Vampire Under the Microscope

A pale and emaciated woman lies dead on a stretcher, abdomen split open, surrounded by sheets soaked in blood (see Fig. 2.1). A vampire plunges a large syringe filled with his venom directly into her heart and then proceeds to apply cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), encouraging blood to flow through her arteries and veins, thus spreading his venom throughout the body. The scene cuts from a series of close-ups of the woman’s open dead eyes and the vampire’s blood-soaked hands as he continues to apply pressure to her heart, to an overhead shot of the body on an operating table surrounded by surgical trolleys and medical equipment all bathed in harsh overhead lighting. Later as the vampire continues to encourage her transformation by injecting her with more venom through small bites on each of her limbs, the sequence moves from the overhead shot to a closeup of the woman’s face, via a series of jump cuts, before plunging beneath the skin through her nasal cavity and into her blood stream, conveyed through computer-generated imagery often referred to as the CSI shot, in which a virtual camera penetrates beneath the skin to explore the inner workings of the body (Hamit 2002: 101).1 Here the virtual camera follows the spread of the venom through her blood and into her heart, seemingly crystalising and hardening the inner structures of her body. These images are accompanied by a sound montage of the woman’s screams. This is the beginning of Bella Swan’s long-awaited transformation into a vampire that concludes the first part of the final instalment in the Twilight Saga, Breaking Dawn Part 1 (2011). Despite the series’ romantic preoccupations, this sequence has replaced the eroticism of John Badham’s Dracula (1979) and the romanticism of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) – characteristics often associated with vampire seduction -- with the brutality of a painful transformation, while the tantalising bite of the vampire has been substituted by the efficiency of a syringe to the heart. The vampire has become the subject of the medical gaze, in which, according to Michel Foucault,

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Figure 2.1  Bella’s transformation in Breaking Dawn Part 1

‘the medical eye must see the illness spread before it, horizontally and vertically in graded depth, as it penetrates into a body, as it advances into its bulk, as it circumvents or lifts its masses, as it descends into its depths’ (Foucault 1993: 136). In the second half of the transformation sequence, after the bloody sheets are removed, Bella’s broken and worn out body is washed and redressed in a montage that evokes the work of an undertaker preparing the body for a funeral. Here the ravages of her monstrous pregnancy and birth begin to be undone by her transformation as her scars heal, the shadows under her eyes vanish, her body fills out to a more voluptuous form, visualising the traditional convention that vampires – especially vampire women – are more beautiful in death than in life as unknowingly suggested by Dr Seward when he looks upon Dracula’s first victim Lucy: All Lucy’s loveliness had come back to her in death, and the hours that had passed, instead of leaving traces of ‘decay’s effacing fingers,’ had but restored the beauty of life, till positively I could not believe my eyes that I was looking at a corpse. (Stoker 1996: 164)

Unlike Dracula, however, where the transformation remains a mystery focused upon surface detail, Breaking Dawn Part 1 invokes the medical gaze as it probes ‘vertically from the symptomatic surface to the tissual surface; in depth, plunging from the manifest to the hidden’ (Foucault 1993: 135) as the film cuts from Bella’s beautiful face and body to a series of internal shots as the venom continues to circulate through her system. Sinew and bone are stitched back together; blood, arteries and veins are hardened; and the sequence concludes as the last red blood cell turns silver and is transformed. While romanticism is returned to the sequence by intercutting this final stage with a montage of images of Bella and

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pu ttin g the va mpire unde r t he m i c r o s c o p e 41 Edward from the earlier instalments of the saga, the emphasis remains upon a highly physicalised and medicalised transformation, taking place on a near-cellular level. This sequence, consistent with how it is described in the book by Stephenie Meyer, is instructive because it highlights a significant characteristic that recurs across a substantial number of postmillenial vampire literature, films and television, which is the reimagining of the genre through the lens of science as well as the increasing medicalisation of vampirism. In a similar vein, the teen-romance vampire TV series The Vampire Diaries (2009–) presents two of its most significant transformations within a hospital, surrounded by medical imagery. In Season 2, high-school mean girl Caroline Forbes is murdered by vampire Catherine, while having  vampire blood in her system thus sparking her transformation (‘The Return’ 2.1). She wakes up in ‘Brave New World’ (2.2) confused but hungry, drawn to another room by the scent of human blood in the form of an intravenous blood bag. She steals the bag and, after an initial rejection of the blood, drinks it down with great enthusiasm. Similarly in the Season 3 finale, series heroine Elena Gilbert drowns in the river but it is later revealed that she, like Caroline, had died with vampire  blood in her system (‘The Departed’ 3.22). The episode ends with Elena dead on a chrome morgue trolley, waking up to her new vampire existence. Like Breaking Dawn Part 1, vampire transformation takes place in a medicalised environment. In her discussion of The Vampire Diaries in relation to discourses surrounding quality television, authorship and genre, Rebecca Williams establishes how Twilight and The Vampire Diaries are generally categorised as Gothic teen romance, with varying degrees of engagement with the conventions of horror (2013: 88–91). Yet as I have demonstrated, both texts contribute to a reimagining of the vampire through science, a move that echoes Richard Matheson’s approach to the vampire in I Am Legend. This chapter will therefore examine how the twenty-first century reconstructed the vampire in film and television through the language and iconography of science with a particular emphasis upon the manner in which the vampire has become the object of the medical gaze, repeatedly returning to the image of the vampire as the object of scientific scrutiny, like the vampire virus cells on the blood slide in Matheson’s novel. The chapter will first consider the long-term relationship that has existed between the vampire myth and science in folklore, literature and cinema, before focusing upon a series of late twentieth- and early twentyfirst century films and television texts to explore the significance and impact of the growing hybridisation of the vampire with science fiction

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(SF). The integration of SF within the vampire text enables the genre to express contemporary preoccupations and anxieties about developments within science as well as its impact upon our understanding of humanity and the body. These preoccupations will focus upon the changing cultural meaning of blood within modern medicine and science, the growth of the tissue economy, and the fear of a global pandemic. It is through this focus upon blood, virology and pandemic that we begin to see the crossfertilising of tropes of the zombie with the vampire, which will form the substance of later chapters.

Legacy of Vampire and Science The vampire has a long-standing relationship with science that predates Matheson’s novel as well as developments within contemporary cinema and television. As Van Helsing explains in the novel Dracula, ‘we see around us every day the growth of new beliefs, which think themselves new; and which are yet but the old, which pretend to be young’ (Stoker 1996: 191). Science has for centuries been a component of the vampire narrative in folklore, literature and film. Folklorist Paul Barber argues that vampires have been the subject of a form of scientific investigation since the eighteenth century when the treaty of Passarowitz (1718) brought an end to the Austro-Turkish and Venetian–Turkish wars, ceding parts of the Ottoman Empire to Austria. As a result, the occupying forces ‘began to notice, and file reports on, a peculiar local practice: that of exhuming bodies and “killing them”’ (Barber 2010: 5). These reports provide quite detailed records of how suspected ‘vampires’ were investigated through a series of exhumations, dissections and autopsies, in order to prove or disprove suspicions of a vampiric influence within the community (Barber 2010: 5). Oft-cited cases such as Peter Plogojowitz (1725 Serbia) or Arnod Paole (c.1700–25 Serbia), reprinted and discussed in detail in numerous publications such as Barber (2010), Frayling (1992) and Hallab (2009), are regularly called upon as examples of Eastern European beliefs and practices because the records of these investigations reveal a near scientific recording of the ‘symptoms of vampirism’, albeit with occasional interpretive leaps. Leo Ruickbie argues that these accounts were recorded ‘through the use of officialdom – neutral, bureaucratic, signed, and dated – creat[ing] the sort of expert testimony that seemed to verify the folklore’ (Ruickbie 2013: 85). These records include details about decomposition, the bloating of the body, the presence or lack of a decaying smell, the absence of rigor mortis (such as the pliability of the body), the peeling away of skin on the feet (replaced by a new layer of skin), continued hair

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pu ttin g the va mpire unde r t he m i c r o s c o p e 43 and nail growth, and blood found in the mouth, chest and/or stomach. These records also included details of the methods employed to destroy the vampire as well as the steps taken to identify the offending person who began these plagues of vampirism. This often resulted in multiple exhumations such as the case of Arnold Paole who was effectively treated as Patient Zero of this particular vampire epidemic, which included seventeen suspected vampires as a result of this outbreak (Barber 2010: 15–20) Barber explains that while these accounts do contain subjective obser­ vations and often contradictory interpretations, vampire stories like these are clever and ‘elaborate folk hypothesis designed to account for seemingly inexplicable events associated with death and decomposition’ (Barber 2010: 3; my emphasis). Barber’s choice of words – ‘hypothesis’ and ‘account’ – evokes a form of scientific method and suggests that these records are attempting to apply a near-scientific rationale to the inves­ tigation and their conclusions. These stories, in fact, represent an early form of what Priscilla Wald describes as an ‘outbreak narrative’, which ‘follows a formulaic plot that begins with the identification of an emerging infection’ – a series of sudden unexplained deaths believed to be caused by a vampire – ‘includes the discussion of the global networks throughout which it travels’ – the trail of contacts between the different victims of the vampire – ‘and chronicles the epidemiological work that ends with its containment’ – the exhumation, dissection and disposal of the bodies so as to prevent the rising of the vampire and further spread of vampirism within the community (Wald 2008: 2). Similarly, nineteenth-century vampire fiction also introduced elements of science within their modern Gothic narratives. In Dracula (1897), Stoker has two scientists, Professor Van Helsing and Dr Seward, leading the team that eventually destroys the vampire rather than the superstitious villagers who are very aware of Dracula’s activities but opt for self-protection over full-on assault. Of course this is primarily because it is the world ruled by science that is most at risk from Dracula. The villagers know to protect themselves but those in the rational world led by science do not believe in anything that cannot be observed, explained and proved, leaving them unprotected as  Van Helsing explains: ‘it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain’ (Stoker 1897: 191). More importantly Van Helsing makes the argument that vampires are simply a fact of nature that science has yet to be able to explain and he compares this to other developments in science when he tells Dr Seward ‘that there are things done today in electrical science which would have been deemed unholy by the very men who discovered electricity – who would themselves not so long before have been burned

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as wizards’ (Stoker 1897: 191). This is the argument that continues to be reiterated in many twentieth-century films such as Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) and Terence Fisher’s Dracula (1958), where Van Helsing represents an authoritative voice, arguing for a scientific basis for his belief in vampirism. In Browning’s film, Van Helsing, after examining a sample of Renfield’s blood under the microscope, declares that they are dealing with a vampire and subsequently counters Dr Seward’s scepticism and belief that the vampire is ‘pure myth’, with the proposition that he ‘may be able to [provide] proof that the superstition of yesterday can become the scientific reality of today’, suggesting that ‘the strength of the vampire is that people will not believe in him’. In Fisher’s film, Van Helsing is similarly attempting to compile evidence of what he describes as the ‘facts of vampirism’. Throughout much of the twentieth century, scientists in vampire films, like those who compiled the records of eighteenth-century vampire exhumations and autopsies before them, do not attempt to explain what vampirism is or what causes it but rather to provide evidence of their existence and prove the validity of superstition, thus justifying action against the vampire. This stands in contrast to vampire hunter Blade’s denunciation of superstition as conveyed through the cinema when he declares: ‘Vampire Anatomy 101. Crosses and running water don’t do dick so forget what you’ve seen in the movies’ (Blade 1998). Like Blade, many of the vampire films and television series of the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first century set out to abandon vampire superstition in favour of pragmatic explanation. Here the role of science is to explain the cause of vampirism or reduce it to a set of familiar and rational concepts that make sense within our real world. The i­conography and traditional conventions of these films from the weapons used against them to the support team that surround the vampire hunter have largely been transformed to reflect a secular, scientific and technological reinterpretation of the genre (see Abbott 2007: 197–201, for a detailed discussion of these tropes). As the vampire ceases to be categorised as a strigoi, revenant or the undead – terms that carry with them the aura of folklore and superstition – and is treated as a separate race or described as ‘a disease’, ‘a virus’, ‘a genetic aberration’, ‘genetic experiment’ or a ‘genetically engineered super-race’, the vampire is increasingly scrutinised and reinterpreted under a medical gaze.

Under the Microscope: Investigating the Medical Gaze The image of the scientist, ‘surrounded by equipment: test tubes, Bunsen burners, flasks and bottles . . . peer[ing] raptly through microscopes’

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pu ttin g the va mpire unde r t he m i c r o s c o p e 45 (Margaret Mead and Rhoda Metreaux 1957, cited in Frayling 2005: 12), is one of the iconic images of twentieth-century science, embodying both an increasing preoccupation with analysing the minutiae of life, such as bacteria, microbes, viruses, genes and atoms, and with conveying professionalism, cleanliness and technological prowess (Frayling 2005: 18–19). While traditionally associated with science fiction, this image has its place across a long history of visual representations of the vampire in film and television and increasingly highlights the generic hybridity of the vampire film with science fiction. In Nosferatu (1922), the earliest surviving adaptation of Dracula, the scientist Bulwer, a peripheral presence within the narrative, is twice shown presenting examples of the vampire in nature to his students, first the venus fly trap and then a carnivorous polyp. While he and his students examine these specimens with the naked eye, the cinema camera takes the place of the microscope by presenting them in extreme close-up. Similarly in House of Dracula (1945), Dr Edelmann uses a microscope to examine a slide of Count Dracula’s blood and identifies an unusual parasite within his blood cells. In both cases the films insert an extreme close-up to take the microscopic view and present the vampire as the object of scientific scrutiny, an aesthetic trope that calls to mind Neville’s examination of the vampire virus in Matheson’s novel. This emphasis on the close-up of the blood cell within vampire cinema was provided with additional resonance in the 1980s and 1990s, in films such as The Hunger (1983) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), as it served to highlight the connections between the vampire and the HIV virus. In the romanticised and eroticised love scene between immortal Merium Blaylock and scientist Dr Sarah Roberts in The Hunger, close-ups of red blood cells are intercut with the vampiric lovemaking at the moment when Sarah drinks blood from Merium’s exposed vein. The sequence begins with an emphasis upon the eroticism of the moment but as it becomes more overtly vampiric, an ominous and reverberating underscore begins to be intermixed with the romantic strains of ‘The Flower Duet’, reiterating the association between the vampire and sexual infection, as well as the potential threat embedded within this sexual liaison.2 This threat is reaffirmed in the subsequent scenes when Sarah begins to show signs of illness and her blood is tested. Again we see Sarah, herself a scientist, leaning over a microscope as she examines her own blood cells which, according to her haematologist colleague, contain two different blood strains – one human and one unidentified non-human – fighting it out for dominance, like a virus taking over the body (see Fig. 2.2) The overt juxtaposition of homosexuality with disease and blood testing in the 1980s seemed to consciously call to mind the outbreak of AIDS as

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Figure 2.2  Mise-en-scène of science in The Hunger

a result of the spread of the HIV virus, but as Nicola Nixon argues, the film’s release in 1983, a point when there were only 800 documented cases of AIDS-type illnesses in the US and 400 in the UK, makes it unlikely that the film was designed to consciously evoke AIDS. The crisis was, in fact, still in its early days – the name AIDS was only coined in late 1982 – and the condition did not receive notable media attention until 1985 when Rock Hudson died. Instead Nixon suggests that the film drew upon a legacy of association between vampirism and sexually transmitted disease that equally became the lexicon ‘of signifiers . . . clustering around AIDS’ (Nixon 1997: 119). In contrast, the fact that the introduction of Doctor Van Helsing in Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1992 is preceded by a microscopic close-up of blood cells as he delivers a lecture on the vampire bat and diseases of the blood, in particular those transmitted through sexual contact, seems hardly coincidental. The film establishes a clear connection between blood, the vampire and sexually transmitted disease, and while the film’s Victorian setting meant that Van Helsing talks of syphilis, the scene speaks to late twentieth-century fears about AIDS. Unlike The Hunger, Coppola’s film was released at a time of great awareness and debate about AIDS, blood testing and treatments. The escalation of the AIDS outbreak to an international health crisis in this period, led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, among others, to organise the conference ‘Emerging Viruses: The Evolution of Viruses and Viral Diseases’ in 1989. At this event, ‘virologists, infectious disease specialists, theoretical biologists, historians, epidemiologists, ecologists, and molecular biologists’ met to ‘consider the mechanisms of viral emergence and possible strategies for anticipating, detecting, and preventing the emergence of new viral diseases in the future’ (Morse and Schluederberg 1990: 1). The

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pu ttin g the va mpire unde r t he m i c r o s c o p e 47 self-conscious allusion to syphilis within Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the use of the microscopic close-up of the red blood cell here serves to position vampirism once again as a metaphor for disease but this time includes the much more contemporary cultural awareness and anxiety around viral outbreaks as most visibly manifested in AIDS. This microscopic imagery of blood is so pervasive within the genre that it continues to appear in contemporary vampire texts. The title sequence for the vampire-pandemic television series The Strain (2014–) begins with an extreme close-up of blood cells as they are being infected and absorbed by a virus. Similarly, the second episode of the Gothic television series Penny Dreadful (2014–) , ‘Séance’ (1.2), shows Doctor Frankenstein examining the blood cells of the mysterious corpse of a creature covered in tattoos from the Book of the Dead. Like House of Dracula the sequence features an extreme close-up of a blood cell. This is followed by a medium close-up of Frankenstein looking away from his microscope as he explains that it is human blood, or at the very least a vertebrate, for it possesses the expected properties, including erythrocytes (red blood cells) and thromocytes (platelets), alongside more ‘unusual properties’ which he cannot identify, recommending the procurement of a haematologist. This language reconfigures the vampire in modern scientific terms (rather than using the more familiar medical vocabulary of red blood cells and platelets) and in both House of Dracula and Penny Dreadful, the vampire’s physical difference is not coded as gothically ‘other’ but rather as something unusual in the blood that has yet to be explained, requiring further scientific expertise. Within twenty-first century vampire films and television series, however, the subtext has fast become text as the vampire no longer serves as metaphor but rather is repeatedly explained and examined via science, bringing together the conventions of horror and science fiction into a hybrid form. The medical gaze has subsequently been extended beyond the inclusion of close-ups of vampire blood cells – although these are still prevalent – to the replacement of traditional Gothic settings or the more everyday locales of such vampire films as The Lost Boys (1987), Near Dark (1987), The Addiction (1995), and The Hamiltons (2006) to a highly medicalised and clinical mise-en-scène that informs the films’ overall aesthetic. Many films, for instance, include sequences in modern, often cuttingedge, laboratories, featuring silver and chrome examination tables, monitors and surgical equipment. The edges are sharp, surfaces gleaming and the mise-en-scène is uncluttered. Vampires occupy these spaces both as ­scientists and as the objects of scientific scrutiny. For example in Daybreakers (2009) vampire haematologist Edward Dalton is depicted

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sitting in his cutting-edge modern laboratory, peering into a microscope as he attempts to design a blood substitute that will sustain the vampires, while in the 2007 version of I Am Legend Dr Robert Nevill sedates his undead test subjects before strapping them to medical trollies as he injects them with experimental serums, and photographs their often painful, almost always fatal, reactions to the drugs. His laboratory wall is covered in photographs of his test subjects, drawing attention to the scope of his experiments and the documentation of the vampire reaction. Even the old-world vampire overlord Damaskinos in Blade 2 (2002) moves from his more traditional Gothic dungeon-like stronghold into a modern laboratory, as he discusses the genetic engineering of new and improved vampires while standing next to a metal refrigerator containing samples of the engineered vampire embryos. While his Count Orlok-like vampire appearance, with white skin, bald head, hollow eyes, pointed ears and elongated fingers, evokes a Gothic or expressionist past, his surroundings speak to the future. The grey reflective surfaces within this room are echoed in the mortuary scene in Rise (2007) where newborn vampire Anita Blake awakens in the mortuary drawer and kicks her way out. Rising from the dead no longer takes place in Gothic graves but in coroners’ antiseptic labs. The credit sequence to the television show Ultraviolet (1998), which predates both Blade 2 (2002) and Rise (2007), however, demonstrates that this visual style does not necessarily jettison the Gothic but re-imagines it as a form of science fiction. The sequence is comprised of a series of closeups of a naked dead body, bathed in blue ultraviolet light as the camera slowly moves up the body before resting on a close-up of fang marks on the neck. The extreme proximity of the camera to the body, enhanced by the deep blues of the ultraviolet light, seems coldly scientific as it picks up on the details of the skin, hair, veins, fissures and pores, showcasing the extreme physicality of the corpse – a trope consistent with television police dramas of the 1990s and 2000s. Within this forensic examination of the body, however, lie dark shadows out of which the bloody fang marks appear as the camera moves into extreme close-up on the neck. These shadows, contrasted against the ultraviolet colour scheme and accompanied by a haunting musical score, lend the sequence an expressionist quality and highlights the uncanny texture of the body on display. These aesthetic tropes continue throughout a wide range of vampire films, including the Blade and Underworld franchises, as well as Ultraviolet and Daybreakers, evoking a new SF Gothic aesthetic for the twenty-first century vampire. While the integration of science within the conventions of the vampire

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pu ttin g the va mpire unde r t he m i c r o s c o p e 49 genre serves to explain the vampire, this should not be mistaken for their domestication or the removal of their symbolic agency. It demonstrates that its meaning has evolved along with its audiences and that the vampire, in these films, has come to express contemporary anxieties about devel­ opments within science and their impact upon humanity and the body. These anxieties and preoccupations come in three key forms: virology, pandemic and the growth of the tissue economy.

Vampire as Virus The association between the vampire and the virus that underpins so many twenty-first century vampire films is embedded within the nature of the virus. Priscilla Wald argues that, like the vampire, viral microbes inhabit ‘the border between the living and the nonliving,’ existing in a dormant state, unable to reproduce, until they are within a living host (Wald 2008: 158). As Lorna Piatti-Farnell explains, ‘by their very nature, they are able to latch onto a cell and get inside them,’ and then subsequently ‘genetically modify’ the host’s cells to facilitate their own reproduction (Piatti-Farnell 2014: 39). In this manner they mirror the vampire’s existence on boundaries between life and death as well as its insidious form of reproduction in which a bite or the exchange of blood can set about a transformation of the victim into a vampire in their maker’s image. As a result of this parallel, the association of the undead with notions of disease and pandemic are not new. In fact since Night of the Living Dead was released in 1968, it is usually zombies, who like the vampire exist on the line between living and dead, that are equated with the threat of pandemic as evidenced by the hoax in 2014 in which stories, as well as a falsified image, began to circulate on the internet about Ebola victims returning as zombies. The story, reported on a satiric website, claimed that stories had been emerging about ‘ebola victims rising from the dead’ in Liberia (Goodman 2014) – (see Chapter 3 for a discussion of zombies). While the zombie, and the subsequent zombie apocalypse, has become a highly visible popular culture vector for the spread of a virus, the association between vampirism and disease, like the links between science and the vampires, predates the zombie, going back to eighteenth-century folklore. According to Paul Barber, disease was one of the root inspirations for the vampire myth. Disease is an invisible killer that can lay waste to a village in a very short period of time and so a supernatural monster that fed off the village was a way of explaining these deaths. The belief that vampires fed off their family members drew from the fact they were most likely to be the first to catch a virus from the infected and it was not uncommon

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for the family to burn the belongings of the suspected vampire as a form of spiritual cleansing. This had a practical impact, for the germs were destroyed in the process thus reinforcing a belief in the superstition. So in folklore the vampire was a means of explaining the effects of disease. Similarly vampirism within nineteenth-century literature, as has been commented upon extensively, is a powerful evocation of sexuality within a period consumed with discourses around its repression, politics and morality. The spread of vampirism therefore came to be equated with the  spread of sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis and, as has been discussed, AIDS. Similarly, Nosferatu, made a only few years after the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 which spread from the US and Europe through to Africa and Asia killing between 20 and 50 million people, uses rats and Orlok’s own rodent-like appearance to associate vampirism with the spread of plague. In 1985 the argument that the rare disease porphyria was the root influence upon the belief in vampires was first posited by the scientist Dr David H. Dolphin. Although this has been subsequently debunked, the association between the two continues to exist. In these cases, however, vampirism serves as a metaphor for disease. In contemporary vampire films, such as Blade (1998), Underworld (2003), Ultraviolet (2006), I Am Legend (2007), Thirst (2009), and Daybreakers (2009), vampirism in most cases does not represent disease but, like Matheson’s I Am Legend, the root cause of vampirism is described as a virus. The television series The Strain (2014), based on Chuck Hogan and Guillermo Del Toro’s novels, also equates vampirism with a virus spread through the transmission of bloodworms, parasites carrying the vampire virus that seek out a human host to infect, generally penetrating the body through the skin, bloodstream or tear ducts. The series chronicles the downfall of humanity via the pandemic spread of vampirism like a plague and features two Centre for Disease Control (CDC) officers as new-age vampire hunters, attempting to stop the spread of the virus through medical means, working alongside an old school vampire hunter, an exterminator and a computer hacker. The series, therefore, embeds vampirism within discourses surrounding science, folklore, mythology, technology and pest control. The spread of the disease in these texts is, therefore, not necessarily through the bite of a vampire but rather by exposure to saliva or blood, and in some cases it may even be airborne. As a result, a number of these films tap into anxieties around the spread of the disease and the potential for global pandemic. For instance, both I Am Legend and Daybreakers take place after the vampire outbreak has decimated humanity and the majority of the world’s population has been turned into vampires or vampire-like

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pu ttin g the va mpire unde r t he m i c r o s c o p e 51 creatures, while in Ultraviolet the vampire virus has spread so rampantly that the population has been split between those with and without the disease. The Strain uses the serial narrative structure of contemporary TV drama to take the audience through a step-by-step account of the vampire outbreak. As such these films, and television series, are direct descendants of Matheson’s novel but this time the threat of pandemic is not there to serve as metaphor for nuclear war, germ warfare or other global threats as is the case with I Am Legend and its early adaptations, emerging as they did within a Cold War context, but rather evoke the twentieth-century apocalyptic discourses surrounding the threat of global pandemic. These discourses are evidenced through international media headlines and news stories that present viral outbreak as an unavoidable global threat, often mirroring similar headlines in vampire films. In his script Night Creatures, Matheson inserts a flashback to a children’s  birthday party, in which neighbour Ben Cortman begins to comment on contemporary anxieties about the potential impact of a plague in Asia upon the Western hemisphere. In this scene, Cortman discusses a  newspaper featuring the headline ‘ASIAN PLAGUE SPREADING’ and Cortman and Neville discuss the article and its claims that the germ is spreading to Europe and could be in the US in less than two months (2012: 70). Similarly, in The Last Man on Earth, Cortman shows Morgan a newspaper clipping featuring the headline ‘Plague claims hundreds: Is Europe’s disease carried on the wind?’, highlighting the growing fear of the disease and uncertainty over how it spreads. While Morgan resists this perceived scaremongering, stating ‘I cannot accept half-baked theories that sell newspapers . . . I am a scientist – not an alarmist’, the inclusion of this headline serves to convey a growing anxiety within the narrative about disease and its potential global impact. In particular, both headlines reflect concerns about the viruses emerging from other countries – Asia and Europe – and spreading to the West, merging, as Laura Diehl argues, ‘the language of bacteriology – bad blood, infection, invasion’ – with ‘the language of national defence – border patrols, resistance, immunity’ (Diehl 2013: 85). These headlines in the script and the film are decidedly similar to headlines that have featured in newspapers in recent years surrounding a series of potential post-AIDS pandemics that have emerged and captured extensive media attention, generating global anxiety about the threat of disease in an increasingly globalised world. As Priscilla Wald explains: Emerging infections . . . were the consequences of globalization. An expanding human population worldwide meant that human beings were living and working in

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previously uninhabited places and coming into contact with unfamiliar or dormant microbes, which in turn globe-trotted by hitching rides in hosts – human, animal, and insect – using the variety of transportation networks that constitute the global village. (Wald 2008: 30)

The most high profile outbreaks have been SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) in Asia and Canada in 2002, the Avian Flu virus which was first seen in humans in 1997 and has had subsequent outbreaks in 2003 and 2013; the H1N1, aka Swine Flu, outbreak of 2009, and the  Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in 2014–2015. While these outbreaks have had varying degrees of global impact – for instance the Avian Flu virus is credited with killing a total of 377 people while the Ebola outbreak has seen a total of 28,637 people infected (as of 20 December 2015) with 11, 315 deaths worldwide (as of 20 December 2015; figures cited by The Data Team The Economist.com) – they have been met with similar alarmist response on the part of the media as is evidenced by these actual newspaper headlines. At the time of the SARS outbreak, many news magazines featured cover stories on SARS using an extreme close-up of a face covered by a surgical mask with headlines such as ‘The truth about SARS,’ (Time 5 May 2003),‘SARS: What you need to know: The new age of epidemics,’ (Newsweek 5 May 2003), and ‘SARS Hits Home,’ (US News 5 May 2003). While subsequent outbreaks have ­featured a plethora of anxiety-inducing headlines and article titles: ‘Bird flu could be worse than SARS, warns UN,’ The Observer 25 January 2004. ‘Britain Hit by Killer Bird Flu,’ The Sunday Times 4 February 2007. ‘Britain faces 75,000 deaths in bird flu pandemic, Lords report predicts,’ The Guardian 21 July 2008. ‘Swine Flu in Britain: the Guessing Game,’ The Independent 19 July 2009. ‘Swine flu: “inevitable flu pandemic” would be fourth in century,’ The Daily Telegraph 27 April 2009. ‘Swine flu : the worst is yet to come in autumn, says Alan Johnson,’ 3 May 2009. ‘Ebola: World Goes on Red Alert,’ Daily Mirror 20 July 2014. ‘Ebola crisis “on the same scale as Aids epidemic”,’ The Times 14 October 2014. ‘Ebola Here!’ New York Post 24 October 2014.

The opening to Nina Lakhani’s report for The Independent (2009) follows its headline with the following statement: ‘as the pandemic spreads, the NHS and other public services are preparing for the worst-case scenario – but they have no real idea of how bad the situation might get,’ deliberately fostering a sense of doom in the anticipation of the ‘worst-case scenario’. Similarly, many of the headlines focus upon the potential or actual threat of the arrival of the virus within North America and/or Great Britain.

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pu ttin g the va mpire unde r t he m i c r o s c o p e 53 In particular the ‘Ebola Here!’ and ‘SARS Hits Home’ headlines are designed to illicit horrified reactions to the idea of the viruses penetrating North American borders, a factor reiterated by much of the media coverage of aid workers infected with Ebola returning to the US, Britain and Spain. Contemporary vampire films continue this tradition of evoking familiar media headlines within the text, driving home the connection between the  vampire and viral pandemic. As such Perfect Creature (2006) features an image of a discarded newspaper featuring the headline ‘Vaccine shortage leads to black market,’ while one of the survivors in Stake Land (2010) finds an old edition of The Montreal Gazette reading: ‘Martial Law Declared in States: Vamp Pandemic Out of Control’. In I Am Legend, there is a brief glimpse of a Time magazine cover image of Neville, pictured by the headline ‘Savior. Soldier. Scientist’ with a question mark scribbled over the image. Furthermore, these films repeatedly draw upon imagery now endemically associated with the notion of these viral outbreaks. As indicated above, the SARS outbreak became codified by the image of the face partially concealed behind a surgical mask as people, first in Asia, and later in Canada, attempted to protect themselves from contagion, a tendency that similarly became endemic of the H1N1 outbreak in Mexico City and the Ebola outbreak in Africa. As Wald explains with regard to SARS, ‘the masks depicted what SARS threw into relief: human beings’ futile efforts to defend themselves against the threat of illness in the daily interactions made global by contemporary transportation and commerce’ (Wald 2008: 4). Films such as Ultraviolet and I Am Legend include images of soldiers, medical officials and the public, wearing the surgical mask as a means of self-protection (see Fig. 2.3). The meaning and significance of this imagery does, however, depend upon whether the film is told from the point of view of the infected or the uninfected, the vampires or the humans. In the beginning of Ultraviolet, as Violet, the film’s vampire protagonist, recounts the origins of the virus and its effect on society, the film contrasts the wearing of facemasks by the uninfected with the wearing of identifying armbands by the infected as a means of biological and social segregation; in effect, stigmatising the ‘infected’ (the vampire), painting them as monsters to be feared. This is reinforced in one shot of an infected person, captured in a close- up of his/her arm wearing the bright red armband over a black overcoat, as passers-by look on in horror and walk out of their way to avoid coming into close proximity. This image is followed by a shot of a family of infected, all dressed in black coats and hats standing in front of a heavily guarded facility as if about to enter but

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Figure 2.3  Fear of contagion in I Am Legend

instead dissolving out of the frame. In both shots, the infected are not identified by face but rather by familiar signifiers of the oppressed. In so doing, the film equates the perceived threat of infection with images of racial/social discrimination from the past, in particular calling to mind the Holocaust when Violet describes the  infected being put into camps and then eventually made to disappear. In contrast I Am Legend is presented from the point of view of the living, that is Robert Neville, and as such the presence of signifiers, such as facemasks in the flashbacks to the initial days of the outbreak, as the spread of the disease spirals out of control, suggests the futility of boundary protection. These flashbacks in particular draw attention to the parallel between protecting the boundaries of the body from infection to protecting the boundaries of society from the infected in a sequence in which it is revealed that the military tried to contain the virus within Manhattan by cutting off all exits to and from the island and destroying all of the bridges. As Neville attempts to get his wife and daughter to safety off the island, he takes them to an exit point filled with crowds of people trying to flee the city. Soldiers wearing face masks perform a retinal scan on each individual to test if they are free from the virus, allowing those who pass to exit while those who do not are forced to stay behind. This leads to panic, hostility and violence as the rules of civilisation break down. This scene also calls to mind images of airport checks and testing for SARS, Swine Flu and Ebola in recent years, in which public health was clearly equated with national security. While face masks attempt to secure bodily boundaries to prevent infection, these films tap into a long history of association between viral outbreak and national boundaries, particularly apropos of the contemporary political climate in which borders are a significant issue, not only in terms of health, but also post-9/11 fears of terrorism, concerns

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pu ttin g the va mpire unde r t he m i c r o s c o p e 55 about global ‘migrancy’, and the growing the refugee crisis. This imagery is mobilised throughout the television series The Strain as borders are set up around and within the city, with checkpoints established within Manhattan and its neighbouring communities Staten Island and New Jersey, in order to restrict the movement and thus the spread of the ‘virus’. Even train stations are monitored and carefully regulated with only government officials allowed to travel beyond the city limits. As the show’s narrative unfolds, these borders are revealed to be impossible to police and the vampire virus continues to spread.

Vampire as Cure The corollary to the vampire as virus is the vampire as cure, a recurring trope within recent film and television, as the virus serves as a vector to reprogramme human DNA. Within contemporary science, virotherapy is a growing discipline exploring how viruses can be used therapeutically, such as to target cancer cells (Kelly and Russell 2007). These developments have gradually integrated with the vampire for as Lorna PiattiFarnell argues [t]he paradoxical notion of picturing the vampiric ‘disease’ as a cure is bestowed a level of verisimilitude and authenticity by the knowledge that genetic improvement is indeed carried out by contemporary scientific (sic) through virulent diffusions. The vampire here provides not only hope, but also tangibility for the idea of re-­ engineering the human into a more efficient being. (Piatti-Farnell 2014: 48)

Responding to this research, I Am Legend (2007) presents vampirism as the direct result of such therapy as the film begins with the media announcement that the measles virus has been reprogrammed to cure cancer. As the film continues, it becomes apparent that this ‘cure’ inadvertently caused the vampire virus. In its most basic form, however, vampirism is generally presented as a cure for death through immortality in which human DNA is completely rewritten and transformed into a new genetic form. In Daybreakers, Charles Bromley, the CEO of pharmaceutical company Bromley Marks, explains that prior to the vampire outbreak, he was diagnosed with sarcoma,  which left him devastated and ‘pray[ing] for a miracle’. With the coming of the vampire outbreak, however, he explains that: ‘The world changed. My prayers were answered. Immortality gave me my cure.’ Similarly, the Twilight Saga also treats vampirism as the cure for death. Edward Cullen is reluctant to turn Bella into a vampire, despite her requests for him to do so, until she becomes pregnant with his child

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and he recognises that carrying the baby to term is slowly depleting her of life as the baby feeds off her blood from within (Breaking Dawn Part 1). The initial throws of labour are so strong and destructive that her back breaks and when they perform a C-section in order to retrieve the baby, she begins to haemorrhage. Once the baby is born Bella dies, a skeletal shape on a blood-stained trolley, until Edward begins her transformation as described in the opening of this chapter in which vampirism not only brings her back to life but heals her broken body. Similarly, each of the Cullens, the ‘good’ vampires at the centre of the story, was transformed into a vampire by the patriarch of the clan, Dr Carlyle Cullen at the point of what he deemed to be an untimely or violent death. Finally, in Underworld, the vampire Selena chooses to bite her werewolf-lover Michael, who has been shot with silver, in order to save his life and in so doing she instigates the rewriting of his genetic make-up into a vampire/ werewolf hybrid mutation, and starts an evolutionary leap for the two races. So the vampire is repeatedly presented as a cure for death. Recent television series True Blood (2008–14), The Vampire Diaries and The Originals (2013–) have taken this to a more literal level by presenting not the bite of a vampire as a cure through transformation, but the blood of the vampire as having healing properties. In these series, a few drops of blood ingested by the wounded person will cure any recently received injuries and this becomes a commonly used convention across  all three series. For instance, Sookie in True Blood, as well as in the novels upon which the show is based, is repeatedly given vampire blood to heal the various injuries incurred usually as a result of her interactions with  the vampire community. In ‘First Taste’ (1.2), Sookie is severely beaten by the Rattrays, a pair of vampire blood dealers, after she interferes with their abduction and blood draining of vampire Bill Compton. After dispatching the Rattrays, Bill heals Sookie’s broken body by feeding her his blood. Similarly in The Vampire Diaries and The Originals, where it is revealed that the bite of a werewolf is a lethal poison to a vampire, the blood of a hybrid of werewolf and vampire is the only known cure for this poison. In True Blood, the blood of vampire/fairy hybrid Warlow is discovered to be a cure for the vampire’s allergy to sunlight (‘Radioactive’ 6.10). In this manner, these series model this use of vampire blood on the longstanding tradition of tissue transfer as cure. As Aspasia Stephanou has demonstrated the most common form of tissue transfer was blood, with transfusions becoming common by the 1910s (Stephanou 2014: 30). As a result, the symbolic meaning of blood, according to Stephanou, shifts from family to biomedicine, ‘enter[ing] the realm of science, no longer as a hidden property of the body but as a visible matter that can be clinically

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pu ttin g the va mpire unde r t he m i c r o s c o p e 57 analysed (Stephanou 2014: 12). Subsequently, throughout the twentieth century, other tissues have contributed to the growth of tissue transfer as a treatment and cure for multiple diseases and conditions, such as organ and bone marrow transplant, skin grafts and stem cell gene therapies. Blood itself has been subdivided into separate components, blood cells, white cells, plasma and platelets, and transfused to different patients based upon their needs (Stephanou 2014: 38). Significantly, these series not only tap into the medicinal uses for tissue transfer but reflect a growing tissue economy that is building within modern medicine through the manner in which the use of vampire or hybrid blood becomes a commodity for exchange. Douglas Starr points out that as early as the 1910s ‘surgeons were performing some 20 transfusions a year at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York alone . . . and charging a handsome $500 fee’ (cited in Stephanou 2014: 20). Furthermore, Melinda Cooper argues that the rise of Neo-liberalism in the 1980s, and in particular the Reagan government in the US, led to the implementation of a series of ‘legislative and regulatory measures’ that rejuvenated the life sciences by enforcing processes of private/public partnerships which focused research upon ‘technical application and commercial outcomes’ (Cooper 2008: 26). In particular, publicly funded science had to patent the results of their research which enabled them to commercially exploit their work, leading to the development of the ‘scientistentrepeneur’ (Cooper 2008: 27). Roger Luckhurst describes the 1980s as a new era of biomedicalisation and the ‘commodification of health, illness and human bodies’ (Luckhurst 2013: 3). This commodification of blood is conveyed by the fact that in True Blood, the medical and hallucinogenic qualities of vampire blood have led to a significant black market economy, for which criminals abduct vampires and drain their blood against their will. Some vampires such as Eric even sell their own blood through a human drug dealer, Lafayette, recognising its economic value. In both The Vampire Diaries and The Originals, vampire-werewolf hybrid Klaus Michaelson repeatedly barters for the use of his blood to cure a vampire who has been bitten by a werewolf. While he does not require money, he often withholds his blood until those in need agree to perform a task. In The Strain, billionaire Eldritch Palmer agrees to financially facilitate the Master vampire’s infiltration of the United States, which sparks the vampire outbreak, in exchange for the Master’s blood. While Palmer desires immortality, he is only given sufficient blood to heal his ageing and failing body. Palmer is first introduced to the audience in Episode 1 through the mise-en-scène of biotechnologies, sitting in a medical chair, attached to monitors and intravenous drips while undergoing dialysis in

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his temperature-controlled office. Repeatedly he is presented throughout Season 1 as undergoing various treatments and procedures, including transfusions, dialysis and organ transplant, in order to sustain his life. Having used every medical recourse at his disposal simply to stay alive, the Master’s blood rejuvenates  him. In particular, Palmer’s choices highlight the questionable ethics of such a tissue economy where his financial position provides him the privilege to exploit humanity for his own health and desire to eschew death, first by paying top price for organ transplants and second by facilitating the downfall of humanity in return for immortality. This positioning of the vampire as a central figure within a tissue economy places the genre within debates about the ethics of such an economy. For instance in The Vampire Diaries, Dr Meredith Fell becomes aware of the healing properties of vampire blood and takes the blood from vampires, such as Damon Salvatore, against their will in order to give it to her patients. While her intentions are to find the good in evil by using this blood for its medicinal purposes, the taking of blood without consent does raise questions about the ethics of such actions even on the part of science. Does Damon’s ‘badness’ make Fell’s actions acceptable or are they acceptable because of the vampire’s status as neither alive nor dead, conforming to what Susan Merrill Squier describes as ‘liminal lives’? Squier argues that within twentieth and twenty-first century ‘bioculture’ ‘medical interventions are reshaping our ways of conceiving, being born, growing, ageing, and dying, liminal lives surround us . . . anywhere that the expected shape or span of human life is being changed through biomedicine’ (Squier 2004: 4). Sherryl Vint, drawing upon the work of Squier, further argues that ‘liminal subjects are entities such as embryonic stem cell genetic material that cannot comfortably be sorted into either category of “thing” (just tissue) or “human subject”, or the ever growing experimental cell lines derived from living human bodies that continue to grow long after the “complete” human subject’s “death”’ (Vint 2011: 165). Vampires are chimeric creations, both human and monster, neither alive nor dead, that exist in the liminal shadows of contemporary life. As such, they embody an ethical grey area. In Blade 2, the blood of the half-vampire day walker becomes such an object of scientific study and commercial harvesting when Blade is locked in a grey laboratory and pinned to a gleaming examination table. Chrome spikes emerge from the table and jut through his wrists and ankles in order to drain his blood for vampiric analysis, before their intended dissection of his body and harvesting of his organs for further experimentation and exploitation. This scene is designed to contrast with a similar scene in Blade when his blood is drained but this time in an ancient temple and

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pu ttin g the va mpire unde r t he m i c r o s c o p e 59 as part of a ritual to invoke the Blood God. Initially, the blood of the day walker is harvested for its mystical properties, while in the later film it is to exploit its genetic make-up. This is reinforced by the fact that the procedure is overseen not by a torturer or scientist – although the examination table evokes both – but rather by a lawyer representing the vampire corporation, Caliban Industries, embodying the union of science and corporate capitalism. This union is reiterated in Daybreakers where the vampire nation appears to be led by Charles Bromley, the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, rather than the government whose members appear in the film either as spokespeople for the corporation or resistance fighters who are easily dispatched by the military at the behest of Bromley. Furthermore, this focus on vampire blood as cure and commodity, once again places the vampire under the microscope, not only on a cellular level, but in recent years it has increasingly become the subject of scientific observation and testing at an institutional level, often, like Dr Fell’s use of Damon’s blood, without consent. As a result, the twentyfirst century vampire text questions the morality and ethics of corporate experimentation on the body and positions the vampire within contemporary discourses surrounding biopolitics. This imagery of the vampire under enforced scientific observation is pervasive across the genre. In the steampunk vampire film Perfect Creature, the renegade vampire Edgar is imprisoned by a vice-like device with metal rods that puncture his body and hold him in place, connoting both modern technology and medieval torture, as he is observed through glass by his captors – themselves vampire scientists (see Fig. 2.4). In Blade Trinity ( 2004) the vampires capture the father of all vampires, Dracula, and imprison him in a darkened cell, while watching his

Figure 2.4  The scrutiny of the vampire in Perfect Creature

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insatiable feeding through infrared monitors. In Daybreakers, Bromley Marks’ board members are presented with a slide show of the results of experiments of blood deprivation upon prisoners and later a vampire soldier is strapped to a trolley while he is injected with an experimental blood substitute as company CEO and board members observe from the viewing theatre. As previously mentioned, Neville captures and tests his ‘cure’ upon a series of vampires by strapping them to a trolley and photographing their responses to his serums. Finally, Underworld Awakening (2012) begins as vampire Selene wakes up from suspended animation and is forced to break out of a cryogenic tube in the centre of a corporate laboratory. The emphasis in these films is upon the imprisonment and scientific observation of the vampire. Recent vampire television has adopted similar tropes in which vampires have become the object of scientific study, usually against their will. The TV series Ultraviolet features two key sequences of scientific scrutiny, the first surrounding a vampire pregnancy as the vampire-hunting team systematically examine and study the in vitro experiments on a patient who may have been impregnated by Code V infected sperm, (‘Sub Judice’ 1.3). The second is when the team captures a leading vampire and holds him in  an observation cell, part interrogation and part examination, or autopsy as they describe the physical examination of dead tissue (‘Persona Non Grata’ 1.6). Season 4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer introduced a military run organisation, the Initiative, which captures and experiments on vampires and demons, including Spike. On Being Human (UK; 2008–13), the vampire Mitchell and his werewolf and ghost friends, George, Nina and Annie, find themselves the subject of scientific experiments run by the Christian fundamentalist Professor Jaggat and her enforcer Kemp (‘Episode 8’ 2.8). This integration of religion and science re-emerges in Season 5 of True Blood as the anti-vampire Governor of Louisiana and his Christian-right girlfriend, Sarah Noonan, develop a scientific ­facility that imprisons, observes, tests and tortures, physically and psychologically, vampires before eventually killing them. Vampire Diaries Season 5 introduces the Augustine society, a secret organisation that funds the imprisonment and experimentation on vampires as a means of harnessing their supernatural qualities and powers for the betterment of humankind, as well as to establish means of protecting humanity against the vampire threat. The line between this experimentation for the greater good and torture is however blurred. The seriality of television, and the tendency for the vampires to be the main protagonists of these shows, has meant that television, even more than cinema, has used this trope as a means of critiquing the unethical use of science in the hands of the politicians, the

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pu ttin g the va mpire unde r t he m i c r o s c o p e 61 powerful elite classes and the church. Even the series Ultraviolet which positions the vampire hunters as protagonists, while the vampires themselves remain unknowable, negotiates the ethics of terminating a vampire pregnancy as well as questioning the manner in which the team pressurise and emotionally manipulate the mother. Dire consequences, for humans and vampires alike, are usually the consequences of these types of detached experimentation. More significant, is that embedded within all of these texts, whether film or television, is the critique of the neo-liberal integration of science, military and corporate capitalism as embodied in the all-powerful pharmaceutical companies. The future apocalyptic dystopia represented or prefigured here is a world in which the corporate pharmaceutical companies rule as Lorna Piatti-Farnell argues: we are indeed in the ‘age of the pharmaceutical’ (Piatti-Farnell 2014: 44). While a common perception of recent vampire films is that they are focused on Dark Romance in which the vampire has been defanged through the love of a human woman, I have shown that a series of alternative associations apply to the genre, particularly within film and television. These associations, drawn from a legacy of intersections of the vampire and science, re-imagines the vampire as defined through the language and discourses surrounding virology, tissue transfer and medical scrutiny and analysis. Vampires are presented both as the victims of a medical gaze and the perpetrators, embodying neo-liberal capitalist discourses, spreading the infection globally and feeding off itself until nothing remains. Of course, this scientific reimagining of the undead is not limited to the vampire but is paralleled by the resurgence in the new millennium of the vampire’s living dead brethren, the zombie hordes. The manner in which they have re-emerged, crawling out of their graves and onto our cinema and television screens, is the subject of the next two chapters.

Notes 1. See Brown for a philosophical discussion of the implications for the ability, within digital cinema, to move seamlessly within and without the body, arguing that this technique ‘suggests that human bodies are “meaningless,” or just a(nother) part of the continuum’ (Brown 2013: 110). 2. ‘The Flower Duet’ is from Lakmé by Delibes and is performed by Elaine Barry and Judith Rees, and The Sinfonia of London (Blake http://www.howardblake.com/music/Film-TV-Scores/545/THE-HUNGER.htm).

C HA PT E R 3

The Cinematic Rising: The Resurgence of the Zombie

Like so many of the classic cinema monsters, the zombie genre repeatedly undergoes periods of transformation and yet, as argued by Kyle Bishop, one of the factors that differentiates it from these other monsters is that ‘it is the only supernatural foe to have almost entirely skipped any initial literary manifestation’, instead leaping from folklore directly to film (Bishop 2010: 12–13). While Bram Stoker’s Dracula and, to a lesser degree, Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla, have been central texts for the vampire film from Nosferatu (1922) through to Penny Dreadful (2014–), Bishop argues that the zombie has ‘no germinal Gothic novel from which it stems, no primal narrative that establishes and codified its qualities and behaviors’ (Bishop 2010: 13). This does not mean, however, that the genre does not have any literary influences. Many scholars, including Bishop but also Roger Luckhurst and Alison Peirse, have demonstrated how White Zombie (1932), generally considered the first zombie film, was influenced by William B. Seabrook’s Haitian travelogue The Magic Island (1929) (Luckhurst 2015/Peirse 2013). Peirse argues that ‘Seabrook’s travelogue provided the discursive context for the film, a point confirmed by the extensive reprinting of extracts from The Magic Island in the film’s pressbook’, acknowledging a direct correlation between the book and the film (Peirse 2013: 65). Furthermore, Luckhurst has unearthed a largely overlooked tradition of zombie stories emerging from the pulp presses of the 1920s and 1930s, arguing that these stories ‘alongside Seabrook’s Magic Island, directly underpin the arrival of the zombie in American cinema just as the category of “horror film” was emerging’ (Luckhurst 2015: 59). As Luckhurst demonstrates, this tradition of pulp storytelling ‘follow[s] Seabrook very closely’ (Luckhurst 2015: 64), revolving around the Caribbean zombie in the form of a ‘being that hovered between life and death, the natural and the supernatural, and toyed with the gruesome prospect of being buried alive by nefarious native conspirators’ (Luckhurst 2015: 63). All of these narratives, as Bishop, Peirse and Luckhurst demon-

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strate, tap into colonial anxieties surrounding the Caribbean following the occupation of Haiti in 1915 by American military forces. If the 1930s and 1940s cinematic zombie traditions were influenced by  these folkloric literary traditions, then the post-1968 films in which the genre underwent a dramatic transformation are similarly indebted, as I argue in Chapter 1, to Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend¸ as well as its first cinematic adaptation The Last Man on Earth. Matheson’s novel achieves this influence through the long-standing impact of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead as discussed in Chapter 1. This film, along with its even more successful sequel Dawn of the Dead (1978), established many of the central conventions that would come to define the late twentieth-century zombie genre on film: an isolated location, a group of survivors, a siege scenario with the living surrounded by the living dead, bearing the marks of decay or the scars of their death and with a new taste for human flesh. These films spawned the flesh-eating undead which would be further developed by the growth of the Italian zombie film, led by Lucio Fulci in the 1970s and early 1980s. In this manner Night of the Living Dead has come to take on the role of what Bishop refers to as the ‘primal narrative’, a cinematic rather than literary, antecedent to which any and all subsequent zombie films pay homage, either by fostering and developing the formula or deliberately eschewing it. Max Brooks acknowledges that when he was approached to write a follow-up novel after the success of The Zombie Survival Guide, he knew he didn’t want to write a zombie adventure story ‘which, true to form, would follow a group of survivors as they fight off the zombies’ thus leading him to re-imagine the zombie narrative globally as an oral-history in the form of World War Z (Brooks 2015). In contrast, Robert Kirkman’s graphic novel of The Walking Dead, as well as the AMC television series and the Telltale video game, is based precisely upon this formula, reworked in creative ways for a serial narrative. Despite the significance and impact of Romero’s work, the zombie film has always been a cinematic sub-genre that is the amalgamation of a wide range of influences and textual borrowings. For instance, the casting of Bela Lugosi as the evil Bokur in White Zombie, the use of the same sets as in Universal Studios’ Dracula, and the narrative structure in which a middle class white woman must be rescued from the influence and power of the demonic Lugosi, mean that the film is as much influenced by Tod Browning’s adaptation of Dracula as Seagrove’s travelogue. Similarly, Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie brings together the Haitian zombie with the Gothic novel, via Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Roger Luckhurst has convincingly argued for a correlation between the Romero and post-Romero zombie and a range of cultural influences from the mass

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threat which is repeatedly played out in 1950s science-fiction to the postwar trauma of the concentration camps and the atomic bombs in Japan, in particular as embodied in the ‘Musulman’ and the ‘hibakusha’ (Luckhurst 2015: 112–14). Luckhurst argues that the hibakusha – ‘explosion affected persons’ – were not only traumatised by their experience and survival of ‘mass death’ during the bombings but that they ‘began to feel that they were the “carriers of death” . . . as if their survival was a vector of transmission for more mass death to enter the world’ (Luckhurst 2015: 112). The Musulman was a term used in Auschwitz for the ‘final stages of the condition of “utmost inanition”, beyond starvation, beyond life, beyond reason, indifferent to pain and suffering, utterly abject and scorned, but not yet dead’ (Luckhurst 2015: 113). In both cases, Luckhurst suggests that these survivors visibly undermined the clear distinction between living and dead and on a mass scale that would haunt the post-war context of the 1950s and 1960s. As Luckhurst explains, ‘if the living dead hibakusha staggered out of the ruins of Hiroshima perpetually haunted by the imprint of death, then it was the figure of the “Musulman” that assailed the memory of those who survived the concentration camps’ (Luckhurst 2015: 113). This tendency for the zombie film to be a bricolage of influences, responding to shifts and changes within the nature of the horror genre, has resulted in the genre being repeatedly reinvented along new matrices from the voodoo-influenced zombie films of the 1930s and 1940s to the alien-invasion narratives of the 1950s to the flesh-eating revenants of the Romero/post-Romero era. The aim of this chapter will, therefore, be to consider the most recent re-invention of the cinematic zombie, in what I refer to as the cinematic rising1 of the zombie film, after its gradual decline in the 1980s. I will pay particular attention to how the zombie, like the vampire discussed in Chapter 2, continues to bear the marks of Matheson’s apocalyptic vision through the genre’s foregrounding of science, the transition within the genre from the medical to the media gaze, and the shift of the genre from localised personal narratives towards a more global pandemic. In this manner, I will explore how the zombie has increasingly become embedded within apocalyptic discourses that preoccupy twenty-first century culture and become a metaphor through which we express anxiety and anticipation of a potential extinction-level event that will bring about the collapse of modern society, if not humanity itself.

The Twenty-first Century Rising The re-emergence of the zombie in the new millennium occurred on multiple fronts. Bishop argues that in the 1980s the zombie film descended

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the  r e s urge nc e o f t he zo m b i e 65 into camp theatricality with Michael Jackson’s Thriller music video, in which Jackson danced both with and as a zombie, as well as zombie film parodies such as The Return of the Living Dead (1985) (Bishop 2010: 15). It is, however, broadly acknowledged that from the 1980s onwards, the zombie was a recurring trope of the video game, achieving growing popularity and blockbuster success in the 1990s with games such as House of the Dead (1996) and Resident Evil (1996) (Kirkland 2009). The zombie was an ideal subject for the increasingly popular survival horror and first-person shooter games that came to dominate the media at the turn of the century (Kirkland forthcoming). As Tanya Krzywinska explains: Pick up any recent horror-based video game and it is pretty likely that at least some of its monsters are zombies. They even appear in games that don’t make direct claims on the horror genre. Whether zombies are encountered in the mainly third person context of the Resident Evil (1996–) or Silent Hill (1999–) cycles, the firstperson-shooter format of the House of the Dead cycle (1998–) or Painkiller (2004), or just as incidental enemies in action-shooter Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation (1999), it is clear that zombies are well suited to the medium of the video game. (Krzywinska 2008: 153)

Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright recognised the way in which video games were rejuvenating the zombie and acknowledge the situation in their comic and affectionate television parody Spaced (1999–2001), in the episode ‘Art’ (1.3), which went on to influence their feature film Shaun of the Dead (2004). In literature, the early 2000s saw the publication of the first issue of Robert Kirkman’s graphic novel The Walking Dead (2003), as well as of Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival Guide ([2004] 2011)2, followed by World War Z (2006), each of which have featured on the New York Times Best Sellers List and have sold millions of copies.3 Previous to both Kirkman and Brooks’ work, however, two key films were released in the cinema and their phenomenal success marked the beginnings of a highly visible renaissance of the zombie on film. They were Paul W. Anderson’s Resident Evil (2002), an adaptation of the video game, and Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002). Resident Evil opened on 15 March 2002 in 2,578 cinemas in North America, earning $17,707,106 in its opening weekend and by the time it closed in cinemas on 9 May 2002, it had earned $39,548,612 after twelve weeks on domestic release. With a production budget of $35,000,000, this appears at first glance like a poor return but the film’s worldwide box office intake came to $103,200,000, signalling the film’s success.4 28 Days Later opened in the UK on 1 November 2002 in 318 cinemas and earned $2,331,922 on its opening weekend, achieving a total of $9,762,194 after seven weeks at the UK box office. When it opened in North America on 27 June 2003 in 1,260 cinemas,

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it earned $10,061,858 in its first weekend. It left North American cinemas on 30 October 2003, having earned a total of $45,064,915 over 18 weeks. Worldwide the film earned $82,719,885 and with a production budget of $8million, the film was a notable success for a comparatively small British film financed by the British Film Council.5 The strong fiscal achievements of both films demonstrates the economic viability of the zombie film in the twenty-first century. These figures are nowhere near the achievements of blockbuster horror films such as The Blair Witch Project (1999) and The Sixth Sense, (1999) both of which were released three years earlier and earned, respectively, $128,076,668 after seven weeks at the US/Canada box office and $176,245,282 after five weeks (Abbott 2010: 35). However, the income generated by Resident Evil and 28 Days Later demonstrates that the zombie film had moved away from the cult box office of classic zombie film Night of the Living Dead which is reported to have earned $12–15 million at the domestic box office and $30 million internationally over a period of ten years (Kane 2010: 88). These figures signal Night as a cult success but cult nonetheless, reinforced by the fact that its domestic box office achievements were largely attributed to the film’s popularity in midnight screenings across the US (Hervey 2008). These new zombie films were, in contrast, tapping into a growing commercial market for the horror genre, which were marketed at a mainstream audience rather than a niche horror fan base. Resident Evil in particular conforms to the shift towards the high-concept horror blockbuster that was emblematic of the late 1990s and early 2000s during which mainstream horror films were being produced from pre-existing commodities (Abbott 2010). To date the Resident Evil film franchise (encompassing five films) has earned a total global box office income of: $909,934,248.6 Additionally, Capcom, who produce the game, has, at the time of writing, released twenty-five games in the series which have sold 61 million units worldwide. On top of that we have tie-in novels, graphic novels, sound dramas, animated films and a planned television series, making Resident Evil one of the most successful horror multimedia franchises of all time (Chipman 2014/Farghaly 2014: 1). While Resident Evil signalled the financial potential of the genre, 28 Days Later was marked by a strong critical success, praised for its successful negotiation of the tropes of the zombie genre as well as its technological innovation, both in its location shooting and use of digital video. For instance, Ryan Gilbey of The Independent praised the film for not being ‘your common-or-garden’ zombie film but rather ‘a zombie movie with a head and heart – as well as the obligatory severed limbs, gouged eyes, punctured organs’. While recognising the debt to Romero, Gilbey argued

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the  r e s urge nc e o f t he zo m b i e 67 that the film’s innovation came from its inherent Britishness both in terms of location and style: ‘But amid all the nasty frights and general beastliness, Boyle has crafted a disquieting portrait of Britain that owes more to this country’s tradition of desolate, appalled surrealism . . . than to any strait forward genre shocker’ (Gilbey 2002: 12–13). Most critics praised the uncanny opening scenes of a deserted London, the eerie quality driven home by the sustained return to recognisable locations presented like we have never seen them before; absent of life (Gilbey 2002; Charity 2002; Hoyle 2002). In particular most reviews acknowledge the significance of Boyle’s decision to shoot the film on digital video, a choice that enabled the crew to capture these images of empty London as well as lend the film a dynamic and jarring aesthetic style (Christopher 2002, Bradshaw 2002). Reflecting back on the film and its success in 2007, Nick Curtis described 28 Days Later as ‘savagely original, brilliantly economical and visually stunning’, while Peter Bradshaw called the film a ‘huge, bloodthirsty, flesh-ripping, eyeball-gouging hit’ (Bradshaw 2007). This success has also lead to a fruitful, if more modest, multimedia franchise which includes a sequel 28 Weeks Later (2007), spin-off graphic novels 28 Days Later: Aftermath (2007) and 28 Days Later (2010–11), and the game 28 Weeks Later: Infected. The commercial potential of the zombie genre was reaffirmed by Zach Snyder’s remake of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (2004) and the British zom-rom-com Shaun of the Dead which earned global box office totals of $102,354,381 and $30,039,393 respectively.7 While distinct in their own rights, these films more overtly acknowledge their debt to Romero than either Resident Evil or 28 Days Later.8 Dawn is a remake with deliberate  echoes and nods to the original while Shaun’s zombies are modelled on Romero’s shambling corpses and includes dialogue from the original film as homage. The critical and economic success of these twenty-first century zombie films paved the way for Romero’s return to the zombie genre after a gap of twenty years with Land of the Dead (2005). Land was Romero’s most expensive zombie film to date and his only studio production, produced for Universal Studios with a budget of $15 million. The film was considered a notable success, earning a worldwide gross of $46,770,602 on its original release and was met with positive reviews by mainstream and horror critics, praising its generic delivery of the requisite scares and zombie gore alongside Romero’s signature social commentary in equal measure, as articulated by Jonathan Romney: ‘Land of the Dead may be an enjoyably grisly, often drily witty horror comic, but you could also think of it as an impassioned call to arms – even if they are severed ones’ (Romney 2005). Critics repeatedly praised and welcomed the return

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of the zombie master to the big screen, while a preview of a fifteen minute sequence from Land of the Dead was screened at the 2005 Cannes film festival, followed by a Q&A with the director, after which he received a standing ovation from the audience (Romero 2005). The release of these five high profile, commercially and critically successful films between 2002 and 2005 mark the beginning of this cinematic rising of the zombie genre which continues through to the present and marks the entry of the genre into mainstream media, a fact reaffirmed by the success of the zombie on television in the form of The Walking Dead, averaging 14.2 million viewers for AMC as well as the show’s spin-off series Fear the Walking Dead which earned a total of 11.7 million viewers for the airing of its first episode (Kissell 2015; Littleton 2015). The British/American split of these films, with Resident Evil as a global product produced by an American studio, based upon a Japanese game and directed by a British filmmaker, also signals the increasing globalisation of a genre that, as Kyle Bishop argues, was initially viewed as a genre of the Americas, albeit with notable success emerging from Italy in the 1970s and 1980s (Bishop 2010: 12 & 160). This global trend has been reaffirmed by the subsequent growth of zombie films being produced around the globe including in Canada (Fido/2006, Pontypool/2008), Spain ([REC] 2007 and sequels), France (Mutants/2008), Chile (Solos/2012), Cuba (Juan of the Dead/2011), New Zealand (Braindead/1992), and Japan (Versus/2000). The genre has also achieved notable cross-over success from the ultra low budget independent sector (Colin/2008) to blockbuster (World War Z/2013); from horror genre (Undead/2003) to comedy (Warm Bodies/2013; Life After Beth/2014) to art-cinema (Ur: The End of Civilization in 90 Tableaux/2015). The zombie film continues to be a ubiquitous presence on twenty-first century cinema screens. This initial renaissance of the zombie genre in between 2002 and 2005 can, in many ways, be linked to a particular cultural moment, namely the terrorist attacks in the US on 11 September 2001 and the beginnings of a period of global paranoia. In fact numerous critics have made compelling arguments for the consideration of many of these zombie films as an allegory for the issues and events surrounding 9/11. For instance, Kevin Wetmore argues that Zach Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead offers a critique of ‘the United States and how it handles threats and crises’ as the survivors sequester themselves in a mall, ‘watch[ing] a wall of televisions, showing them the crisis unfolding’ while ‘“America”, by which we mean the government, the military, and all authority figures, is unable to protect its people or solve the problems’ (Wetmore 2012: 163). Aviva Briefel compares 28 Days Later and Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead with Romero’s

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the  r e s urge nc e o f t he zo m b i e 69 original Dawn of the Dead as a means of exploring how these films, in the wake of 9/11, negotiate the tension between the use of cinema as a form of social critique and their own existence as a lucrative commodity (Briefel 2012: 142). Terence McSweeney (2010) offers a detailed analysis of Land of the Dead as a much-needed critique of the Bush administration and the complicity of the American Government in the events of 9/11 as a result of their military and self-serving global interventions – thus reaffirming Romero’s own argument that his zombie films ‘reflect on the sociopolitical climate of the different eras. The stories are similar, but they are set in difference decades. It’s an unusual conceit, but I like being able to make the film current, politically speaking, even though the story continues’ (quoted in Land of the Dead Press Book: Production Information: 4). In fact, Romero has acknowledged the fact that this film was written to critique the Bush administration and the situation in Iraq and that Dennis Hopper recognised that his character Kaufman was based on Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defence and Vice-President respectively (Romero cited in Roddick 2005). Even a cursory examination of many of the films demonstrates recognisable imagery associated with 9/11 – events which themselves were highly mediated through news footage as the world watched these events unfold on twenty-four-hour-news broadcasts, evoking what Aviva Briefel and Sam J. Miller describe as the ‘post-traumatic response of “It was just like a movie”’ (2012: 1). For instance, 28 Days Later features images of the memorial wall of the missing while shots of bicycle-courier Jim wandering through the empty and derelict streets of London filled with the debris of some form of cataclysmic event, call to mind the often repeated images of the seemingly abandoned streets of Lower Manhattan strewn with debris from the fallen towers (see Fig. 3.1). Characters in Land of the Dead use the language of twenty-first century terrorism with mercenary Cholo vowing to ‘do a Jihad on his ass’, while Fiddler’s Green President Kauffman declares that he ‘doesn’t negotiate with terrorists’ when Cholo threatens to destroy the city, embodied in a looming tower over the horizon, if his demands are not met. The Canadian film Pontypool presents the zombie outbreak exclusively from the point of view of the staff in a radio station reporting on strange events ­occurring in the rural town of Pontypool. The eye-witness accounts coming into the radio station describing mobs, rioting, explosions, violence and military intervention evoke the panicked reports that emerge around terrorist attacks such as 9/11. Surrounding these events are references that drive home this connection such as the revelation that Mazzy’s technician Laurel Anne had been a soldier returned from Afghanistan, while one of

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Figure 3.1  The memorial wall of the dead in 28 Days Later

Mazzy’s guests is a troupe of actors known as ‘Lawrence and the Arabians’, which includes women dressed as Bedouins and a man in a turban, fake beard and sporting a toy submachine gun, who Mazzy describes as Osama Bin Laden. Later a reporter from the BBC calls to inquire about the story and refers to the events as an insurgency and alludes to French Canada’s history of separatist terror groups, in the form of the 1970s FLQ (Front de libération du Québec) crisis. The aura of crisis and trauma permeates the film as Grant must decipher the truth from the morass of reports and hysterical responses to these events. The opening of Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead offers the most evocative ­allusion to 9/11 through the seemingly instantaneous disruption of normality by chaos. The film begins with a brief sequence to introduce the main protagonist Anna, a nurse returning home after working a double shift at the hospital, establishing a status quo of normality. She lives in a middle class suburban neighbourhood, surrounded by families, and is in a loving and seemingly fulfilling relationship with her husband. After this four and a half-minute sequence, the disruption of the status quo is marked with an extreme close-up of the clock as the number changes to read 6.37 am. The emphasis upon a precise time calls to mind the precision with which the world recorded and chronicled the events that took place on September 11: 8.46.30 am (EST) the first plane hits the North Tower of the World Trade Center; 9.03.02 am a second plane hits the South Tower; 9.58.59 am South Tower collapses; 10.28.22 am North Tower collapses. The close-up of the clock in Dawn of the Dead signals the precise moment when Anna’s world changes. This close-up is then fol-

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Figure 3.2  Zombie-child in Dawn of the Dead

lowed by a series of slow and ominous camera movements in the bedroom before settling on a close-up of the door as it opens creakily, waking up Anna’s husband Lewis who sees one of the neighbourhood kids standing in the shadows. The ominous nature of the moment comes to fruition when the child moves into the light to reveal her bloodied and torn face, blankly staring. This image of the zombified child, recognisable as such to the audience if not to Lewis who runs to her aid, immediately shatters the status quo with its connotations of death, violence, and loss of innocence (see Fig. 3.2) In this pivotal moment, the world has changed and there is no going back. This brief pause ends when the child bites into Lewis’ neck. The sequence then moves into hyperdrive as Anna throws the child out of the room, locks the door and attempts to save her husband before he dies. A close-up of the phone as she dials 911 drives home the correlation between these events and the terrorist attacks, reaffirmed by the engaged signal and message coming from the emergency services. When Lewis revives as a zombie and attempts to kill her, Anna fights him off and escapes via the window in the bathroom, only to find her quiet and peaceful neighbourhood transformed into a warzone. As she falls out of the window, Lewis’ screeches are replaced by the sounds of sirens and alarms going off all around her. She turns to look at her street and sees one of her neighbours brandishing a handgun and threatening to shoot anyone who comes near him before being hit by a speeding ambulance. Anna’s eyes follow the ambulance and we get a re-establishing shot of her street as the camera pans right to left, revealing smoke, fire, explosions, people running from and being attacked by their neighbours. In the distance the city is engulfed in smoke. Anna’s confusion now extends beyond her street, conveying the

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experience of being at the centre of a terrorist event or natural disaster where the extent of the damage is unknown. In exploring the way in which the zombie genre, and the horror genre more broadly, evoke the experiences of 9/11, many critics draw upon Adam Lowenstein’s argument about an ‘allegorical moment’ in order to explore how the cinema explores and confronts the trauma of 9/11. Lowenstein defines an allegorical moment as: ‘a shocking collision of film, spectator, and history where registers of bodily space and historical time are distributed unevenly across the cinematic text, the film’s audience, and the historical context, so that . . . shock emanates from the intermingling of a number of sources’ (2005: 2) Arguing to position horror films as texts that evoke historical trauma through such shocking collision, Lowenstein claims that ‘horrific images, sounds, and narrative combine with visceral spectator effect (terror, disgust, sympathy, sadness) to embody issues that characterise . . . historical trauma’ (Lowenstein 2005: 2). This is evident in the Spanish found footage zombie film [REC] and its American remake Quarantine (2008), which self-consciously refer in their narrative and form to the iconic imagery associated with 9/11 via the footage shot by French filmmakers Gédéon and Jules Naudet for the film that would become 9/11 (2002). By shadowing a rookie firefighter in the months that led up to 11 September for a documentary about the fire service, the Naudets were on hand when the attacks happened and were able to capture some of the earliest footage of these events, including the first plane hitting the North Tower, the experience of the North Tower falling from within the lobby of the South Tower, as well as the chaos on the streets in the surrounding area. Shot in the found footage format, both [REC] and Quarantine also begin with a television crew shadowing a group of firefighters on the night shift as they follow their normal routine. Like the Naudet brothers who were keen to capture their rookie on his first call out for a fire, both horror films also reflect this ominous desire on the part of the crew for something to happen for them to film. [REC] and Quarantine both capture the sense of foreboding that permeates 9/11 as the rookie and the documentary crew anticipate and prepare for this first fire. In both horror films, when a call comes in, the crew go with the firefighters on what seems to be a standard domestic disturbance in an urban apartment block. The films are defined by the found footage aesthetic which includes shaky, hand-held camera; direct to camera address on the part of the reporter and the firefighters; the dialogue between the unseen camera operator and the other characters. This choice of aesthetic, in tandem with the quotidian qualities of much of the initial footage of the films, directly alludes to Naudet’s film in which, in an attempt to chronicle

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the  r e s urge nc e o f t he zo m b i e 73 the routine, the filmmakers captured the extraordinary and the horrific. Furthermore, the participatory aesthetic of the found footage film, in which the spectator is positioned within the space of the narrative via the subjective camera, evokes a visceral memory of the 9/11 footage and the trauma of these events. To further enhance this visceral experience, these horror films reinsert into the narrative a factor that had been removed from the 9/11 story and its representation (even the Neudets’ film), namely, according to Laura Frost, ‘human, bodily devastation’(2012: 34). For instance, Jules Naudet explains that upon arriving in the lobby of the North Tower, he was ­immediately confronted with the sight of two people on fire, ‘burning’. In the film, however, as he enters the building the footage slows down and stays focused on the firemen rather than follow the direction of the screams coming from screen right, as he explains, ‘I just didn’t want to film them. It was like no one – no one should see this’. Similarly, as is noted in Henry Singer’s documentary The Falling Man (2006), and then subsequently by Frost (2012), media coverage very quickly responded to the events of 9/11 by removing references or evidence of those victims who jumped from the World Trade Tower to their deaths, and this evasion fed into many of the dramas like World Trade Center (2006), and ­documentaries  like 9/11. In these films, according to Frost, horror was replaced by narratives of heroism and survival. It is of note that all of the firefighters from Engine 7/Ladder 1/Battalion 1 Firehouse, who were the subject of 9/11, survived. While the film acknowledges that hundreds of firefighters died, the story focuses upon the experience and emotional price of survival. The fusion of the documentary aesthetic of 9/11 and the zombie genre in both [REC] and Quarantine, however, reinserts body horror to the centre of this narrative. This occurs most notably when the body of one of the firefighters suddenly falls screaming from the third floor straight down into the lobby, splattering against the floor as the reverberations of his body hitting the ground echo through the building. The Spanish film in particular emphasises the blood splattered across the floor while the American film emphasises, through sound, the impact of the body hitting the ground. Either way there is an intense physicality to this moment that seems to offer a shocking collision and intensely visceral spectator effect that Lowenstein argues defines the allegorical moment. In so doing, this sequence seems to reinsert what was withheld from so much of the representation of 9/11 in the news and media, including Naudet’s film: the corporeal horror of these events. Frost notes that even Naudet’s film, which does include the sound of bodies falling, ‘was later edited to decrease its

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impact and imply that there were fewer “jumpers” than there actually were’ (Frost 2012: 22). In contrast, the zombie film, through its channelling of the fantastic as allegory, ‘play[s] the role of provocateure’, standing as ‘the genre that will go where no genre has gone before, however taboo’ (Frost 2012: 16). The death of this firefighter, and the subsequent death and infection of everyone in the film including the television journalists, confront the audience with the trauma of these events rather than negate trauma through stories of survival. This conception of the horror film, and the zombie film in particular, as offering a space in which to negotiate the experience of historical trauma, as argued by Lowenstein, builds upon a legacy of criticism of the American horror genre of the 1970s (arguably from Night of the Living Dead to Dawn of the Dead), that positions the genre as expressing a cumulative form of anxiety as a result of extreme social change and cultural trauma taking place in the US, as well as globally, at this time. According to Robin Wood, the horror genre ‘becomes in the 70s the most important of all American genres and perhaps the most progressive, even in its overt nihilism – in a period of extreme cultural crisis and disintegration, which alone offers the possibility of radical change and rebuilding’ (Wood 1986: 84). The filmmakers from this period, George Romero, Wes Craven, David Cronenberg, John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper, have subsequently acknowledged the degree to which their work was responding to this cultural crisis by, according to Romero, ‘shuffling it all together in one big nightmare’ (cited in Simon 2000). While the arguments for the zombie film being a response to 9/11 are compelling, I am somewhat cautious about considering its prevalence within the twenty-first century as simply, or largely, a repeated allegory for the trauma of 9/11. In many ways, like the horror genre of the 1970s, these films are a product of numerous influences all shuffled ‘together in one big nightmare’. Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later is an exemplar of a film that seems to speak intuitively about 9/11 and yet is the product of a wide range of cultural inspirations. To begin, 28 Days Later actually went into production before 9/11. While 9/11 undoubtedly influenced how audiences read and responded to the film, particularly at the time of its release, the film was conceived to evoke a range of other intertextual references, national traumas and historical moments. For instance, Boyle acknowledges that screenwriter Alex Garland was influenced by Romero and the long tradition of the zombie film (Boyle and Garland 2007). The post-title sequence of the film, in which bicycle-courier Jim wakes up from a coma to an empty and silent London, seems, however, to be a direct allusion to the British cold-war narrative The Day of the Triffids by John Whyndam. In  Whyndam’s novel, and the subsequent film adaptation, a man who

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the  r e s urge nc e o f t he zo m b i e 75 has  suffered damage to his eyes, and is thus bandaged, wakes up the morning after a meteor shower to find that all who looked at the shower were rendered blind. He then walks through an empty and dishevelled hospital and out onto the streets of a post-apocalyptic London filled with blind inhabitants, wandering the streets aimlessly. 28 Days Later’s realist aesthetic and use of recognisable locations for Jim’s lengthy walk through the city also seem to refer to another British apocalyptic narrative, The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961). In this film, simultaneous American and Soviet nuclear testing has disrupted the rotation of the earth, causing a series of natural disasters which sets the earth on the path to apocalypse. Like 28 Days Later, this film begins with the protagonist walking through an abandoned London shot on recognisable locations. As a result, 28 Days Later is as embedded within established traditions of British postapocalyptic narratives as it heralds a new future for twenty-first century post-apocalyptic cinema. Furthermore, Boyle explains that the imagery within the film was influenced by images and stories associated with a wide range of twentiethcentury atrocities, wars and acts of terror (Boyle and Garland 2007). For instance, the violent news footage that opens the film is based on the material shot by Sorious Samura for his documentary Cry Freetown (2000), which featured brutal imagery of the civil war in Sierra Leone. The image of the memorial wall of messages for the missing, which today calls to mind similar walls surrounding the World Trade Center following 9/11, was actually shot before 9/11 and was based on an earthquake in China where survivors constructed a similar wall in an attempt to track down their loved ones. The image of the bodies stacked up in a large pile in a Limehouse church where Jim first comes into contact with the infected was inspired, according to Boyle, by stories of Rwanda in which bodies of those murdered during the massacres were deposited in churches, while the scene where survivors Selena, Mark and Jim hide from a bomb blast behind a wall, as the windows blow out around them, was based on a photograph of survivors of a bomb in Northern Ireland. This film reflects back upon twentieth-century violence while being produced in a historical moment that would shape the film’s reception as well as future depictions of apocalypse, conforming to James Berger’s argument that apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic writing is in fact looking backward, while narratively projecting forward. As he explains: ‘apocalyptic writing stands in the midst of crisis and between two catastrophes: one historical (remembered and suffered), and one imagined (desired and feared)’ (Berger 1999: 35). Furthermore, Boyle’s DVD commentary repeatedly reflects upon the timing of the film’s production in relation to 9/11, acknowledging

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practical aspects of the production that they would not be able to do in a post-9/11 world, most notably overturning a bus on Whitehall just outside Downing Street.9 He even points out which scenes were shot on September 11 as the ‘world was turned upside down’. In a later interview, Boyle acknowledges that the film’s release ‘coincided with ratcheting up of world tension and world paranoia . . . about our safety and our vulnerability’, which contributed to the film’s success. The film, he argues ‘met that mood’ (cited in Kane 2010: 180). As Boyle suggests, 9/11, as well as the retaliatory wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and subsequent al-Qaeda terrorist attacks (including the anthrax attacks in the US (2001), and the co-ordinated bombings in Madrid (2004) and in 2005 in London), contributed to a cultural climate that seemed to be underpinned by the notion of an impending apocalypse and one that was particularly defined by the perceived negative implications of globalisation, whether in the form of terrorism, war, natural disaster, viral outbreak, or social dissolution/revolution. This culture of apocalypse has continued to be reinforced by world events such as the global economic crisis (2008), the Arab spring (2010), London riots (2011), Ferguson unrest (2014), the SARS (2003) and H1N1 pandemic scares (2009), and the Ebola outbreak (2014–15) that repeatedly position society as hovering on the brink of collapse, fostered by a media culture (including professional and social media) that is intent upon capturing the moment of collapse. The events of 9/11 and their depiction on screen, therefore, have become a prism through which we understand the language of twentyfirst-century apocalypse even when the films are exploring or tapping into other apocalyptic discourses. As James Berger argues, ‘apocalyptic writings respond to social crisis (or, more accurately), to perceived crisis’ (Berger 1999: 34). This ‘perceived crisis’ is galvanised in the zombie film by credence being given to the twenty-first century media representation of violence as a defining aesthetic characteristic of the apocalypse. These films make the zombie apocalypse all the more believable by immersing the  audience within an aesthetically recognisable media landscape that looks like events we have already seen unfold. The medical gaze of the vampire film, which is present to a degree within the zombie film, seems, however, to be increasingly transformed into a mediated gaze in which the apocalypse is presented through the aesthetic language of contemporary news. There is evidence of this aesthetic in 28 Days Later, which begins in extreme close-up on a monitor showing a montage of news footage of civil war, revolution and violence. The camera slowly pulls out and pans around to reveal a chimpanzee in a laboratory, strapped to a table, with

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the  r e s urge nc e o f t he zo m b i e 77 electrodes connected to his head. He is being forced to watch this imagery on multiple television screens, the first step, it is eventually revealed, in a scientific experiment to render the human rage depicted on screen into a virus that can be passed from chimpanzee to human. Danny Boyle explains that this opening both served to provide exposition for the origins of the rage virus that is the subject of the film but also to prepare the audience for the different aesthetic quality of the digital video footage, with which they shot the film (Boyle and Garland 2007). While on the one hand this serves to ease the audience into a new technological aesthetic, on the other it also presents the zombie narrative as seemingly ‘real’ by making the film look more like news footage. Romero makes the same argument about the decision to shoot Night of the Living Dead in black and white. While largely an economic decision as the film stock was cheaper, Romero acknowledges that in the 1960s the news was in black and white and so the use of b/w stock connotes realism (cited in Simon 2000). Similarly the chimpanzee’s attack on the activists in 28 Days Later, which begins the spread of the virus, is shot in a style that suggests realism through a chaotic series of extreme close-ups, filmed with a hand-held camera. These images have shallow focus and are shot in low lighting which enhances the grain. They  also feature blurred motion, strobe lighting and indistinguishable and overlapping sounds and screams, all of which viscerally immerses the audience in the action. While not diegetically explained as found footage, this aesthetic prefigures the look that would become identifiable with found footage horror in films such as Diary of the Dead (2007) and [REC]. Alex Garland admits that his original vision for the sequence was ‘pure genre’, implying a more traditional approach to horror from which the rest  of the film would break away. He acknowledges, however, that the strength of the sequence is achieved by the manner in which Boyle pulled away from genre from the start (Boyle and Garland 2007). The association of the zombie film with news footage is repeated in the title sequences for both Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead (created by Kyle Cooper) and World War Z. The Dawn of the Dead opening builds upon the relationship between human violence and the zombie outbreak by intercutting extreme close-ups of blood cells and zombie attacks with footage from a government press conference about the virus, followed by a montage of images of attacks, violence, riots and death, all to the strains of the apocalyptically themed Johnny Cash song ‘The Man Comes Around’. Here again we see the fusion of the medical and mediated gaze. Similarly, World War Z opens with a montage of seemingly, innocuous but increasingly apocalyptic imagery. First it highlights normality but with an emphasis on the overcrowded nature of modern cities and the

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interconnectedness of the globe via images of modern air travel. A sonic montage of overlapping news reports and audio commentaries introduces apocalyptic themes through mention of viral transmission, natural disaster, environmental concerns, fears of global warming alongside denials of climate change, references to the world health organisation, evacuation guidelines, travel restrictions and an ambiguous reference to a ‘doomsday hoax’. These themes are visualised through images of traffic jams, crowded streets, crowds of people staring at mobile phones, animal attacks, swarms of insects feeding off their prey, people in protective masks and hazmat suits. The driving music that accompanies the imagery, coupled with the sequence’s increasingly fast editing, suggest that the human race is on an unavoidable path towards ‘World War Z’. Of course the synergy between the zombie film and news footage is here limited to the paratext of the title sequence, establishing critical frames through which to consider the narrative as it unfolds. In found footage horror films such as [REC], Quarantine and George Romero’s Diary of the Dead, however, this synergy underpins the entire narrative as it unfolds. There are different strategies of found footage horror films that impact upon the meaning that is created. As discussed above, [REC] and Quarantine represent the first person point-of-view style of found footage horror, in which the entire film is presented from the single point of view of a camera person filming events as they unfold, or more specifically from the point of view of the camera, as the camera is often left running without the camera person present. These films evoke a visceral experience of the zombie outbreak, capturing events as they unfold. Furthermore, while both films start as the filming of an episode of a reality TV series following firemen on the night shift, they become a record of events as they transpire to show people ‘the truth of what happened’. George Romero’s Diary of the Dead, however, represents a different strand of found footage horror, namely the faux documentary.10 In this case, the film is presented as a documentary called The Death of Death constructed around the footage shot by Pittsburgh student filmmaker Jason Creed and his friends on three hand-held digital cameras during the first three days of the zombie apocalypse, as they try to escape the city to find family and loved ones. Intercut with this footage is a collection of news reports, recordings from surveillance and security cameras, blogs and footage uploaded via social media. Both formats of found footage horror film call attention to the means of production through the direct address to the camera but the faux documentary does not suggest purely the recording of events as they unfold. Instead it highlights a conscious construction of meaning by the fictional filmmakers through the juxtaposition of imagery, overlaying of music for

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the  r e s urge nc e o f t he zo m b i e 79 effect, and the addition of critical commentary through the use of a voiceover soundtrack. Furthermore, the film highlights the production process as the students repeatedly film each other filming and editing the footage before uploading their work-in-progress online. A key theme of each of these films is the capturing and communication of the ‘truth’ through the media. The journalists in [REC] and Quarantine demand that they keep the cameras recording in order to capture the ‘truth’ in the face of a seeming conspiracy by authorities to contain and detain the apartment complex and its inhabitants. But neither film provides any indication as to whether anyone has seen it or if the camera was simply left behind in the apartment when the journalist is attacked in the final seconds of both films.11 The nature of what we are looking at and how we are looking at it, is never explained. In Diary of the Dead, Jason and his friends seek to capture and share the truth online by filming ­everything on the ground, editing it together into a narrative chronicling the apocalypse and then uploading the material online at different points in the film. They are focused on getting the message ‘out there’ and challenging what they perceive as the inaccurate or ‘contrived’ representation of events produced by official media. In so doing Jason is keen to reveal, through his film, moments where official broadcasters either don’t know the truth or conspire to conceal the truth. For instance, the film begins with B-roll news footage that was never broadcast but was made available online by the cameraman who, like Jason, wants to get the truth out there. The footage is of one of the first zombie attacks as a local news crew prepare to report on a domestic shooting but inadvertently film the wife, and then the husband, rising from the dead and attacking the paramedics and one of the journalists. Later it is revealed that this footage was edited for broadcast, denying that the dead had risen, and instead explaining the events as the result of the authorities misidentifying the victims – clearly positioned within the report as ‘illegal immigrants’ – as dead and then shooting them. The report includes a statement from a police chief, played by Romero, explaining ‘The only time they was dead was when a white guy shot em’. This re-presents the zombie attacks within familiar discourses around immigration, racism and police violence, in order to pacify the audience with all-too familiar horrors. As the voice-over commentary explains, ‘the media were lying to us or the government was lying to them. They were trying to make it seem like everything was going to be all right’. While Jason’s film questions official media and their representation of the ‘truth’, promoting the role of citizen journalism as a means to get the truth out there, Romero’s overarching film seems ambivalent about all forms of media, particularly as expressed through the film’s voice-over, delivered

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by Debra, the director’s girlfriend. There is after all no evidence within the film that Jason’s footage helps anyone and his obsession with filming is repeatedly called into question, presented as an empty compulsion to film/upload/share as strong as the zombie’s compulsion to feed. As Debra explains – in a voice-over presumably recorded after the majority of her friends are dead and she sits in a panic room hiding from the undead, completing Jason’s film – ‘mainstream media had vanished. It was just us – bloggers, hackers, kids. The more voices there are the more spin there is. The truth becomes that much harder to find. In the end it all just becomes noise.’ In this manner, Romero is focused on the global spread not just of the zombie contagion but empty/meaningless media imagery via the increasingly prevalent presence of ‘user-generated content’. This is a theme that is shared in the Canadian zombie film Pontypool, a film that could not seem more diametrically opposed to global concerns, focused as it is on a peculiar zombie outbreak in the small town of Pontypool, Ontario (population 2,100) and told from the point of view of a local talk-radio DJ, Grant Mazzy, his producer and technician. Once Mazzy arrives at work, the film never leaves the radio station but instead follows the spread of the outbreak through a series of calls into the station and a few small attacks on the station itself. Yet the film is completely embedded within a culture of global media communication as Grant’s producer, Sydney, and technician, Laurel-Ann, work the phones, the wire, follow the news online and via other media in an attempt to ascertain the facts underpinning the reports they are receiving. The nature of the zombie apocalypse, however, undermines this endeavour as this is an outbreak that corrupts communication as the contagion is spread via spoken language. In this film, the infected begin to speak in gibberish, trapped in repetition, and words become meaningless. The very attempt to communicate leads to infection as the gibberish is spread from person to person and  the inability to communicate leads to violence. The film’s director Bruce McDonald explains how the virus impacts upon the infected: There are three stages to this virus. The first stage is you might begin to repeat a word. Something gets stuck. And usually it’s words that are terms of endearment like sweetheart or honey. The second stage is your language becomes scrambled and you can’t express yourself properly. The third stage you become so distraught at your condition that the only way out of the situation you feel, as an infected person, is to try and chew your way through the mouth of another person. (cited in Turek 2008)

As such, the potentially global reach of the infection, centred as it is on ­ language, is paramount to the narrative despite its local nature.

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the  r e s urge nc e o f t he zo m b i e 81 Furthermore, the film’s evocation of the contagion of nonsensical communication connects with Romero’s commentary on how the increasing plethora of voices available through the viral spread of user-generated content online transforms communication from truth to noise.

The Zombie goes Viral To say that the zombie has gone viral is to explore a number of significant  discourses at play within the contemporary zombie film. First, it  highlights the manner in which the production of zombie films has grown exponentially since the initial renaissance outlined at the beginning of this chapter. Countless zombie films are produced every year and spread the globe, while the genre has also seeped beyond horror into other genres such as children’s films (ParaNorman), comedies (Cockneys vs Zombies/2012), musicals (Z: A Zombie Musical/2007), queer cinema (Otto: or Up With Dead People/2008), art-cinema (Ur: The End of Civilization in 90 Tableaux) and student films (Verdens Ende/2014). The popularity of the genre is indeed contagious. Second, the zombie genre, like the vampire films discussed in Chapter 2, has made the relationship between virology and the undead, a factor implicit within the contagion framework of all zombie films, far more overt. Significantly, it presents a contagious zombie virus as a potential ‘extinction level event’, bringing about a seeming end of days. In this manner, science in the zombie film has become a catalyst to apocalypse, in keeping with developments within the genre across other media. For instance in Max Brooks’ novel The Zombie Survival Guide, he attributes the rising of the dead as zombies to a virus called ‘solanum’ that ‘travel[s] through the bloodstream, from the initial point of entry to the brain’, first causing the heart and other bodily functions to stop, and the cells of the virus then mutate into a new organ that causes the body to reanimate (Brooks 2011: 2). Brooks based his conception of the zombie as virus on the AIDS virus, the spread of which he describes as ‘the greatest failure of the human race’, because it could have been contained but was allowed to spiral out of control because people refused to accept or believe in the threat (Brooks 2015). This complacency is partially the result of the fact that by the 1970s modern medicine seemed to have reduced the threat of infectious disease, as Priscilla Wald explains: ‘[t]he miracle of antibiotics and other medical victories (such as the eradication of naturally occurring smallpox in 1977) seemed to have made infectious disease a relatively minor inconvenience in the global North’ (Wald 2008: 29–30). By the mid-1980s, however, HIV/AIDS put the threat of such diseases and viral

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outbreaks back onto the international agenda and in 1989 an international conference was held in which virologists, epidemiologists and other infectious disease specialists began to ‘address the outbreak of numerous newly identified or resurfacing communicable diseases’ (Wald 2008: 30). It is of note that this resurgence of virology as a global concern re-emerges just as the zombie genre was scaling down into parody. It is, therefore, not surprising that by the time the zombie resurfaces as a global phenomenon that creators, like Brooks, reflect this new concern within their conception.  For instance subsequent zombie survival guides, like the Haynes’ Zombie Survival: Owners’ Apocalypse Manual, as well as immersive theatre productions such as Generation of Z¸ survival games such as 2.8 Hours Later, and Fitness app Zombies Run! continue to attribute the zombie to a virus that infects and reanimates the dead. Along similar lines, indie-horror film Mulberry Street (2006) features an overt outbreak of a virus communicated via rat (thus evoking plague) that transforms the infected into rat-like monsters. While Mulberry Street tracks the rate of spread of an outbreak within one community, serving as a microcosm for society at large, Mutants (2008) traces the spread of a disease in the body by telling the story of Sonya and Marco on the run from an outbreak that transforms individuals into zombie-like monsters in the mountain region of France. Marco becomes infected and the couple hide out in an abandoned building as Sonya tends to Marco as his body and personality slowly transform from the inside out, turning him into a violent and bloodthirsty creature. In the Japanese film Stacy (2001), a virus emerges that infects girls between the ages of 14 and 16 which manifests initially as a period of what they refer to as ‘Near Death Happiness’ before they die and revive as flesh-eating zombies, called Stacies. While Shaun of the Dead is about the zombification of modern society in the form of the ‘slacker’ generation, there is evidence of a growing plague in London even before main character Shaun recognises that the dead have risen. For instance, when Shaun goes to the local shop in the morning, he passes a street cleaner listening to a radio broadcast about a space probe and unusual radiation (dialogue taken directly from Night of the Living Dead) and in the store, the film cuts to a close-up of newspaper headlines which include: ‘New super-flu scares public’; ‘Havoc’; ‘Mutilated Remains’, ‘GM Crops to Blame’ – headlines that call to mind the use of such media in Last Man on Earth and numerous subsequent outbreak films as discussed in Chapter 2. On the bus to work, Shaun witnesses someone collapse in the street, while other passengers display flu symptoms. At work he is forced to take on managerial responsibilities because his colleagues have called in sick.

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the  r e s urge nc e o f t he zo m b i e 83 Both Resident Evil and 28 Days Later explore the genetically engineered virus linking this renewed focus on virology with Matheson’s I Am Legend, in which the virus is presumed to be the, albeit unintentional, result of germ warfare. In this manner, this sub-genre of the zombie film has more in common with Romero’s The Crazies (1973) or David Cronenberg’s Rabid (1977) than with Night of the Living Dead. Both films overtly explore the horror of contagion as communities of people are infected with scientifically produced viruses that incite violent behaviour (murder in The Crazies and the brutal drinking of human blood in Rabid). Both films use imagery of medical and military personnel in hazmat suits and street level military presence as martial law is put into place in an attempt to contain the spread of the virus. This imagery is pervasive across twentyfirst century cinema, including Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011), the remake of The Crazies (2010), [REC], Infection (2004), and The Thaw (2009) (see Fig. 3.3). In both Rabid and The Crazies, the attempts to contain the virus prove futile but the films remain localised. They do not follow the spread of the virus beyond the borders of the initial outbreak, although The Crazies does end with the clear implication that the virus has spread. The twenty-first century zombie film, such as 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Resident Evil, Mutants, Solos and World War Z, brings together many of the conventions of the zombie narrative with these viral and scientific paranoia films but explodes the narrative nationally and globally. Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later even more overtly engages with the notion of a viral threat by re-conceiving the zombies not as the dead risen but

Figure 3.3  Mise-en-scène of viral paranoia in [REC]

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as infected. While Boyle acknowledges the debt to Romero’s zombies, he emphasises that his ‘creatures’ are infected by a ‘psychological virus’ (Boyle and Garland 2007). This leads to questions about the place of 28 Days Later within the zombie canon, as a result of three basic facts about Doyle’s infected. First, the infected are not dead. They do not die and rise again like the zombies in Resident Evil but rather are infected with a virus through the exchange of blood and/or saliva. The result of the infection which spreads within seconds is that the infected are driven into a rage that overwhelms rational thought and propels them towards uncontrollable violence. Second, as they are not dead they can be killed and, despite their enhanced strength and speed, they can be killed by any normal human means: guns, machetes, grenades and even starvation. The third and probably most significant reason that they are not considered zombies by many genre fans is that they move very fast in contrast to Romero’s shambling walking corpses. In the documentary Doc of the Dead (2014), special make-up-effects artist and executive producer of The Walking Dead, Greg Nicotero facetiously sums up this disdain with the succinct: ‘fuck fast zombies’. Nicotero is a colleague and acolyte of Romero, growing up in Pittsburgh, appearing as a young actor in Day of the Dead and eventually heading up the special make-up effects of Romero’s Land of the Dead. George Romero has, of course, consistently resisted the allure of fast zombies and argues that because zombies, in his films, are dead, they can’t move fast and that their decomposing ‘ankles would snap’ under the strain. It is more than just the internal logic of his conception of the zombie but also a generic preference, arguing that slow and relentless zombies, like other horror monsters such as Hammer’s The Mummy (1959), and Michael Myers in Halloween (1978), [I would add the entity in It Follows/2014], are scarier because they embody an ‘inexorable thing coming at you and you can’t figure out how to stop it’ (cited in Oler 2008). Simon Pegg, equally a Romero fan, has similarly articulated his dislike for fast zombies in an article for the UK newspaper The Guardian in which he clearly declared: ‘ZOMBIES DON’T RUN’, explaining that fast zombies undermine the metaphorical significance of the slow zombie, which is that they embody our ‘deepest fear: death’ while ‘speed simplifies the zombie, clarifying the threat and reducing any response to an emotional reflex’. Furthermore, their slowness, he argues, highlights their ineptitude presenting them as a monster that can be avoided and yet which generally still, in their persistent way, wears humanity down through their neverending drive (Pegg 2008). I would further argue that the slow-moving undead zombie highlights in graphic terms both the inevitability of death but also the futility of fighting a war against an enemy that can only grow

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the  r e s urge nc e o f t he zo m b i e 85 in number, a trope that is clearly evoked in Max Brooks’ novel World War Z. Death, whether of the individual or society, is inevitable and the zombie apocalypse film confronts us with this inevitability. While these distinctions between the undead and the infected were notable at the time of 28 Days’ release, the genre has subsequently evolved to accept a more fluid definition of the zombie, with films repeatedly oscillating between undead and infected zombies, slow- and fast-moving. While the infected in 28 Days Later may not be dead, they still possess many of the crucial characteristics of the zombie that have come to play a vital role within the genre’s development. Most significantly, they are largely devoid of individual identity and purpose but are driven by a physical need that propels them forward and drives their actions. They do not think but simply act and are fuelled by the need to enact violence against the uninfected. This need serves two purposes. It is an expression of the rage with which they are believed to be infected: a physical manifestation of the emotion. It also serves to spread the virus, feeding the need of the virus to reproduce. In this manner the infected and their rage serve as vectors facilitating the spread of the virus. As such they also possess another key characteristic of the zombie which is the need to feed off the living. They attack and bite into the bodies of uninfected, ripping through skin, sinew and muscle, and seemingly feed off their blood. While they do not necessarily eat the flesh like most zombies, they do engage in an almost vampiric exchange of bodily fluids that serves to spread the virus. More importantly, they are driven by the compulsion to tear into flesh as relentless as the need for Romero’s zombies to eat flesh. This also facilitates another core characteristic of the genre, which is the display of the body in ‘profuse disarray’ (Boss 1986: 14) as the film is replete with images of bloodied and mangled infected bodies and corpses. Finally, the fast spread of infection leads to a key characteristic of the zombie genre, which is that the power of the zombie lies in their numbers. In the tradition of Matheson’s vampire, the speedy and efficient spread of the virus means that the infected are unstoppable because they are many. Much like Resident Evil, and in contrast to Romero’s zombie films, 28  Days Later clearly positions the infection as human made, first as the virus that is released is the result of genetic engineering. Secondly, the virus that is transmitted is the biological manifestation of a very real human emotion, namely a form of rage that often manifests as ‘road rage’/ ‘air rage’/domestic violence and other forms of violent and physically aggressive human behaviour. In this manner, the film overtly taps into established science fiction tropes, such as science being out of control in its pursuit of knowledge which risks bringing about the end of days (for

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example, splitting the atom led to the atomic bomb). The film also raises questions about the nature of humanity as the virus that destroys humanity is a product of human nature, generated as it is within a chimpanzee forced to watch news footage of human violence. While the image of the ape strapped to a stretcher watching television screens calls to mind the psychological conditioning of Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange (1971), a technician overseeing the experiments implies that the emotional rage has in fact been rendered viral and is communicable by blood and saliva – a factor reaffirmed when one of the apes is released and attacks one of the activists. The speed with which the virus operates is a significant factor which brings us to yet another discourse that underpins the viral spread of the zombie: the rate of infection of the individual and the planet. While it is right to say that no virus can enter into someone’s blood stream, replicate, spread and thus manifest symptoms within 10–15 seconds, within the narrative this speed is central to the horror being evoked. 28 Days Later calls attention through exaggeration to the speed with which certain viruses can spread epidemiologically through society, potentially spreading out of control before they are even noticed. Here the almost instantaneous spread of the virus in the body and subsequent transformation of the host operates as a metaphor for the apocalyptic potential within modern society. This is the underlying theme of Steven Soderbergh’s non-zombie film Contagion, although, because it is presented in realistic terms, there is a limit to how far the film can go in its depiction of societal collapse. By eschewing reality in favour of effect, the zombie genre in the form of 28 Days Later and many subsequent films, focuses not on the process by which society would be deconstructed as is very effectively conveyed in Contagion – albeit with a focus also on how the skills of scientists can rescue humanity from the brink. Instead 28 Days Later conveys the horror of the fragility of the human body and society and it does so in structurally simplistic terms. The opening sequence establishes the speed and violence of the virus in a manic few minutes of horror as the chimpanzee attacks one of the activists, who becomes infected before the others have fully responded to the events by killing the chimp. As they turn to help, she spits blood onto another activist who similarly turns within seconds and by this point, it is already too late to stop the spread. Shot in hand-held, close-up, the sequence is manic and overwhelming, ending with a cut to a black screen and the caption ‘28 days later’. Boyle, and screenwriter Garland, deliberately contrast the frenzy of the opening sequence with the silence of the title card followed by the slowness of the subsequent scene in which Jim wakes up in a silent abandoned hospital and explores a now

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the  r e s urge nc e o f t he zo m b i e 87 empty London, revealing the debris of chaos and violence. The contrast between frenzy and stillness, claustrophobic close-ups of violence and a series of long shots of recognisable locations within London, now empty of people, cars, and any form of movement or noise, clearly convey the transition into a post-apocalyptic world. Society has fallen and Jim is alone within the debris. The speed of the virus and the elliptical structure of the opening scene emphasise the horror at the realisation of the precariousness of modern society, able to collapse so quickly. This is later emotively conveyed by survivor Selena as she explains the viral origins of the outbreak to Jim: It started as rioting. And right from the beginning you knew this was different. Cause it was happening in small villages, market towns. Then it wasn’t on the TV anymore – it was in the streets outside. It was coming through your windows. It was a virus – infection. You didn’t need a doctor to tell you that. It was the blood – or something in the blood. By the time they tried to evacuate the city it was already too late. The infection was everywhere. The army blockades were overrun. That is when the exodus started. The day before the TV and radio stopped broadcasting, there were reports of infection in Paris and New York. You didn’t hear anything more after that.

This violent transformation of society so eloquently expressed by Selena is the subject of the sequel 28 Weeks Later which chronicles the resurfacing of the virus after the authorities believe that it has died out. When a carrier is found and unintentionally spreads the virus to her husband through her tears at their reunion, the virus spreads rapidly across the communities in London which have been gradually repopulated under the supervision of the military. Once the newly infected person enters the compound into which the living have been placed for their protection, the virus spreads violently like a hurricane until the military can no longer distinguish between those infected by rage and those running for their lives. While the spread of the virus takes place across Great Britain in 28 days, according to the first film, the sequel has the virus running rampant overnight so that all of the recently reinhabited London is infected once again. The truly horrific climax of the film is, however, the rescue of a child who is a carrier of the disease. As the helicopter flies over the white cliffs of Dover towards France, the film cuts from a close-up of the boy to a black screen where the title card ‘28 Days Later’ appears. The film then cuts to a shot from within the abandoned helicopter as a French voice is heard over the radio calling for help, followed by hand-held footage taken from within the crowd of infected as they run through the tunnels of the Paris Metro and out onto the square beneath the Eiffel Tower. The boy was brought to apparent safety in Paris, only to release the virus globally.

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So while the speed with which the rage virus is able to spread is clearly a biological fiction – described as ‘Hollywood BS’ by a microbiology student discussing the film on Scienceforum.net (Fanghur 2011), it serves as an emotionally effective metaphor for the local and global pandemic or more broadly the zombie has come to embody the possibility of societal collapse. This is particularly evident in World War Z, in which the speed of the viral spread is galvanised to convey not just the potential for global pandemic but an extinction-level event, a potential outcome that is implicit within 28 Days/Weeks Later but which is explored quite explicitly here. In so doing the film draws upon imagery associated with a wide range of disasters and apocalyptic discourses. Like Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, the film begins with a glimpse of normality as embodied in the character of Gerry Lane and his wife Karin and two daughters, Rachel and Constance. Gerry is a former UN investigator who has given up this life in favour of staying at home to bring up his children. The normality of Gerry’s family life is conveyed at first by the image of Gerry and his wife in bed as his children leap into the room to wake them up, followed by a normal family breakfast. Later this normality, as they sit in their car in a traffic jam, playing a guessing game, is disrupted as helicopters begin to fly overhead, motorcycle police officers speed past and eventually explosions are seen in the distance. Then with one fell swoop a large truck comes crashing into the road beside them smashing through all of the cars, leaving rubble in its wake. As chaos builds and people take to the streets, running from their cars, the smoke and the explosions, individual infected are glimpsed from within the crowd. Presented through the combination of hand-held close-up cinematography, in which it is difficult to distinguish between the infected and the hysterical, and overhead helicopter shots of the city streets, the sequence provides both a visceral experience of the eruption of violence on the ground and the overview of the speed with which the chaos is spreading. The screams of the victims and the screeches of the infected intermingle to create a cacophony of terror. Within minutes, as Gerry and his family escape onto the highway, the sequence returns to the helicopter shots, retreating from the city which is receding into the distance, engulfed in smoke. The implication is that the city has already fallen. Like 28 Days Later, the zombies are presented as the infected, victims of a virus that spreads and overwhelms the host within ten seconds of the bite. The speed of the virus is again used to emphasise the hopelessness of the situation, which is reinforced by the film’s signature imagery, of hordes of live action and sometimes computer-generated zombies running in unison, like a tsunami barrelling through cities, leaving

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the  r e s urge nc e o f t he zo m b i e 89 devastation in their wake. Interspersed throughout the film are images of crowds, rioting, looting, bodies falling from above and characters, usually Gerry, flying away as cities fall. When Gerry and his family arrive after the initial outbreak, seemingly to safety on board a military ship, he is taken to a cavernous command centre with a giant digital map of the United States, marking the rate of the spread of the virus across the US. The rest of the room is filled with people working at stations surrounded by computer monitors showing footage of viral outbreaks and societal collapse across the globe. This sequence draws upon familiar imagery of the map tracking the path of a pandemic, rife both within real world media, used to display the spread of SARS, H1N1 and Ebola, and within apocalyptic cinema such as the conclusion of Rise of the Planet of the Apes in which a virus that will bring humanity to the verge of extinction is tracked via a map of multiplying flight paths as the virus spreads globally. This command centre also calls to mind the use of similar maps within anti-nuclear war films to illustrate the retaliatory paths of nuclear bombs should a first strike take place, such as Wargames (1983). This film exploits the speed of the zombie as well as the infection rate to highlight the degree to which we live on a precipice of extinction. World War Z ends on a somewhat hopeful note with Gerry discovering a means of camouflaging humanity so that it can fight back against the zombie hordes, albeit by infecting humanity with treatable but deadly diseases that render the living invisible to the infected zombies. The potentially hopeful conclusion of humanity fighting back stands in contrast to most zombie texts that have generally celebrated the open ending as a means of suggesting a revolution in which humanity is on the verge of being replaced by a new zombie society. This is in keeping with the conclusion to Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend in which the last remaining human must die and retreat into legend, and the nihilism of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, in which the hero Ben is shot by a monster worse than zombies: humanity. While Neville’s death in Matheson’s novel can, potentially, be read as sad, it is also necessary: the destruction that is an inherent part of creation, in this case the creation of a new society to replace the old. In contrast, Ben’s death is senseless, mistaken for a zombie by the militia who were supposed to save him and then burned with the bodies of the zombies. The militia are not presented as heroes saving the day but rather, in John Landis’ words, ‘yahoo NRA guys shooting zombies’ (cited in Simon 2000). The cold series of still photos of the militia picking Ben’s body off the ground with hooks and depositing him onto the fire, suggests a lack of humanity and serves as an indication that humanity should be replaced. Romero argues that ‘[t]he only reason

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to do horror or fantasy stuff is to upset the apple cart . . . It seems to be the convention that, in the end, order is restored. Well, I don’t want order restored!’ (cited in Roddick 2005). In twenty-first century cinema, Romero’s open ending, in which order is not restored, is a consistent characteristic of the zombie film, which generally features similar endings. For instance, in Dawn of the Dead, the end credits are intercut with found footage of the survivors, having found a camcorder on board the boat they used to escape. The footage provides glimpses of the survivors – Ana, Kenneth, Terry and Nicole – on the boat, until they arrive at an island only to find that it is overrun by the dead. While Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead ends with Fran and Peter escaping in a helicopter, flying off into an uncertain future, Snyder’s remake dashes any hope for survival – no matter how limited – that is suggested within the original ending. While gun shots are heard from off  screen, the camcorder, presumably held by Terry, is knocked to the ground as the dead continue to run over it. The final images of the film that continue to appear until the credits are finished are of extreme closeups of zombies filling the frame. In the twenty-first century, the dead will always outnumber the living. Similarly, [REC] concludes with the camera operator dead, the camera having fallen to the ground and the journalist being pulled into the darkness; everyone is dead or infected and the outbreak is not contained (see Fig. 3.4). Even where a film has a potentially closed ending, such as 28 Days Later, which concludes with Jim, Selena and the teenage Hannah surviving in the countryside before finally being found by the military when the

Figure 3.4  The unresolved ending in [REC]

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the  r e s urge nc e o f t he zo m b i e 91 infection has died out, the ending is often undermined by the serialisation of the narrative through sequels. 28 Weeks Later undermines this happy ending with its narrative about the resurrection of the virus and the unavoidable global outbreak while plans for a sequel to World War Z would suggest that the story is hardly concluded. Serialisation through franchise has in fact become a natural component of the zombie film as demonstrated through George Romero’s Dead films, 28 Days/Weeks Later, the [REC] franchise and the Resident Evil films. In each of these films, the virus continues to evolve and spread, highlighting a synergy between serialisation and the zombie, for the zombie embodies, after all, a very slow apocalypse. The next chapter will explore the narrative potential of this serialisation in more detail through the televisual zombie text, a format that seems ideally designed to defer resolution and deny any restoration of order.

Notes   1. In referring to the cinematic rising, I am intentionally alluding to Dominic Mitchell’s use of the term ‘the second rising’ in the television series In the Flesh, to describe a potential second event in which the dead will rise.   2. It is worth noting that according to Brooks this book was not an immediate success as it was marketed by the publishers as a parody rather than a horror text. This was possibly due to Brooks’ position as the son of Mel Brooks, and Max Brooks’ background as a writer for Saturday Night Live but also, potentially, due to the fact that the publishers did not recognise the fiscal potential of zombie books. It took Brooks’ own grassroots promotional campaign, in which he gave lectures on how to survive a zombie apocalypse, for him to find his audience (Brooks 2015).  3. See Publisher’s Weekly (2011) http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/bytopic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/49456-brooks-s-world-warz-hits-sales-milestone.html; http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/ combined-print-fiction/list.html;  http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellersbooks/2014–01–05/paperback-nonfiction/list.html  4. These figures are taken from The Numbers http://www.the-numbers.com/ movie/Resident-Evil#tab=summary   5. These figures are based on BoxOffice Mojo.com   6. These figures are taken from The Numbers http://www.the-numbers.com/ movies/franchise/Resident-Evil). At the time of writing the sixth film in the series is in production: Resident Evil 6: The Final Chapter (2017).   7. These figures are taken from Box Office Mojo.com.  8. 28 Days Later screenwriter Alex Garland does acknowledge two key allusions to Romero in the film. The first is the shopping spree which refers to a similar scene in the Mall-set Dawn of the Dead, and then the captured infected which

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alludes to the trained zombie Bub from Day of the Dead (Doyle and Garland 2007).   9. This image of the bus, when considered in relation to twenty-first century terrorism, now feels prescient of the London bombings on 7 July 2005, in which a London double-decker bus was blown up by a suicide bomber in a coordinated attack on London’s public transport during rush hour. 10. I prefer the term faux documentary over mockumentary, as mockumentary suggests parody such as What We do in the Shadows (2014), while faux documentary implies a fictional narrative presented through a documentary format. 11. This question is answered in the fourth instalment of the series, [REC]4: Apocalypse, when the journalist and the camera are recovered from the apartment and brought to a science facility on a ship for study.

C H A PT E R 4

A Very Slow Apocalypse: Zombie TV

The phenomenal popularity of the zombie in twenty-first century cinema now positions the zombie as a central member of the canon of classic big screen monsters, alongside its undead cousin the vampire, as well as the mummy, the wolfman and Frankenstein’s monster. Many of these ­creatures have been making a re-emergence in contemporary cinema and television, although with nowhere near the ubiquity of the zombie. Arguably, even the vampire has not had the same level of transmedial impact as the zombie. This is despite the fact that the zombie was for many  years positioned in a more marginal role alongside its monstrous brethren. Regardless of this new-found popularity, little consideration has been given to the role of television within the development of the zombie genre, despite a growing number of suitable and, increasingly, long running texts to examine. More attention has been paid to vampire TV with many book- length studies devoted to Dark Shadows (1966–71), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, True Blood and The Vampire Diaries. In comparison, the TV zombie has, with the exception of The Walking Dead, been largely ignored. This is in part because, historically, the zombie has not played a major role within television horror, primarily as a result of its generic association with a corporeal body horror. From its earliest origins, the zombie embodied the abject corpse raised from the grave seemingly devoid of a soul, which was subsequently splattered in the 1960s and 70s by George Romero (Abbott 2015). This type of graphic material has, until recently, been unpresentable on television as it has been more strictly regulated in terms of what is considered acceptable to be screened on terrestrial television. Furthermore, the zombie, by its very nature as a corpse that has risen from the grave, lacks identity and character, features that are key components of television drama. In contrast while the vampire similarly embodies the dead returned from the grave, it is not presented as a corpse but rather as immortal and usually characterised by his/her charismatic personality and past as a human. The vampire is the undead

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creature who blurs the line between the living and the dead while the zombie is a graphic reminder of the corporeality of death. The seeming incompatibility between the zombie and television appears to have been resolved within the twenty-first century as a result of the changing nature of the media within a multi-channel and post-television landscape. Against this new backdrop, the zombie repeatedly appears on our television screens in a variety of significant and yet distinct approaches. For instance, zombies are featured in such reality TV series such as I Survived a Zombie Apocalypse (2015), Town of the Living Dead (2014) and Darren Brown’s Apocalypse (2012), while also forming the subject of intertextual parody in episodes of Spaced (1999–2001), Community (2009–15), South Park (1997–) and The Simpsons (1989–). The zombie and/or the conventions of the zombie apocalypse genre are often  drawn upon as allegory and satire in dramas such as Dollhouse (2009–10), Torchwood: Miracle Day (2011), ‘Homecoming’ (Masters of Horror/2005–7) and Dead Set (2008). The most common appearance of the zombie historically has always been in the form of the monster-of-the-week within both episodic and long-running serial narratives beginning with Dark Shadows and Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974–5) but continuing through The X-Files (1993–2002/2016), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Blood Ties (2006–8), Doctor Who (1963–89/2005–), Being Human UK (2008–13), Supernatural (2005–), Grimm (2011–), and American Horror Story (2011–). To date, however, its most visible and yet seemingly least-likely presence is in longrunning serial narratives such as In the Flesh (2013–14), Les Revenants (2012–), Z Nation (2014–), iZombie (2015–), The Walking Dead (2010 –), and Fear The Walking Dead (2015 –). The zombie, which in so many films since Night of the Living Dead seemed desperate to penetrate the domestic space, bursting through the walls, now seems to be inscribed within the domestic space, populating  our television screens in hordes. The aim of this chapter, therefore, will be to offer an overview of the diverse approaches to the zombie on television before focusing my analysis upon the seeming tension between the allegorical approach to the genre and the more televisual focus on seriality.

Twenty-first Century Golden Age of TV Horror Historically the zombie has had a limited presence on television despite repeated upsurges of interest within horror. As indicated above, the vampire has played a far more significant role within TV horror from as early as the 1960s and through much of the 1970s. In this period, which can be seen as the first golden age of TV horror, the vampire appears

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a v e r y s lo w ap o c a l yps e 95 across a wide range of TV movies, mini-series, soap operas, anthology ­programmes and episodic series while the zombie makes very few appearances (Jowett and Abbott 2013; Wheatley 2006). For instance, Dark Shadows, a daily Gothic horror soap opera which ran from 1966 to 1971, made a star out of its leading vampire, Barnabus Collins. Collins was supposed to make a limited appearance on the show over a few weeks as he terrorised the community of Collinsport, Maine before being killed by a Van Helsing-like character. His popularity with the audience, however, led the writers to keep him alive and position him as the central protagonist on the show. In contrast, the show only featured six notable uses of a zombie within its four-year story lines, which encompassed a total of 1,225 episodes. In each case, zombies are presented as figures that are brought back to life via witchcraft in order to do the bidding of another – usually the witch Angelique, the vampire Barnabus Collins or the Leviathan Jeb Hawkes [episodes 393, 430, 722, 939, 962, 1109]. The zombie’s lack of personality makes it an ideal tool to be used by the more dynamic central villains or monsters through their harnessing of the power of dark magic. Similarly, the zombie played a minimal role in pre-millennial British television. Where it does appear, it is more influenced by science fiction than horror. British television tended to evoke the theme of the loss of identity and control over the self by reimagining, much like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the zombie as an alien. For instance, in Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass II (1955), aliens take over human bodies in order to colonise the earth. These traditions have continued in Doctor Who in episodes such as ‘The Unquiet Dead’ (1.3), ‘Silence in the Library’ (4.8), and ‘Forests of the Dead’ (4.9), in which aliens commandeer and inhabit the bodies of the dead while in ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’ (2.7), the aliens feed off the souls of the living, leaving their bodies empty but still animated and thus inherently uncanny. In these cases, the dark magic of voodoo is replaced by alien technology and science but in all cases these episodes or limited serials emphasise the zombie’s lack of identity. While the TV vampire has from its earliest appearances been in possession of many faces – reluctant, romantic, Machiavellian, barbaric and monstrous – the zombie in the earliest days of television, and thus the first golden age of TV horror, has been restricted to fulfilling the role of ‘monster-of-the-week’. The late twentieth and early twenty-first century revival of the zombie, however, coincides with significant changes to the broadcast industry both in terms of production and consumption. Catherine Johnson argues that by the 1990s ‘the three-network oligopoly that had dominated the US television industry over the 1960s and 1970s had collapsed as the total television audience commanded by the networks fell from over 90 per

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cent to around 60 per cent,’ with new smaller networks and channels such as Fox, the WB, UPN (WB and UPN merged in 2006 to form the CW), emerging and taking a growing share of the audience (Johnson 2005: 95). A similar proliferation of channels took place in the UK at the turn of the century, particularly with the transition to digital television, and as a result, space for a diverse array of television products was created. As a result of these changes, the traditionally marginalised genre of telefantasy became a ‘dominant form of primetime series’, playing a crucial role in an increasingly fragmented broadcast landscape, particularly in the US (Johnson 2005: 95). Through The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, these nascent US networks began to adopt narrowcasting programming strategies, targeting fans of cult genres such as science fiction, fantasy and horror. This proliferation of cable and pay channels also lead to a gradual relaxation of censorship restrictions. In this manner, television began to exhibit a renewed engagement with the horror genre although initially still contained within a mask of genre hybridity so as to make the series palatable for television audiences, unaccustomed to the presence of horror on TV (see Hills 2005). The X-Files hybridised horror with science fiction, while Buffy was presented more overtly as teen comedy. As the decade progressed and the industry moved from a multi-channel landscape to a post-television landscape in which television is watched across an increasing range of broadcast and streaming platforms, the restrictions facing TV horror have lessened extensively. Where Buffy and Angel masked themselves as teen and young adult fiction with a supernatural underpinning, Supernatural, which began to air in 2005 after both Buffy and Angel had gone off the air, was able to more overtly position itself as horror. By the time of The Walking Dead which began in 2010, AMC not only commissioned a 90-minute pilot and five further episodes from the start but gave the show’s producers and the special make-up effects creators at KNB relatively free rein in terms of the show’s graphic zombie effects. The creator and producer of Season 1, Frank Darabont, explains how, having been promised creative freedom by AMC, he was still surprised by what they were able to do in a television series. Denise Huth (Producer/ Co-Executive Producer 2010–15) similarly explains how there was much discussion between the creators and the networks about one of the most graphic scenes in the first season, which occurs in ‘Guts’ (1.2) when the group hack up a zombie body and cover themselves in zombie blood and body parts in order to conceal themselves amidst the undead (see Fig. 4.1). According to Huth, this ‘made everybody nervous’ and Darabont notes that he was sure that eventually they would be called upon to trim the scene, but the scene was broadcast as originally conceived (The Making

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Figure 4.1  Walking among the zombies in ‘Guts’ The Walking Dead (1.2)

of the Walking Dead 2011).1 The result, therefore, of these changes within broadcast television over the last fifteen years is that the horror genre entered a new televisual golden age in which it was able to pronounce itself as horror through the more graphic and nihilistic conventions of the genre. It is within this context, that the zombie emerges on television with a vengeance. If the 1960s and 1970s golden age of horror was characterised by the presence of the vampire, then the twenty-first century golden age is, arguably, defined by the growing hordes of zombies parading across our television screens across a wide variety of TV formats. For instance, the aesthetics of the zombie apocalypse are repeatedly cross-fertilised with other genres such as science fiction in Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse and vampire series such as True Blood and The Strain which will be discussed in detail in Chapter 8. In all of these cases the mise-en-scène of the zombie apocalypse is used as a means of exploring themes surrounding social disintegration. Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse, like the British science-fiction of the 1950s and 1960s, re-imagines the voodoo zombie as the product of scientific and technological control, albeit of human rather than alien origin. In this series, the bodies of the living are controlled by a technological bokor this time in the form of scientist and technician Topher Brinks. The souls of living ‘volunteers’ are emptied from their bodies to be replaced by new programmed identities constructed by Brinks to meet the needs of clients who hire the ‘dolls’ for their own personal use. As Gerry Canavan argues, ‘the horror of the zombie in most episodes of Dollhouse is not her violence but her fundamental passivity – the extent to which she can be entirely controlled and made to work’ (Canavan 2011:

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194). More significantly, Canavan sees the zombie in the series as embodying the ‘ultimate synthesis between biopower and market logic’ in which ‘the market, imagined now as an ontology that transcends the human, becomes the final arbiter of all disputes: the market now speaks’ (Canavan 2011: 194; emphasis in original). The horrors of this market-led economy reach their apotheosis in the show’s two season finales ‘Epitaph 1’ and ‘Epitaph 2’ in which the mise-en-scène of the post-apocalyptic zombie narrative is mobilised in full force as Brink’s technology has unleashed an apocalypse where bodies can be hijacked remotely, initially by wealthy individuals looking to upgrade into new bodies. Once out of control, the options for humanity are threefold: to be left as ‘dumbshows’ – humans emptied of any identity and therefore existing in a zombiefied form – or turned into ‘butchers’ – humans with imprints that transform individuals into murderous monsters, violently hunting and killing all ‘actuals,’ anyone still in possession of their original identity. The butchers overtly evoke the post-apocalyptic zombie, mindlessly driven by the need to kill and feed off the dead. Reality television has similarly begun to capitalise on the popularity of the zombie apocalypse genre across media with the US Syfy series Town of the Living Dead and BBC reality game show I Survived a Zombie Apocalypse. Town of the Living Dead, described by Alison Keene as a ‘brand of Southern-sploitation . . . with a hint of Jackass’ (Keene 2014), follows a group of quirky residents of Jaspar, Alabama as they attempt to make their own independent zombie film Thr33 Days Dead (John M. Ware 2014). I  Survived a Zombie Apocalypse merges Big Brother with Dawn of the Dead, as a group of ‘survivors’ of a zombie infection hide out in an abandoned shopping complex, awaiting rescue while also having to perform various survival tasks that put them in the path of the zombies. Even renowned illusionist/magician/hypnotist Derren Brown staged an Apocalypse in which he attempted to convince one individual that there has been a global outbreak of an infection that causes people to lose their reason and intellect and behave violently, leading to a fundamental breakdown of society. While no one interacting with Brown’s subject refers to the infected as zombies, Brown and his behind-the-scenes crew repeatedly make this reference. All of these reality series draw heavily from the lexicon of the cinematic zombie apocalypse. The most dominant forms of zombie television, however, remain the monster-of-the week episodic series and the increasingly popular long-running serialised narrative.

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The Many Meanings of the Zombie-of-the-Week The zombie as monster-of-the-week begins with Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974–5), a prime time series scheduled for one evening a week and lasting only one season with a total of twenty episodes. ‘Zombie’ was the second episode of the series, a choice which highlights the perceived significance of the zombie as a horror monster with potential to engage audiences. What is of note about this episode, however, is the nature of the zombie. Journalist Carl Kolchak uncovers a series of mafia-related murders that seem to be committed by a Haitian man who was killed by mob hitmen and has been raised from the dead to enact revenge. Despite airing six years after the cinematic release of Night of the Living Dead, the series harks back to the definition of the zombie that comes not from Romero but rather voodoo and witchcraft. The zombie in this story is a puppet awakened by his bokor-mother to kill each of the men she deems responsible for her son’s death. To stop the zombie, Kolchak does not kill the brain or ‘beat ‘em or burn ‘em’ as the sheriff in charge of the militia in Night of the Living Dead advises, but follows folkloric ritual by pouring rock salt into the zombie’s mouth and sewing the lips shut before encircling the zombie with white candles. Despite the cult success of Night of the Living Dead, which was screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1970 and had been a central feature of midnight movies at the Waverley Cinema in New York from 1971 to 1973 (Hervey 2008), the most familiar incarnation of the zombie remained the one from voodoo, harking back to the voodoo traditions that are the subject of films such as White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie. In this manner, the episode expresses cultural anxieties about the foreign ‘other’, in this case in the form of the Haitian bokor – Mamalois. In contrast to these earlier films, however, the threat emerges on US soil and in the wake of the civil rights movement and  in this manner does feel post-Night of the Living Dead. The zombie seems to represent the cultural heritage of the growing and empowered black community, depicted in this episode as challenging white authority in the form of the syndicate of organised crime as well as corrupt police officials. It is significant that in addition to the mafia leaders, Mamalois targets the police chief who covers up the syndicate’s crimes. As John Kenneth Muir argues, Kolchak: The Night Stalker is a show that reflected a post-Watergate distrust of government authority with ‘Kolchak’s constant besting of city hall . . . an optimistic battle cry for individualism and the importance of a single voice’ (Muir 2001: 71). This episode in particular reflects the tensions between AfricanAmerican communities and the police, a conflict that was well-established

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in the 1960s due to documented clashes during the civil rights movement as well as the violence of the Watts riots of 1965. At the same time, ‘Zombie’ displays an ambivalence about this empowered community, that is embodied either by up-and-coming black gangsters who are rivalling the old guard Italian syndicate or the superstitious voodoo-practising Haitians. This community seems restricted to a representation as criminals, witchdoctors or the mindless, monstrous zombie who is manipulated by everyone. Emerging from this mix, the zombie is presented as an abject monster, lacking any individual agency, that must be contained and defeated by the white hero, Carl Kolchak, in which Kolchak serves as a fusion of Van Helsing’s old-world knowledge and modern American ingenuity. This stands in contrast to the contempo­ raneous Blaxploitation film Scream Blacula Scream in which the African Vampire, Prince Mamulwalde (aka Blacula) is brought back to life or undeath by a voodoo witchdoctor only to be destroyed eventually by the female bokor when her attempts to cure his vampirism are thwarted and he has fully embraced his vampiric nature. In the tradition of Blaxploitation all of the power, agency and authority lay within the African-American community. In contrast, while Kolchak opposes the criminality on the part of organised crime and police corruption, he must also contain and destroy the zombie. Contemporary series, such as The X-Files and Angel, have tapped into the racial and colonial themes embedded within the Haitian origins of the zombie as explored on Kolchak, a show that X-Files creators have acknowledged was an influence. Writer and producer Frank Spotnitz explains that both he and X-Files creator and showrunner Chris Carter had ‘grown up loving The Night Stalker’, which he describes as sharing The X-Files ‘DNA’ (Spotnitz 2013: iii). The X-Files’ ‘Fresh Bones’ (2.15) and Angel’s ‘Thin Dead Line’ (2.14), both use the zombie narrative to explore the tensions between white authority and black communities in the US but with a more contemporary spin. In ‘Fresh Bones’, an episode reflecting on the growing Haitian Refugee Crisis of the 1990s, the unexplained, seemingly voodoo-related, deaths of soldiers stationed at an internment camp for Haitians awaiting extradition, bring FBI agents Mulder and Scully to investigate. While they uncover a culture of voodoo rituals, magic and soldiers transformed into zombies, initially presented as morally ambiguous and culturally ‘other’, what they realise is far more monstrous is the institutional racism and abuse occurring on the part of the military within the camp. Inmates are being tortured and abused which leads to a riot, the death of a young boy and, eventually, a cover-up. Furthermore, it becomes apparent that the white camp commander, Colonel Wharton,

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a v e r y s lo w ap o c a l yps e 101 has co-opted the use of voodoo and zombification to punish the Haitian inmates of the camp. Similarly, in ‘Thin Dead Line’ a multicultural group of young people living on the street in Los Angeles are being terrorised by white police officers who repeatedly use excessive force as they patrol the streets of this usually crime-ridden and gang-ruled neighbourhood. Demon-hunter Charles Gunn decides to expose the police violence by walking the streets and waiting to be accosted in order to clandestinely film the attack, deliberately evoking the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers.  When asked how they know they will be accosted, Gunn responds, ‘cause we’ll be the ones walking while black’. Eventually it is revealed that the white captain of the local precinct has used voodoo to resurrect cops who died in the line of duty, now transformed into zombies who walk the streets and keep them safe by any means. In both ‘Fresh Bones’ and ‘Thin Dead Line’ it is, therefore, white figures of authority who appropriate Afro-Caribbean voodoo traditions in order to dominate and control these black and ethnic communities. While in both series, it is the white heroes, Mulder and Scully and Angel, who, like Carl Kolchak, uncover the truth and expose the bokors responsible, they are in fact standing up to racism and institutional corruption rather than attempting to contain the black and minority communities. Furthermore, in ‘Fresh Bones’ it is the Haitian bokor Pierre Bauvais who gets the final revenge on Colonel Wharton by blowing ‘zombie powder’ in his face which makes him appear to be dead. The episode concludes with Wharton inside his coffin, buried alive. Other series have adopted and mobilised the conventions of the zombie genre to serve their own multitude of narrative and thematic functions. For instance, long-running serial horror series Supernatural has repeatedly returned to the zombie as a go-to-monster to be dispatched by the demon-hunting Winchester Brothers. The series, however, often channels  different conceptions and embodiments of the zombie depending upon the needs of the episode. The first appearance of the zombie is as a woman who is brought back to ‘life’ through magic by her best friend who is in love with her and who uses rituals drawn from ancient Greek mythology. This episode initially seems to evoke the original Hollywoodstyle creature of White Zombie, although attributing it to Greek rather than Haitian origins, by having her raised by the living, seemingly as  a love slave. As the episode progresses, it becomes clear, however, that she is a self-actualised monster, choosing to murder those who wronged her in life, linking the episode to the show’s broader themes of free will, retribution and grief (‘Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things’ 2.4).

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Figure 4.2  The family that eats together in ‘Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid’ Supernatural (5.15)

In contrast, the zombies in ‘Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid’ (5.15) were not restored through black magic but are the dead returned from the grave by Death – one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – and returned to their families, seemingly as they were in life, until, that is, they develop an unsatisfying hunger for human flesh (see Fig. 4.2). Here the series introduces strong aspects of the Romero-esque zombie to a narrative about resurrection, in particular in a scene where a young boy murders and eats his own father. This episode prefigures the French television series Les revenants (2012–) in its preoccupation with grief and mourning as the living are confronted by the return of their loved ones. Both of these episodes use the zombie as a means of reflecting on the show’s developing theme of familial loss and the mechanisms of coping with grief. Supernatural, however, also engages with more contemporary manifestations of the zombie. For instance, as part of the show’s long-running apocalyptic narrative which climaxes in Season 5, the writers introduce an outbreak narrative, in the form of the Croatoan virus. This disease causes the infected to transform into rabid, murderous creatures, evoking the fast-moving zombies, infected by the rage virus in 28 Days Later. Similarly in ‘How to Win Friends and Influence Monsters’ (7.9) the attempts on the part of the Leviathans – Lovecraftian monsters escaped from Purgatory – to control the human population through mind-numbing additives in their fast food, has the reverse effect on a small percentage of the population who become super aggressive, murderous cannibals. Here the series

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a v e r y s lo w ap o c a l yps e 103 uses the zombie as a critique of how corporate capitalism attempts to control the population through conspicuous consumption. The zombie on Supernatural is inherently malleable to the thematic preoccupations of the narrative and is never the central ‘big bad’ of the show’s arc narrative, which tends to draw upon a more biblical conception of apocalypse such as demons, angels and Lucifer. The zombie does, however, evoke the show’s focus on loss and grief, as well as the loss of identity and the importance of free will. All of these episodes present the zombie as an abject monster-of-theweek that must be cured or destroyed. In contrast, Being Human UK which re-imagines horror as kitchen sink Gothic (Jowett and Abbott 2013), offers its own twist on the zombie, when ghost Annie befriends Sasha, a woman who died in a car accident and then woke up on the mortuary slab as the coroner was about to begin his autopsy (‘Type 4’ 3.3). Unlike traditional zombies, Sasha still has her own, highly developed, personality and memory. She can talk and does not eat human flesh, but as George points out she is a ‘dead body, moving about’, decomposing and giving off a rotten smell when Annie and her friends meet her, causing the group to designate her a zombie. Sasha is, however, presented as an anomaly, for when George comments that ‘at least she’s not attacking us. Don’t they usually attack people?’, Mitchell responds that they ‘don’t usually do anything because they don’t usually exist.’ In a series in which vampires, ghosts and werewolves are normalised through friendship as well as the show’s kitchen-sink style, Sasha is a reminder of the horrors and harsh realities of death and dying, as her body steadily decomposes throughout the episode. She does not mark the intrusion of fantasy within this realist show, which is better described as a fusion of fantasy and realism, but rather connotes through her abject body a much darker form of realism, which has been a part of zombie genre since Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. The harsh reality of Sasha’s decaying body is represented through repeated close-ups of her bloodied face, decaying teeth, postmortem scars and the abject liquids soaking through her clothes, all of which highlights the association of the zombie with graphic body horror and signals the presence of horror on television (see Fig. 4.3). While the abject horror surrounding her body does initially cause the group to attempt to distance themselves from her, distinguishing her form of supernatural as decidedly other in relation to their own monstrosity masked beneath a veneer of humanity as well as the desire to be ‘normal’, the revelation that the doctors at the hospital had been experimenting on Sasha and the other zombies, returned at the same time as her, fosters pathos for her situation. Video footage of autopsies on screaming corpses

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Figure 4.3  The all-too-human zombie in ‘Type 4’ Being Human UK (3.3)

followed by the revelation that the corpses were incinerated while conscious, alongside Sasha’s persistent but failed attempts to resume her old ‘normal’ life, remind the group (and the audience) that she is much like them and us. Body horror here is a reminder of the monstrous physicality of life and death to which we must all succumb. Eventually, Sasha does die (or die again) when her body has decomposed to such a degree that it can no longer sustain the spark of life that has been keeping her moving and this does seem consistent with the monster-of-the-week formula. The zombie is too abject a figure to be integrated into the family. But by this point, the episode’s focus on her decaying body no longer incites abject repulsion but rather pathos, intensified by her dying wish that she had lived life more fully. Here body horror reminds the group and the audience of her fundamental – corporeal – humanity, which inspires the other characters to attempt to embrace their own lives more fully.

Serial Zombie TV vs the Allegorical Zombie While the monster-of-the-week formula highlights the allegorical potential inherent within the zombie, the serialisation of the zombie narrative has become an increasingly prevalent format for the genre. The subtitle to Robert Kirkman’s ongoing serialised graphic novel The Walking Dead is ‘a continuing story of survival horror’ and he has described his work as ‘the zombie movie that never ends’ (cited by Bishop 2010: 206). This focus on an ongoing narrative highlights why television is the appropriate space for this text to be adapted. Kirkman conceived of an epic narrative

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a v e r y s lo w ap o c a l yps e 105 that to date has published 150 issues since its beginning in 2003. In the conclusion to his book, American Zombie Gothic, Kyle Bishop posits that the future of the zombie genre ‘will follow Kirkman’s lead, and the cinematic version of this “long-haul” approach will work best on television’ (2010: 206). This conclusion, according to Bishop, was written just at the time that AMC had signed a development deal for The Walking Dead for television. In the intervening years since the series began in 2010, the show has become a phenomenal success for AMC, averaging 14.4 million viewers per episode in North America in Season 5, regularly breaking ratings records and spawning a successful spin-off Fear the Walking Dead (Thomas 2015). Despite this success, George Romero, the grandfather of the modern zombie tale and a key influence on Kirkman’s work as well as the television series, has, however, explained that while invited to direct a few episodes of the series, he declined the opportunity. According to Romero, his primary reason was because the scripts were written and he prefers to both write and direct his work (cited by Robey 2013). Of note, however, is that Romero further dismissed The Walking Dead by describing it as ‘a soap opera with a zombie occasionally’, explaining that he ‘always used the zombie as a character for satire or a political criticism and I find that missing in what’s happening now’ (cited by Angie Han 2013). While not putting words into his mouth, this statement is a very telling remark, evoking a contrast between soap opera – a term indelibly linked to television with a focus on the never-ending serial story and on character – and notions of allegory and political satire. This seems to be quite a loaded opposition – contrasting something seemingly frivolous with something serious and worthy: something inherently televisual with something cinematic. Embedded within this opposition is the suggestion that television is, as  a result, not the appropriate space for the zombie genre. Television and horror were long thought to be incompatible bedfellows, but Lorna Jowett and I have argued the opposite as evidenced by the increasing prevalence of the genre across television internationally. Our argument is that the shape and nature of horror must be different on television as it is produced and consumed in a way that is completely different from literature and film. Seriality is a key factor of this difference, in which TV slowly unfolds its narrative over multiple episodes and multiple seasons which can span many years. The impact of this structure is that the target emotion of horror cannot be sustained over multiple episodes and multiple seasons. You cannot keep your audience in a perpetual and escalating state of fear or disgust indefinitely. The effect would be counter-productive to the generation of horror as over-familiarity and repetition would lead

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to boredom rather than sustained suspense. Similarly, if zombies are overused or body horror is too often on display, then you run the risk of it all becoming so normalised that it ceases to be scary, unsettling, disgusting or threatening. The audience is at risk of becoming desensitised to horror through repetition. Instead on television, horror must operate in an ebb and flow of effect both within episodes and across entire seasons. Furthermore, the entire basis of a serial narrative is the postponement of resolution. These factors require a rethinking of the structures of horror as developed for cinema (Jowett and Abbott 2013). Now with this in mind, the zombie begins to look like an ideal focus for TV horror as the zombie across media evokes notions of seriality as suggested in the previous chapter. In addition to Kirkman’s epic serial narrative, zombie video games play out an ongoing storyline from level to level and game to game, suggesting a gradually unfolding experience. UK young adult fiction writer Darren Shan has written, to date, twelve books in his Zom-B series. Similarly, zombie franchises such as Romero’s Living Dead films, 28 Days Later/28 Weeks Later and Resident Evil each began with a self-contained film with a beginning, middle and end, following a group of individuals struggling to survive but they developed into extended franchises which demonstrate the potential within the zombie narrative for seriality. The zombie apocalypse is not a sudden cataclysmic event but a gradual dispersing infection or contamination and even once it has spread globally, the remainder of humanity continue to fight for survival. It is by its very nature a very slow apocalypse, making it ideal for seriality. Of course, in addition to the metaphorical use of the zombie as monsterof-the week, the social and political allegorical use of the zombie described by Romero does exist within zombie TV, such as Charlie Brooker’s Dead Set, a mini-series that critiques the consumption of reality TV and celebrity culture by setting the zombie apocalypse around the Big Brother house. This series uses an extended serial narrative as allegory, as noted by Chris Moran, reviewing the first episode of Dead Set for The Guardian: It might be the first zombie film since Romero’s Dawn of the Dead to successfully pull off satire. These blank, voracious, unthinking shells are a powerful metaphor in the right hands and in the right context, and just as Romero’s choice of a ­shopping mall all those years ago skewered consumerist America, Brooker’s convincingly nasty reality TV complex nicely draws attention to our vicious urge to see celebrities and non-entities tearing each other apart on the small screen. (2008)

In the first episode, Big Brother contestant Joplin comments that television serves as a ‘big fat arrow pointing you away from the problem’ and as

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a v e r y s lo w ap o c a l yps e 107 the episode unfolds it becomes increasingly apparent that this is, in fact, the case as the Big Brother fans and behind-the-scenes crew, preparing for eviction night, are oblivious to dramatic events occurring across the country as the apocalypse begins to unfold. Television screens in the Big Brother control room, broadcasting the news feature headlines such as ‘Four dead in south London riot’, ‘injured victims attack police’, ‘civil unrest’, ‘Rioting spreads: violence worsens across the nation’, while mobile phone networks begin to fail and the highways are reported as completely jammed. The crew, participants and fans ignore these developments, and the producer expresses more anxiety about the show being taken off the air in favour of an emergency news update as opposed to worrying about the content of the announcement. He complains: ‘Why do people riot anyway? It’s not the 80s. You know, they’ve got distractions. They should stay in, watch telly’. As the world is taken over by zombies, leaving only a few members of the crew and the inhabitants of the Big Brother house to fight for survival, the series offers a condemnation of the public’s need to consume empty television with the mob of fans who surrounded the house to witness the eviction turned into the zombie hordes looking for a way into the house to feed off the inhabitants. Similarly, Joe Dante’s ‘Homecoming’ (1.6) – a stand-alone episode of Masters of Horror – offers a searing critique of the Bush Administration in which zombified corpses of soldiers who died in Iraq come back to the US to vote out the Republican Government who sent them there. The episode was described by Dennis Lim of The Village Voice as ‘easily one of the most important films of the Bush II era’, produced at a time when, according to Dante, ‘Nobody is doing anything about what’s going on now – compared to the ’70s, when they were making movies about the issues of the day. This elephant in the room, this Iraq war story, is not being dramatized’ (cited in Lim 2005). Literally confronting the audience with the return of the repressed, in this case the repressed voices of dead soldiers who died for a lie, the episode also highlights the hypocrisy of the political machine and its spin doctors, ready to turn any development to their political advantage. When the dead rise and begin to vote, the Republicans immediately present this in the media as a vote of confidence in the government and their role in the war with Republican pundit Jane Cleaver declaring ‘far be it for me to offend members of the loser religion but if I am an Islama-fascist right now, I would have to take this as an omen. Talk about our God is bigger than your God’. But once the zombies begin to talk and reveal that they are back in order to vote ‘for anyone who ends this evil war’, the government turns against them and rounds them up into internment camps, declaring them a public health threat. Cleaver,

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appearing on the same political programme, presents the government’s new position, stating: The fact is . . . they’ve studied these creatures and they have no higher brain function. Their intelligence level is basically that of a liberal . . . On top of which these things – they’re turncoats. They’ve betrayed their government and their country and their fellow soldiers. And they are giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

When the Government cheats over the election, ignoring the voices of  the undead, soldiers from every war begin to rise to join their more contemporary brethren. The episode concludes with zombies taking over Washington – depicted in a parody of the A. M. Willard painting Yankee Doodle as the zombies march in front of the American Flag to the strains of the national anthem – and making an open declaration that if any government again sends soldiers to ‘give their lives for a needless, pointless lie’, they will once again be confronted by ‘the true face of war; the face of hell’. As these programmes demonstrate, allegory in the Romero tradition does exist on television albeit within one-off television programmes or short series. These types of allegories are, however, difficult to sustain across longer-running narratives as once the allegorical point is made, there is little left for the narrative to explore. Furthermore, these programmes are built around characters who serve as archetypes rather than characters with which we have emotional investment. A significant part of  Dead Set’s allegory is built around the fact that these characters are truly horrible people, questioning why we would want to keep coming back to watch them. As Brooker points out in the introduction to his book Screen Burn (2005) ‘the first series of Big Brother was broadcast in the summer of 2000, marking the start of the reality TV boom, and, in a roundabout way, the beginning of an era during which TV finally jettisoned any pretence at being an important, socially beneficial medium and simply concentrated on sticking its bum in our face and giggling’ (xi). Brooker’s position on Big Brother is subsequently played out in Dead Set. Serial television, however, generally requires a form of emotional investment in the characters or their situations in order to draw audiences back from week to week and season to season. Seriality is a central characteristic of television drama storytelling, embedded within the long established soap opera traditions with their ‘endlessly deferred openness’ and ‘decades of narrative accumulating within the memories of their multigenerational fan communities’ (Mittell 2015: 22) as well as recent developments in ‘quality’ or ‘complex’ television as defined by Robert J. Thompson and Jason Mittell respectively. Thompson argues that Quality TV has ‘memory’, referring back to its

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a v e r y s lo w ap o c a l yps e 109 own narrative past while characters grow and evolve (Thompson 1996: 14), while Mittell argues that ‘complex television employs a range of serial techniques, with the underlying assumption that a series is a cumulative narrative that builds over time, rather than resetting back to a steady-state equilibrium at the end of every episode’ (Mittell 2015: 18). This form of storytelling does not, however, preclude social commentary as suggested by Romero’s dismissal of The Walking Dead as ‘soap opera’. Instead the televisual format necessitates that the commentary is embedded within the unfolding storyline and developed slowly over the serial narrative. For instance, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is well known for using the monster as metaphor within its diegesis (see Wilcox 1999 for more on this). This is particularly notable in its earlier seasons as the monsters embody the very real threats and experiences of adolescence: bullying (‘The Pack’ 1.6), cyber-predators (‘I Robot, You Jane’ 1.8), abusive boyfriends (‘Innocence’ 2.14; ‘Beauty and the Beasts’ 3.4) and high school violence (‘Earshot’ 3.18). In Season 6, the series similarly employs the metaphor of the zombie as a narrative catalyst for characters to reflect on the nature and meaning of their humanity as they enter into adulthood, with the now grown-up Buffy forced to confront the evils of everyday life and finding herself just ‘going through the motions’ of living (‘Once More With Feeling’ 6.7). Notably, and in contrast to the examples cited above, the metaphor is laid out across the entire season rather than in a single episode. While the zombie is not a major player on Buffy, preoccupied as it is  with the figure of the vampire, Season 6’s narrative arc re-imagines Buffy herself as a zombie, having died at the end of the previous season and brought back from the dead in ‘Bargaining Part 1 & 2’ (6.1/2) by her witch best friend Willow. The season begins and ends with Buffy crawling out of a grave, highlighting the importance of this metaphor to the narrative. The zombie iconography, both pre- and post-Romero, is established throughout these two episodes. For instance, Buffy does not revive randomly from the grave but is brought back via a black magic resurrection ritual performed by her friends, a ritual that involves candles, snakes and a blood sacrifice, alluding to voodoo, hoodoo and Egyptian resurrection mythology. When the ritual is disrupted by marauding demons, and Willow and the others have to disperse, the camera swoops beneath the surface of the earth and into Buffy’s coffin to reveal a close-up of her decomposing corpse-face before it slowly reconstitutes as she wakes up, buried alive (see Fig. 4.4). This close-up of her corpse confirms Buffy’s place as a zombie, a fact that is reinforced when she is forced to claw her way out of her coffin and dig through the earth beneath her grave in a convention that has become

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Figure 4.4  Buffy as zombie in ‘Bargaining Part 1 & 2’ Buffy the Vampire Slayer (6.1/2)

a hallmark of many post-Romero zombie narratives.2 In the scenes that follow, Buffy wanders in a dazed fashion through the abandoned and burning streets of Sunnydale, overrun by destructive Hellion demons who have learned of Buffy’s death. These images, presented from Buffy’s blurred and confused perspective are apocalyptic, a fact that is reinforced when Buffy later asks her sister Dawn, ‘is this hell?’ A specific reference to Night of the Living Dead is included when the leader of the Hellion demons, having ripped the Buffy robot (put in place to protect the town in the real Buffy’s absence) into pieces, sees the real Buffy and instructs his men ‘another one for the fire, boys’, an allusion to the sheriff’s final instructions to his men after having mistaken Ben, the hero of Night of the Living Dead, for a zombie and shot him. Later when Buffy’s friends find her and realise that she was forced to dig her way out of her own grave, friend Anya compares Buffy to a zombie when instructing one of the demons to leave them unaccosted: we have a slayer here – who might actually be looking to eat some brains – and so I think a little quiet moseying/no hard feelings and I’m sure your demon hoard won’t think any the less of you. (‘Bargaining Part 2’)

While Buffy is initially presented largely through the language of the Romero-zombie, as the season progresses her zombiness becomes characterised by her tendency to ‘go through the motions’ of real life, like a zombie under someone else’s control. This is literally the case in ‘Life Serial’ (6.5) when the Trio, a team of geeky supervillains, make Buffy

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a v e r y s lo w ap o c a l yps e 111 the pawn of their magic experiments which causes the world to speed up around her and then later to trap her within a time loop, while in ‘Gone’ (6.11) they make her invisible. Throughout the season, she is repeatedly described in zombie-like terms, such as numb, lifeless and unresponsive. In the musical number ‘ Walk through the Fire’ in the episode ‘Once More with Feeling’, Buffy, again surrounded by fiery apocalyptic imagery that recalls ‘Bargaining Part 2’, complains about her empty condition when she sings, ‘I touch the fire and it freezes me; I look into it and it’s black; Why can’t I feel? My skin should crack and peel; I want the fire back’. In the same song, her watcher and mentor Giles questions whether Buffy ‘is too far gone to care’ and the episode concludes with Buffy initiating a kiss with vampire Spike, a scene that prefigures their sexual relationship, explaining ‘I know this isn’t real but I just want to feel’. This season uses the zombie metaphor as a means of exploring Buffy’s transition into adult life, having to cope with grown-up responsibilities that are not defined by a sacred calling or a passion for friends, family and mission, but simply meeting basic needs like earning a living, paying the bills and finding fulfilment in empty sexual encounters. It is only following her recognition of her dramatic failure at coping with adult responsibility that Buffy stops feeling like she ‘was not really here,’ having left a part of herself in the grave. When she fights her way out of the grave for a second time at the end of the season finale (‘Grave’ 6.22), having saved her sister and avoided yet another apocalypse, she seems to have found what she left behind the first time and is ready to embrace life and her unknown future. Here the social commentary about adulthood – life is the big bad – unfolds through the seriality of the seasonal narrative. While this is one narrative strand of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which the zombie works as an extended allegory, serialised zombie series In the Flesh and The Walking Dead weave multiple forms of social commentary within their unfolding zombie storylines. Most significantly, as the stories build from season to season, the commentary develops and grows, becoming more complex, taking in new meanings and evolving with the show. For instance, the British series In the Flesh presents a post-post-zombie apocalypse set years after the dead have risen and humans have re-established some form of control through the discovery of a ‘treatment’ which enables the zombies to regain their faculties and return to their previous ‘normal’ lives. Season 1 focuses on the personal story of Kieran Walker, a Partially Deceased Syndrome (PDS) sufferer, as he attempts to reintegrate within his family and community as they all come to terms with his condition and he deals with his guilt over his actions during his pre-treated state. His position as a zombie allows for the series to explore themes of sexual

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i­dentity and social alienation as Kieran’s condition is queered both textually and sub-textually (see Chapter 6 for a more detailed discussion of this point). This season also uses Kieran’s undead condition to confront the audience with the horror of grief and mourning as loved ones come face to face with their dearly departed (Abbott 2016). In contrast, the second season, which still focuses primarily on Kieran, begins to develop the narrative to engage with social and political concerns, particularly around terrorism, social intolerance, and the drive towards radicalism, themes that are highly prevalent in contemporary society. The season opens with the voice-over narration from a news report about radicalism within the PDS community and the government crackdown on the Undead Liberation Army (ULA), a revolutionary/terrorist organisation fighting for the rights of the undead. This news report is presented over images of a group of PDS sufferers as they dress and apply their cover-up mousse to conceal their undead status. Intercut with these images is a conversation between former Roarton citizen Ken Burton, whose wife was a PDS sufferer who was killed by a member of the Human Volunteer Force (HVF) while in her treated state, and his grandson as he encourages tolerance in the face of PDS sufferers and explains why the undead lash out at the living. Burton and the boy get on to a tram at the same time as the group of undead. While in between stations, the zombies remove their cover-up mousse and snort Blue Oblivion, a drug that returns them to their rabid state, brutally attacking and killing everyone on the tram. This opening establishes the theme of political extremism which permeates the season as the living and the undead become caught between the radical oppositions of the Undead Liberation Army and the up-and-coming pro-living party Victus. While the ULA at its most extreme radicalises the undead, Victus, a single issue party, also works to radicalise the living by spreading fear and hatred. They repeatedly remind the living that ‘a PDS sufferer . . . is just “one missed dose” away from tearing your head apart’, while also working to limit the rights of the PDS sufferer by taking away their passports and forcing them into community repayment schemes as enforced labour (BBC3 In the Flesh). Dominic Mitchell argues, however, that Victus do have a point and he was keen that they be represented as right wing in their policies but at the same time they ‘seem reasonable’. ‘They kinda have a point’(Mitchell 2014). The PDS sufferers ‘did do terrible things’ and perhaps it is not unreasonable to ask them to pay the community back in some form. With Kieran and his undead friends Amy and Simon at the centre of this narrative, the show therefore explores the complexities of both sides of this debate, presenting the truths embedded within both. In this manner the zombie narrative speaks to a wide range of personal

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a v e r y s lo w ap o c a l yps e 113 and political themes from the trauma of dealing with suicide and grief to contemporary issues around tolerance, terrorism, radicalism and the aftermath of war. The political relevance of this second season was felt when the UK Independence Party (UKIP) – a British party that is anti-Europe and anti-immigration – won 24 MEP seats in the European Parliamentary election in May 2014, the same month that the series was broadcast (BBC News 2014a). While not necessarily intended to represent UKIP, the connection between the series and contemporary debates about immigration was noted by Guardian TV reviewer Stuart Jeffries when he commented upon Maxine Martin, a Victus MP for Roarton, introduced in this season: Maxine Martin MP is made of sterner stuff. They come here, take our jobs, eat our faces? Not on Maxine’s watch. In the second series of Dominic Mitchell’s superb In the Flesh (BBC3, Sunday), the Victus party MP terminated the symbolic Other with a power tool and told an election rally that the living would no longer tolerate having medicated zombies in their midst. Why? “Behind that mask of makeup and medication is a cold-hearted killer,” she said. “Just one misdose away from tearing your head apart.” I’m not saying that this is how Ukip characterises Romanians in its manifesto, but if it did its electoral share would surely rise. (Jeffries 2014)

Cancelled after its second season, In the Flesh has been prevented from fully developing its multiple themes and narrative strands despite Mitchell’s claims that he has numerous stories left to tell (Mitchell 2014). At the time of writing, The Walking Dead is, however, in its sixth season and demonstrates the potential for the zombie narrative to offer a complex social commentary that shifts and develops with the series as the zombie apocalypse slowly unfolds over time. As Gwyneth Peaty explains, ‘this is a tale about time . . . More specifically, it is a tale in which the concept and experience of time is interwoven with monstrosity’ (Peaty 2014: 186–87, emphasis in original). The centrality of time and its experience is evident in the first half of Season 6 which takes place over a short and sustained period, with each episode focusing on a selection of characters and events. The episodes are closely entangled narratively and temporally, each revealing fragments of the story as the community of Alexandria comes under attack by a group of marauding humans known as the Wolves while protagonist Rick and his people attempt to lead a mammoth horde of zombies away from Alexandria’s gates. Rather than simply allowing events to unfold in a linear progression, the episodes feature overlapping time while also moving backward and forward through flashbacks in order to explore the way in which all actions and reactions are interconnected. Significantly, the series positions the audience within a sustained moment of terror – highly unusual within serial television as mentioned above.

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This moment reaches its climax in the mid-season finale which ends as one group of survivors try to escape the house in which they had become trapped by covering themselves in zombie blood and viscera in order to masquerade as the undead (‘Start to Finish’ 6.8). The episode ends in medias res as the group walks out of the house and into the hordes of zombies, as a young traumatised child begins to call for his mother. The Walking Dead is, therefore, designed to be experienced over time and it is through this extended experience of the apocalypse that our expectations and understanding of the world and humanity are challenged and dismantled. This show offers a unique opportunity to explore the impact of this level of social disintegration on humanity through the eyes of one particular set of characters. Through these people and their various trials and tribulations as they fight for survival, the series questions the nature of humanity and civilisation in the face of such horror; it explores the tension between idealism and pragmatism and questions where morality fits within a world in which societal rules have been systematically dismantled; and it lays bare the constructed masquerade of masculinity and the politics of power, particularly through the machinations for power and influence between lead protagonist Deputy Rick Grimes and a series of antagonists Shane (Seasons 1 and 2), The Governor (Seasons 3 and 4), and Morgan (Season 6). Alongside this it explores emotional dramas surrounding loss, grief and the changing dynamics of family. In the tradition of Mittell’s ‘complex TV’, the ongoing storyline interweaves multiple narrative strands together and each character’s development introduces new layers of social commentary and moral questioning. This is illustrated by the narrative strand that explores issues around gender construction within a survivalist/militarist environment, which becomes particularly significant and complex as we focus on the character Carol. In the first two seasons of The Walking Dead a strict gender division  emerges wherein the men are responsible for protection while the women are responsible for nurturing. This has led to negative criticism of the show for seemingly reinforcing traditional gender roles as argued by Philip L. Simpson, the gender politics in The Walking Dead are, for the most part, strictly and conventionally delineated in the post-apocalyptic world, in which women are consigned to doing laundry, cooking, and bearing babies while men make the life-or-death decisions, take on leadership roles, stand watch, and go out on hunter-gatherer scavenger missions. (Simpson 2014: 35)

The women comment on this seeming sexism by asking why it is that they are still responsible for the laundry (‘Tell it to the Frogs’ 1.3). When

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a v e r y s lo w ap o c a l yps e 115 Andrea, however, decides that she wants to learn how to shoot and help protect the group from walkers rather than cook and tend the children, she is critised by the other women, embodied in Rick’s wife Lori, for not pulling her weight with the household chores. Lori accuses her of sitting on top of the mobile home with a rifle in her lap, working on her tan, while she and the other women ‘are providing stability. We are trying to create a life worth living’ (‘18 Miles Out’ 2.10) Lori seems to embody a particular stereotype of gender, defined as wife to Rick, lover to Shane, and mother to Carl. At first, as the women complain about their domestic responsibilities, the show seems to be mildly questioning but also reinforcing gender divisions, in particular through the condemnation and pathologising of Andrea who is initially represented as unreliable and suicidal. As the stability that the women are working so hard to provide and protect is increasingly revealed to be an illusion in this post-apocalyptic world, however, the gender roles are broken down. In Season 3, they all work together as a team, albeit under Rick Grimes’ strict leadership, sharing equal responsibility for all aspects of their survival from finding food and shelter to killing zombies, referred to on the show as walkers. ‘Seed’ (3.1) opens as the group break into an abandoned house and, like a well-oiled machine, silently sweep through in two groups, with Maggie working alongside Rick, Daryl, T-dog and Carl in the first group, killing the remaining walkers, while the others scavenge for food and weapons before they all leave as the next wave of walkers arrive. Later, when they find the abandoned prison, they all work together to distract and dispatch the walkers while Rick secures the gate. Carol takes up position on the watch towers with Daryl, Hershel and Carl, picking off the walkers from a distance with their rifles and crossbow; Lori shoots her pistol from the gate while Maggie, Beth, T-dog and Glenn draw the walkers to the fence and take them out, one by one, by stabbing them through the skulls. The women work alongside the men throughout these opening scenes. Living on the road and hand to mouth requires that the division of labour should be based upon strength and skill rather than gender. As such, through the gradual deconstruction of societal norms, social constructions are seemingly laid bare and gradually dismantled. Even Rick’s leadership of the group in Season 3, described by fans as a Ricktatorship, breaks down at the end of the season as he turns over the decision-making to the group now attempting to set up a life in the prison. By the beginning of Season 4 the group have established a cross-gender Council to run things, with Carol and Sasha taking leading positions alongside Daryl, Glenn and Hershel. Similarly, after Lori dies in childbirth, itself both a gender

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cliché and a harsh reality about giving birth without medical supervision in this new world, the responsibility for caring and raising the baby Judith is shared as well. While Hershel’s daughter Beth initially leads on this task, the series repeatedly shows everyone in the group taking turns at holding, feeding and sourcing food for the child. In particular, in Season 4, Tyrese, having had his fill of killing walkers, takes responsibility for caring for the baby, while in Season 5 this falls to her older brother Carl. Furthermore, while leadership is repeatedly presented as the purview of the male c­haracters – even Alexandria-leader Deanna eventually dies and hands over the responsibility for the community to Rick – the leadership strategies of the men are regularly called into question. Deanna’s death in Season 6 seemingly reinforces Rick’s view that the community is soft and unable to sustain itself in this new world and once again places him in charge, but the implication is that Deanna’s plans for the growth and prosperity of the community, scribbled on a map and handed over to Michonne (and not Rick) with the motto ‘some day this pain will be useful to you’, does represent the right way forward; only time will tell whether the group will follow her lead. This brings us to Carol, a character whose narrative arc both conforms to and redefines conceptions of gender. In Season 1 Carol embodies the domestic within this new cultural landscape, described by Simpson as ‘one of the most traditional women in the storyline’ (Simpson 2014: 35). Carol takes responsibility for cooking, doing laundry and taking care of the children, and even goes as far, when pushed to vote on whether they should murder a man who might be a threat to the group, as to declare ‘I didn’t ask for this. You can’t ask us to decide something like this. Please decide either of you, both of you but leave me out’ (Judge, Jury, Executioner 2.11). Carol seems to conform to a very traditional gender role, deferring leadership to the men. The revelation, however, that she is the victim of domestic abuse highlights the problematic nature of the domesticity that she seems to embody. While she clearly appears meek in these early episodes, it becomes apparent through how she protects her daughter from her husband Ed, that she is, in fact, a canny survivor, a factor that will play an important part in her narrative trajectory. For instance in ‘Indifference’ (4.4) she tells Rick that she learned how to reset a dislocated shoulder on the internet rather than telling an ER nurse that she fell down the stairs a third time and in ‘Consumed’ (5.6), Carol leads Daryl to safety in a shelter for victims of domestic abuse. While on reflection she describes herself as stupid and weak, these survival techniques underpin her strength in the post-apocalyptic landscape. Carol survives her husband in life, as well as his death, and even survives the traumatic death of her daughter Sophia,

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a v e r y s lo w ap o c a l yps e 117 reminding Lori ‘I don’t need you to patronise me. Everyone either avoids me or they treat me like I’m crazy. I lost my daughter. I didn’t lose my mind’ (‘Judge ,Jury, Executioner’). From this point onward, Carol begins to evolve in a way that parallels Rick’s narrative trajectory. As he struggles with the demands of leadership and the moral choices required in an increasingly uncivilised world, Carol becomes more and more pragmatic about the need for survival. In Season 4, after the loss of Lori and the near loss of his faculties following her death (in contrast to Carol who made it clear that she didn’t lose her mind) Rick turns away from fighting towards farming as a means of providing for his extended family. At the same time Carol takes a pivotal role on the Council as well as clandestinely teaching the children, under the guise of ‘Story-time’, how to protect themselves: how to use knives, how to dispatch a walker and how to fight for survival (‘30 Days Without an Accident’ 4.1). When an infection begins to spread within the community in the prison – doubly dangerous because each person who is infected will come back as a walker when they die – Carol takes it upon herself to kill the infected so as to contain the outbreak, recognising ‘it isn’t just the illness. People die they become a threat’ (‘Infected’ 4.2). This decision is one step too far for Rick, who is fighting to maintain a moral framework he can teach his son. He banishes Carol from the compound because he doesn’t trust her with his children and can’t live with the choices she has made. She is forced to become a lone survivor and survive she does (‘Indifference’ 4.4). Carol is repeatedly shown to be able to do what others cannot, best demonstrated when she is forced to shoot Lizzie – a damaged child so traumatised by this new world that she kills her sister in order to see her return as a walker – because Lizzie is too dangerous to remain around people (‘The Grove’ 4.14). In Season 4’s finale ‘A’(4.16), Rick is similarly pushed beyond normal limits in terms of what he will do to survive when a gang threaten to beat Daryl to death and rape both Michonne and Carl. Unable to free his arms from the grip of the leader of the group, Rick bites into his neck, tearing the flesh and severing the jugular vein, killing him instantly. This is a stark reminder that the line between human and walker is a thin one. When Daryl tries to comfort Rick by telling him that anybody would have responded similarly, Rick admits ‘no, they wouldn’t . . . It ain’t all good but that’s me. That’s why I’m here now. That’s why Carl is. I’m gonna keep him safe. That’s all that matters’. In Season 5, Carol and Rick are reunited after she facilitates the escape of the group from the cannibals at Terminus and Rick acknowledges that he finally understands her and that they are the same: ‘I still don’t know about what you did. I know you knew

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somethings that I didn’t . . . I sent you away to this and now we’re joining you. Will you have us?’ (‘Strangers’ 5.2). Finally, when Carol arrives at the seeming sanctuary of Alexandria, a gated community which has survived the apocalypse untouched, she and Rick both doubt whether this community can survive the world beyond its walls and prepare to protect their own people in any eventuality. Carol, therefore, decides to retreat into obscurity beneath the masquerade of gender. She adopts a cardigan, baking tins and a sunny disposition to become the image of the happy homemaker and thus become invisible within the community. This performance evokes her earlier appearance on the show and highlights how her behaviour was itself a performance of domestic life, concealing the reality of the abused wife. This emphasis on performance is paralleled by other performances by Carol within the series: story time; covering herself in walker guts in order to break into the terminus surrounded by the undead (‘No Sanctuary 5.1); and dressing as one of the Wolves in order to get close enough to kill them (‘JSS’ 6.2). Carol’s repeated performances of gender and identity across the series highlights the performativity of all identity and demonstrates the way in which the serialised apocalyptic narrative facilitates an analysis and critique of social norms in keeping with Romero’s allegorical approach to the zombie but which slowly unfolds over time and requires the committed engagement with character and plot that are the mainstay of the televisual form. Furthermore, this is but one thematic strand within The Walking Dead that regularly intermingles with a range of other strands about masculinity, power, authority, community, faith and family, allowing for a complex use of the zombie not as allegory but provocateur, confronting the audience with heart-breaking, thought-provoking and often shocking developments that raise questions about what it means to be male, female, child, adult, animal, human, barbaric and civilised. More significantly, the golden age of zombie TV seems to be just beginning with a growing number of zombie television series emerging on the horizon with the potential to take the zombie in new directions by integrating the genre within different televisual storytelling traditions. While The Walking Dead, Fear the Walking Dead and Z-Nation are, at the time of writing, set to continue to dominate the apocalyptic/postapocalyptic zombie text, Rob Thomas’ iZombie offers a fresh take on the genre by integrating the zombie with the police-procedural and a Veronica Mars-style female detective format, giving more credence, not just to the zombie voice but to the female zombie voice. While the first season focused on the personal experience of Liv Moore (a good zombie name), a promising young med student who is infected with the zombie virus and

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a v e r y s lo w ap o c a l yps e 119 must renegotiate her career and ‘life’ plans, as well as her eating habits, the show seems set for a darker turn as the outbreak begins to spread further. Furthermore, plans exist for Simon Barry to adapt Stefan Petrucha’s novel Dead Mann Walking for CBS, another first person zombie narrative, while AMC have signed up the adaptation of George Romero’s graphic novel Empire of the Dead. Romero is due to co-write the series, with longtime collaborator Peter Grunwald, as well as act as executive producer. Romero’s move to television marks the final confirmation of the synergy between the zombie apocalypse format and the serial nature of TV as he implicitly offers his stamp of approval. What he will do with it and how he will negotiate his allegory along televisual lines remains to be seen. After decades of clambering at the doors and windows, the zombie has finally found its way into our homes.

Notes 1. Of note is that this scene that ‘made everyone nervous’ was repurposed as a repeated trope within the reality television series I Survived a Zombie Apocalypse in which contestants twice have to cover themselves in blood and viscera in order to conceal themselves from the undead. 2. This convention of the genre is spoofed in Michael Jackson’s music video for Thriller and then given very serious treatment and discussion in the BBC3 series In the Flesh when zombie Kieran describes his experience of crawling out of the grave. His description is discussed in Chapter 6.

C HA PT E R 5

The Hybrid Hero

In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode ‘Get it Done’ (7.15) vampire slayer Buffy Summers discovers the origins of the slayer-line. It is revealed that the Shadowmen, pre-modern precursors to the Watchers Council who oversee the training of Slayers, infused the body of the first slayer with the spirit of a demon, deliberately constructing a human/demon hybrid as humanity’s protector from monsters. Buffy is horrified by this revelation and refuses the Shadowmen’s offer of additional power as the risk to her humanity is too high a price. In the same episode, however, the preference for pure humanity is called into question by former demon Anya when she complains about being human again: ‘Being human? Ugh! You’re always icky on the inside, disgusting on the outside’. In the same episode recently re-ensouled vampire Spike is forced to find a balance between his soul and his inner demon in order to help Buffy. He finds his strength by embracing his dark side and rekindling his pleasure in the kill, something he had lost with the restoration of his soul. Similarly reformed witch Willow – whose power had escalated out of control after bringing Buffy back from the dead in Season 6, as discussed in the last chapter – taps into the recesses of her dark magic to re-open the portal through which Buffy had travelled to meet the Shadowmen. While both Spike and Willow are hesitant to draw upon their powers and slightly horrified by the results, the episode makes it clear that these actions put both Willow and Spike on  the path towards accepting their power and the hybridity of their identities which enables them to play a major role in saving the world at the end of the series. Furthermore, after Buffy refuses the Shadowmen’s offer, they give her a vision of the vampire army that she will eventually have to face, which forces her to question her decision, telling Willow, ‘I think I made a mistake’. The episode may express anxiety about this type of hybrid identity in the face of the potential loss of their humanity, but it also celebrates hybridity as a necessary component of a hero, particularly in the face of an impending apocalypse.

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the hybr id he ro 121 In the final episode of Angel (‘Not Fade Away’ 5:22), Angel, a vampire with a soul and therefore a character, like Spike, equally defined by hybridity, accepts that it is the demon that gives him the strength to defeat evil. In a final battle, Hamilton, the liaison to the demonic Senior Partners of evil, multi-dimensional law firm Wolfram & Hart, taunts Angel by claiming that he cannot be defeated because the blood and ancient power of the Wolf, the Ram and the Hart run through his veins. Angel responds by asking ‘can you pick out the one word there you probably shouldn’t have said’ before revealing his fangs and attacking Hamilton to drink his blood. Infused with his powers, Angel is able to defeat Hamilton and is ready to face the demon hordes unleashed by Wolfram & Hart. In this case, Angel not only accepts his inner demon but draws upon his vampire nature in order to gain the necessary strength to survive this final battle. In fact, the need for Angel to accept vampirism as a part of his identity as a champion is a key component of the series from the show’s first season. While Angel yearns to be human again, he accepts that in order to help the helpless, thus atoning for the crimes and atrocities he committed as a vampire, he must have the power of a vampire. In ‘I Will Remember You’ (1.8), Angel becomes human when he accidentally absorbs the transformative blood of another demon. While he has a brief opportunity to revel in his humanity, enjoying the sensual pleasures of sunlight, food and making love to Buffy, he chooses to turn back time and become a vampire with a soul once more as he understands that he is of no use in the cosmic battle against evil as a human. In the worlds of Buffy and Angel, the strength to hunt and fight the vampire, as well as other monsters, requires hybridity. The presence of hybrid heroes is not limited to these series but rather permeates a significant proportion of twenty-first century vampire literature, film and television – such as Blade, Underworld, Ultraviolet, The Originals, Vampire Academy, The Strain – as well as a growing proportion of zombie fiction and film – most notably the revitalised in Darren Shan’s Zom-B young adult literary series, R in both the book and film Warm Bodies (2013), and the heroine Alice in the Resident Evil films. In order to fight monsters, one must be a little monstrous. The undead hybrid is not entirely a twenty-first century phenomenon as it finds a pre-cursor in Slavic folklore surrounding the dhampir – the term for a male child born of the union between vampire and human. Within folkloric belief, the dhampir has the power to ‘see and destroy all vampires of the world, and among many Gypsies is the chief vampire slayer’ (Guiley 2005: 101).This figure has subsequently been adapted into literature, film and videogames as a hunter of vampires, a creature that possesses many of the powers of the vampire but few of their weaknesses,

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although they often share their bloodthirst which they must control. In fiction, the dhampir can be either male or female. In the videogames and spin-off film Bloodrayne (2005), the lead protagonist Rayne is a dhampir who kills vampires in her vengeful pursuit of the vampire who raped her mother, and as such connotes cultural anxieties about sexual abuse, rape and miscegenation (see Perkowski 1976).1 In this manner the dhampir has much in common with the myth of the ‘tragic mulatta’, in which ‘a fair-skinned black woman, usually of mixed racial heritage’ possesses ‘hair and facial features [that] allow her to “pass” for white’ (Edwards 2002:88). According to Lynne Edwards, ‘her tragedy lies in her thwarted potential, in her marginalisation; she is the ultimate “other” who does not belong in either the black community from which she comes or the white society to which she aspires’ (Edwards 2002: 88). The relationship between the ‘tragic mulatta’ and the ‘othered’ vampire is evident in the Angel episode ‘Are you Now or Have you Ever Been’ (2.2) when Angel meets Judy, who explains that her fiancé rejected her when he found out about her: Judy: Because I’m not what I say I am. I’ve been passing since I was 15 years old. Angel: Passing? Judy nods: For white. My mother was colored, my father – I didn’t even know him! My blood isn’t pure. – It’s tainted. Angel: It’s just blood – Judy. – It–it’s all just blood. Judy: Nobody believes that! Not even my ‘mother’s family’. I’m not one thing or the other. I’m nothing. Angel: I know what that’s like.

While Angel is not a traditional dhampir, he can relate to the feeling of being neither one thing nor another. The alienation associated with the tragic mulatta seems to manifest within the dhampir as a type of self-loathing, seeing the vampire inside them as remnant of the monster who raped their mother, and this often fuels their role as vampire killer. This is evidenced in Rayne in Bloodrayne and the character Mr Quinlan in The Strain, both the books and the television series, who is the half-vampire son of the Master, the pure bred vampire who seeks to take over the world. Like Rayne, Quinlan is the result of the rape of his mother. Quinlan loathes the Master and chooses to work first with the other original vampires, and then with the human resistance, to destroy him and his vampire progeny. In contrast to Rayne and Mr Quinlan, the vampire-hunting superhero Blade is a modernised dhampir, whose hybridity extends beyond sexual union to genetic alterations due to exposure to vampire DNA. This occurs when his human mother was bitten by a vampire while pregnant (Blade 1999). Rushed into hospital in

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the hybr id he ro 123 shock and haemorrhaging from the neck, her vampire bite can be read as a form of rape or sexual violation. In this case the bite triggers a transformation in Blade’s DNA while in the womb – turning him into a day-walking vampire. Like Rayne and Mr Quinlan, Blade subsequently devotes his life to fighting vampires and searching for the vampire who bit and ‘murdered’ his mother. The hybridity associated with the dhampir has in the twenty-first century been transformed in keeping with the modernisation of the genre as discussed in Chapter 2. While Angel’s hybridity seems more spiritual as his soul and the demon fight for dominance, in most other twenty-first century texts, this hybridity is written at a cellular level. Even Van Helsing, it is revealed in Dracula 2000 (2000), has become a human/vampire hybrid by infecting himself with small doses of Dracula’s blood – collected via leeches – in order to gain long life and continue his war against the undead. Vampire hunter Abraham Satrakian in The Strain takes a more scientific approach by infecting his body with small doses of the vampire blood worms, absorbed in a solution through the eyes, as a means of maintaining his health in order to keep living and continue his fight against the vampires (‘Fort Defiance’ 2.3). Furthermore, the focus upon and, in many cases, celebration of hybridity extends beyond human/ vampire hybrids to werewolf/vampire in Underworld and The Originals and human/zombie hybrids in Resident Evil. With this in mind, and following on from the previous chapters’ analysis of how the vampire and zombie have been re-imagined through science and technology, this chapter will consider how the vampire or zombie hunter has been similarly re-imagined, particularly within big budget, dystopian, vampire/zombie cinematic franchises, such as Blade, Underworld, Ultraviolet and Resident Evil, as a hybrid hero. In these films the hero is no longer represented by religious or learned experts – nor is Alice, the protagonist of the Resident Evil films, the usual all-too human survivor of a zombie apocalypse – but rather a product of genetic engineering or genetic mutation that mirrors the development of the vampire and zombie in these films. Significantly, these films in particular suggest that the hero, much like Buffy and Angel, must embody a cross between human and vampire/zombie in order to defend humanity and combat the hordes of undead. Furthermore, their hybridity is compounded by genetic and technological enhancements that relocate their power as monster hunters away from their mind – best represented by Dracula’s Van Helsing – and into their body, gifted as they now are with physical prowess and a tech­ nological embodiment that presents them as internal and external cyborgs. This technological prowess is enhanced through the use of digital special effects in the representation of their bodies. In this manner, while the films

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express, like Buffy, uncertainty about the loss of humanity in favour of the monstrous, the hybridising of the genre of the undead with the specialeffects-driven action film also celebrates the hybrid form.

Hybridity, Post Humanism and the Undead When discussing the undead in relation to notions of hybridity, it is necessary to note that the undead are themselves inherently hybrid in the basic sense of the word. Whether vampire or zombie, these creatures bring together life and death in one body, or as Julia Kristeva suggests, they are ‘death infecting life. Abject’ (Kristeva 1982: 4). They are a body without a soul; or in the case of Spike and Angel (from Buffy and Angel), they are the undead with a soul. They are doubly hybrid, or ‘doubly abjected’ as Matt Hills and Rebecca Williams argue, claiming that Angel, and by implication Spike, ‘is a vampire that crosses the border between life and death, but as a vampire with a soul he is narratively and semiotically humanized, and given free will to choose not to harm others . . . He is both a monster and a victim, both occasionally feminized and often highly conventionally masculinized’ (Hills and Williams 2005: 210). It is this hybridity that has contributed to their positioning as monstrous, as, by Noël Carroll’s definition, they are categorically interstitial – not one thing or another but both simultaneously (Carroll 1990: 32). Due to this hybridity, the vampire and zombie have both, historically, been positioned as standing in opposition to the idealised notions of purity of mind and body and as such embodying a threat to humanity. The vampire’s invasion, from country to city to body, marks the infiltration of protected societal and bodily barriers that must be restored through the eviction of the vampire and the restoration of boundaries. As Laura Diehl argues with regard to vampire and alien invasion narratives of the 1950s and earlier, ‘[t]he proteanism of the alien organisms reflects deep-rooted anxieties over the horror of continuity and the loss of integral body, identity, and species boundaries’ (Diehl 2013: 97). Stephen D. Arata describes this, in relation to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as the ‘narrative of reverse colonization . . . [expressing] the fear that what has been represented as the “civilized” world is on the point of being colonized by “primitive forces”’ (Arata 1990: 623). Significantly, this colonisation occurs from within as the vampire infiltrates the borders of society as well as penetrating the boundaries of the body. As Arata explains ‘horror arises not because Dracula destroys bodies, but because he appropriates and transforms them’ (Arata 1990: 630). This threat is best exemplified by the way in which the vampire and zombie are presented as a threat to the heroine in two classic – in many

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the hybr id he ro 125 ways foundational – American horror films: Dracula (1931) and White Zombie. In both films, the learned vampire hunter or romantic hero must rescue the heroine, Mina and Madeleine respectively, not simply from the monstrous ‘foreign’ villain, played by Bela Lugosi in both cases, but from becoming a vampire or a zombie. It becomes imperative to protect the purity of their body and spirit, and in so doing, preserve the integrity of humanity from the insidious influence of the undead. In these films, humanity is embodied in the white heterosexual couple repeatedly rescued at the climax of the film. For instance, at the end of Dracula, after Mina is saved from an undead life as a vampire by the destruction of Dracula, she and Johnathan Harker are depicted escaping Dracula’s tomb by walking up the Gothic staircase, into the light of day and away from the dead. Similarly, White Zombie concludes with the evil bokor, Legendre, being thrown off a cliff and to his death and thus lifting the zombie veil from Madeleine, as if from a dream so that she finally recognises her husband. As Alison Peirse argues, ‘the horror is washed away like the waves lapping at the shore beneath the castle’ (Peirse 2013: 79). Furthermore, the vampire hunter as embodied in Stoker’s Van Helsing is traditionally a white male patriarchal figure and while it is usually his responsibility, as discussed above, to preserve the purity of the heroine, he is also often defined by his own purity of spirit and intellect, as well as commitment to his mission. For instance, Hammer Studios’ Dracula presents a battle of patriarchs as the equally youthful and virile vampire and vampire hunter – Dracula and Van Helsing – fight for a paternalis­ tic control of the women, with Van Helsing presented as the virtuous, controlled and highly moral professional (hu)man of science in contrast to Dracula’s decadent, demonic and primal aristocrat. This figure of the vampire hunter remains a pervasive, if often contested, presence within contemporary film and television. One notable example is the Universal blockbuster film Van Helsing – a film that was released contemporaneously with many of the blockbuster films I am discussing in this chapter. While this film suggests modernisation of the genre by reimagining the vampire hunter as a young white action hero, the film remains quite traditional  by presenting Van Helsing as the embodiment of patriarchy because he is employed by the Vatican, a patriarchal institution, and later revealed to be Gabriel – the left hand of God, following the line of JudeoChristian mythology in which God is the ultimate patriarch – ‘God the Father’. While both revelations demonstrate that Van Helsing is not the ultimate authority, he remains an integral part of a patriarchal system. Van Helsing briefly toys with hybridity when he is bitten by a werewolf, but he is eventually cured of this affliction and so the purity of his spirit and

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body are restored and he is left to continue his service to man, church and God. This type of representation of the vampire hunter is, however, increasingly anomalous. Gregory Waller argues that texts such as I Am Legend and Dawn of the Dead critique the role of the vampire hunter by ‘reject[ing] Stoker’s presentation of the “butcher work” [of killing the vampire] as good works’ (Waller 2010: 22). Similarly, many contemporary texts undermine the patriarchy traditionally embodied in Van Helsing by either deconstructing his representation, such as in the television series Dracula (2013–14) in which Van Helsing is shown to be in league with the vampire in an attempt to bring down the secret capitalist society The Order of the Dragon, or by removing him from the narrative, replaced by an altogether different form of vampire hunter who disrupts the social hierarchies associated with patriarchy. It is after all not a coincidence that the modern vampire hunter is often either a person of colour or a woman (or both as in Rise), challenging the privileged authority associated with white male vampire hunters like Van Helsing. It is important to note that Selene and Violet in Underworld and Ultraviolet respectively are not in fact vampire hunters in the traditional sense. Selene is a Deathdealer, a highly skilled vampire who hunts down and kills werewolves, while Violet is part of the vampire resistance. Through the course of their stories, however, they are forced to turn against their own kind in order to uncover conspiracy and betrayal and defend the innocent. As a result, they, along with Alice in Resident Evil, repeatedly defy patriarchy through action by ignoring commands and following their own initiative, instinct and logic and in so doing challenging vampire coven leaders in Underworld and Ultraviolet, government, religious and corporate officials all merged into the character Vice-Cardinal Daxus in Ultraviolet, and global corporate capitalism, embodied in the form of the all-male, international Board of Directors of the Umbrella Organisation in Resident Evil. Similarly, the zombie narrative has, since Night of the Living Dead, challenged the notion that any authority has the answer to the zombie outbreak from the bickering military and scientific leaders who cannot agree on anything in Romero’s first zombie film through to the scientist for the Centre for Disease Control who cannot find a cure and kills himself out of despair in The Walking Dead.2 Furthermore, these heroes challenge patriarchy by embodying a physically disruptive form that defies boundaries, physical limitations and easy categorisation. They achieve this by embracing and embodying hybridity through the blurring of lines between the monstrous and the human, rather than holding onto outdated notions of purity. Lorna Piatti-Farnell

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the hybr id he ro 127 argues that the term ‘hybrid’ should ‘no longer . . . be understood as an in between state, a disordered stage of fusion, but [is] a position in itself ’, a ‘third term’ (Piatti-Farnell 2014: 33). While at different points in their narratives, Blade, Selene, Violet and Alice may see themselves (or be seen) as existing in such an ‘in between state’, these films and franchises are largely focused on establishing the hybrid hero as such a third term. As Dracula points out to Blade, ‘all this time my people were trying to create a new type of vampire, when one already exists. I don’t need to survive. The future of our race rests with you’ (Blade Trinity 2004).Their hybridity is manifested within the films via the iconography of science and technology in which this ‘third term’ is characterised by their cyborg identity. Donna J. Haraway, in her landmark essay ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’, defines the cyborg as ‘a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction’ (Haraway 2004: 158). Rather than seeing this concept in its simplest, robotic terms, she posits that ‘by the late twentieth century, . . . we are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short we are cyborgs’ (Haraway 2004: 158). According to her argument, the social reality is one in which the lines between human, animal and machine have become blurred and technology is an embedded part of human existence. Thus we exist in a world of posthumanism, a term used ‘to describe a humanity taken beyond its original form and subjectivity by the technologies of the post-industrial West’ (Wasson and Alder 2014: 12). While this term often reflects anxieties about the loss of humanity in favour of a growing dependence on technology, Sara Wasson and Emily Alder, drawing upon the work of Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, argue for the ‘political value of the posthuman in the degree to which it resists stable identity categories’ (Wasson and Alder 2014: 13). These monster hunters, therefore, destabilise our understanding of humanity through their physical embodiment of cyborg characteristics, achieved through costume and props that seem to present their weaponry as an extension of their bodies and which serve as the surface indicators of the transformations within. For instance, John J. Jordan argues that Blade ‘is made into a cyborg, a creature that seamlessly blends flesh and technology together into an other-wordly being’ (Jordan 1999: 9). Blade’s body is, throughout all of the films in the trilogy, presented in streamlined, stealth clothing adorned externally with gadgets and pockets for technological and pre-technological weapons, including his samurai sword, ninja stars, silver stakes, submachine gun and a hand-to-hand delivery mechanism for an anti-coagulant, all produced in silver, a metal to which the vampires  are allergic, thus even the pre-modern weapons are re-imagined

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Figure 5.1  The action vampire in Underworld

along ­scientific lines. This cyborg-warrior aesthetic is equally built into the representation of Selene and Violet in Underworld and Ultraviolet respectively. Selene wears a close-fitting one-piece jumpsuit, with a body-armour bodice, spandex leggings, and a long leather coat in which she stores her weapons (see Fig. 5.1). This clothing allows for flexibility in fighting and facilitates the aerodynamics of speedy movement while in pursuit of her enemies. While it does fetishise her body through its close-fitting qualities, it also embodies Selene’s rejection of the frivolousness of the traditional vampire lifestyle, in which most of the other female vampires dress in sparkly – thus highly visible – lose-fitting evening gowns (see Fig. 5.2). Similarly, Violet wears close-fitting spandex trousers, mid-riff tank top and leather jacket that equally allow for flexibility and manoeuvrability. While this style may appear more aesthetic than practical, it is revealed to be made from colour-changing material that, in addition to c­ ontributing

Figure 5.2  Costume for the vampire cyborg in Underworld

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the hybr id he ro 129 to the spectacle of the film, allows Violet to change the colour of her clothing on command, thus enabling her to transform where necessary and present her entire appearance as scientifically constructed. Furthermore, the clothing is adorned with weaponry produced by ‘flat space’ ‘dimension compressing’ technology through which she, and the other vampires, are able to conceal their weaponry within their clothing. Thus their seemingly  traditional pre-modern swords are re-imagined as cutting-edge technology and presented as an extension of their bodies. These characters therefore conform to N. Katherine Hayles’ argument that the ‘posthuman implies not only a coupling with intelligent machines but a coupling so intense and multifaceted that it is no longer possible to distinguish meaningfully between the biological organism and the informational circuits in which the organism is enmeshed (Hayles 1999: 35). This intense coupling of body and technology goes deeper than surface appearance as both Blade and Violet have also been transformed on the inside through scientific intervention. Blade uses a serum, initially taken through injection and later via an inhaler, that allows him to suppress his blood thirst. Similarly, Violet’s body is transformed when she uses a medical suppressant to conceal the vampiric symptoms in her blood and thus get past the security tests upon her entry into a secure medical facility. The cyborg aesthetic characterised by these vampire hunters is paralleled and superseded by the highly aestheticised and fetishised representation of the human/zombie hybrid Alice in the Resident Evil films: Resident Evil (2002), Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004), Resident Evil: Extinction (2007), Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010), and Resident Evil: Retribution (2012). Throughout the franchise Alice is a character who both ­internalises and externalises her cyborg-identity. A viral hybrid, as will be discussed below, Alice’s DNA has ‘bonded’ with the zombie-creating T-virus, resulting in a gradual, internal transformation and her being studied by the Umbrella Organisation who refer to her as ‘Project Alice’. As Margo Collins explains within the Umbrella Organisation ‘she is always called “Project Alice.” This distinction is significant in that it highlights Alice’s position as a posthuman; she is not a person, but a project’ (Collins 2014: 208). Over the course of the film series, she develops superhuman strength and psychic abilities and like her fellow hybrids, Blade, Selene and Violet, her costuming becomes a means of externalising her posthumanism. Alice spends the majority of the first film in a close-fitting, spaghetti-strap red dress with a long slit up the side, revealing black shorts and knee high boots – a style that seems designed to feminise and expose Alice, leaving her vulnerable. The costume, however, undercuts her feminisation by allowing the flexibility and dexterity for her action scenes. In the

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Figure 5.3  Western camouflage for the desert in Resident Evil: Extinction

s­ubsequent films, her style evolves into an increasingly functional and efficient, if also fetishised, costume. In the second film, RE: Apocalypse, she wears military-style khaki trousers, tank top, string vest and boots, with her weaponry strapped around her legs and mid-riff. For the desertlocated post-apocalyptic setting of the next film, RE: Extinction, she wears brown shorts, white T-shirt, leg warmers, boots and Western-style coat (see Fig. 5.3). While the Western theme to the costume is reinforced by the gun holsters strapped to her legs, as well as the bandana tied loosely around her neck, the style continues to emphasise tactical efficiency and, in this desert landscape, camouflage. In RE: Afterlife and Retribution, her costume becomes increasingly similar to Selene’s costume in the Underworld films, with variations on the black spandex body stocking and armoured bodice, causing one character to ask ‘so what’s with the S&M get-up?’ (Retribution). The costuming in these last two films, in particular, raises significant questions and contradictions with regard to the objectification of the female action heroine as the costume is both revealing in its closefittedness but also concealing by covering her entire body. Furthermore, its armoured qualities emphasise strength and power while also suggesting the more conventional gendered image of the dominatrix. So while Alice’s image seems to evoke spectacle, it is also a spectacle that suggests action and movement rather than passive objectification. Bronwen Calvert, drawing upon the work of Dawn Heineken, suggests that ‘action cinema and television shows do “allow greater freedom for the female action hero” and that this is partly to do with the way that such characters are filmed as “figures in motion against a landscape” so that “[t]heir bodies . . . seem part of the world around them rather than set apart”.’ Calvert deduces therefore that this ‘makes it possible both to display the body of

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the hybr id he ro 131 a female action hero and to undercut its objectification because it is being presented in the context of physical strength and fighting ability.’ (Calvert forthcoming). All of the films that feature the hybrid hero, therefore, undermine, and in many ways overturn, the opposition between flesh and technology, passive and active, good and evil, living and dead, human and non-human by having their lead vampire/zombie hunters take on a posthuman form, highlighting the empowerment that lies within this hybrid identity. Alice may bemoan the fact that she ‘barely feels human’ (RE: Apocalypse) while Violet looks for a cure to her vampirism, but their actions confirm the strength that is an inherent part of their hybridity. Similarly, Blade’s hybridity curses him with the vampire’s thirst for blood but he remains free of its allergies to sunlight and silver and in possession of its speed, strength and longevity. Furthermore, at the conclusion of Blade, the daywalker chooses to remain the hybrid human-vampire rather than take the cure developed by the haematologist Dr Karen Jenson, telling her ‘It’s not over. You keep your cure. There is still a war going on – and I have a job to do. You want to help? Make me a better serum’. Here he chooses his posthuman existence over the promise of a pure human life.

Deconstructing the Myth of Racial Purity In the Blade and Underworld films, Selene and Blade embody hybridity but the vampire community and leaders deny their inherent hybridity by fighting for the perceived purity of their race. As Jeffrey Weinstock notes, notions of purity and hybridity are at the heart of the Blade trilogy as well as the Underworld franchise, when he explains: the modern vampire film . . . suggests that the solution to racism and racial violence in modern Western culture is precisely the mixing of bloodlines. Those who remain wed to the ‘purity’ of bloodlines in the modern vampire film are shown to be racists, often with genocidal intentions, wed to old and discredited ideas. Contamination of blood is the solution, not the problem. (Weinstock 2012: 108)

Weinstock argues that ‘Blade is a thinly-veiled allegory of American race relations in which vampires stand in for whites, and humans in general for racial minorities’(Weinstock 2012: 109). This is a legitimate reading of the text in terms of social hierarchies for the distinction between vampire and human does embody, in many ways, the class distinction often associated with race relations in the West. I would argue, however, that the Blade films, alongside the Underworld franchise, equally explore a nuanced and complex representation of identity that muddies a traditional ­understanding of

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race and expresses a contemporary reading in which race is inherently hybrid, reinforcing the hybridity of the heroes. While the leaders of the vampire communities, such as Dragonetti in Blade, Damaskinos in Blade 2, and Victor in Underworld, argue for and attempt to protect the perceived purity of the vampire race, the films repeatedly challenge notions of race as being a distinct biological subset but rather a conglomeration of different categories, constantly intermingling. In this manner, the vampire genre has tapped into contemporary scientific debates about the biological legitimacy of genetic determinacy of race as opposed to the perception that it is a social construction. Neurobiologist and cultural critic Kenan Malik points out that while genetic research has established that ‘race accounts for  just 3–5 per cent of all human difference’, ‘[t]he last few years have [also] seen . . . the development of a number of so-called race specific drugs, medicines targeted at particular race’ (Malik 2011). Scientists repeatedly debate and claim that the Human Genome Project has proved that race does not exist while also claiming that genetics has now provided evidence to support ‘continued use of self-identified race and ethnicity’ (Risch, Burchard, Ziv and Tang 2002). Furthermore, as Malik explains, the traditional concept of race is of a ‘discrete group that is distinguished by certain features – skin colour or body shape, say, or even musicality or intelligence – that are unique to that group. But’ he argues, ‘we now know that there are no features that are the possession of one group to the exclusion of another’ (Malik 2011). There is no such thing as pure race. This complex and at times contradictory cultural and scientific understanding of race is conveyed throughout the Blade and Underworld franchises in which race can be read along multiple layers, from the biological in terms of the genesis and creation of vampires to the complex social and  racial hierarchy within the vampire nation. In the Blade films, the vampires have constructed a hierarchical social division between born and turned vampires, with the latter perceived as a lesser form of being. Repeatedly throughout the films, born vampires look contemptuously on those who are turned, such as Dragonetti’s abhorrence of Frost, when he tells him, ‘who are you to challenge our ways? You’re not even a pure blood . . . I was born a vampire as was every other member of this house. But you Frost, you were merely turned.’ Frost may be characterised as white through the casting of Caucasian actor Stephen Dorff as well as his status as a vampire as argued by Weinstock, but his position as a ‘turned’ vampire enables him to recognise a kinship with the African-American Blade’s vampire/human hybridity, chastising Blade for his denial of his hybridity: ‘so it’s back to pretending we’re human again? Spare me the Uncle Tom routine’. He explains that the humans will ‘never accept a

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the hybr id he ro 133 ­ alf-breed’ like Blade because ‘they’re afraid’ of him, a statement that h equally applies to the pure blood Dragonetti’s fear of Frost. The hatred of  pure blood for the turned vampire is equally on display in Blade 2 when  the elite team of trained pure vampires, the Bloodpack, enter the vampire night club, The House of Pain, and one of the team, Priest, complains: ‘look at them. Half of these bastards aren’t even pure bloods. I tell you what, why don’t we just fucking kill everyone. Just to make sure.’ Similarly, in Blade Trinity, pure vampire Dracula tells vampire leader Danica Telos that the modern vampires are nothing ‘but shadows of your former selves. Look how far you have fallen.’ The vampire nation is rife with prejudice against the hybridised forms of vampires – although they are the ones that seem to fully embrace their enhanced vampire physicality, taking part in euphoric blood raves, S&M practices and body modifi­ cation while pure bloods negotiate treaties with humans. At the same time, Blade confuses these distinctions because he is both a hybrid of human and vampire, and a born vampire. The Bloodpack also embody the racial contradictions that underpin the series. They are an elite team of pure vampires, which suggests notions of eugenics and racial purity along the lines of Nazi Germany, reinforced by the presence of the German-born Reinhardt who makes racially disparaging comments to Blade. Yet one cannot ignore the casting of a racially diverse group of actors to play this pack. These pure blood vampires are a multi-racial/ multi-ethnic group, made up of white, black and Asian actors, embodying a range of global identities, mirroring Fost’s group of turned vampires in Blade. Blade is also surrounded by associate vampire hunters who are equally hybridised. Whistler who connotes white hillbilly trash was turned into a vampire but cured by Blade (Blade and Blade II); Hannibal King was also a turned vampire who was cured (Blade Trinity); and they are all cyborgs. While in Blade it is suggested that it is the turned vampires who display cyborg qualities, dancing to techno music, using computer technology and modern science, in Blade II and Blade Trinity all vampires and vampire hunters display these qualities, undermining the lines between the two sides. More importantly, the layers of identity that surround the vampire characters in the series, challenge the notion of racial purity. Similarly, the Underworld films present notions of racial purity as backward and fictitious. The vampire elder, Victor, argues for the purity of the vampire race, despite the fact that he is a turned vampire, as is Selene. The racial tension in Underworld is not between born and turned vampires, but vampires and werewolves, a relationship that began as master and slave and then became a military opposition when the werewolves broke free and rebelled. Victor sees the werewolves as a lesser race and murdered his

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own vampire daughter when he found out she had slept with a werewolf and was pregnant with his child. He would rather see his daughter burn than see her give birth to a vampire/werewolf hybrid child (Underworld; Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (2009)). He describes the child – and later Michael, the first vampire/werewolf hybrid – as an abomination, language that evokes anxieties about miscegenation. However, when the origin mythology for the vampires and the werewolves is revealed in Underworld Evolution, it demonstrates that there is no purity within either species but they are inherently linked and hybrid. Selene uncovers that the fifth century Alexander Corvinus, a lone human survivor of a plague, had genetically adapted to the virus, making him immortal. He had three sons, each of whom carried this gene. One was bitten by a wolf and another by a bat and, as a result, these brothers became the first werewolf and vampire. The third remained human but passed the dormant gene down through the generations. Hybridity is, therefore, revealed to be an inherent part of every identity within the franchise, through the merging of a virus, human DNA and bat/wolf DNA to produce the vampire and werewolf nations. There is a symbiosis of elements interacting here. The same occurs within Michael, the modern-day heir to the Corvinus line, whose genetic make-up makes him an ideal candidate to be the first vampire/werewolf hybrid, when he is turned into a werewolf and then later bitten by Selene. In his body the two genetic lines are able to coexist. Similarly, Selene is given the choice to drink the blood of Alexander Corvinus in order to transform her at a molecular level which leads to her becoming the first day-walking vampire. When she asks Corvinus, what she will become, he responds ‘the future’. In this manner it is the mixing of her vampire DNA with his immortal blood that propels her on to the next stage of evolution. In the final film in the series, Underworld Awakening, Selene has given birth to Michael’s child – the first born vampire/werewolf hybrid. The series positions hybridity at the centre of its serialised narrative and suggests that it is this hybridity that propels evolution. This thinking is in keeping with evolutionist Lynn Margulis’ argument that evolution is fostered by the symbiosis of living creatures. She and Dorion Sagan claim that ‘symbiosis, the merging of organisms into new collectives, proves to be a major power of change on earth. As we examine ourselves as products of symbiosis over billions of years, the supporting evidence for our multimicrobe ancestry becomes overwhelming’ (Margulis and Sagan 1987: 34). Controversial within evolutionary biology, Margulis claims that ‘evolution goes in big jumps’ based upon what she refers to as symbiogenesis, ‘the mergers between different kinds of organisms’ (quoted in Teresi 2011). According to Margulis ‘symbiosis is an ecological phenomenon where one

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the hybr id he ro 135 kind of organism lives in physical contact with another. Long-term symbiosis leads to new intracellular structures, new organs and organ systems, and new species as one being incorporates another being that is already good at something else’ (quoted in Teresi 2011). This symbiotic relationship is central to Underworld in which both vampirism and lycanthropy are the product of the symbiotic union of the vampire and werewolf virus respectively with a human host who is able to survive the infection and be transformed. Michael is the ultimate host, able to survive the fusion of his human DNA with both werewolf and vampire DNA simultaneously, which transforms him into a new hybrid. In this manner, Michael embodies the destabilisation of the very notion of purity that underpins the racial identity that defines vampires like Victor and the other elders, and instead represents, along with Selene and Blade, a new future.

Viral Hybridity Rewriting the Body Milla Jovovich has played two notable undead hybrid heroes in the form of Violet Song Jat Shariff in Ultraviolet and, more famously, Alice in the Resident Evil franchise. In both cases, Violet and Alice are viral hybrids, infected with a genetically designed virus that transforms Violet and Alice into a hemaphage (someone infected with a modified form of vampire virus – the Hemoglophagic Virus) and a zombie/human hybrid respectively. Priscilla Wald has argued that in contagion narratives, the viral hybrid that carries the infecting agent is presented as being at the centre of an ‘apocalyptic battle’ between science and pathogen, a threat that must be contained (Wald 2008: 212). This is the key plot point that underpins 28 Weeks Later, which takes place after the rage virus has been eradicated from the UK and the military have begun the process of repatriating British survivors to the city of London. The return to a form of ‘normality’ is, however, disrupted when a survivor who seems to be immune is ­discovered. Just as the scientists realise that she is in fact a carrier, and before they can contain her, a painful reunion with the husband who abandoned her to the infected causes her to pass on the virus to him through her tears and thus begins the viral outbreak once more. As a result, the hybrid is positioned as an unruly threat that is capable of penetrating the boundaries of the body, thwarting military and scientific control and inciting a global apocalypse. In Ultraviolet and Resident Evil, however, the story is told from the point  of view of the infected and so we watch the infection transform Violet and Alice into superhuman heroines, like Buffy and Selene, ­possessing great strength, dexterity, precision and intelligence. Their

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enhanced abilities are conveyed through the hybridised conventions of the digital special-effects-driven, martial arts action film, building on what Michele Pierson describes in relation to The Matrix as a ‘transnational aesthetic matrix – drawn from Hong Kong action cinema, Japanese anime, and from the art of the American comic artist Frank Miller’ (Pierson 2002: 161).3 In this manner, they further embody generic and transnational hybrids, as well as being cyborgs, a fusion of physical action and stunts performed by Jovovich (and a team of stunt performers) and digital special effects in which the body is made to transcend normal physical limitations. As William Brown explains characters in films are typically contrasted to their setting, such that figures stand in opposition to each other and to their ground. They can neither walk through a brick wall nor mesh with it, for materially they are different. Humans are different from all solid objects that surround them, including other humans. Such a statement is obvious, to the extent that we take it for granted. However, since the advent of digital cinema, we can no longer make such assumptions. (Brown 2013: 108)

Violet and Alice are presented as no longer defined by the typical rules of space and time as described by Brown. Violet, in fact, is repeatedly presented as being interconnected with the space around her, able to transform her appearance to match her surroundings. The world in which the narrative is set is a highly artificial one, constructed through layers of green screen special effects and Violet’s clothing repeatedly changes to mirror the colour schemes of her environment, achieved through digital colour correction. This is most evident in the beginning of the film when she walks through the various stages of security within the Laboratories for Latter Day Defence in an attempt to acquire what she thinks is a cure for vampirism. Each room has a bold colour scheme and as she walks through each space, the colour of her clothing transforms from violet to black, to yellow and black, to red and black, mirroring the changes to her environment. Similarly, her skin has a smooth digital sheen to it that matches the visual quality of the film’s digital aesthetic. She is as much a product of digital technology as the film’s highly artificial setting. In this manner Violet seems to embody what physicists refer to as ‘entanglement’ and which William Brown argues is conveyed through the way in which digital technology highlights our inseparability from the universe (Brown 2013: 95) by presenting the body as ‘just a(nother) part of the continuum’ (Brown 2013: 116). As Brown explains, digital technology captures ‘the complementarity, or the (admittedly boggling) connection of particles – even when separated by (great) distances’ (Brown 2013: 103), challenging, according to Brown, ‘the typical binarism of (separated) subject and

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the hybr id he ro 137 object through which we typically understand our position in the world/ universe’ (Brown 2013: 95–6). Brown argues that the ‘ability of the digital camera to pass through bodies suggests that human bodies are “meaningless,”’ (Brown 2013: 110) and as a result blurs the lines between the subject and object, embodying a fundamental loss of identity, rendering the human ‘hollow or invisible’ (Brown 2013: 109). Ultraviolet explores this loss of identity  as outlined by Violet in her opening narration when she explains that the ­infection caused her to lose her husband, child, future and life. Similarly, Alice explains that she ‘barely feels human’ but struggles to hold onto a semblance of her humanity as she faces the undead. In both cases, however, this technology also embodies a new posthuman identity, one of power and strength. In Resident Evil: Apocalypse, it is revealed that Alice has been deliberately infected with the T[zombie]-virus and later her blood is described as having ‘bonded’ with the virus. As a result, she does not become ill nor does her body mutate on the outside, as does the body of the environmentalist, Matt who is transformed into a giant monster through infection. Instead her body mutates on the inside and she is able to transcend not just the physical restrictions of her human body but also the zombie body. The zombie is a monster that is generally bound within its decaying body although that body does undermine boundaries – between life/death, inner/outer, whole/dismembered. As mad scientist Dr Isaac explains, however, the zombie – or biohazard as he refers to them – is defined by its ‘hunger for flesh’ and its ‘baser instincts’ despite not having a biological need for food and while it can continue to exist despite its decaying nature, its movements are limited by the constraints of its body particularly in relation to speed (Resident Evil: Extinction).4 In contrast, Alice is presented as a superlative p ­ hysical fighter, able to use a wide selection of weapons, such as guns, knives, swords, crossbows, all with perfect precision, while also possessing great speed and dexterity in hand-to-hand combat. As the virus continues to cause mutation within her body, her powers grow and enable her to perform outstanding feats of acrobatics. In Resident Evil: Apocalypse she is able to run down the side of a high-rise building with only a wire to protect her (see Fig. 5.4). Before reaching the bottom, she leaps upon and disarms four security guards. In Resident Evil: Extinction she even moves beyond the physical as she d ­ evelops the powers of telekinesis and pyrokinesis. For instance, when a convoy of survivors is attacked by a flock of zombified birds, infected by having fed off the bodies of the dead,  Alice  stops and redirects the fire issuing out of a flame-thrower away from the survivors and up into air. Through her intervention the

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Figure 5.4  Special Effects Action Cyborg in Resident Evil: Apocalypse

flames expand until the sky is on fire and all of the birds have been reduced to ash. Her abilities grow exponentially with each film as does the manner in which she disrupts the boundaries of the body and of society. Special effects play a key role in conveying this disruption such as in the final shot of RE: Extinction when she discovers that the Umbrella Organisation has cloned her DNA. The final shot of the film is a medium shot of Alice and her clone as the virtual camera pulls back to an extreme long shot to reveal hundreds of Alices, all stored in a warehouse, kept in suspended animation. The viral infection that has transformed Alice into this hybrid action hero and resulted in her being cloned, makes Alice so much more than human but also more than monster. The franchise overturns our conception of monstrosity by reimagining the heroine as a hybrid monster. Bronwen Calvert explores this relationship between monstrosity, hybridity and female empowerment through her analysis of the similarly hybrid figure of the demon God Illyria – God/human, male/female – in Angel in which Illyria’s prowess is presented via ‘spectacular fight scenes together with special effects, which allow Illyria to show her powerful superiority’ (Calvert 2015: 185). Like Illyria, Alice similarly displays her monstrous hybridity through her appropriation of the action-hero role, able to perform dynamic and acrobatic feats of martial arts, drawing upon cinematic traditions established in films such as The Iron Monkey (1993), The Matrix (1999) and Equilibrium (2002). Resident Evil: Afterlife begins with a spectacular special effects opening in line with these earlier action/science-fiction spectaculars in which Alice and the clones she liberated from the medical facility in the last film work together to infiltrate and destroy a science facility in Japan in order to bring down the corporation who infected her. In this sequence, she

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Figure 5.5  Digital Effects in Resident Evil: Afterlife

defies the boundaries of her own body through its duplication, multiplying her skills and operating like a machine with a new clone appearing to replace each one destroyed in the attack.5 The Alices repeatedly perform daring feats of martial arts, such as when two of them leap backward in slow motion through a window as they fire at the oncoming soldiers (see Fig. 5.5). As they plummet to the ground they continue to fire while also attaching a grappling hook and wire to the ceiling, thus allowing them to turn and continue the fall head first as they shoot the men below. While one of the clones is shot as she approaches the ground, the other is able to land perfectly. What distinguishes Ultraviolet and the Resident Evil films from Blade and Underworld is that the virus that transforms them into a vampire and zombie/hybrid is genetically engineered, a product created and used by corrupt corporate and political institutions to exploit humanity. In Ultraviolet a weapons lab discovered an obscure virus and tried to modify it to create faster, stronger soldiers, but in so doing unleashed a more contagious form of the virus. In Resident Evil, the T-virus is the product of the Umbrella Organisation, a global corporation specialising in the production of bio weapons. Furthermore, both films are marked by the absence of any independent form of government but instead present dystopian futures in which the world is run by the corrupt collusion of science and military organisations. Ultraviolet in fact brings together science, military and church in the form of the Arch Ministry, led by Vice-Cardinal Ferdinand Daxus, while the Umbrella Corporation is a global conglomerate. The attempt to contain, control and exploit the virus within Violet and Alice, therefore, is presented as a means of restricting their posthuman

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evolution by those who created them. In Ultraviolet, the hemaphages are rounded up, segregated and then eventually ‘disappeared’ as they are deemed a threat to humanity, all of which leads to a vampire resistance and what Violet describes as the ‘blood wars’. Similarly in the Resident Evil films, Alice is monitored, tracked, cloned and controlled by the Umbrella Corporation who view her as their property, an object to be controlled and patented. Even when they, briefly, restore her humanity by providing a serum to the T-virus in Resident Evil: Afterlife, she continues to be tested and monitored until they forcibly reinfect her in Resident Evil: Retribution to make her the ultimate weapon against the zombie apocalypse. In this manner, these heroines are presented as the product of patriarchal organisations, the inevitable result of a growing market economy in which science, military and corporate capitalism are increasingly intertwined. In Ultraviolet, Violet attempts to stop the government from unleashing what she believes to be a vampiral antigen. In reality, it is revealed that it is in fact a human antigen, ‘lethal enough to kill every human on the planet’. With the vampires nearing extinction, the government needs a new object of fear with which to control humanity and from which it can also, presumably, earn profit. Vice Cardinal Daxis explains that he has an antidote and once the virus is released, anyone who wants it can queue up daily to receive it, enabling him to ‘keep order in a society that left to itself would sprint toward chaos like an Olympic event.’ Similarly, Alice describes the Umbrella Corporation as the ‘largest, most powerful commercial entity in the world’. Through the hybridity that the viruses foster in Violet and Alice, these women develop the power to resist their social and corporate programming, challenge their patriarchal creators, and protect humanity from the monsters.6 Significantly, the monsters are not the vampires and zombies that surround the narrative, but the corporate and scientific authorities who seek to destroy and/or exploit these hybrids. From Buffy to Blade, Violet to Alice, the hybrid hero resists and challenges corporate and patriarchal organisations through their actions and their bodies that refuse to be contained, regardless of the origins of their hybridity. They defy accepted behaviour, perceived racial boundaries, physical limitations and the boundaries of the body, reimaging the human as a hybrid form in which the lines between human, machine and monster are blurred. Of course it is important to remember that these texts are examples of big budget, global corporate film and television production, embodying the tensions between being a product of a corporate economy and evoking a critique of such systems. Despite this tension, the fusion of the vampire and zombie film with the high-octane, digital action genre still serves to celebrate their resistance and viscerally align the audience

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the hybr id he ro 141 with the hybrid’s perspective through the genre’s visually stimulating and kinetic aesthetic form. These films invite the audience to embrace hybridity in all of its forms and see the world through the eyes of the monster. This perspective plays an increasingly important role within the contemporary vampire and zombie film and TV series which has seen a rise in sympathetic undead. The next chapter will consider the implications of the first-person vampire and zombie text for our understanding and experience of the apocalypse.

Notes 1. One could also argue that the living vampires in I Am Legend are a form of hybrid, existing somewhere in between Neville as the last living human and the undead vampires who stalk the living. The living vampires have been changed  at a cellular level by the virus but can walk in daylight and have learned to control their bloodlust like Blade. They even hunt the undead vampires as well as, eventually, Neville. 2. It is worth noting that in the Resident Evil films, the figures of scientific and military authority shift from incompetent to culpable. 3. Pierson uses this phrase to describe the aesthetics developed for The Matrix and so in applying her phrase to Ultraviolet and Resident Evil, it is important to note that The Matrix is a key referent here. 4. Dr Isaac does eventually create genetically altered zombies that are super-fast and strong. 5. There is also a touch of the videogame framework within this trope as the Alice avatar is replaced each time she dies thus facilitating her continuance in her mission much like avatars are brought back to life so we can continue playing the game. This synergy with the game is made clear in Resident Evil: Retribution in which Alice must escape a biohazard testing facility by working her way through each testing ground in the form of different urban locations (Tokyo, New York, Moscow). Each location possesses its own physical threats that must be overcome. 6. Violet and Alice’s resistance to their programming and defiance of the institutions who facilitated their evolution is paralleled in Buffy the Vampire Slayer when Buffy resigns from the Watchers’ Council in order to work independently. In each case these hybrid heroes challenge the patriarchal institutions that seek to control their development and power.

C HA PT E R 6

‘Be Me’: I-Vampire/I-Zombie

In the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In (2008), a lonely twelveyear-old boy, Oskar, who is bullied at school, is befriended by the new girl, Eli, when she moves into the apartment next door. Oskar is drawn to Eli as she appears to be an equally lonely child of a single parent who, like him, does not seem to fit in. Eventually, however, Oskar discovers that his new friend is a vampire. After this revelation, Eli explains that she is just like him, reminding Oskar that the first time she heard him speak, he was holding a knife and rehearsing threats against the classroom bullies. He counters by pointing out that he doesn’t kill people, to which she responds ‘but you’d like to if you could to get revenge’. She, as Eli explains, kills only out of necessity. To make her point, she sits on his lap, stares into his eyes and asks that he ‘be me for a little while’, inviting him to see the world through her eyes. This is followed by a lyrical shot/ counter shot sequence between an extreme close-up of Oskar’s eyes and Eli staring down at him, all filmed in shallow focus as if for a moment they  are unified in private space. As Oskar closes his eyes and a gentle musical score plays over the image, the film suggests that perhaps he is able to see the world through her eyes, even if briefly. This shot is then followed by a short over-the-shoulder shot of Eli, now revealed as an old woman who once again begs Oskar, ‘Please – be me, for a little while’. While the shot of the older Eli is a moment that reminds us that she is not what she appears to be, that is a child, there is also a sadness to this image of the old woman trapped within the body of a child. This image represents, in part, the ‘othering’ of the vampire as a creature that blurs lines of identity, but it also provides a glimpse of who she is on the inside. It is a highly subjective moment that positions the audience, along with Oskar, in her point of view. This sequence introduces two key ideas that are important for our understanding of a significant strand of the twenty-first century undead. First it presents Eli as sympathetic as she explains that she kills only out

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‘be me ’: i- v a mpire /i- z o m b i e 143 of need and not desire. She struggles throughout the film to restrain her hunger for blood, running away from Oskar rather than feeding on him when he innocently cuts into his hand in order to exchange blood with Eli as a marker of friendship. Secondly, the scene highlights the importance of her point of view to the generation of sympathy. It is through this moment that Oskar and the audience are invited to be Eli for a moment. From this perspective, Eli is presented sympathetically, reaffirmed by her seemingly genuine friendship with Oskar. This positions Eli within the well-established tradition of the sympathetic or reluctant vampire that has circulated extensively throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century. As Milly Williamson argues this concept ‘signals one of the most important transformations in our perception of the vampire – it is no longer predominantly a figure of fear in Western popular culture, but a figure of sympathy’ (Williamson 2005: 29). As Williamson argues, the sympathetic vampire has, in fact, been present for over 200 years, dating back to Lord Byron and Dr John Polidori, and the emergence of the Byronic hero within literature, a character that has been repeatedly associated with the vampire. Kathryn McGinley, drawing upon the work of Patricia L. Skarda, describes this character as ‘passionate, pessimistic, self-exiled, dark, handsome, melancholic, and mysterious’ (McGinley 1996: 73). These characteristics have been associated with the vampire in film, to varying degrees, since its earliest days but they have become an increasingly dominant approach to the genre in recent years. The focus of much discussion of the sympathetic vampire has surrounded the literary genre of Dark Romance, as embodied by the Twilight franchise (books and films) and the Southern Gothic Chronicles (adapted into the HBO series True Blood), as well as many other literary series. It also has a very strong presence within post-millennial television. It is clearly a factor  contributing to the development of the hybrid hero discussed in the previous chapter – Blade, Selene, Violet and Alice are all sympathetic undead, characters with whom we identify and for whom we feel sympathy. This taste for the sympathetic vampire is read by many as a sign of its ‘domestication’, a transition that is not welcomed by some critics and authors, particularly in its association with romance. Returning to the vampire genre as a guest writer for the comic American Vampire, Stephen King openly declared his dissatisfaction with recent developments within the vampire genre in the foreword to the first issue: Here’s what vampires shouldn’t be: pallid detectives who drink Bloody Marys and work only at night; lovelorn southern gentlemen; anorexic teenage girls; boy-toys with big dewy eyes. What should they be? Killers, honey. Stone killers who never get enough of that tasty Type-A. Bad boys and girls. Hunters. In other words, Midnight

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America. Red, white and blue, accent on the red. Those vamps got hijacked by a lot of soft-focus romance. (2011)

Similarly, in his introduction to the literary anthology Vampires Don’t Sparkle, Michael West displays a similar disdain for the contemporary vampire when he says: That supernatural creature of the night – a dark being who once struck fear in the hearts of mortal men and women – has been corrupted. In movies, in television shows, and in fiction, this fearsome demon has been ‘defanged.’ Instead of viciously preying on the blood of the living, today’s vampires are meek ‘vegetarians.’ They have the gift of limitless power and eternal life and how do they choose to spend their time? They go back to high school and sit in the same classes year after year; they sulk in corners, brooding and fawning for students who are centuries younger than they are, and in the face of these young, nubile bloodbags, these symbols of raw sexuality, these fearsome killers, these animals are suddenly neutered . . . weak, more frightened at the thought of going dateless to the prom than a cross or wooden stake through their black, soulless hearts. (West 2013: 1–2)

Tenga and Zimmerman argue that the popularity of the zombie is a response to the gradual defanging of the vampire and it is notable that the  phenomenal popularity of the Twilight franchise in literature and film, as well as the proliferation of vampire television series, is paralleled by the global success of the zombie in film and television as outlined in Chapters 3 and 4. The zombie seems to serve as a corollary to the sympathetic vampire; an embodiment of the monstrous undead. Of course, the rise of the sympathetic vampire could in fact be a response to the growing popularity of the zombie, now liberated from its monstrosity. As Williamson points out the vampire, no longer ‘a manifestation of our “grisly nightmare” . . . speaks instead to our undead desires’ (Williamson 2005: 29). Finally the success of the sympathetic vampire has led to a developing sub-genre of creative work that is beginning to apply the same approach to the zombie, seemingly countering so many of the assumptions that we hold about the living dead, namely that their lack of cognition means that they do not have a point of view with which to identify. While there is a growing body of scholarly research on the sympathetic vampire (Auerbach 1997; Gordon and Hollinger 1997; Williamson 2005), my aim is to focus my analysis on the impact of point of view and perspective, in which the audience is narratively aligned with the vampire rather than with human characters, in the construction of the sympathetic vampire and subsequently the sympathetic zombie. As such I am referring to this approach as the I-vampire/I-zombie, in which the audience become implicated within the perspective of the undead. I will explore

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‘be me ’: i- v a mpire /i- z o m b i e 145 how this first person point of view has been increasingly used within a growing body of twenty-first-century films and television series and question whether this transition serves to empty the vampire of symbolic agency, rendering it ‘dewy’, ‘neutered’, ‘anorexic’ or ‘weak’ as described above, or does it serve to manipulate the genre to explore new meanings. Furthermore, the chapter will chart the manner in which the prevalence of the I-vampire has impacted on the zombie genre through the growth of the sympathetic zombie and the introduction of a zombie point of view within film and television. In the previous chapters I discussed how the half-human/half-vampire or half-zombie, in the form of the hybrid action hero, highlighted a synergy within the two genres of undead as they merge with the action genre. In a similar manner, this chapter will consider the way in which vampires and zombies are increasingly interconnected, calling attention to similarities between the undead rather than differences. These similarities move the genre of the undead away from themes of apocalypse and cultural anxiety and explore questions of identity and the self within a changing world.

I-Vampire Let the Right One In both promotes Eli’s point of view alongside Oskar’s, as well as conforming to the tradition of the sympathetic vampire, particularly in the manner in which Eli’s relationship with Oskar invokes ­friendship. Nina Auerbach argues that a defining feature of the sympathetic vampire in nineteenth-century romantic texts by Lord Byron, Dr John Polidori and Sheridan LeFanu is the manner in which they promise ‘intimacy and friendship’ (Auerbach 1997: 14), as she explains: in England (at least until the coming of Dracula), vampires offered an intimacy that threatened the sanctioned distance of class relationships and the hallowed authority of husbands and fathers. Vampires before Dracula were dangerously close friends. (Auerbach 1997: 6)

The relationship between Oskar and Eli harks back to such friendships. LeFanu’s Carmilla is told from the human Laura’s point of view and largely presents Carmilla as sympathetic, a much-needed companion. It also captures Laura’s own anxieties about her feelings towards Carmilla: And when she has spoken such a rhapsody, she would press me more closely to her trembling embrace, and her lips in soft kisses gently glow upon my cheek . . . From these foolish embraces, which were not of very frequent occurrence, I must allow, I used to wish to extricate myself; but my energies seemed to fail me. Her murmured

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words sounded like a lullaby in my ear, and soothed my resistance into a trance, from which I only seemed to recover myself when she withdrew her arms. In these mysterious moods I did not like her. I experienced a strange tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust. I had no distinct thoughts about her while such scenes lasted, but I was conscious of a love growing into adoration, and also of abhorrence. (LeFanu [1872] 2013: 29)

This vampiric encounter incites a great deal of teenage confusion around sexual identity but despite Laura’s seeming reticence, the story remains one of intimacy and friendship. Similarly, this is a theme that is returned to in Let the Right One In, as well as its American remake Let Me In (2010).  Eli offers friendship and intimacy to the emotionally damaged Oskar, an isolated child who is bullied at school, neglected by his mother and estranged from his father. Oskar seems less ambivalent about Eli than Laura is about Carmilla, despite Eli’s occasional strangeness, even when she appears at his window, asks to be invited in, removes her clothes and crawls into his bed. He is unfazed and sleepily welcomes the companionship. When he asks her if she will be his girlfriend and she tells him that she is not a girl, he is somewhat confused but unfaltering in his request, responding ‘Oh – but do you want to go steady or not?’ Eli agrees when he explains that nothing will change in their relationship and they can continue as they are: ‘It’ll be you and me’. The scene ends on a close-up of them holding hands. The way in which the scene is filmed allows the audience access to each of their perspectives as they lie side by side, both facing the camera and as such the audience can read their facial expressions while they cannot. This is enhanced by the use of rack focus to shift the focalisation back and forth between Oskar and Eli throughout the sequence, reading Oskar’s disappointment when she initially declines his invitation to be his girlfriend and later Eli’s fascination and affection for Oskar. In this light, Eli is presented as sympathetic, if also morally ambiguous – her mouth is still smeared with blood. The film’s conclusion captures this ambiguity. Eli saves Oskar’s life by brutally murdering the bullies who were in the process of drowning Oskar. As the film ends, however, with Oskar on a train, transporting a large chest in which Eli is concealed, the implication is that he is taking on the role of human familiar to watch over her during the day and, potentially, kill for her. This moral ambiguity is a key factor of the sympathetic vampire that is enhanced when the narrative is told primarily from the vampire’s point of view. Auerbach argues that while the sympathetic vampire was prevalent in the nineteenth century, it was displaced by the monstrous and authoritarian  Count Dracula, a character who had significant influence on the ­representation of the vampire in cinema, particularly over the medium’s

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‘be me ’: i- v a mpire /i- z o m b i e 147 first sixty-seventy years of existence (see Auerbach (1997) for a discussion of the influence of Dracula). By the 1960s, however, the sympathetic vampire, and with it the Byronic hero, re-emerged in three key texts that have had varying degrees of influence. The American television series Dark Shadows, a Gothic daily, daytime soap opera, introduced the sympathetic/ reluctant vampire Barnabus Collins in 1967. While conceived as a villainous vampire who would haunt the New England community of Collinsport Maine before eventually being killed by a Van Helsing-type character, Barnabus became so popular with audiences that the writers felt that they could not kill him and so introduced a tragic backstory that painted him as cursed with vampirism and loathing of his existence (Thompson 2009: 57). The series was ostensibly told from the point of view of governess Victoria DeWinter, who offered the opening narration to each episode. As the show progressed, however, it increasingly adopted Barnabus’ perspective by focalising the narrative around his motivations and actions, as well as through flashback and journeys through time to uncover his tortured past. He became a figure who embodied tragic loneliness and isolation as well as self-loathing for his cursed condition, a condition he repeatedly attempted to cure. This rendered Barnabus both sympathetic and reluctant. Reluctance, and a struggle against their vampire-nature, increasingly became a characteristic of the sympathetic vampire in this period, alongside an emphasis upon the vampire as narrator as in Fred Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape and Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire ([1976] 1992). Fred Saberhagen’s novel is a retelling of the events of Stoker’s Dracula but this time from the Count’s point of view as he records his version onto an audio cassette. In this manner, Saberhagen provides the one missing voice from Stoker’s original epistolary novel, in which the narrative is constructed from a collection of letters, newspaper articles and diary entries. Dracula’s is the one voice that is absent from the narration. As a result, in Saberhagen’s story, Dracula attempts to correct the libel committed against his name and presents himself as the hero of the narrative. Similarly, and more famously, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire offers insight into the wonders and horrors of being a vampire through the character of Louis Pointe du Lac, followed by Lestat Lioncourt in The Vampire Lestat, and then a wide range of vampires across all of her Vampire Chronicles. This first novel, like Saberhagen’s book, presents the story clearly from the vampire’s first-person point of view as he recounts the details of his life as a vampire, to a journalist who records their discussion. It also explores the existential angst of this reluctant vampire who struggles with guilt and the horrors of his perceived monstrosity. Katherine Ramsland argues that Louis is

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horrified by the necessity of killing mortals for survival . . . who prefers contemplation and reading to action and adventure . . . An intellectual. Louis thinks through the consequences of his behaviour rather than acting on whim, as Lestat often does. He is impelled to search for answers to the ultimate questions of life, and is especially concerned to discover whether God exists, and if so, if that makes him a child of the devil’. (Ramsland 1993: 242)

Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger associate this transition towards the vampire’s point of view, and its subsequent existential angst, with what they describe as the vampire’s ‘domestication’, as they explain: the domestication of the vampire has come about through a shift in the perspective from which the horror tale has conventionally been told . . . Not surprisingly, the impact of this shift from human to ‘other’ perspective works to invite sympathy for the monstrous outsider at the same time as it serves to diminish the terror generated by what remains outside our frame of the familiar and knowable. (Gordon and Hollinger 1997: 2)

The term ‘domestication’ suggests, in some contexts, a defanging of the vampire, rendering it safe and absorbing it into the mainstream. In the context of its emergence in the 1970s, however, it embodied changing discourses about dominant culture and the beginnings of a fragmentation of cultural identity due to the emergence of voices previously unheard. As a result, the sympathetic vampire increasingly became associated with a form of ‘self-disclosure’, challenging cultural perceptions and dominant ideologies, whether by calling up a talk-radio programme to dispel the cinematic mythologies about vampirism in George Romero’s Martin or Lestat writing songs extolling a noble vampire lineage going back millennia in The Vampire Lestat and the film Queen of the Damned (2002). The shift in the genre in the 1970s, according to Margaret L. Carter, is from the perception of the vampire as attractive but decidedly evil to one in which the vampire is perhaps morally ambiguous but humanly complicated. This transition, she argues, is evoked by making the vampire serve as narrator or ‘viewpoint character’ (Carter 1997: 30). It is Carter’s contention that this transformation is a result of the changing attitude towards the outsider. The vampire has always existed on the fringes but in a postmodern world, the ‘alien qualities’ of the vampire, that would have been seen to be ‘a terrifying threat’ were now being embraced (Carter 1997: 29). For instance, the female vampire who was perceived as a threat that must be destroyed or saved in Victorian stories or classic Hollywood horror films, such as Lucy and Mina in Dracula, becomes liberated through vampirism in films that came out during and after the rise of second-wave feminism such as Daughters of Darkness and The Hunger. While acknowledging the

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‘be me ’: i- v a mpire /i- z o m b i e 149 ambivalence of the vampire, Milly Williamson argues that the lesbian vampire in these films ‘evades the trap of conventional female domesticity; she has autonomy, and her relations with women run counter to the ties of marriage; she may appear unnatural, but she simultaneously emerges as a symbol of female power’ (Williamson 2014: 74). Similarly the homoeroticism of Anne Rice’s vampires, as well as Louis’ struggle with his vampiric identity, speak to the burgeoning gay rights movement of the 1970s. Where the vampire was originally a metaphor through which the outsider was punished, it gradually became the means through which the outsider found his or her voice. In the 1980s, in films such as The Hunger, The Lost Boys, and Near Dark, the narrative is told primarily from the point of view of a halfvampire, a human part-way through the transition to becoming a vampire and through whom the audience experiences the wonders and horrors of immortality. Today, vampires in film and television have their own voices, tell their own stories, and shift the focus of the story away from the relationship between human and vampire to the vampire him- or herself, raising their own questions about the nature and quality of their existence. Television, in particular, has become a space that allows for a slow and complicated exploration of identity through the popularity of the serialised narrative that allows for identity to be developed over time and for audiences to become increasingly involved and implicated within the vampire’s story. For instance, Angel was initially presented as an enigmatic figure in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, whose motivations were often unclear, that is until he revealed himself as a vampire with a soul. This factor made him sympathetic and positioned him as a reluctant vampire, choosing to control his blood lust and not feed off humans. While a signifi­ cant character in Buffy, he remained a peripheral love interest. Angel was, however, eventually able to express his own perspective in the spin-off series Angel, a show defined by his struggle with the meaning of his existence and his fight for redemption for his actions as Angelus – the name given to his soulless alter-ego. In the episode ‘Sanctuary’ (1.19) Angel establishes its own focus and divorces itself from its parent show Buffy when Angel confronts Buffy about his mission and its divergence from her own as they fight over how he handled the arrival of the rogue slayer Faith in Los Angeles: Buffy: You should have told me what was going on. Angel: I didn’t – I didn’t think it was your business. Buffy: Not my business?

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Angel: I needed more time with Faith. I’m not sure – Buffy: You needed more – Do you have any idea what it was like for me to see you with her? That you would behind my back – Angel: Buffy, this wasn’t about you! This was about saving somebody’s soul. That is what I do here and you’re not a part of it.

Even the romantic element of plot is presented here from his perspective rather than Buffy’s as she taunts Angel with revelations of her new relationship. The shot of Angel, taken from over Buffy’s shoulder, seemingly suggesting her perspective, actually highlights his emotional point of view as he looks away from her, staring unblinkingly. That is until he turns back to meet her gaze and explain his emotional take on their relationship: That’s great. That’s nice. You moved on. I can’t. You’ve found someone new. I’m not  allowed to, remember? I see you again, it cuts me up inside and the person I share that with is me! You don’t know me anymore so don’t come down here with your great new life and expect me to do things your way. Go home!

In this series, Angel was repeatedly revealed to be emotionally complex and morally ambiguous in keeping with Mittel’s notion of complex TV. Even his position as a reluctant vampire, explained in Buffy as the result of a nineteenth-century curse that returned his soul, causing him to feel guilt for all of those he murdered, is rendered far more complicated in Angel. While it is believed – assumed – that Angel never drank human blood after the restoration of his soul – linking his ensouled vampirism to Victorian romantic vampire fiction – it is revealed through a series of flashbacks that he did in fact return to his vampire-maker Darla, finding her in China during the Boxer rebellion (‘Darla’ 2.7). Lost and unclear about what and who he is, Angelus, still identifying himself by this name rather than adopting the new identity, Angel, begs Darla to let him return to the only life he has known for over a century. This flashback episode was preceded on the WB by the Buffy episode ‘Fool for Love’ (5.7) in which Spike reflects on his transformation into a vampire and his early years killing humans alongside Angelus, Darla and Drusilla, his own maker, in which certain events overlap. ‘Darla’ was aired after ‘Fool for Love’ and the double bill, in Rashomon-fashion, very self-consciously highlights the shift in perspective from Spike to Angelus, by revealing new and conflicting information. In particular it becomes clear in ‘Darla’ that Angelus hadn’t given up on drinking from humans, a fact he kept secret from Buffy. It also shows that he couldn’t bring himself to kill the innocent but in true Anne Rice-fashion, he only murders the evil-doers, a fact he kept secret from Darla. The repetition of the same shot of the four vampires striding

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‘be me ’: i- v a mpire /i- z o m b i e 151 in slow motion through the chaos and violence of the rebellion, showcases the shift between two conflicting perspectives and its impact for our understanding of character and story. In ‘Fool for Love’, the shot reflects Spike’s feelings of confidence and empowerment, having just killed a vampire-slayer. In ‘Darla’, it shows Angelus’ internal conflict as he is torn between his vampire nature and his conscience, leaving him isolated and alienated from his vampire family. These flashbacks do not undermine his place as a champion of the helpless but rather demonstrates that the path of the sympathetic/reluctant vampire is a difficult one. Rather than neuter the vampire, they explore the moral, and evolving, complexity of identity. Since Angel went off the air in 2004, there have been numerous vampire television series told largely, if not always exclusively, from the point of view of the vampire, such as Moonlight, Being Human UK/Being Human US, The Originals and Hemlock Grove (2013–15). True Blood and The Vampire Diaries initially seem to focus on the human perspective, focalising like Buffy on the point of view of a human woman who falls in love with a vampire. As Ananya Mukherjea argues, Sookie remains ‘the focus point’ of True Blood ‘and the men and women [including vampires] all react or respond to her and are moved and acted on by her’ (Mukherjea 2012: 112). For instance, the show’s revelation of vampire Eric’s history with his maker Godric does offer ‘insight into Eric’s past vulnerabilities and heroism and culminates in a striking image of Eric bowed, in tears and begging’ Godric not to die. As Mukherjea explains, however, this image, witnessed by Sookie, ‘serves, in large part, to advance Sookie’s relationship with Eric and as a plot device towards an intensifying intimacy between the two’ (Mukherjea 2012:112). Similarly Elena Gilbert is the centre point of The Vampire Diaries, the human who is torn between two vampire lovers. In this manner, the series has repeatedly been compared with Twilight, in which narrator Bella was torn between her love for a vampire and a werewolf (Rebecca Williams 2013). On The Vampire Diaries, however, Elena is as much an object of vampires Steffan and Damon’s desire, as they are of hers. While the show initially seems to be built around her point of view, opening as it does with her narration as she writes in her diary, later it is revealed that Steffan has a long history of writing in diaries – producing his own chronicles. While Damon does not write in diaries, too focused on living in the moment to reflect upon past actions, the series frequently highlights his perspective as well, particularly in later seasons as his relationship with Elena grows more complicated. The series, therefore, explores this love triangle from all three perspectives. More importantly as the show has progressed, it has introduced a wide range of vampires and witnessed key characters transformed into vampires,

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including Elena, her best friend Caroline Forbes and her guardian Alaric Saltzman. This has meant that the series is told from multiple points of view and allows for an unfolding mosaic of representation of the modern vampire, neither good nor evil but perilously flawed. This is all the more the case for the Diaries spin-off The Originals, which focuses upon the ­character  development of the Michaelson’s, a family of 2,000-year-old vampires (the first of their kind) as they engage in domestic and community squabbles, vying for power in the family home and in their chosen home of New Orleans. The head of the family, Klaus, was the villain of The Vampire Diaries and, like Angel, the move to his own television series has facilitated a clearer focus on his perspective and explored his vulnerabilities. Unlike Angel, however, Klaus is neither a reluctant vampire nor seeking redemption, although others seek it for him. He embraces his condition, but manages his bloodlust. He has become sympathetic precisely because of the intermingling of great passion with substantial human flaws. In these vampire television series, the vampire’s perspective is mobilised via story and character, often explored through flashbacks to earlier time periods that position the vampire within a long temporal framework. In this manner, the seriality of television allows for a multiplicity of points of view and a complexity of characterisation. As a result, the vampire has not been defanged by television but rather the audience is invited in to share their perspective and, therefore, become complicit in their actions. In film however, the vampire point of view is used less to explore character and story in the manner of television but more to convey the sensual and sensorial experience of being a vampire. In hybrid vampire/ action films such as Blade and Underworld, this perspective is conveyed via the kinetic energy of the action genre. The fast-paced editing of Blade during his hand-to-hand martial arts combat sequences or the Matrixstyle bullet-time used in Underworld, convey the speed and power of the vampire. Their superhuman qualities are captured in the elegance of the martial-arts-style combat and shoot-out scenes. For instance Underworld Awakening features numerous fight scenes between heroine Selene, her vampire brethren and the werewolves come to destroy her and her child, which intermix balletic wirework, choreographed acrobatics and slowmotion gun play, viscerally evocative of battle and dance simultaneously. Through this visual style, the film offers a celebration of hybridity and the posthuman as discussed in the previous chapter. Recent indie vampire films, such as Byzantium (2012) and Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), however, focus less on the embodiment of power than on the vampire’s sensual experience of their existence: their relationships, their storytelling and their desire to make a mark on the world. In so doing,

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‘be me ’: i- v a mpire /i- z o m b i e 153 these films are not simply perpetuating the tradition of the passionate and melancholic Byronic hero but interrogating it through a dialogue with earlier vampiric traditions, particularly Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, as well as the film adaptation by Neil Jordan (1995). Byzantium, a film based on Moira Buffini’s The Vampire Play, which she adapted for the screen, marks a return to the vampire genre for director Neil Jordan and in many ways is a companion piece to Interview. The film focuses on a similarly antagonistic relationship between a young vampire, Eleanor, and her maker, Clara. Eleanor shares Louis’ antipathy towards his maker, finding Clara base, ignorant and controlling, compounded by the fact that Clara is also Eleanor’s birth mother: two women bound together by history, time and blood. Like Louis, Eleanor has led an isolated existence – restricted by Clara’s nomadic life in which she provides for Eleanor by working as a stripper or prostitute. Eleanor yearns to reach out to tell her story and be known. She desires freedom and truth. The film begins with her narration as she sits in a darkened room and writes in a notebook: ‘My story can never be told. I write it over and over, wherever we find shelter. I write of what I cannot speak. The truth. I write all I know of it and then I throw the pages to the wind.’ That she writes the words ‘The End’ just as the film begins highlights the cyclical nature of her storytelling and her persistent need to be heard. In this opening, the film emphasises the nature of storytelling through the act of writing but also the importance of subjective perspective. This is Eleanor’s attempt to express her story and her voice. While Interview with the Vampire championed the vampire’s voice, Byzantium takes this in a new direction by promoting the voice of the female vampire, one which even in recent years has been comparatively silent. Rice’s work and Jordan’s film, focus almost exclusively on the male vampire. Only two of  Rice’s Vampire  Chronicles are narrated by a woman, Pandora and Merrick, but the most significant female vampire who haunts both Interview and Lestat, is the vampire child Claudia who remains silent. As Lorna Jowett points out: critical credit goes to Rice for creating vampires who are not alien/other/object, not perceived through the eyes of human subjects, but who tell their own stories as subjects themselves. Louis tells his story in Interview, Lestat tells his in Lestat, yet Claudia remains a third person in both narratives . . . Throughout Interview we see Claudia through Louis’ eyes, as object, not subject, and in later writing as an absent presence. (Jowett 2002: 63–4)

Nina Auerbach similarly argues that ‘Rice’s vampires are compulsive storytellers, but Claudia, the ultimate spectacle, is unable to break free of

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paternal narrative’ (Auerbach 1997: 154–5). In this manner, Byzantium is a response to this absence by wresting vampire storytelling away from male voices to the female, making them the subject and not the object of the narrative. In this manner Byzantium is building on the tradition of The  Addiction and Nadja, two New York-based vampire films that are primarily told from the point of view of the female vampire, evoking their sensorial experience of an urban reverie (Abbott 2007). Byzantium is, however, enhanced by the multiplicity of female vampire perspectives, not competing for dominance but highlighting how shared and individual experiences shape identity. While the majority of the story is informed by Eleanor’s point of view, as she recounts hers and Clara’s past, Clara also acts as storyteller. She not only fills in Eleanor’s gaps in knowledge but specifically explains her own sensual experience of becoming a vampire and the liberation it brought to her, asking Eleanor’s teacher ‘Shall I tell you what it was like for me? . . . It was wonderful. I had eyes that cut through lies and lungs that breathed eternity. I felt I had lived my whole wretched life just to prepare me for that moment’, a highly poetic statement that runs counter to Clara’s usual colloquial language, suggesting more layers to Clara than Eleanor is aware. The sequence is then followed by a sensual slow-motion shot of the voluptuous Clara standing at the base of a cliff, being showered by a waterfall of blood, accompanied by climactic choral music as Clara luxuriates in the eroticism of her transformation and then joyously leaps from the cliff before swimming to shore. Her liberation is then contrasted by her initial confrontation with vampire patriarchy in the form of a secret society known as the Pointed Nails of Justice, a brotherhood of male vampires. In this meeting, she sits at a table while the men stand around her, surrounding her in the frame and talking about her rather than to her (see Fig. 6.1) . In this composition she is contained,

Figure 6.1  Composition of resistance in Byzantium

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‘be me ’: i- v a mpire /i- z o m b i e 155 restrained and rendered silent as they judge her, describing her as base, and banishing her from their order. The female-centred focus within the narrative is perpetuated by the way in which Buffini and Jordan rewrite nineteenth-century vampire fiction from a woman’s perspective. Eleanor’s stories, which tell of Clara’s, and then her own, vampire origin myth, are filled with allusions to Byron and Polidori. The two men who meet Clara as a young girl and put her on the path to ruin are named Darvill and Ruthven, the names of the vampire protagonists of Lord Byron’s ‘Fragment of a Story’ and Dr John Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’ respectively (both reprinted in Frayling 1992). Clara herself goes by three names, Carmilla – the vampiric allusion here is self-evident – and Clara and Claire, both of which suggest the names of Byron’s illegitimate daughter Clara Allegra Byron and her mother Claire Clairmont – two women with whom he had fraught relationships and over whom he exerted his control. Beyond naming, the film offers a reworking of Polidori’s ‘Vampyre’ from a feminist perspective. In this film, Ruthven is human in body but, like Polidori’s character, he is vampiric in soul: drinking, gambling, stealing, ruining women, and using and abusing Clara, by taking her childhood with her virginity and turning her into a prostitute. Eventually Darville returns, now a vampire, prepared to offer Ruthven the gift of immortality and let him join the Brotherhood. To do this he is given a map to where he must travel in order to undergo the transformation, but Clara steals the map for herself, denying Ruthven immortality and eventually killing him after he attacks Eleanor. Her theft of this vampiric gift – for which she is unapologetic, claiming that Ruthven was ‘unworthy’ – pits Clara against the male-dominated Brotherhood, who banish her because of her sex and class. They also prohibit her, as a female vampire, from creating another, a rule she breaks in the transformation of Eleanor – an act of love rather than power. The two sides of the Byronic Hero, the ‘lusty libertine’ and the ‘moody lover’ (Twitchell, 1985: 117) that McGinley draws upon in her analysis of Interview with the Vampire – describing Lestat as the ‘rebel’(McGinley 1996: 82) and Louis as the ‘brooding one’(McGinley 1996: 84) – re-emerge and are re-imagined in Clara and Eleanor. Clara is sensual and passionate, while Eleanor is contemplative and melancholic. Both, however, demonstrate the great propensity for love and show mercy in their own way, highlighting a closer kinship than apparent between Louis and Lestat. Clara kills those who are unjust, especially to women, while Eleanor only feeds on those who are old, infirmed and prepared to die, coming to them like an Angel of mercy giving peace. While the Brotherhood of the Pointed Nail purports to serve justice, they are defined by codes, conventions,

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class  and gender hierarchies, considering Clara too base to understand their ways and Ruthven, a man of ‘good blood’ despite his cruel and lascivious behaviour. After her transformation, when asked what she would do with this gift, Clara explains that she would use the gift ‘to punish those who prey on the weak’ a creed that is similar to other sympathetic vampires like Angel but she also plans to ‘curb the power of men’, a promise to deconstruct patriarchy, adding a feminist agenda to Angel’s vow to ‘help the helpless’. The film climaxes with the women being captured by the Brotherhood and condemned to die for violation of their laws, but Darvill, having acknowledged his respect for Eleanor’s merciful approach to her victims, chooses to kill his brother vampire and save the women. While this conclusion seems to undermine the feminist stance of the film, with the women needing to be saved, it is because of their influence and his desire to adopt their code that he intervenes in this moment. As he later explains to Clara, he would like to join her for she ‘hunt[s] the powerful and protect[s] the weak’ an approach he would like to try. It is their story that informs his choices and their stories that continue as the film comes to a close, with the two women going their separate ways and Eleanor declaring: ‘I am Eleanor Webb. I throw my story to the wind and never will I tell it more. Another one begins’. While Byzantium explores the subjective via the process of storytelling as a means of wresting narration away from the male vampire to the female, Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive challenges the melancholic associations of the sympathetic vampire through the aesthetic invocation of the vampire point of view, capturing in aesthetic form the wonder and beauty of the world through the eyes of a vampire. Like Byzantium, this film also seems to be in dialogue, if perhaps less self-consciously, with vampire stories of old. Most significantly, the emphasis upon the aestheticisation of the vampire perspective is in keeping with a tradition established in Anne Rice’s novel Interview with the Vampire, where much attention is paid to the enhanced levels by which vampires see, hear and feel. This is a significant factor of what distinguishes Rice’s characters from the vampires who predate them, for part of their transformation seems to involve a heightening of all of their senses, not simply to make them more efficient hunters but to enable them to better experience the aesthetic and sensorial pleasures of the world. In the tradition of classic Gothic literature, the novel is highly descriptive and much of it is given over to Louis recounting how he sees, hears and feels the world and all of its inhabitants, human and vampire. For instance, in explaining his transformation, Louis emphasises his initial perceptions as he sees and hears the world for the first time as a vampire:

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‘be me ’: i- v a mpire /i- z o m b i e 157 I saw as a vampire. Lestat was standing at the foot of the stairs, and I saw him as I could not possibly have seen him before. He had seemed white to me before, starkly white, so that in the night he was almost luminous; and now I saw him filled with his own life and own blood: he was radiant, not luminous. And then I saw that not only Lestat had changed but all things had changed. It was as if I had only just been able to see colors and shapes for the first time . . . Then Lestat began to laugh, and I heard his laughter as I had never heard anything before. (Rice 1992: 24–5)

Every image and sound brings its own sensual pleasure and Louis talks of spending an hour looking at the moon, or listening to the whispering sound of the night (Rice 1992: 25). It is precisely because of this heightened existence that Louis – the quintessential reluctant vampire – feels such overwhelming guilt for his vampiric actions. Rice’s conception of the vampiric existence as one of a heightened emotional and sensorial experience – able to talk about ‘passion . . . longing . . . things that millions of us won’t every taste or come to understand’ (Rice 1992: 365) – has had a lasting influence on the vampire genre. For instance, in the 1987 film Near Dark, Mae talks about the night as both ‘blinding’ and ‘deafening’, begging her paramour Caleb, before he is turned, to really look and listen in order to experience the night like her. Similarly, as I’ve argued elsewhere, the 1994 indie-vampire film Nadja uses the avant-garde aesthetic of pixelvision – a toy video camera used by experimental filmmakers in the 1990s – in order to convey the vampire’s sensual experience of the city. The pixelated and blurred grain produced by the camera, which Almereyda often uses in scenes that feature dissolves and layerings of imagery, lends a visual aesthetic to the subjective vampire experience described by Rice. We are witness to both Nadja’s vision and her visceral experience of her surroundings (Abbott 2007: 45–6), as a form of liberation from the monochrome world in which the rest of the characters live. This emphasis upon the vampire as a creature who is able to see and hear so much more from their surroundings has led to a tendency within contemporary vampire texts to present the vampire as an artist or musician, capable of channelling their unique aesthetic appreciation of the world into their work: Marius the painter in The Vampire Lestat and Blood and Gold; Lestat the rock star in The Vampire Lestat; John Blaylock the Cellist in The Hunger; Eleanor the pianist in Byzantium and Klaus the painter in The Originals. This tradition of the vampire as artist finds its apotheosis in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, a film that explores the vampire as artist through the figure of Adam, a vampire recluse musician, living in Detroit, writing music and wallowing in despair about the horrors of

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humanity. Through Adam, the film once again returns to the Byronic Sympathetic vampire which is reinforced when it emerges that Adam used to associate with Byron and Shelley, a fact that his wife Eve blames for his ‘romantically suicidal’ tendencies. Adam, however, is Byronic with a twist. If Louis embodies a Byronic romantic vampire, who celebrates humanity while loathing his own cursed vampire existence, Adam is the opposite. He demonstrates no self-loathing or guilt over his vampiric existence but rather loathes humanity – calling them zombies – for what they have become and their inability to evolve past their own paranoid limitations, explaining ‘It’s the zombies I’m sick of and their fear of their own fucking imaginations’. Adam’s melancholy is, however, balanced out by Eve’s joie de vivre. Emotionally and spiritually intertwined, Eve is light to Adam’s dark. She embraces the beauty of the world, while he wallows in despair for its loss. Despite Adam’s feelings, the film embodies the wonder of being a vampire that transcends despair as Jarmusch galvanises a highly stylised and sensual aesthetic in order to evoke the subjective experience of being a vampire. This perspective is established in the opening frames of the film. The film begins as an image of a starry night starts to turn in a circular motion, causing the light to stream. The sequence then dissolves to an overhead close-up of a record turntable as a record spins in the same direction as the stars, accompanied by a rhythmic piece of music – dirge rock band Sqürl’s version of ‘Tunnel of Love’. The turning of the record is then mirrored in two shots, first of Eve and second of Adam as they lie peacefully prostrate on their sofas with their eyes closed. The camera, positioned directly above them looking down, continues to turn in a circular motion, deliberately mirroring the image of the turntable. As the sequence cuts between the two vampires, the camera moves steadily closer to them, starting in long shot but ending in medium close-up. Once the camera stops, both open their eyes (see Fig. 6.2). This sequence rather hypnotically invites the audience into their world through the driving music and the spiralling camera. The next sequence sutures our point of view with the vampires through the use of two direct point-of-view shots as each vampire looks down from their own domicile onto the humans below. The audience watches them looking and then looks with them. This is a repeated motif of the film as the vampires move through the cities, Tangiers and Detroit, the object of our gaze but also the subject of their own gaze. Perspective, however, is not simply evoked through the direct point-of-view shot but also a sensual aesthetic through mise-en-scène, music and cinematography. Adam and Eve’s respective homes are filled with objects and clutter which represent the immortal’s

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‘be me ’: i- v a mpire /i- z o m b i e 159

Figure 6.2  I-vampire in Only Lovers Left Alive

history. Adam’s house is dark and dilapidated, filled with antiquated technological equipment and musical instruments, while his walls are covered in photographs of his heroes, from Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allen Poe to Buster Keaton and Neil Young. Eve’s home is brightly lit and coloured, airy and filled with books. These environments evoke the tangible experience of immortality through the accumulation of loved objects that embody history. Significantly, the way in which the vampires feed is filmed to invite us into their experience. Rather than feeding direct from the vein, these vampires opt to acquire their blood direct from hospitals. This is not out of a moral compunction but rather because human blood has become so contaminated that they must be cautious about their sources. Having each acquired their blood, Adam and Eve pour their blood into elegant long stemmed glasses, a further indication of their sensual aestheticism. As they sip the blood, they each tilt their heads back with a euphoric – near ecstatic – expression on their faces. The scene conveys their rapture through the visual displacement of space. The camera is fixed to the actor so as they each lean back the distance between the camera and the background changes while the distance between the camera and the actor remains fixed. This causes the background to seem to roll out to meet them in a dream-like fashion. Each of these shots is set against the slowly building notes of Josef Van Wissem’s lute, a tactile musical instrument to accompany this most sensual of experiences. Finally, the film includes two sensuously evocative sequences in which the vampires wallow in their pleasure in music and objects. The first is a

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sequence in which Adam is recording a new piece of music. As he plays each individual instrument, presumably piecing together the accompanying music – Squrl’s ‘Spooky Action at a Distance’ – layer by layer, Jarmusch edits the sequence through a series of dissolves and superimpositions that evoke the haptic quality of the musical construction, made all the more sensual through the inclusion of slow motion shots of Eve dancing in her room in Tangiers. In this sequence the two vampires seem to be sensually connected across the distance, evoking ‘entanglement’, what Eve describes as Einstein’s ‘spooky action at a distance’ in which entwined particles are separated but continue to be connected. Eve is later granted another similar, sensual and haptic musical sequence as she packs her bags to go to Detroit to comfort the suicidal Adam. Packing only her favourite books, the sequence is a montage of her carefully selecting books, skimming their content, running her hands sensuously along the spine and the page as she reads. The books are a combination of recent publications and old first editions, written in a diverse range of languages and scripts including Arabic and Chinese. The manner in which she holds the books is sensuous, reaffirmed by the revelation that a vampire’s touch is so sensitive that they can read the history of an object by touching it. Eve identifies one of Adam’s guitars as a Gibson made in 1905. It is as if the vampires are linked with the objects they touch across space and time. Josef Van Wissem’s lute music once again accompanies the sequence of Eve with her books, highlighting through the layering of music and dissolves, superimpositions and a roving camera, the importance of the tactile and haptic to the vampires as they experience so much of the world through sound, sight and touch. The style of these sequences invite the audience to share in their aesthetic pleasure and, despite Adam’s melancholy, their celebration of life and living. As Eve explains to Adam, at the height of his despair, ‘how can you have lived for so long and still not get it? This self-obsession is a waste of living – that could be spent on surviving things, appreciating nature, nurturing kindness, friendship and dancing!’ Adam and Eve, therefore, both embody and renew the sympathetic I-vampire through Eve’s condemnation of the tropes of the Louis-styled Byronic vampire, plagued by guilt and depression. Life is a gift, immortal or not. Through Jarmusch’s revisiting of the sympathetic vampire and the focus upon conveying their perspective, the vampire has become a celebration of living.

I-Zombie If the I-vampire in Only Lovers Left Alive has come to represent the celebration of living, then the zombie embodies the mourning of life. A

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‘be me ’: i- v a mpire /i- z o m b i e 161 walking reminder of death, the zombie is the embodiment of our fears of our own mortality and the grisly realities of death: not released into the ether as a spirit or transformed into the beautiful undead, the zombie is the decomposing dead incarnate. Zombies are not strong and beautiful like so many vampires nor do they sparkle. Their bodies do not heal nor are they healing. They rot; smell; body parts fall off; and they bear the scars of their death. Tenga and Zimmerman argue that ‘[z]ombies . . . threaten stability and security not only through their menace to life, but through their very bodies, a stark image of disintegration and harbinger of a crumbling civilization’ (Tenga and Zimmerman 2013: 78–9). They are also an object of horror because they lack individuality. This goes back to the voodoo zombies of Haiti, in which the undead were the revived dead, transformed into automaton slaves, controlled by the will of a master. Through Romero, the voodoo master has disappeared but the zombie is still humanity stripped of identity and controlled by primal hungers, namely the need to feed. They travel in large numbers, often referred to as hordes, herds or swarms, further divorcing the zombie from humanity and individuality. In this manner, the zombie seems diametrically opposed to the sympathetic vampire, who hinges on individuality and some form of subjective perspective. The lack of identity seems, by necessity, to preclude the notion of the zombie subject. All of this contributes to what makes them monstrous but it can also foster a tinge of sympathy. As Romero has often explained, they are us (cited in Simon 2000), although Kim Paffenroth argues that they are not quite ‘us’ but rather like ‘us’. When humans die they will not (as of yet) get up again and start eating human flesh. According to Paffenroth, this is a fiction ‘interested in the moral implications of the resemblance of zombies to humans, the disturbing implication that even if we are conscious and the zombies are not, our consciousness does little to make us “better,” even if it makes us epistemically different or more complex’ (Paffenroth 2006: 11). Zombies are fundamentally uncanny, an embodiment of the familiar (the dead) made unfamiliar (the dead walking around). As Paffenroth points out, zombies straddle the line between human and non-human, living and dead. Having said that, death – or the corpse more precisely – is also inherently uncanny as it is equally the familiar, in the form of family or loved ones, rendered unfamiliar through death, specifically the loss of animation, consciousness or spirit. As such the zombie confronts us with that uncanniness of death (see Abbott 2016 for a discussion of TV horror as an exploration of grief and mourning). Furthermore, in recent zombie texts such as The Walking Dead, the line has become even more blurred with the notion that ‘we are all infected’. The characters in the graphic novel

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and television series are effectively zombies both figuratively and literally. As they continue the fight to survive, Rick Grimes and his family become increasingly dehumanised and distant from all that they once understood to be human. In a literal sense they are also zombies waiting for their virus to be activated when they die and their bodies are revived. In this manner, the zombie is not an idealised fantasy of death like the vampire in which we are reborn, like Bella in Twilight, as beautiful, strong and immortal, but rather they embody the corporeality of our mortality and as a result sympathy and horror are intermingled, a factor that increasingly plays a role within many contemporary zombie texts but which emerged very early on in the genre. From as early as Dawn of the Dead (1978), Romero built in a degree of sympathy for the zombies, who are at times presented as helpless in the face of human brutality. This is the case in the opening massacre of the inner city tenement house in which members of SWAT team surround the building and then indiscriminately shoot the living and the undead. Similarly, in the mall, motorcycle marauders tear through the sanctuary and tease, torment, shoot, hack at and run over zombies for fun. In these scenes, the humans are far more monstrous and the zombies are defenceless. Despite these moments, however, the lack of individual identity continues to ‘other’ the zombie, rendering the body devoid of soul, spirit or consciousness, as abject waste to be destroyed and expelled, explaining why zombie bodies are often burned so as to ensure that they do not contaminate. Furthermore, much of the entertainment of the zombie film or TV series is the creative ways in which zombies are killed such as when the head of a zombie is sliced open by a helicopter blade in Dawn or Daryl thrusting his fingers through the eye sockets of a zombie in order to use the skull as a weapon in The Walking Dead (‘Crossed’ 5.7). The individualised zombie, however, does begin to appear as early as 1973 in the Marvel comic book Tales of the Zombie (1973–5), a serialised narrative about undead Simon Garth. The Marvel comic, which ran for a total of ten issues, was an attempt to tell the story about a sympathetic zombie, individualised if still not fully cognisant, in which, as Michael Ahmed has argued, Garth struggles between ‘his undead body and his human soul’ (Ahmed 2009). In 1985, George Romero’s Day of the Dead featured Bub, the first individualised zombie in the Romero landscape. Bub is the subject of scientific experiments on a military base in which Dr Logan attempts to domesticate zombies through a form of conditioning. Bub is not represented as part of the zombie hordes, instead he is depicted in human company; given a name; and learns to ‘behave’ and not attack and eat the humans around him although this is partially explained

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‘be me ’: i- v a mpire /i- z o m b i e 163 because he is being fed human flesh as a reward. Bub also demonstrates remembered behaviour, miming the motion for shaving, listening to classical music, and saluting when senior soldiers enter the room. As Tony Williams points out, Bub ‘exhibits pain when he discovers Logan’s body’ but his progress involves the basic stimulus-response training shown in the case of Pavlov’s dog and animals trained to perform tricks. But although Bub represents no zombie future alternative, he appropriately brings down [the megalomaniac solider] Rhodes later in the film in a manner resembling EC’s poetic justice tradition. (Williams 2003: 136)

These examples demonstrate that experiments with the generation of sympathy for zombies were happening around the same time as the appearance of the I-vampire. Despite this parallel emergence, the zombie has been slower to develop its own perspective and take control of the narrative in the manner of the vampire. It seemed to take until the e­ xplosion of zombie texts within the post-millennial zombie renaissance for the I-zombie to take hold. Kyle Bishop argues that the need to maintain audience enthusiasm for the genre dictates that creators will ‘alter key protocols of the subgenre or translate them to tales that are not technically about zombies at all’ (Bishop 2010: 204). As a result, Bishop concludes his book by suggesting that the ‘next step in the evolution of this highly special[ized] subgenre will likely literalize’ Romero’s metaphor that ‘people and zombies are the same’, ‘presenting narratives in which the zombies tell their own stories, acting as true protagonists and even heroes’ (Bishop 2010: 196). Tenga and Zimmerman concur, albeit less enthusiastically: With the advent of sentient, sympathetic zombies, the zombie’s future is uncertain. We note here simply that we regret the zombie’s emerging humanization, even as we anticipate a corresponding rise in true monstrosity elsewhere in the horror genre. As the zombie has compensated for the vampire’s romanticisation and idealization, surely another monster will come forth, or rise again, to unsettle, disturb, and disorient audiences, as true horror was meant to do. (Tenga and Zimmerman 2013: 84)

These critics rightly identify a developing trend within contemporary literature, graphic novels, film and television that has blossomed in recent years: the I-zombie, in which the zombie is not only sympathetic but is also  the narrator or focalising perspective of the text. An international array of novels have begun to appear that are, in many ways, modelled on Interview with the Vampire as they are narrated in the first person by the zombie, including the Canadian Husk (Corey Redekop 2012), the

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American Warm Bodies and its prequel The New Hunger (Isaac Marion 2010/2013) and the British series of young adult novels Zom-B (Darren Shan 2012–2016). Similarly Chris Roberson’s comic book I-Zombie (2010) is narrated by a sentient female zombie who works as a gravedigger and absorbs the memories of the corpses whose brains she eats. This comic has been adapted for television by Rob Thomas and transformed into a detective procedural, as the zombie Liv Moore, now working in the morgue, uses the memories she inherits to solve crimes. Again, the story is not only about her but is told from her point of view, which emphasises the presence of cognitive brain function and identity formation. The series follows Liv as she comes to terms with her new condition and the implications this has for her identity as she attempts to thwart the pending zombie apocalypse. The zombie with brain function is similarly the subject of the television series Z-Nation, about a penitentiary prisoner, Murphy, who is used as a test subject for a potential zombie cure. When the lab is overrun with zombies, and the cure is seemingly lost, Murphy is attacked but manages to survive multiple zombie bites. As a result, he is believed to represent a potential cure for the zombie outbreak, but as he and a group of survivors travel to the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) to harvest his blood, he begins to physically change as his teeth rot, his hair falls out, his skin turns grey, and his instincts become more feral. Effectively he becomes a sentient zombie, recognised as such by the undead that obey him. Although the show is not told exclusively from Murphy’s point of view, he does offer a key perspective, designed to unsettle the audience as his sympathies in the battle between human and zombie become unclear. Murphy is increasingly presented as abject, crossing not just moral lines but physical lines, not one thing or another. The cinema has also seen an increasing presence of sentient zombies and subjective zombie narratives. In 1998, independent filmmaker Andrew Parkinson produced the low-budget film I, Zombie: Chronicles of Pain, a film that charts a man’s transformation into a zombie, once infected. George Romero built upon his success with Bub by introducing the character of Big Daddy, the leader of the zombies who attack the human stronghold and haven for the rich, Fiddler’s Green, in Land of the Dead. Consistent with Romero’s previous use of the zombie, Big Daddy’s revolution against humanity is less about character and more about allegory as his revolution is presented along class lines. Romero has described the zombie as the ‘blue collar’ monster (cited in Simon 2000) and in Land of the Dead this is literalised in Big Daddy who was an African-American gas station attendant in life. In death he is trapped within a cycle of learned behaviour, still wearing his uniform and going through the motions of his

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‘be me ’: i- v a mpire /i- z o m b i e 165 job until he breaks free when a group of mercenaries attack his community of zombies, much like the bikers in Dawn of the Dead. Big Daddy then leads an army of undead to attack the wealthy inhabitants of Fiddler’s Green. In this manner, Big Daddy embodies a class allegory in which the working class breaks through societal boundaries and fights back against the upper classes who dominate society. Kyle Bishop discusses this film as an example of zombie evolution, in which the undead ‘exhibit the ability to remember, to learn, and to act as an organised group, taking an active role in the film’s storyline’ (Bishop 2010: 191). Big Daddy’s awareness and individual agency illustrates how the oppressed must became aware of their oppression before they can overturn it. In this manner, Land of the Dead sees Romero return to the Matheson model established in I Am Legend in which the undead become organised and take a stand against the living, presented as revolution and embodying a new society. So while Big Daddy is individualised, he also represents the potential for a zombie society and serves as a class allegory. In the ten years since Land of the Dead, there has been a growth of films which explore the zombie perspective from a range of approaches, such as the ultra-low-budget film Colin and the cinematic adaptation of Warm Bodies. Even the stop-motion animated film ParaNorman, which features zombies returned from the grave to, presumably, terrorise a small community as a result of a witch’s curse, provides a revisionist perspective to the undead. Told from the point of view of a living boy, Norman, who can speak to the dead, and as such is mocked and ostracised from his family and community who see him as strange and non-conformist, the film sets out to challenge preconceptions about normality, and the zombie is a part of this agenda. The film nods to all of the zombie conventions, opening as Norman watches a zombie movie on television in which the zombie terrorises a living woman, breaks down the walls of the house, lumbers toward her at a very slow speed, and eats brains. These cinematic conventions seem to be confirmed by ‘reality’ when the zombies actually climb out of their graves and display decaying bodies, rotting teeth and speak in guttural moans while they attack the living. It is eventually revealed, however, that they are attempting to speak through their moaning but only Norman can understand them and once he stops running, he realises that they are trying to explain that they are, in fact, tormented by the curse and long for release. Their pursuit of Norman has been an attempt to get him to listen to them. While the point of view of the film is Norman’s, his perspective allows for a glimpse into the zombie’s point of view, revealing that it was their actions in life – sentencing a young witch to death – that brought about this curse. They are, however, presented as sympathetic

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because they have been trapped and transformed into the undead by their own weakness and fear of the unknown. The true monsters in the film are the adults who attack the zombies, arguably in self-defence, and who are threatened by Norman’s ability to speak with the dead. These adults are presented as grotesque and monstrous due to the manner in which they refuse to accept Norman and the zombies for who or what they are and like the zombies before them try to destroy that which they do not understand. In contrast, the zombies are presented as sad, dejected, filled with remorse for their actions and haunted by guilt. In this film, fear of the zombie comes to represent fear of the unknown which is then dispelled by gaining access to their perspective. The film therefore embraces the nonconformist by embracing the zombie. While ParaNorman provides a glimpse into the zombie point of view through Norman’s perspective, the British zombie film Colin, best known for the fact that it cost £45, offers a day in the life (or undeath) of the zombie. Colin does not position the zombie as narrator because he does not have cognitive brain function. He does not recognise the family members who try to reach him and displays only basic motor function as he shambles through the streets. The film does, however, make him the central protagonist from the moment he returns to his house in the middle of a zombie outbreak, bitten and about to undergo the transformation. The film primarily follows him as he moves through his neighbourhood, and restricts its view of the apocalypse to Colin’s experience, first as he attempts to escape his own house, eventually falling out through a window, and then as he shambles in search of food, struggling against the violence of other zombies and humans. Significantly, this limited perspective ­showcases the violence of humanity, which is presented as brutal when divorced from their perspective. Colin’s first encounter with humans comes when he is attacked and restrained by a couple of survivors who try to steal his shoes. Later, trapped in someone’s basement we bear witness through Colin to a man who uses the undead to torture young women for his own pleasure. Finally, we witness a generically standard encounter between zombies and humans. The sequence is graphic and gory, showing zombies ripping into human flesh, humans driving spikes through the heads of the undead, all shot in close-up and on a hand-held camera which enhances the visceral experience of the sequence. This cinematographic approach positions the audience with Colin in the centre of the melee. The sequence climaxes when one human smashes Colin in the head with a hammer. Shot as direct from Colin’s point of view, this is a violent attack on the camera, and thus the audience, and is all the more shocking when the image cuts to black. By withholding the human perspective in this

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‘be me ’: i- v a mpire /i- z o m b i e 167 scene, the humans’ actions seem monstrous and our experience of Colin’s attack is all the more brutal. Here all of humanity is rendered monstrous much like the adults in ParaNorman. Through Colin’s eyes, humans are unknowable and therefore defined by violence and self-serving need; that is, the positions are reversed between human and zombie. More recently, the I-zombie has become more direct in its depiction of the zombie perspective. In Warm Bodies and In the Flesh, the zombies are sympathetic because they are, in keeping with Interview with the Vampire, not only the central protagonist around which the story is focalised but also the narrator, injecting their conscious point of view to shape the trajectory of the story. Although they owe a debt to the I-vampire genre, these texts offer their own spin on the convention. For instance, Warm Bodies uses narration to comic effect by gently parodying the genre’s conventions through the lead zombie R’s humorous narration. R is dead and therefore a zombie in traditional fashion. He is pale, dishevelled, monosyllabic (at least initially); he shambles, kills humans and eats their brains. But he also thinks and it is his thoughts that form the film’s narration. While he has limited memory – only remembering the first letter of his name – he also collects memorabilia from the old world, listens to music and reflects on the nature of his undead existence. The film establishes R’s perspective by opening the film with an extreme close-up of his eye and then slowly pulling back to a close-up of his face, overlain by the following narration: What am I doing with my life? I’m so pale. I should get out more. I should eat better. My posture is terrible. I should stand up straighter. People would respect me more if I stood up straighter. What’s wrong with me? I just want to connect. Why can’t I connect with people? Oh right . . . it’s because I’m dead.

This narration establishes R as functioning within the teen film, a genre plagued with questions of identity and acceptance. These are insightful observations for any young adult made humorous by the revelation that he is a zombie. R’s zombie-angst therefore comes to represent familiar teenage uncertainty and emotional turmoil. He yearns to connect with others but is unable to speak, quite literally. He also demonstrates anxiety about his future, as he looks at and comments on the Bonies – zombies reduced to skeletons, devoid of any residual humanity and defined by a primal hunger for flesh. While R acknowledges that he also craves flesh, he points out that he is ‘conflicted’ about this hunger unlike the Bonies who feel nothing. However, he also reconciles himself to the fact that he is destined to become a Bonie, explaining ‘we all become them some day. At some point you just give up I guess. You lose all hope. After that there is no turning back’. Here R echoes statements made about growing up

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in teen films like The Breakfast Club, when the Goth-girl Alison points out that  they can’t avoid becoming their parents. ‘It’s unavoidable,’ she explains ‘It just happens –when you grow up your heart dies.’ Additional pleasures of the film emerge from the disparity between R’s astute commentary about life, death and undeath, and his shambling, undead behaviour. For instance, as he and a group of zombies decide to leave their secure stronghold at the airport in search of food, shambling off into the distance, R explains that moving in packs is logical given that ‘everyone and their grandmother is trying to shoot [them] in the head’. As they continue to move into the distance, he further notes in an exasperated voice, ‘God we move slow’, followed by a sigh as he says ‘this could take a while’. Earlier as he watches another zombie rip a strip of skin off his own face exposing the fleshy tissue and jawbone beneath, R responds with disgust, ‘Oh man – gross. Stop! Stop! Don’t pick at it. You’re making it worse’, echoing the audience response to this abject moment and then adding a touch of humour by observing: ‘This is what I have to look forward to. It’s kind of a bummer’. R’s commentary makes fun of the alltoo-familiar conventions of the genre while also delivering them. The comic tone of this voice-over turns towards questions of romance as the story moves into a Twilight-styled teen love story between a zombie and a teenage girl, suddenly single because R ate her boyfriend. Produced by Summit Entertainment, the same company that produced the Twilight films, Warm Bodies is an attempt to revitalise the human/undead romance genre but it does so with a sense of irony, a gentle parody of Twilight’s Romeo and Juliet storyline. R’s status as a zombie renders the notion of a girl falling in love with the undead, so common in vampire literature, film and television, as ridiculous. That he falls in love with her because he has inherited the memories of her boyfriend by eating his brains makes their relationship downright disturbing. The line between comedy and horror is blurred within the film, such as through the image of R, his mouth and teeth covered in blood, combing back his hair in order to look presentable and then miming that he won’t eat her by gnashing his teeth together and shaking his head as if to say ‘no’. Later, as he approaches Julie, he reminds himself ‘don’t be creepy, don’t be creepy, don’t be creepy,’ offering a comic  take on teenage awkwardness, and the common tale of romance across different social strata that links Twilight to Romeo and Juliet. His inability to speak now reads as his inability to speak to girls; his zombie shambling becomes teenage awkwardness.1 The film also carefully uses the zombie as a metaphor for the outsider, like the vampire in the 1970s. R’s pale skin contrasted with his dark hair, evoke the style of both Goth and Emo sub-cultures. As his relationship with Julie develops, the manner

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‘be me ’: i- v a mpire /i- z o m b i e 169 in which he becomes an object of persecution by the humans is less focused on actual danger and more on difference.2 The I-zombie format in this film does seem to domesticate the undead by portraying their undeadness as curable and their identity as ­recoverable, lending the zombie apocalypse a happy ending as R and Julie’s romance sparks a transformation in the other zombies, restoring their heart beats along with their humanity. As a result, humans and zombies learn to ­integrate and accept each other. This happy ending seems to go against the nature of the zombie apocalypse narrative which is usually ­open-ended as discussed in Chapter 3. Warm Bodies instead resolves the narrative by finding a cure that facilitates a happy co-existence between living and undead. Furthermore, this domestication is designed to serve the romantic plot as well as its idealistic message of hope for humanity through the restoration of heterosexual romance. True love, it appears, can save humanity because the impossible romance encourages a world in which boundaries and walls are lowered, difference is celebrated. This theme is literalised in the film’s final frames as the wall that separates the humans from the zombies is demolished. This happy conclusion, however, is not endemic to the I-zombie. While Warm Bodies presents a near idyllic conclusion in which humans and zombies learn to cohabit, exhuming the human race and providing a bright vision for its future, the BBC television series In the Flesh and its serialised narrative offers a more cynical take on the ability for humans and zombies to coexist and in so doing renders the zombie as unsettling and uncanny, and able to embody morally complex and socially taboo material. While Warm Bodies introduces the notion of a cure, the BBC series In the Flesh (BBC 2013–14), set years after the zombie apocalypse, is based upon the premise that the government have identified a treatment for zombies – now known as Partially Deceased Syndrome (PDS) sufferers – that reignites the synapses in their brains that facilitate cognitive thought and memory. Effectively they regain their memories and with them, their identity. They also stop feeding off human flesh. As a result the government attempts to reintegrate the PDS sufferers into their home communities and it is this period of reintegration – a post-post-Zombie Apocalypse – that is the subject of the series. The story is told, primarily, from the point of view of Kieran Walker, a PDS sufferer, as he returns home to Roarton, a Northern community that led the way in establishing its own paramilitary force (the Human Volunteer Force) to protect themselves from the zombies. It is a community with strong antipathy to the zombies, known more commonly as ‘rotters’. The first episode begins in familiar terrain. A young woman, dressed

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in military uniform, moves through an abandoned grocery store, collect­ ing supplies, subtly evoking what Aviva Briefel describes as the ‘Bliss Montage’ of 28 Days Later in which survivors ‘grab items that they could not previously afford or that had been denied to them in the apocalyptic climate’ (Briefel 2012: 149). In contrast to Boyle’s film which begins ominously but becomes a celebration of survival and consumption, the opening of In the Flesh begins comfortably, if not joyously, in the safety of the store but is disrupted when the woman runs into a female zombie feeding on human brains. She shoots the zombie in the chest, resulting in a splatter of black ooze on the wall and then turns to run away as the lights go out. Up until this moment, the series draws upon familiar horror conventions: normality disrupted by a monster, expressionist lighting, body horror and blood spatter. As the woman turns, she comes face-to-face with a male zombie who grabs her just as a voice is heard off screen calling the name Kieran. Focused in a medium shot of the zombie, over the shoulder of his female victim, the sequence cuts to a high angle shot of a young man, seemingly convulsing and moaning, dressed in white, surrounded by antiseptic white walls and being held by a man in a white lab coat who continues to call to Kieran. As the young man calms down, the sequence cuts to a frontal close-up of him as he slowly raises his face to the camera, which cuts to a visually contrasting shot back in the dark store of the male zombie as he raises his eyes to look directly into the camera which then dissolves to the man’s face back in the medical facility (see Fig. 6.3). The young man, Kieran, is bloodless and pale, with bleached eyes and faded scars on his face. He is the zombie, now recovering in a medical facility. This opening, which initially seems to present the point of view of the living woman, actually establishes Kieran as both the object and subject of the gaze – we look at him in both pre- and post-treated states and identify

Figure 6.3  I-zombie in ‘Episode 1’ In the Flesh

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‘be me ’: i- v a mpire /i- z o m b i e 171 him as a zombie, but it is Kieran’s nightmare flashback. The horror of the scene is from his perspective as he remembers his undead life before treatment. From these opening frames, the audience is positioned within Kieran’s perspective but does not sugar-coat what he is or was but rather confronts the audience with the horror of his monstrous zombie condition and then invites the audience to feel sympathy for him. From the start, the series unsettles expectations. This discomfort is reinforced by the manner in which the opening sequence also serves to present the audience with the familiar – horror and zombie film conventions – and then render it unfamiliar as Kieran exits the doctor’s office to find a queue of hundreds of PDS sufferers trailing through a brightly lit and antiseptic medical building/prison; an unsettling reworking of the zombie horde. This image shifts the horror of the zombie away from the abject and uncanny to the dehumanisation of bureaucracy and the threat of institutionalisation. Kieran’s perspective is, however, not the only point of view that is ­highlighted in this first episode. These scenes of Kieran in the institution are cross-cut with images of the community of Roarton and the iconography of the apocalypse: graffiti saying ‘beware rotters’, the memorial wall with posters identifying the missing, a new cemetery filled with crosses for the recently deceased, and a sombre memorial service for those who died during the Rising. Opening with Kieran’s perspective, however, lends these images an ominous air as he prepares to return home. This is reinforced by the continued cross-cutting between Kieran and the people of Roarton. While Kieran prepares to return home, talking in group therapy about his guilt and anxiety, his parents try to sell their house for fear of the impact of his return to this community; his sister, a member of the Human Volunteer Force, conceals that her brother is returning, while the militia continue their patrols and discuss how to deal with these ‘returning rotters’. As Bill Macy, leader of the HVF tells his followers: ‘a rotter’s a rotter, drugs or no drugs. If there’s any round ’ere, we’ll deal with ‘em’. Furthermore, these opening scenes with Kieran highlight his self-loathing for what he is and guilt for what he has done. While the medical facility encourages Kieran to deny his guilt and responsibility through the medicalisation of his condition – calling zombies PDS sufferers and reminding them that they are ‘not responsible for their actions during their non-treated state’ – Kieran is weighed down by regret. He is contrasted with his room-mate Alex who shows no remorse for what, he explains, only came naturally, was beyond his control and necessary in order to survive. Alex encourages Kieran to accept and celebrate who he is, while condemning the living for their treatment of them. Kieran resists. More than any zombie discussed in this chapter, Kieran is the picture of

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the sympathetic zombie in line with his vampiric cousins, Louis, Angel and Eleanor, plagued by guilt and remorse, and terrified to face his family. The presentation of the televisual zombie narrative from the zombie’s point of view serves two narrative and thematic purposes that are intrinsic to the series as discussed in Chapter 4: the personal and the ­political. In particular, the personal framework of the I-zombie facilitates an explora­ tion of sexual identity, a subject which bridges the personal and the political in terms of identity politics. As Kieran and other PDS sufferers return to their homes, they are provided with cover-up mousse and contact lenses to hide their undead pallor and bleached eyes in order to conceal their undead identity, or at the very least, its most visible evidence. In this manner, there is a queering of the zombie, where they are expected to take part in a masquerade of living-normativity, which also includes pretending to eat or drink. While ‘queer representation of the undead in the moving image have long favoured the vampire’ (Elliot-Smith 2014: 148), Darren Elliot-Smith argues that in fact the zombie is ‘a perfect metaphor for the homosexual’ (2014: 149). Elliot-Smith explains: With the signs of horrific difference displayed on the surface of the monster’s skin, difference can be acted upon (by avoidance or destruction). The zombie is a visibly ‘outed’ monster forced to inhabit its decaying flesh for eternity. (Elliot-Smith 2014: 148)

The act of covering up the signs of their zombie identity is equated within the series with the act of performing heteronormativity or homonormativity – in which homosexuality is made ‘acceptable’ by mirroring the conventions of heterosexuality. This queering of the zombie in In the Flesh operates at both a textual and subtextual level as it becomes apparent that Kieran is in fact gay and his troubles in the community of Roarton began long before he died and came back. As he tells his undead friend Amy, he was banned from the local pub while he was alive, explaining ‘the people in there – they hated me before I was like this . . . because I wasn’t like them.’ In the pub, Kieran is the target of insults about his undeadness and his sexuality, as Bill Macy complains that the pub ‘serves rotters now’ while HVF soldier Gary tells Kieran he should have gone to Girls Grammar School, he’d ‘fit right in’. This queering of the zombie becomes all the more apparent with the introduction of Rick, Kieran’s lover, whose death in Afghanistan was the reason Kieran killed himself. Rick also returns to Roarton as a PDS sufferer and is forced on his return to resume his performance of the dutiful, heteronormative son to Bill Macy. On hearing about his son’s return, Bill enters into denial about his condition that mirrors his denial of Rick’s sexuality; talking to Rick about

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Figure 6.4  Queering the zombie in ‘Episode 3’ In the Flesh

women, guns and killing ‘rotters’. Furthermore, Bill tries to force Rick to shoot Kieran, an act that would condemn Kieran for both his sexuality and undead condition and confirm Bill’s view of Rick as ‘normal’ in every sense of the word. Upon his return Rick immediately takes up a masquerade of masculinity by engaging in target practice with his Dad, drinking alcohol in the pub with the other ‘men’, and laughing at sexist and bullying jokes. The masquerade is undermined by his abject vomiting of black ooze into the urinal as his body expels the alcohol, his zombie body rejecting this performance. Rick’s struggle with his identity is conveyed by the image of him staring at his reflection in the mirror and covering up the scars on his face, a reminder of his death and undead condition, to see the human face (see Fig. 6.4). It is at this point that Rick wipes off the mousse and removes the contact lenses, abandoning the masquerade and appearing to his father to confront him about Kieran who he describes as his ‘best mate’ (see Fig. 6.5).

Figure 6.5  Zombie revealed in ‘Episode 3’ In the Flesh

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Telling the story from the zombie point of view, first Kieran but then Rick, brings  the cultural charade of identity and sexual politics into full view within the narrative. While Interview with the Vampire uses the vampire to explore the sensual pleasures of homosexuality and is immersed within a language of homoeroticism, In the Flesh uses the zombie point of view to critique homophobia and the masquerade of gender, sexuality and identity. Presenting the narrative from the zombie perspective in this series also highlights an inherent political meaning by exploring a ‘them or us’ wartime narrative from the point of view of ‘them’. As I’ve already mentioned zombies are usually presented as inhuman hordes that lack identity. They are not human but threaten humanity and as such it is deemed acceptable to destroy them. In contrast, the humans in these narratives, such as Rick in The Walking Dead or Gerry in World War Z are highly individualised, with clear morals and humanist motivations. They are, in particular, motivated to fight zombies in order to protect their families. Sherryl Vint argues that in this fashion, the zombie narrative has, in recent years, emerged from a post-9/11 discourse in which the enemy is painted as inhuman and a global threat to humankind (Vint 2015: 2–3). As she explains: The recent obsession with the figure of the zombie in popular culture emerges from this context, an exaggerated embodiment of the gap between the proper human life to be fostered by bio-political control and the sub-race whose very existence threatens, literally in the case of predatory zombies, the health of the population as a whole. (Vint 2015: 4)

The mobilisation of the zombie point of view stands in contrast to this more conventional approach, such as World War Z, the text that Vint uses as her exemplar case study, in which the zombies are presented as non-individualised monstrous hordes – ‘an attacking mass whose closest visual math in the film is to scenes of swarming insects’ (Vint 2015: 9). Kieran’s perspective humanises the enemy and challenges this more conventional representation. In World War Z or The Walking Dead it is quite acceptable, and necessary, to shoot the undead. In fact, in Seasons 5 and 6 of The Walking Dead, which take place in Alexandria, a human enclave which has been protected from the realities of life beyond their walls, Rick and his group initially view these inhabitants as weak because they are too inexperienced in killing walkers. In the Flesh, however, questions the celebration and validation of this violence. In Season 2 (Episode 4), Kieran and his new romantic interest Simon sit down to family dinner with Kieran’s parents, his sister Jem and her boyfriend Gary. Both Jem and Gary were in the HVF and during the course of the dinner, Gary

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‘be me ’: i- v a mpire /i- z o m b i e 175 begins to recount ‘humorous’ stories of his and Jem’s activities during the Rising, referring to people ‘making the ultimate sacrifice’ and describing in detail how they dispatched various ‘rabids’, shooting them in the head and even thrusting a shower pole through one rabid’s eye. The events Gary describes are common tropes of the zombie genre, but the scene is here inflected by Kieran and Simon’s perspective as they sit uncomfortably listening. Once Gary has finished, Kieran responds ‘So that is what you did during the war. You killed people. Well I killed people too’. He goes on to explain how he ‘rose from the dead and ripped people apart’; and then describes in highly subjective and evocative terms, the experience of the Rising. Awaking in the dark, in his coffin and having to break out, ‘push . . . through all the soil’ and crawl out of the grave. You’re pushing through and then all this stuff at once. The moon and this incredible storm blowing. And the clock chiming midnight, you’re just standing there. Nobody else around and all of it pushing into me . . . but you know what I felt . . . that feeling is like what being born must be like, except you’ve got context . . . Because honestly dead . . . everything up until then was fear. Everything. Even when I was alive, just different levels of fear and then it’s gone. And you’re like yeah come on. Just give it to me, fill me up. And you know what Gary, this hunger, this appetite. I could not wait to get started.

This speech not only explains his zombie birth but provides the emotional context for his actions. While Gary and Jem ‘high five each other about killing’ zombies, Kieran offers a heartfelt explanation for how and why becoming a zombie was both terrifying and a release from fear, facilitating the pursuit of primal hungers. As disturbing as this story is, it humanises Kieran’s experiences and contextualises the war against the zombies as a war with two sides. The series, however, does not simply reverse perspective but explores multiple perspectives. Jem may ‘high five’ with Gary as they recount their adventures, but scenes in previous episodes reveal that Jem is suffering from nightmares about the Rising and oscillates between freezing in the face of danger and lashing out at visions of zombies. In fact her visions of Henry Londscale, a young PDS sufferer she shoots because she mistakes him for an ‘untreated’ zombie, are reminiscent of Kieran’s visions, in Season 1, of his last victim, Lisa Lancaster, the girl in the grocery store that opens the series. Both Kieran and Jem seem to be suffering from ­post-traumatic stress disorder. Furthermore, while sympathies remain with Kieran in the Walker family dinner scene, Gary is equally humanised, if somewhat less likeable. Dominic Mitchell explains that in another show, Gary would be the hero – he would be Rick Grimes, fighting to

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save his family and community (Mitchell 2014). In this context, however, the show confronts the reality for the ‘hero’ who must now resettle into a post-war world where he is told his skills and his protection are no longer needed and he must find a way to make a living in this new world. There are no jobs, let alone jobs that give him the kind of respect he had during the Rising. To make matters worse, he is told that the enemy is no longer the enemy and he must now coexist with those he was, recently, expected to kill. He must deconstruct the thinking – that rabids were monsters – that enabled him to do what needed to be done. While fans responded negatively to Gary, he was, according to Mitchell, never intended to be a villain but by encouraging the zombie perspective, audiences were encouraged to question and challenge Gary’s assumptions about the world and the enemy (Mitchell 2014). In so doing, the series raises complicated questions, for both Kieran and Gary, about how you move forward in this new post-war world. The focus on the undead point of view, whether vampire or zombie, is not inherently domesticating, although this is always possible as in Warm Bodies. Instead, it opens up the genre to new, complicated readings in which the audience are implicated in the undead actions and desires. We are challenged to see the world from both sides and question any assumptions that we make about the foreign ‘other’. Zombies and vampires are  here shown to be inherently similar, distorted versions of humanity, struggling with fear and questions of identity. This focus upon the sympathetic undead has, however, led to assumptions that vampires and zombies are no longer scary, fundamentally defanged. The next chapter will consider further overlap between the two through an examination of the apocalyptic vampire, a trend that renders the vampire as monstrous once more.

Notes 1. Thank you to Catherine Spooner for making this particularly astute observation about the film and the way in which it blurs the line between the zombie and the teenager during our email conversation about the film. 2. It is worth noting that as R becomes more humanised in the film, and therefore an increasingly suitable partner for Julie, his skin colour becomes less pale until in the final shots of the film, his hair is nicely combed and he has started to wear more colour – that is less Goth – clothing. As Spooner commented to me in an email, this film does fit in with traditions of Goth makeover narratives (not unlike Alison in The Breakfast Club).

C H A PT E R 7

How to Survive a Vampire Apocalypse: Or, What to Do When the Vampires are Us

In the last chapter, I considered the evolution of the sympathetic vampire and its influence on the development of an equally sympathetic zombie. In the figures of Kieran from In the Flesh and R from Warm Bodies, we see characters that embody the introspection, self-loathing, empathy and pathos that have become the hallmark of the sympathetic vampire. Furthermore, we see undead figures who, while bearing the signs of their zombie state – pale, near translucent skin, bleached eyes, unhealing scars – have yet to show signs of decomposition and so remain attractive figures and subjects of love and romance. In this they have more in common with the traditional image of the vampire than with the decaying walkers who populate the post-apocalyptic landscape of The Walking Dead. Running parallel to this development, recent years has also borne witness to the presence of an alternative version of the vampire to its attractive and sympathetic brethren. This vampire is more violent and monstrous, spreads its contagion very quickly, operates in large numbers and exists within a dystopian, often post-apocalyptic, landscape. This strand of vampire text, therefore, similarly highlights an interconnection between the vampire and the zombie that is the subject of this book. Much like the I-vampire/I-zombie, the vampire apocalypse has begun to appear in multiple locations. In literature, the genre received global success through Justin Cronin’s best-selling novel The Passage (2010) and its sequels The Twelve (2012) and City of Mirrors (2016). Similarly renowned Mexican horror filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro has co-written the vampire apocalypse trilogy, The Strain (2009), The Fall (2010) and The Night Eternal (2011), with Chuck Hogan, author of, among other things, The Blood Artists (2009), an outbreak narrative in which a new virus takes human form. The Strain has subsequently been adapted to television by FX, produced by Del Toro, Hogan and Carlton Cuse. It has also been adapted in comic-book form by Dark Horse (2011–15). On television, the traditionally romantic, often erotic, vampire series

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True Blood altered its tone in its final season by developing a decidedly apocalyptic narrative strand. At the conclusion of Season 6, human scientists developed a virus, Hep V, which is highly contagious and fatal to vampires, and deliberately contaminated the supplies of the blood substitute TruBlood. At the start of Season 7, supplies of TruBlood have run out and the virus has spread globally through the vampire population, as well as within humans who act as carriers. Uninfected vampires face starvation while those who are infected feed their infection mercilessly, descending upon towns, drinking them dry, leaving nothing but corpses in their wake, all before they each die in a haemorrhagic explosion of blood and tissue (‘I Found You’, 7:2). The government has abandoned small towns like Bon Temps, who have to defend themselves or die, and this leads to mob mentality and unchecked violence.1 In this manner, the series seems to be deliberately evoking the legacy of Hurricane Katrina (2005), about which the Federal Government and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) came under intense criticism for their slow and mismanaged response to the crisis (Ahlers 2006). The episode ‘I Found You’ in particular draws upon a visual language of  apocalypse as well as imagery associated with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (Barnow 2014). In this episode, Sookie and her friends from Bon Temps go to the neighbouring town of Saint Alice in order to find out who the vampires are and where they are hiding but, instead, find in 28 Days Later-fashion, the town completely deserted of life. Buildings are boarded-up and the walls and roofs of the buildings are covered in graffiti, through which inhabitants pleaded for help, rescue, or mercy. ‘Looted everything gone! Out of Guns and Ammo. Leave us in peace’ is written on one building, while the white external walls of a church, read ‘pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death Amen’. The sign ‘I am sleeping w/100lbs of silver and 2 UV guns’ is quite self-consciously reminiscent of Anthony Posey’s photograph of a similar sign in the wake of Katrina: ‘Don’t try. I am sleeping inside with a big dog, an ugly woman, two shot guns, and a claw hammer.’ 2 High angle shots of the plea ‘FEMA Help us’ painted on the ground and an ‘SOS’ on the rooftop, further lend the sequence, the ‘Katrina-esque sense’ that Barnow was looking for in this episode, while also reminiscent of similar SOS signs within countless zombie apocalypse films (see 28 Days Later and Dawn of the Dead). The final high angle shot of a giant mass grave filled with the bodies of all the town’s folk, is an apocalyptic conclusion to the sequence that allows Sookie and her friends to confront their own potential end at the hands of the vampires. This episode is a far cry from the usual erotic atmosphere of this ‘blood-drenched, sexually charged’ Gothic series (Cherry 2012: 13).

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h ow t o s urv ive a v a mpire a p o c a l y p s e 179 In cinema, this apocalyptic trend has been manifested in vampire films such as Stake Land, the 2007 adaptation of I Am Legend, Priest (2011), and Daybreakers, while Ultraviolet and Perfect Creature manifest dystopian aspects of this sub-genre. Furthermore, while 30 Days of Night is not literally post-apocalyptic, it does, like True Blood, possess an apocalyptic atmosphere. The film begins as the human inhabitants of Barrow Alaska prepare for the onset of solar winter – thirty days in which the sun will not rise – and come under siege from monstrous vampires, who have travelled into Alaska over the Bering Strait. Like the episode of True Blood, the film’s isolated setting and siege narrative draws extensively upon the conventions of the zombie film as the surviving humans are forced to barricade themselves in their homes to hide from the undead. The vampires are brutal as they feed upon the living, ripping out their throats and chasing them through the streets in primal pursuit of blood and carnage. The film therefore offers an engaging hybrid form of vampire and zombie text in which, like so many of these films and television series, the vampire is increasingly re-imagined as a zombie-like creature. As Victoria Nelson explains: Building on the escaped-government-virus-that-wipes-out-most-of-humanity template of [Stephen] King and his predecessors, these works imagine a post-­apocalyptic Gothick America overrun by zombified, flesh-seeking vampires who are far more relentless than their garrulous, dandified, seductive forbears. Neck biters and brain feeders alike are completely powered by the blind instinct to feed on (and thereby kill) their human prey. Though they retain their frightening speed (in contrast to typical zombie shuffling), the post-apocalyptic vampires, like zombies, have also been stripped of personality, speech, and individual consciousness. (2012: 154)

So the apocalypse that began with vampires in I Am Legend, born out of cold-war anxieties about nuclear self-destruction, gave birth to the zombie apocalypse narrative in the 1960s and 1970s and has subsequently reasserted itself within the vampire genre in the twenty-first century, largely in response to the successful proliferation of the zombie within contemporary culture. In this we see evidence of a dialogue between genres of the undead, not simply standing in opposition to one another, but also borrowing and reworking conceptions of monstrosity to create new meanings. James Berger argues that ‘the study of post-apocalypse is a study of what disappears and what remains, and of how the remainder has been transformed’ (Berger 1999: 7). This chapter will therefore focus its analysis upon the influence of the zombie on the vampire in the form of the rise of the vampire apocalypse within film and television in order to consider what disappears, what remains and how the genre has been transformed.

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In Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula explains that ‘your girls that you all love are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine – my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed’ (Stoker 1996: 306). The threat of infection, implicit in this statement, has been taken, via the influence of the zombie film, to a dystopian conclusion, offering a post-apocalyptic vision of humanity’s vampiric future, bringing the genre full circle from Matheson’s I Am Legend.

The Apocalyptic Vampire In his book Vampires, Burial & Death, a treatise on the vampire of folklore,  Paul Barber comments that the common expectation of a vampire would be for it to be ‘a tall elegant gentleman in a cloak’ (Barber 2010: 2), a tradition that he argues developed from literature and not folklore. Furthermore, it is an image that has taken hold of the cinematic and televisual representation of the vampire from Bela Lugosi’s Dracula (1931) through to Johnathan Rhys Myers in the television series Dracula (2013–14). While clothing styles may change, this description would equally apply to Lestat in Interview with the Vampire, Eric in True Blood, and Edward in Twilight. The vampire is traditionally tall, elegant, wellbred and, if not always aristocratic, usually wealthy. To this I would also add, that they are not visibly monstrous and thus can generally pass for human. If they do stand apart from humanity it is not because of physical monstrosity but rather excessive beauty. While these factors mean that they share certain aesthetic qualities as described by Barber, they are also completely individual and part of what makes them dangerous is that they look like us. The post-apocalyptic vampire film or television series, however, does not generally subscribe to this image and in recent years seems to represent a conscious attempt to make the vampire visually and aurally scary once again. They are visually coded as monstrous, often with twisted, deformed or scarred bodies, misshapen skulls and protruding fangs (Stake Land, Priest, I Am Legend). Additionally, they often lose their ability to communicate, restricted to feral snarls and growls (Stake Land, I Am Legend), or speak in their own gutteral language (Priest, 30 Days of Night). Significantly they are recognisable as monsters and cannot pass for human. In many cases, they lose their individuality and all look alike (The Strain, Stake Land, I Am Legend, Daybreakers). When they feed, they brutally rip into flesh to access the blood. There is no intimate seduction, but a violent assault, often descending upon their victim en masse, like animals (Stake Land, Priest, True Blood) (see Fig. 7.1). In

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Figure 7.1  Feeding frenzy in Priest

this aspect they appear to have more in common with the zombie than with classically handsome vampires such as the Salvatore brothers in The Vampire Diaries or the super cool vampires Adam and Eve in Only Lovers Left Alive. Having said that, they are not necessarily an aberration in the vampire genre but rather are following a separate strand – or strain if you will – that has run parallel to the dominant form of the genre since its first emergence in the cinema in 1922. Nosferatu re-imagined Stoker’s Count Dracula – now named Count Orlok and played by actor Max Schreck – as a monstrous figure, recognisable by his bald head, pointed ears, ratlike fangs, and curled elongated fingers that resemble claws. While the intertitles confirm that Orlok does speak and he is presented as unique in appearance and behaviour, he is not able to conceal his monstrousness, or at least not for very long, a fact confirmed by Hutter’s at first uneasy and later terrified expression when he is approached by Orlok. While a historically significant film, Nosferatu did not initially have the same influence as Browning’s Dracula starring Bela Lugosi, for, as recounted by David J. Skal, the film was removed from circulation after Bram Stoker’s widow, Florence Stoker, sued the studio, Prana-Film, for not paying for the rights to adapt her husband’s novel (Skal 1990: 43–63). The film only began to show its influence in the 1970s, most notably through Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu Phantom der Nacht (1979) and Tobe Hooper’s TV adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot (1979). In Herzog’s film, the vampire is once again imagined in the image of Max Shreck’s Count Orlok, this time played by Klaus Kinski and imbued with a heightened sense of melancholy, world weariness and, as S. S. Prawer has argued, ‘racked by existential anguish and romantic longings’ (Prawer 2004: 66); a vampire suitable for newGerman cinema’s post-war context and cultural malaise.

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In contrast, the original novel of Salem’s Lot owes a debt to Stoker’s work in terms of both plot and the representation of the vampire but the television mini-series re-imagines the vampire Mr Barlow in line with Murnau’s conception, ‘so that [Hooper’s] Barlow is never seen as a seductive fulfiller of dark f­ antasies’ but instead is depicted with ‘ratlike teeth [and] hissing, yellow’ eyes, made all the more monstrous by his inability to speak (Waller 2010: 241). This Orlok-inspired vampire also re-emerges as the Master in the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel and Damaskinos, leader of the vampire nation in Blade 2 – both of whom share Orlok’s bald head, white skin, pointed bat-like ears, protruding fangs, and elongated fingers. In both cases, this intertextual reference to the classic silent cinema vampire connotes the age of the vampire. The Master is too old to morph between vampire and human face, like all of the other vampires in the series, described as having ‘grown past the curse of human features’ (‘Darla’ Angel 2.7). He lives below ground unwilling, and unable, to live among humans. Similarly, Damaskinos’ appearance matches the Gothic miseen-scène of his dungeon-like fortress, which includes old vampire texts, blood pools in which to bathe, and an old-fashioned drawbridge. This is contrasted with the cybernetic appearance of Blade and the Bloodpack who look human, use high tech equipment and wear stealthy black leather and lycra (see Chapter 5 for a discussion of the Bloodpack and the cyborg vampire). In these texts, the Orlok-inspired appearance connotes the barbaric and the ancient, but also the individual. There are usually  no other vampires like them. They alone have lived long enough to shed their human appearance. For instance, while Barlow’s invasion of the small town of Jerusalem’s Lot is followed by a rampant spread of vampirism, each of these newborn vampires retain their individual appearance rather than be transformed into Barlow’s image, although their pale faces, black eyes and blank expressions, are reminiscent of the appearance of the Romero-zombie. In Blade 2, however, it is notable that the new genetically engineered strain of vampire, known as the Reaper, which feeds off other vampires, is developed from Damaskinos’ DNA and does come to mirror his monstrous appearance. The reaper strain emerges from the ‘birth’ of the genetically engineered super vampire Nomak, Damaskinos’ Frankenstein-like son who rejects his father and begins to spread this new vampire strain. While Damaskinos and Nomak are presented as articulate, uncompromising, and individual – with Damaskinos in particular being duplicitous – the reapers are shown to be feral monsters, who have lost their individuality and identity through infection. Damaskinos is driven by his Machiavellian

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h ow t o s urv ive a v a mpire a p o c a l y p s e 183 plans for the vampire nation and Nomak for revenge, but the reapers are driven only by the need to consume blood and thus spread the infection. This is a trope that recurs in the 2007 adaptation of I Am Legend and the novel and television series of The Strain. In both texts, the plague that decimates the human population transforms humanity into a hybrid  of zombie and vampire, in which they shed all body hair, lose all of the pigment in their skin and are driven by their need to feed. The vampires in Stake Land are similarly feral and monstrous with hollowed out eyes and scarred, disfigured features, more reminiscent of the decaying zombie then Nosferatu. Furthermore, they often crawl on all fours and snarl like an animal. In all of these films, the vampires have become, through infection, allergic to daylight like the traditional vampire but often live and hunt in packs or hordes like the zombie. Most importantly, they seem to lose high levels of cognitive function, operating more on instinct than intelligence. In this manner, the vampire seems to be physically ‘othered’, rendered unknowable through their monstrous bodies and lack of voice. Yet, they can also serve as a metaphor, as in the case of the Australian vampire film Daybreakers, for the manner in which the unknown, or the socially marginal, is othered as a distanciation technique. Daybreakers is a film that overtly builds upon Matheson’s premise and its subsequent interpretation through the zombie film by setting itself ten years after the spread of a virus that turns most of humanity into vampires. The ten-year time lag following the initial spread of the virus enables the film to explore the nature of the new society that has emerged in humanity’s wake. In so doing, the film self-consciously integrates the two strands of these representations of the vampire, attractive individualised vampire versus the monstrous vampire hordes, with Matheson’s original conception of two tiers of vampires: the living versus the dead vampires. The film develops this distinction to explore social and class issues within a dystopian neo-liberal society in which pharmaceutical companies and corporate commerce dictate government policy, ‘exemplif[ying] the new biopolitics of control [that] draw[s] attention to the transformation of the body in the bioeconomy’ (Vint 2011: 167). Matheson’s novel is deliberately ambiguous about the nature of this new society created by the vampires, while Romero’s zombies offer a complete revolution, laying waste to the old, human system. The vampires in Daybreakers, however, have simply recreated the human world, with all of its flaws, for the new vampire matrix. It is a world that functions nocturnally, with the additional protection of underground walkways, high-spec security barriers and cars with blacked-out windows, navigated by sophisticated computer technology. Their violence is merely a nocturnal reflection of their human legacy and

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Figure 7.2  The monstrous vampire observed in Daybreakers

like the human world that has been left behind, the vampire existence is also a world that continues to be ruled by corporate greed. In this world, the remaining human population is either farmed for blood or in hiding from the vampires. Evoking the manner in which the growth of the human population is putting unprecedented pressure on natural resources, the sudden expansion of the vampire population has caused them to exhaust their food supply. Human blood is running out. Furthermore, it is discovered that blood deprivation results in a form of vampire regression, in which its body begins to deform and its cognitive functions deteriorate, leading to madness and feral behaviour. This transformation is presented early in the film, through a slide presentation of photographs of a death row inmate selected for a month-long study of blood deprivation. The slides show the gradual deterioration of the vampire’s ‘frontal lobe’, the elongation of his ears, the loss of hair and teeth, leaving only the canine fangs. By the end of the slide show, he is yet another Orlok-styled vampire – a monster (see Fig. 7.2). Later in the film, when the protagonist Edward is attacked by such a vampire – referred to as subsiders – his arms are shown to have grown into bat wings and his feet into claws enabling him to hang from the ceiling, signalling that the transformation is akin to a regression to a hybrid form of bat, the animal reputedly responsible for the initial spread of the virus. This transformation of the vampire into subsider is used to convey class distinction and social hierarchy within this new society, as the decrease in blood supply leads to inflated prices. Those who suffer deprivation first are those who are poorest. For instance, Ed realises, to his horror, that the subsider who broke into his house was the neighbourhood gardener, Carl. The subsiders become the underclass of the vampires, visually depicted as such when the camera cranes down, away from a group of vampires

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h ow t o s urv ive a v a mpire a p o c a l y p s e 185 standing on a train station platform, to the image of multiple subsiders scurrying around the crawl spaces below. A similar transition is used in Blade 2 when the camera cranes down away from vampires dancing in the S&M bar, The House of Pain, to the reapers gathering in the sewers. The subsiders and the reapers embody a horrific future for the vampire but also a regressive past, conveying the monster that lurks within the monster, concealed by the veil of civilisation. While presented in opposition to the vampires, stripped of their civilised demeanour, they are, in actuality, the physical embodiment of the vampire’s rapacious hunger and need to consume. Furthermore, while they are condemned as animals because they resort to feeding off other vampires, they actually mirror the manner in which Charles Bromley, CEO of Bromley Marks, a ‘World Leader in Blood Pharmacy’, similarly plans to feed off his own kind by farming and selling real human blood to the wealthiest of vampires, while the poorer ones must live on a substitute. As Bromley explains ‘there will always be those who are willing to pay a little extra for the real thing . . . we have to be realistic if we don’t cater to all markets someone else will’. In this manner, the social division can also be seen to evoke a first and third world division. The need to deny the barbaric side of vampirism is conveyed in Daybreakers by the authority’s repugnant description of subsiders as animals, and their eventual round-up as a means of containing the ‘subsider epidemic’. This sequence deliberately associates these monstrous vampires with social ‘undesirables’, such as the homeless, the poor, migrants and asylum seekers. As Sherryl Vint explains, in a world in which ‘nation state[s] are being understood as a matter of biology or race’, ‘racism allows what is homogenous (the human species [or in the case of Daybreakers the vampire species]) to be conceptualised as divided between the “good”, healthy citizens and the “bad”, unhealthy specimens, construed as fundamentally different from the human/citizen’ (Vint 2011: 162). This distinction between healthy citizens and unhealthy specimens is established at the beginning of Daybreakers as a homeless vampire, bleeding from the ears, stands in the rain, wearing a sign that says ‘Starving – Need Blood’. When he lashes out at a wealthy couple who pass by, careful to avoid the man’s gaze and thus deny his presence, the vampire is captured by the police, who subdue him with an electric prod that restrains him by the neck. As the number of subsiders expands and the crisis develops, the threat they represent shifts from the threat of physical violence on the street to the cost of their containment. One respondent explains in a news report that ‘our families are starving. We can’t afford to feed these creatures too’, while another claims ‘I know it may be wrong but these things – they gotta

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go’. They cannot simply be contained but must be destroyed. The image of the subsiders being chained up, loaded onto trucks and then eventually dragged out into the sun to burn up, as ‘respectable’ citizens and soldiers watch, deliberately evokes the Holocaust. It also speaks to continuing cultural anxieties about poverty, migrants and third world refugees in a world where the human population is growing beyond its ability to sustain itself. This has been increasingly prevalent during 2015 with the growing Syrian refugee crisis in Europe.3 James Berger argues, ‘the most dystopic visions of science fiction can do no more than replicate the actual historical catastrophes of the twentieth century’ (Berger 1999: xiii). He explains that we have already seen ‘after the end of our civilization’ and it ‘looks like a Nazi death camp, or an atomic explosion, or an ecological or urban wasteland’ (Berger 1999: xiii). Both Ultraviolet and The Breed (2001) selfconsciously allude to the Holocaust in their representation of vampires as marginalised and ostracised from mainstream society. The Breed makes the allusion crystal clear by presenting the vampires as being forced to live in former Jewish ghettos. Daniel Pick argues that Bram Stoker’s Dracula charts, in its representation of the vampire, late-nineteenth-century anxieties about ‘bio-medical degeneration of the race in general and the metropolitan population in particular’ (1988: 75). According to Pick, the novel both ‘sensationalise[s] the horrors of degeneration and chart[s] reassuringly the process of their confinement and containment’ (Pick 1988: 83). In Daybreakers, this study in physical degeneracy embodied in the subsiders, suffering at the hands of corporate greed, offers a critique and condemnation of a system that ‘retains its sovereign power to harm and to kill through the naming of persons for whom’ its obligation to keep alive ‘need not be fulfilled’ (Canavan 2011: 173). The return to the monstrous vampires provides a space through which we can project our cultural anxieties in order to safely destroy a clear and visible villain. However, the manner in which Daybreakers, and to a lesser degree Blade 2, presents the monstrous vampires as the dark side of the civilised vampire – the Hyde to the vampire’s Jekyll – reminds us that the monster we seek to destroy is in fact a part of ourselves.

The Post-apocalyptic Landscape In Chapter 2, I argue that an increasingly dominant trend within many contemporary, mainstream vampire films was the reimaging of the genre through the language of science, in which vampirism was no longer necessarily presented in these films as metaphor for disease but was increasingly being described diegetically as a virus, something located in the blood. In

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h ow t o s urv ive a v a mpire a p o c a l y p s e 187 Blade, a haematologist works to discover a cure to vampirism while the vampire Selene in Underworld openly acknowledges that vampirism is caused by a virus. In these cases, however, the spread of vampirism is carefully controlled. The post-apocalyptic vampire film begins long after that control has been lost. In these cases, the spread of vampirism is no longer through the slow process of exchanging blood, but rather simple exposure to blood or saliva and as a result it spreads quickly. In Perfect Creature a renegade vampire drains his own blood into the water supply, while in Seasons 6 and 7 of True Blood, the blood substitute has been infected by a virus. In I Am Legend the virus is airborne, while in Ultraviolet, the tiniest spattering of blood can lead to infection. While the television series The Strain, like the novel, reasserts the need for a vampire bite to communicate the virus, carried in the form of blood worms embedded within the vampire blood, the bite is de-sexualised and conveyed in the form of a vector, seeking to spread the virus. Due to the speed with which the infection spreads, these narratives are set within a dystopian landscape in which society has collapsed, or is on the verge of collapsing and as a result they call to mind global preoccupations with society collapse whether through natural disaster, terrorism, viral outbreak or economic global crisis. It is notable that the majority of these post-apocalyptic vampire texts were made following the economic crisis of 2008. The Strain further taps into a modern lexicon of cultural crisis by having the vampire, modelled on Dracula, infect the passengers of a plane, killing them all in the process. Since 9/11, air travel is repeatedly signalled within popular media as the potential target for terrorism but in fiction and non-fiction media, it is equally perceived as the perfect modern delivery system for the virus that could lead to a ‘species-threatening event’ (Wald 2008: 32). This anxiety about air travel was conveyed on 2 August 2014 as global news was transfixed by the announcement that an American aid worker in Africa, Dr Kent Brantly, infected with the Ebola virus, would be transported back to the US. The images of the plane and the ambulance, as well as two people emerging from an ambulance in full biohazard protective clothing were shown repeatedly on multiple channels throughout the news cycle (BBC News 2014b). These images embodied an apocalyptic anxiety about the spread of the Ebola virus, already out of control in Africa, to the West. This collective anxiety about terrorism and viral outbreak is the starting point of The Strain, both novel and television series, in which the plane arrives in New York and falls mysteriously silent upon landing, its engines cold ‘like a dead animal’. Concerned about a potential terrorist attack or viral outbreak, airport security calls all emergency services, including

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Figure 7.3  The zombie-like vampire in ‘Night Zero’ The Strain (1.1)

SWAT, Port Authority, FBI, and the dual strands of twenty-first century crisis management: Homeland Security and the Centre for Disease Control (CDC). When the CDC finds the majority of the passengers dead and sends the bodies to the morgue for examination, the victims rise from the dead later that evening. Like zombies, they slowly surround the coroner, each at different stages of their autopsy, and descend into a feeding frenzy, before returning home to their families to spread their vampire contagion further (‘Night Zero’ 1.1) (see Fig. 7.3). The distinction between vampires and zombies is significant because a vampire virus facilitates a speedier spread. Zombies would simply feed on those in close proximity thus allowing a potential for containment. Vampires, on the other hand, move more quickly as Nelson points out but are also drawn to family and therefore quickly disperse the virus across the city. The first season of The Strain follows the trajectory of the first book in the series by charting the speed with which the virus is spread and the subsequent collapse of community and communication as control of the city is lost. This is the subject of Steven Soderbergh’s drama Contagion. Soderbergh explains that in making the film he wanted ‘to convey the feeling that I get now all over the world that the fabric of society is stretched thin’ (cited in Solomons 2011). As a result, the film channels the  fear not of dying but the collapse of society. Contagion is, however, a realist film that explores how an outbreak might happen and the stages through which our society will be brought to the brink of collapse. While the film is bleak and frightening in its realism, that very realism is what

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h ow t o s urv ive a v a mpire a p o c a l y p s e 189 prevents it from taking that one step further. It hovers on the brink but cannot go further. Furthermore, the need to pull humanity back from collapse allows the film to fulfil the conventions of the contagion narrative in which the virus is ‘heroically contained with help from the laboratory and as a result of the brilliant epidemiological detective work that is the cornerstone of the outbreak narrative’ (Wald 2008: 217). The post-apocalypse vampire film, however, is able to imagine the extreme  possibilities of physical and social apocalypse in a way that Contagion  cannot, and transcends the specificity of a viral outbreak and becomes symbolic of social collapse. These post-apocalyptic vampire films are a stark reminder, in a world that has struggled with recession and austerity, that our way of life is not fixed and can be overturned at a moment’s notice. As a result these films begin not necessarily with the outbreak but rather when the story begins, the world has already been transformed. Vampires no longer hide alone in the shadows, a fairy-tale monster to scare children or a Byronic hero to seduce the willing, but rather they stalk the night-time landscape, hunting the living and laying waste to communities, changing the world to suit their weaknesses in the process. In so doing, the films and TV series marshal a dystopian mise-en-scène to convey the apocalyptic nature of this contagion, each distinct but highlighting the breakdown and transformation of society. To achieve this mise-en-scène the vampire genre is integrated with the visual and aural conventions of others genres, such as Film Noir, crime thriller, science fiction and Western, all contributing to the construction of a dystopian vision, establishing an aesthetic stage for the apocalyptic events. For instance, Stake Land begins in the light of day as a car drives up a familiar open road to the gentle strains of gospel singing, but this familiar and comforting establishing shot is disrupted, as the camera pulls back, by a large bullet hole in a city boundary sign now dangling on its hinges. This image disrupts the familiar conventions of the road movie and establishes the post-apocalyptic setting, reaffirmed in the narration when Martin, a teenage boy travelling with vampire hunter Mister, explains ‘let’s begin at the beginning. I was like any other kid. I had a family. I went to school. I didn’t believe in the boogeyman. But then the world woke up to a nightmare.’ Similarly, Perfect Creature takes place in a claustrophobic, overcrowded, polluted cityscape, drawing on the conventions of the crime film and Film Noir, mixed with the temporal collage of steampunk. This is an alternative universe that brings together the aesthetic conventions of 1940’s noir in terms of costumes, cars and lighting with the urban poverty and squalor of the nineteenth century, while vampire scientists – one of which is modelled on Rotwang in Metropolis – experiment with genetic engineering.

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Genre is significant to the re-conception of the vampire in these films with the Western and Film Noir operating as notable touchstones for rethinking the vampire and reimagining the Gothic landscape as a postapocalyptic one. While Stake Land is effectively a road movie, as Mister and Martin travel across the US in an attempt to escape to New Eden in Canada, with allusions to other post-apocalyptic stories such as Mad Max and The Road, the narrative and aesthetic conventions that it draws upon most closely is the Western. It does this primarily by imagining this post–vampire-outbreak world as one in which the American landscape is marked by a violent frontier peppered throughout by small human outposts – lockdowns – in which humans protect themselves and attempt to maintain a semblance of civilisation. It also sets up an opposition between these frontier towns and the territories held by savage tribes of canni­ bals and Aryan religious fanatics, as well as the vampires that circulate throughout the landscape. This conception is in keeping with Jim Kitses’ perception of the Western frontier as embodying both the natural but cultivated dignity of the garden and the harshness and brutality of the desert landscape (Kitses 2007). In Stake Land, however, the promise of civilisation embodied in these lockdowns is gradually revealed to be a false promise. While they provide some safety and some evoke a semblance of normality – kids, dogs, food, bars, dancing, barbers – others are rougher, suggesting the wildest of the frontier towns in Westerns, where bars only serve hard liquor and vampires are tied up outside to burn in the sunshine. Strivington, the third and most developed lockdown that they visit, seems the most promising. Protected by the US volunteer militia, Strivington possesses a strong outer perimeter and rigorous gun control. In the tradition of American frontier towns like Dodge City or Tombstone, all visitors much check their weapons with the authorities upon entry (Winkler 2011). Within Strivington, people barter for food and clothes, children play school, and the community gathers for a festive dance, celebrating their survival and the re-establishment of some form of society. The unity and harmony of the sequence is conveyed through the use of a single long take as Martin and his friends intermingle within the community and join the dance. Even Mister joins the crowd as he picks up a little girl and dances with her cradled in his arms. In the same shot, Martin is reunited with Sister – a nun he and Mister had saved from rapists only to have her, they believed, lost again to the Aryan Brotherhood. The sequence’s emphasis upon celebration and the establishment of society within a hostile ­frontier environment evokes John Ford’s use of the country dance within his Westerns such as My Darling Clementine. In this film, the building of the

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h ow t o s urv ive a v a mpire a p o c a l y p s e 191 new church within the town of Tombstone is celebrated with a dance and the symbolism of the scene is consolidated around the moment when the Western hero Marshall Wyatt Earp joins the dance with the Eastern-born Clementine Carter. As Douglas Pye argues, the interruption of the dance as Earp and Clementine reach the floor . . . is a prelude to a greater harmony, the community joining the dance around the marshal and his ‘lady fair’ – an image that points toward the possibility of a perfected society in the West that will reconcile opposing forces in an ideal harmony. (Pye 1995: 195)

The long take in Stake Land reinforces this unity and harmony through the choreographed movements of camera with community, moving in  time  with the music and through the dancers. But this unity and harmony  is disrupted when helicopters fly over and drop vampires into the lockdown, all in the same long take, turning choreography into chaos. The music stops, people run and scream as vampires leap out from the shadows, ripping them apart. As Martin explains, after he and his friends escape into the shadows once more, ‘all that goodness shattered by some Christian crazies dropping vamps from the sky’. The hope of the Western is shattered by the post-apocalyptic reality in which the attempt to recapture a past way of life is proved to be futile. Similarly, Priest and Perfect Creature present humanity forced to retreat to overcrowded and decaying cities. The deliberately postmodern visual style in both films draws from the past and the future, the Western and Film Noir, speaking to a civilisation that is stalled, trapped in the past, unable to move forward or progress but simply struggling to stay alive.

The Fundamentalist Vampire Film As I have argued elsewhere, the twentieth-century vampire film reflects the growing secularisation of contemporary Western society by ­stripping away the Christian iconography that had been such a significant aspect of the vampire genre, drawn from folklore, Stoker’s Dracula and the Universal horror films. The eponymous vampire in George Romero’s Martin (1977) claimed that there was no magic as he held a crucifix up to his face, while Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark abandoned any references to God, the crucifix and holy water along with the word vampire, and the only method of killing a vampire was exposure to the sun (or fire), an appro­ priate weapon for a film set in the desert. In Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Interview with the Vampire, when asked, Louis tells his interviewer that he is ‘quite fond of looking at crucifixes.’ Furthermore, the film’s exploration of a form of vampire existentialism, in which Louis questions the meaning

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of his existence, challenges the very nature of good and evil. When Louis meets vampire Armand in Paris, Armand denies any knowledge of God or purpose to their existence, when he explains: ‘I know nothing of God – or the Devil. I have never seen a vision or learned a secret that would damn or save my soul. As far as I know, after four hundred years I am the oldest living vampire in the world.’ In contrast, teen vampire films such as Fright Night, The Lost Boys and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (film and series), reinstated the use of classic religious imagery but their postmodern emphasis on the pop culture origins of the vampire myth (with repeated references to Dracula, horror movies and comics) located the power within intertextual knowledge rather than religious faith. In the original version of Fright Night, the vampire Jerry Dandridge tells vampire-hunter-actor Peter Vincent, holding a crucifix up to ward off the vampire, ‘you have to have faith for that to work on me’ before knocking the cross out of his hands. But when the teenage – horror movie fan – Charlie Brewster holds up his tiny cross, Jerry backs away in terror. Charlie’s faith is not necessarily in God or in religion, but in the movies. When looking at these post-apocalyptic vampire films, however, they are  notably marked by the reinfusion of religious imagery, albeit in a somewhat schizophrenic way across the genre. No two films use religion in the same manner but consistently religion and/or the church are no longer presented as the protector of humanity or, necessarily, as an opposition to the vampire. Instead it is usually a part of the vampire problem. For instance, in Ultraviolet, government, military and church have been unified into The Archministry, led by Vice Cardinal Ferdinand Daxus and it is this group which has been rounding up the infected but also planning the development of a further virus that will keep humanity under control and their medical wing in business. In Stake Land, humanity has devolved into factions the most dangerous of which is the fundamentalist Aryan group, The Brotherhood, which sees the vampire pandemic as a plague sent from God to destroy the non-believers, the racially impure. They trap people on the roads through their territory, rape the women, beat the men, leave them for dead or serve them up to the vampires – all supposedly in the name of God. In Strivington, it was the Brotherhood who dropped the vampires into the outpost to destroy their attempt at developing a civilised community, an act of terrorism as apocalyptic as 9/11. Their fundamentalist views embody the worst of all religious extremism, exploiting people’s fears in order to assert their will as Martin explains, ‘in desperate times, false gods abound. People put their faith in the loudest preacher and hope they’re right. Sometimes they’re wrong –

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h ow t o s urv ive a v a mpire a p o c a l y p s e 193 dead wrong.’ Jebedia Loven, the leader of the Brotherhood, is one such preacher, informing Mister: We know who you are. You kill them that come. Them that serve us. Them that God brought down to do his work, leaving us to purify the blood of our fathers. And when that day comes, he will bring them back and peace and purity will rain on the earth forever. Amen.

In Stake Land, like so many zombie films, it is the all-too human Brotherhood which is an even greater threat then the vampires, and when he is turned, Jebedia becomes an even more horrifying monster. In Perfect Creature, in a break with tradition, the vampires in this plague-ridden society have come to represent hope for humanity as they  are invulnerable to disease and their blood has healing properties for humans – a trope that is also present within True Blood and Vampire Diaries as discussed in Chapter 2. The word vampire is not used, but their distinguishing external identifying features are their fangs and the fact that they drink human blood. They are referred to as Brothers and worshipped by the human population. In a twisted inversion of Christianity, in which it is believed that Christ gave his blood for the salvation of humanity – symbolised by the drinking of wine as part of Holy Communion – the vampires/brothers have now become the church, with their congregation giving their own blood to sustain the brothers. In return, the Brotherhood is responsible for ‘preserving and maintaining human life’. It is the perfect symbiotic relationship. But the Brotherhood is eventually revealed to be corrupt, experimenting with genetics in order to make more brothers as no new brothers have been born in over seventy years, which inevitably leads to the release of an even more dangerous virus upon the human populace. The film follows the battle between two brothers (figuratively and literally as they have the same mother): Silas, disillusioned by the corruption within the Brotherhood but wanting to live up to his vocation and protect humanity and Edgar, infected with a virus that transforms brothers into bloodthirsty monsters. Edgar attempts to bring down both the Brotherhood and humanity by spreading his virus throughout the human population. Finally, Priest chronicles a Holy War between humanity and vampires, in which the Priests are believed to be the holy vessels of God, fighting machines trained by the church and able to destroy the vampire menace. Set years after the presumed end of the war, the church is presented as a political machine, more interested in protecting its power then its people. The cities built to protect humanity from the vampires have become prisons in which humanity is trapped beneath the all-powerful control of the church whose slogan, repeated

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numerous times throughout the film, reinforces their totalitarian view : ‘To go against the church is to go against God.’ In these films the church does not offer salvation in the face of apocalypse but rather exploits it for their own gain, either financially or in terms of power. These films link the institution of the church with broader cultural cynicism about figures in authority. Unlike Night of the Living Dead which presents government and authority as outmoded and useless, these films present them as corrupt and an intrinsic element of the problem. This reinfusion of religious imagery into the vampire genre should not be too surprising in a post 9/11 context. The seeming secularisation of society that became a key component of late twentieth-century horror and vampire films, was overturned by the events of 9/11 that saw notions of religion reassert themselves within popular discourses around society, government, terrorism and war. These films embody conflicting, ambivalent attitudes to religion and politics in the light of these cultural developments. For instance, in Ultraviolet the vampires – hemophages – are presented as terrorists, operating in small cells, breaking into government laboratories, fighting against The Archministry – looking to bring down the government/church. As the film is told from Violet’s point of view, it reasserts that every terrorist is potentially a resistance fighter, depending upon your perspective and it presents the government/church to be the true criminals. Similarly, Stake Land presents the Brotherhood as the most extreme form of religious fundamentalism, absolutely intolerant and desirous of bringing down any alternative form of society. In this manner, they call to mind contemporary discourses surrounding Muslim extremists embodied in recent groups such as the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and ISIS. The film alludes to these discourses through the character, Willie, a former marine who was brought back from the ‘war’ in the Middle East at the beginning of the outbreak to facilitate the evacuation to Canada but it was a mission, he argues, that was poorly conceived and mishandled by the government. The fact that the Brotherhood is a Christian fundamentalist group rather than Muslim, however, highlights that all religions have the potential for this form of destructive thinking, as embodied in the Westboro Baptist Church as well as the recent shooting in the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado on 28 November 2015. Priest most overtly represents the opposition between the living and the undead as a Holy War, dating back to the Middle Ages with imagery that calls to mind the Crusades (see Fig. 7.4). Unlike these other films, the vampires are not infected humans but rather another species and as a result they are more overtly presented as other – monstrous and alien (in fact highly reminiscent of the Alien films in their design). As the hero

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Figure 7.4  The fundamentalist vampire film: Priest

is one of the Priests, born with innate strength and power to destroy the vampire, the film does seem to be the most overt evocation of the religious war on terror. The vampires, led by a charismatic leader trained by the church before he was turned into a vampire and became the first vampire/ human hybrid, are planning to launch an unprecedented attack on one of the human cities, led by a ruling body that does not believe that they, or the cities, are vulnerable. The similarities to America pre-9/11 are selfevident. The fact that the Priest and his allies manage to stop the attack seems to be a form of 9/11 wish fulfilment and the conclusion with the Priest driving off into the desert following his declaration that the war ‘is just beginning’, seems to assert the necessity of the war on terror. The film’s meaning is, however, more ambivalent then this. The  film offers a dystopian critique of a religiously based society and a c­ hurch-ruled government, and the church is presented as culpable in this war. The vampire/human hybrid explains that the church teaches that the eyes are the window to the soul and since the vampire evolved without eyes, ‘it is a soulless creature that must be eradicated’. It is their intolerance for this species, and their need to impose their views upon the world, that brings the war upon them. Furthermore, the Priests – the soldiers of the church – are presented as having been abandoned by their government, their church, unable to find their place in contemporary society and suffering for the horrors of the atrocities they were forced to commit under the auspices of the church. Again we see similarities with discourses surrounding American soldiers and post-traumatic stress disorder as well as Gulf War syndrome. Finally, the film’s integration of conventions of the Western with the vampire film also takes a reading of this Holy War to even more complex levels. Priest is effectively a remake of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956),

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with the Priest in the role of John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards. This positions the vampires in the role of the Native Americans, stealing away his daughter and threatening to turn her into a familiar. On the one hand, the vampires are being used as a replacement for Native Americans who can no longer be positioned in the role of ‘savage’. As vampires are a fictional creation they can take on this role without causing offence. However, the vampire’s place as a stand-in for the Native Americans is obvious due to the film’s use of other Western conventions and as a result contemporary attitudes towards Native Americans and the recognition of the extent to which they have consistently been mistreated by the military and the American Government influences the reading of the vampires in this film. The vampires are presented, like Native Americans, as having been beaten back, their numbers decimated by the Priests in the war and subsequently forced to live in confined reservations. Their attack is an attempted retaliation for the damage that was done to them and their association with Native Americans does lend itself to a more sympathetic reading of their actions. In this manner the film offers a complex, at times contradictory, rein­ terpretation of the post-9/11 war on terror that embodies the growing cultural ambivalence to those events and the wars that followed and continue to occur in the Middle East. When taken together the depiction of religion in these dystopian and post-apocalyptic vampire films does not suggest a restoration of faith in the church to protect us from the monsters, in the manner that Van Helsing’s use of religious iconography did in Dracula, nor does it suggest a clear-cut separation of good and evil. Nor do they strip away any or all notions of society, government, science and religion like Night of the Living Dead and other zombie apocalypse films. Drawing upon Robin Wood’s notion of the ‘incoherent text’ in which films are either deliberately fractured and fragmentary in order to convey a specific type of experience, or are responding to a series of conflicting cultural conditions , the post-apocalyptic vampire film captures in its dystopian vision confused and ambivalent responses of a society coping with drastic changes in science, economics, war, globalisation and religion (Wood 1986: 46). These films take us full circle from Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend in which humanity is replaced by a new society. Through the reimaging of his work in the form of the zombie apocalypse, now so prevalent as to lead to this new subset of vampires that wallow in the apocalypse, these films present a version of humanity that has not been replaced but rather exposed for its complicity within the apocalypse. In these films there are no clear distinctions between good and evil because this time the vampires are us.

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Notes 1. This bears unconscious echoes of In the Flesh, for Dominic Mitchell explains that within the series the Human Volunteer Force emerged within small town and rural communities because the government failed them and they were left to fend for themselves (Mitchell 2014). 2. Posey’s photographs are available to see here: http://www.flickriver.com/ photos/60053005@N00/popular-interesting/ 3. See Sophie Brown (2015) for her comparison of Daily Mail headlines about German Jews trying to enter the UK in 1938 with the 2015 ‘migrant crisis’ at the port of Calais as well as multiple discussions of the controversial use of the term ‘swarming’ by Prime Minister David Cameron to describe the migrants’ attempts to enter Britain through the Eurotunnel.

A FT E RWORD

They Walk Among Us: Vampires and Zombies in Popular Culture

On 13 February 2013, the Canadian House of Commons gained global attention when it became the first government body to address within official proceedings an issue of global concern when the then-MP for Winnipeg Centre, Pat Martin, raised concerns over the possibility of a zombie pandemic, and asked whether the Minister for Foreign Affairs was ‘working with his American counterparts to develop an international zombie strategy so that a zombie invasion does not turn into a zombie apocalypse’. Martin’s remarks were met with laughter and applause by fellow MPs and followed by the then-Minister for Foreign Affairs, John Baird’s response as he assured all Canadians that ‘Canada will never become a safe haven for zombies, ever”!’ This comedic interlude within Canadian politics followed a public announcement that the Quebec civil security department was planning to stage a zombie apocalypse as part of training on how to respond to a catastrophic event. This event was modelled on similar training that has repeatedly been run across Canada and the US, even by the American HALO Counter-terrorism unit (31 October 2012). The potential benefits of making use of the zombie apocalypse as a means of preparing people for how to respond to disaster was identified in 2011 by the Center for Disease Control who launched their ‘Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse’ website, with the following declaration: The rise of zombies in pop culture has given credence to the idea that a zombie apocalypse could happen. In such a scenario zombies would take over entire countries, roaming city streets eating anything living that got in their way. The proliferation of this idea has led many people to wonder ‘How do I prepare for a zombie apocalypse?’   Well, we’re here to answer that question for you, and hopefully share a few tips about preparing for real emergencies too! (Kahn 16 May 2011)

The campaign was so successful that they began blogging about The Walking Dead, drawing upon events within the series in order to highlight

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af t e r wo rd 199 the dos and don’ts of disaster response (Silver 2012) and have subsequently produced an online graphic novel Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic (Silver 2015). This adoption of the zombie apocalypse for these purposes is in keeping with the apocalyptic preoccupations that underpin much of this book. However, the zombie and vampire within popular culture are not simply the embodiment of survivalist training and paranoia. While some are preparing for how to survive the zombie hordes, others recognise the allegorical potential within the undead as exhibited by many of the films discussed in this book and have been using it for political purposes. In 2012, during the American Presidential campaign, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel creator Joss Whedon filmed and released a satirical commentary on Republican candidate Mitt Romney, declaring that Romney was a ‘different candidate; one with the vision and determination to cut through business as usual politics and finally put this country back on the path to the zombie apocalypse’ (Whedon 2012). Similarly, students have, over the past ten years, repeatedly chosen to dress like zombies as part of their protest against changing education policies such as standardised testing (Providence, RI, Chicago, Denver), tuition hikes (California), and school closures which have also often involved students from Philadelphia to Santiago in Chile not only dressing like zombies, but dancing to Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’. Similar zombie protests have taken place within the Ukraine against Vladimir Putin and the anti-Ukraine bias of much Russian programming on Ukrainian television, and in New York as part of the Occupy Wall Street campaign. The zombie is a recognisable metaphor, embodying the death of education and culture, corporate greed and the overall sentiment that without political change we are on the path to the ‘nightmare zombie wasteland’ (Whedon 2012). It is not, however, all apocalypse and politics, for the zombie experience can be about fun and even good health. The ‘Run for Your Lives’ Zombie runs are 3–5K runs in which the participants must dodge obstacles including zombies, while the 2.8 Hours Later zombie chase game gives everyone the opportunity to negotiate their way through an abandoned part of the city, avoiding zombies, helping survivors and attempting to find their way to a sanctuary without becoming infected. These events are exhilarating, at times terrifying, and teach you whether you have what it takes to survive or become one of the living dead. Similarly the vampire has for decades embodied a form of countercultural existence, with fans of the vampire choosing to embrace the lifestyle and fashion of the undead as a means of personal identification that has historically been seen as sub-cultural. Maria Mellins argues, however, that with the increasingly popular position of the vampire within the

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twenty-first century this sub-cultural product has increasingly bled into the mainstream making it ‘possible to purchase Gothic clothes on the high street and tweet-watch the latest episode of your favourite vampire television show with a wider audience of online fans’ (Mellins 2013: 1). Mellins documents the rise of vampire fashion on the catwalk and the proliferation of vampire bars, in particular the True Blood tie-in Fangtasia London, a lifestyle event that presents itself as ‘a unique performance club experience with drinking, dancing and death in the swamplands of Bethnel Green’ (cited in Mellins 2013:5). Brigid Cherry has explored the rising popularity of Gothic knitting as a form of fan expression, in which fans of vampire texts such as True Blood, Dracula and Twilight, draw inspiration from these books, films and television series in the creation of their cuddly and creative handicrafts. I am in possession of a knitted Dracula Meerkat and a crocheted Nosferatu (Cherry 2010).1 Both the vampire and the zombie are booming products within novelty merchandising such as Dracula pop-up books and puppet theatres, vampire and zombie dolls, bat-shaped Christmas tree decorations, and zombie cupcake recipe books. Both the vampire and the zombie continue to be popular cosplay choices whether at Halloween, pop-culture conventions or one of the many zombie walks that happen around the world (see Fig. 8.1). While the zombie in particular is a metaphor that often represents the loss of identity and the disappearance of the individual within the masses, a walk through the crowds of zombies on World Zombie Day London (10 October 2015)

Figure 8.1  The pleasures of zombie face painting and cosplay (photo and zombie design by Joanne Abbott; zombie by Liam Orlowski)

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af t e r wo rd 201 highlighted not the loss of identity but rather the expression of identity: men dressed as zombie cheerleaders, children as zombie police-officers, a zombie bride and groom, a zombie Laurel and Hardy, zombie Red Riding Hood, and the scariest zombie Ronald McDonald. In addition to distinct identities were the zombies that emphasised, or even celebrated, the breakdown of bodily boundaries that is intrinsic to the genre, such as a woman with a bird attached to her head pulling out her brains, while numerous other examples of the undead featured decaying skin, torn flesh, blades and weapons protruding from their bodies, and even a man sporting a Mohican of pencils penetrating his skull. As these ‘people’ wandered through Saturday afternoon London, they were the embodiment of the carnivalesque, embracing and confronting the horrors of blood, death, and decay, and celebrating the creativity and exhilaration within the genre in much the same way that vampire fashion and cosplay allows individuals to tap into and explore alternative, or perhaps simply more expressive, sexualities. This engagement with the undead across popular culture, including film, television and literature, highlights a cultural fascination with the undead and the threat of apocalypse that is a response to an unsettling cultural climate in which we are bombarded by the threat of annihilation – something that is played out and critiqued by the many texts I have discussed in this book. It however, also stands as  evidence of a cultural appropriation of this apocalyptic threat, whether through satire or cosplay or through the enjoyment and consumption of the films and television series I have been discussing. As Lyndsey points out in Angel, as quoted in the introduction to this book, we are indeed soaking in it – the undead and the apocalypse – but by soaking in it these icons have been absorbed into ourselves and become a part of us.

Note 1. Thank you to my mother-in-law Sheila Brown for the Meerkat and Lorna Jowett for Nosferatu.

Filmography

9/11 (James Hanlon, Gédéon Naudet, Jules Naudet, USA/FR, 2002) 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, UK, 2002) 28 Weeks Later (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, UK 2007) 30 Days of Night (David Slade, USA, 2007) Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (Charles Barton, USA, 1948) Addiction, The (Abel Ferrara, USA, 1995) Birds, The (Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1963) Blade (Stephen Norrington, USA, 1998) Blade 2 (Guillermo Del Toro, USA, 2002) Blade Trinity (David S. Goyer, USA, 2004) Blair Witch Project, The (Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez, USA, 1999) Bloodrayne (Uwe Boll, USA, 2005) Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters, The (Edward Bernds, USA, 1954) Braindead (Peter Jackson, NZ, 1992) Bram Stoker’s Dracula (F. F. Coppola, USA, 1992) Breed, The (Michael Oblowitz, USA/Hungary, 2001) Byzantium (Neil Jordan, UK, 2012) Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, UK, 1971) Cockneys vs Zombies (Matthias Hoene, UK, 2012) Colin (Marc Price, UK, 2008) Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, USA, 2011) Crazies, The (George A Romero, USA, 1973) Crazies, The (Breck Eisner, USA, 2010) Cry Freetown (Sorious Samura, UK, 2000) Curse of Frankenstein, The (Terence Fisher, UK, 1957) Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero, USA, 1978) Dawn of the Dead (Zach Snyder, USA/Can, 2004) Day of the Dead (George A. Romero, USA, 1985) Daybreakers (Michael and Peter Spierig, Aus, 2009) Day of the Triffids, The (Steve Sekely, Freddi Francis, UK, 1963) Day the Earth Caught Fire, The (Val Guest, UK, 1961) Diary of the Dead (George A. Romero, USA, 2007) Doc of the Dead (Alexandre O. Philippe, USA, 2014) Dracula (Tod Browning, USA, 1931) Dracula (Terence Fisher, UK, 1958)

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f il mo gr a p hy 203 Dracula (John Badham, USA/UK, 1979) Dracula 2000 (Patrick Lussier, USA, 2000) Equilibrium (Kurt Wimmer, USA, 2002) Falling Man, The (Henry Singer, UK, 2006) Fido (Andrew Currie, Can, 2006) Fright Night (Tom Holland, USA, 1985) Frostbite [Frostbiten] (Anders Banke, Sweden, 2006) Godzilla (Ishirô Honda, Jp, 1954) Hamiltons, The (The Butcher Brothers, USA, 2006) House of Dracula (Erle C. Kenton, USA, 1945) Hunger, The (Tony Scott, UK/USA, 1983) I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence, USA, 2007) I Am Ωmega (Griff Furst, USA, 2007) I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, USA, 1943) I Zombie: The Chronicles of Pain (Andrew Parkinson, UK, 1998) Infection[Kansen] (Masayuki Ochiai, Jp, 2004) Interview with the Vampire (Neil Jordan, USA, 1995) Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, USA, 1956) Iron Monkey (Woo-Ping Yuen, Hong Kong, 1993) Juan of the Dead [Juan de los Muertos] (Alejandro Brugués, Cub, 2011) Last Man on Earth, The (Ubaldo Ragano, USA/It, 1964) Land of the Dead (George A. Romero, Can/USA, 2005) Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Swe, 2008) Let Me In (Matt Reeves, UK/USA, 2010) Life after Beth (Jeff Baena, USA, 2014) Lost Boys, The (Joel Schumacher, USA, 1987) Mad Max (George Miller, Aus, 1979) Martin (George A Romero, USA, 1977) Matrix, The (Lilly and Lana Wachowski, USA, 1999) Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (John Gilling, UK, 1952) Mulberry St (Jim Mickle, USA, 2006) Mutants (Amir Valinia, Fr, 2008) My Darling Clementine (John Ford, USA, 1946) Mysterians, The (Ishirô Honda, Jp, 1957) Nadja (Michael Almereyda, USA, 1994) Near Dark (Kathryn Bigelow, USA, 1987) Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, USA, 1968) Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, Ger, 1922) Nosferatu Phantom der Nacht (Werner Herzog, Ger, 1979) Omega Man, The (Boris Sagal, USA, 1971) Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, Ger/UK/Fr/Gr, 2013) Otto; or, Up with Dead People (Bruce La Bruce, Ger/Can, 2008) ParaNorman (Chris Butler, Sam Fell, USA, 2012) Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, UK, 1960)

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Perfect Creature (Glenn Standring, NZ/UK, 2006) Plague of the Zombies (John Gilling, UK, 1966) Pontypool (Bruce McDonald, Can, 2008) Priest (Scott Stewart, USA, 2011) Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1960) Quarantine (John Erick Dowdle, USA, 2008) Quatermass Xperiment, The (Val Guest, UK, 1955) Queen of the Damned (Michael Rymer, USA/AUS, 2002) Rabid (David Cronenberg, Can, 1977) [REC] (Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaz, Sp, 2007) [REC]2 (Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza, Sp, 2009) [REC]3 (Paco Plaza, Sp, 2012) [REC]4: Apocalypse (Jaume Balagueró, Sp, 2014) Resident Evil (Paul W. S. Anderson, UK/Ger/Fr/USA, 2002) Resident Evil: Apocalypse (Alexander Witt, Ger/Fr/UK/Can/USA, 2004) Resident Evil: Extinction (Russell Mulcahy, Fr/Aus/Ger/UK/USA, 2007) Resident Evil: Afterlife (Paul W.S. Anderson, Ger/Fr/USA/Canada, 2010) Resident Evil: Retribution (Paul W.S. Anderson, Ger/Can/USA/Fr, 2012) Return of the Living Dead (Dan O’Bannon, USA, 1985) Revolt of the Zombies, The (Victor Halperin, USA, 1936) Rise (Sebastian Gutierrez, USA, 2007) Scream Blacula Scream (Bob Kelljan, USA, 1973) Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, UK, 2004) Searchers, The (John Ford, USA, 1956) Sixth Sense, The (M. Night Shyamalan, US, 1999) Solos [Descendents] (Jorge Olguín, Chile, 2012) Stacy (Naoyuki Tomomatsu, Jp, 2001) Stake Land (Jim Mickle, USA, 2010) Thaw, The (Mark A. Lewis, Can, 2009) Them (Gordon Douglas, USA, 1954) Thing from Another World, The (Christian Nyby, USA, 1951) Thirst (Chan-wook Park, South Korea, 2009) Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, USA, 2008) Twilight Saga, The: Breaking Dawn Part 1 (Bill Condon, USA, 2011) Twilight Saga, The: Breaking Dawn Part 2 (Bill Condon, USA, 2012) Ultraviolet (Kurt Wimmer, USA, 2006) Undead (Michael and Peter Spierig, Aus, 2003) Underworld (Len Wiseman, UK/Ger/Hun/USA, 2003) Underworld Evolution (Len Wiseman, USA, 2006) Underworld Awakening (Mans Marlind, Björn Stein, USA, 2012) Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (Patrick Tatopoulos, USA/NZ, 2009) Ur: The End of Civilization in 90 Tableaux (William Brown, UK, 2015) Van Helsing (Stephen Sommers, USA/Czech Republic, 2004) Verdens Ende (Paige Bronson, UK/Nor, 2014)

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f il mo gr a p hy 205 Versus (Ryûhei Kitamura, JP, 2000) Village of the Damned, The (Wolf Rilla, UK/USA, 1960) Warm Bodies (Jonathan Levine, USA/Can, 2013) What We Do in the Shadows (Jemaine Clement, Taika Waititi, NZ, 2014) White Zombie (Victor Halperin, USA, 1932) World Trade Center (Oliver Stone, USA, 2006) World War Z (Marc Foster, USA/Malta, 2013) Yeux sans visage, Les (George Franju, Fr, 1959) Z: A Zombie Musical (John McLean, USA, 2007) Zombieland (Reuben Fleischer, USA, 2009)

TV Guide

American Horror Story (FX 2011–) Angel (WB 1999–2004) Being Human UK (BBC3 2008–13) Being Human US (Syfy 2011–14) Blood Ties (Chum TV 2006–8) Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB/CW 1997–2003) Dark Shadows (ABC 1966–71) Darren Brown’s Apocalypse (C4 2012) Dead Set (E4 2008) Doctor Who (BBC1 1963–89/2005–) Dollhouse (Fox 2009–10) Dracula (NBC 2013–14) Fear the Walking Dead (AMC 2015–) Grimm (NBC 2011–) Hemlock Grove (Netflix Original 2013–15) I Survived a Zombie Apocalypse (BBC3 2015) In the Flesh (BBC3 2013–14) iZombie (CW 2014–) Kolchak: The Night Stalker (ABC 1974–5) Masters of Horror (Showtime 2005–7) Originals, The (CW 2013–) Penny Dreadful (Showtime 2014–) Quatermass II (BBC1 1955) Revenants, Les (Canal + 2012–) Salem’s Lot (CBS 1979) Spaced (Channel 4 1999–2001) Strain, The (FX 2014–) Supernatural (CW 2005–) Torchwood: Miracle Day (BBC1/Starz 2011) Town of the Living Dead (Syfy 2014) True Blood (HBO 2008–14)

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tv guide 207 Twilight Zone (CBS 1959–64) Ultraviolet (C4 1998) Vampire Diaries, The (CW 2009–) X-Files, The (Fox 1993–2002/2016) Walking Dead, The (AMC 2010–) Z-Nation (Syfy 2014–)

Works Cited

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Index

9/11 (film), 72–4 9/11 (terrorist attack), 6, 54, 68–74, 75–6, 174, 187, 192, 194–6 28 Days Later, 65–7, 68–9, 74–7, 83–7, 88, 90, 91, 102, 106, 170, 178 28 Weeks Later, 67, 83, 87–8, 91, 106, 135 30 Days of Night, 4, 179, 180 Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, 11–12 abjection, 18, 64, 93, 100, 103–4, 124, 162, 164, 168, 171, 173 AIDS, 45–7, 50, 51, 52, 81–2 Angel, 1, 2, 4–5, 7, 8, 93, 94, 96, 100, 101, 121, 122, 123, 124, 138, 149–51, 152, 156, 182, 199, 201 apocalypse, 4–7, 8, 17, 19–20, 22, 23, 51, 61, 64, 76, 77–8, 79, 86, 88, 102–3, 110, 111, 120, 140, 141, 145, 201 post-apocalypse, 5–6, 11, 30, 34, 75, 87, 98, 114, 115, 116–18, 130, 177, 179–80, 186–91, 192, 196 vampire apocalypse, 177–97 zombie apocalypse, 34, 37, 49, 76, 78, 80–2, 85, 91, 97–8, 106–7, 111–14, 119, 123, 140, 164, 166, 169–71, 178, 196, 198–9 atomic war see nuclear war Auerbach, Nina, 10, 19–20, 145, 146–7, 153–4 Barber, Paul, 42–3, 49–50, 180 Being Human (UK), 60, 94, 103–4, 151 Berger, James, 5–6, 34, 75, 76, 179, 186 biomedicine, 56, 57–8 biopolitics, 59, 98, 74, 183 biopower see bio politics Bishop, Kyle, 62–3, 64–5, 68, 105, 163, 165 Blade Blade, 44, 50, 58–9, 122–3, 127–8, 131–3, 152, 187

Blade 2, 48, 58–9, 121, 132, 133, 182–3, 185, 186 Blade Trinity, 59, 127, 133 franchise, 48, 123, 129, 131, 139, 140–1 blood, 47, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 56, 59, 84, 164, 185, 193 as cure, 36, 193 as gore, 26, 29, 35, 39, 40, 73 as infection, 86, 87, 187 cells, 45, 46, 47, 77 drinking, 2, 12, 14, 15, 19, 23, 31, 35, 41, 83, 85, 86, 121, 131, 134, 143, 150, 159, 178, 179, 180, 183, 184, 186, 193 slide, 15, 41, 45 stream, 39, 50, 81, 86 transfusion, 56–7 vampire blood, 41, 45, 56, 123, 129, 187 zombie blood, 96, 114 Bloodrayne, 122 Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), 39, 45, 46–7 Breed, The, 186 Briefel, Aviva, 68–9, 170 British Board of Film Censors/ Classification (BBFC), 24–9, 38 Brooks, Max, 2, 6, 63, 81, 82, 85, 91 Brown, William, 61, 136–7 Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV), 4, 60, 93, 94, 96, 109–11, 120, 121, 123–4, 135, 140–1, 149, 150–1, 182, 192, 199 Byronic Hero, 143, 147, 153, 155, 158, 160, 189 Byzantium, 152–6 Calvert, Bronwen, 130–1, 138–9 Canavan, Gerry, 97–8 Carmilla, 62, 145–6, 155 Center for Disease Control (CDC), 50, 126, 164, 188, 198–9 Cherry, Brigid, 4, 200 Christian imagery, 36, 191, 193; see also religion

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Colin, 68, 165, 166–7 concentration camp, 12, 15, 64; see also Holocaust contagion, 80–1, 83, 135, 177, 188–9; see also viral outbreak; pandemic; infection Contagion, 83, 86, 188–9 Count Orlok, 48, 50, 181–2, 184 Curse of Frankenstein, The, 9, 24, 25–6 cyborg, 123, 127–31, 133, 136, 182; see also posthuman Dark Romance, 3, 4, 40, 61, 95, 143, 168–9, 177 Dark Shadows (TV), 93, 94, 95, 147 Darren Brown’s Apocalypse, 94, 98 Dawn of the Dead (1978), 10, 32, 34, 63, 67, 69, 70–2, 74, 90, 91, 98, 106, 126, 165 Dawn of the Dead (2004), 67, 68, 77, 88, 90, 178 Day of the Dead, 84, 92 Day of the Triffids, The, 12, 74–5 Daybreakers, 47–8, 50–1, 55, 59, 179, 180, 183–6 Dead Set, 94, 106–7, 108 decomposition, 2, 35, 42–3, 63, 84, 103–4, 109–10, 137, 161, 165, 168, 172, 177, 183, 201 Diary of the Dead, 77, 78–80 Doctor Who, 94, 95 Dollhouse, 94, 97 Dracula (novel), 9, 10, 11, 13, 15–16, 17, 24, 40, 42, 43–4, 62, 145, 146–7, 148, 180, 186, 191, 192, 196, 200 Dracula (1931), 11, 12, 21, 44, 63, 125, 180, 181 Dracula (1958), 24, 25–6, 35, 44, 125 Dracula (TV 2013–14), 126, 180 dystopia, 4, 8, 61, 123, 139, 177, 179, 180, 183, 186, 187, 189, 195, 196 economic crisis, 6, 76, 187 extermination camp see concentration camp Fear the Walking Dead, 68, 94, 105, 118 flesh eating, 1, 2, 31, 35, 38, 63, 64, 82, 85, 102, 110, 117, 163, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169–70, 180 genetics, 44, 48, 49, 55, 56, 58, 59, 83, 85, 122–3, 132, 134, 135, 139, 141, 182, 189, 193

genre hybridity, 45, 47, 96, 136, 189–91 germ, 13–15, 22, 23, 51 warfare 11, 23, 51, 83 Gothic, 3, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 24, 35, 41, 43, 47, 48, 62, 63, 95, 103, 125, 156, 179, 182, 190, 200 Hammer Studios, 9, 13, 24–7, 29, 35, 38, 84, 125 Holocaust, 54, 186; see also concentration camp horror, 4, 9–10, 11, 12–13, 14, 18, 24–6, 27, 28, 29, 35, 41, 47, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 72–4, 77, 81–2, 84, 91, 94–7, 99, 124–5, 148, 162, 163, 168, 170–1, 177, 191, 192, 194 body horror, 73–4, 85, 93, 96–7, 103–4, 106, 170 found footage horror, 72–7, 78–9, 90, 92 modern horror, 19–23, 37, 74 TV horror , 10, 93–7, 101, 103–4, 105–6, 107, 161, 170–1 House of Dracula, 45, 47 Hunger, The, 45–6, 148, 157 Hurricane Katrina, 6, 178 hybridity, 7, 56, 57, 120–1, 134, 143, 152, 184 and purity, 125, 126, 131–5 and race, 122–3, 131–5, 140 human/vampire hybrid, 132–3, 195 human/zombie hybrid, 123, 129, 135, 145 viral hybrid, 129, 135–40 werewolf/vampire hybrid, 123, 134 zombie/vampire hybrid, 183 I Am Legend (film 2007), 9, 10, 23–4, 36, 48, 50–1, 53, 54–5, 179, 180, 183, 187 I Am Legend (novel), 7, 9–11, 17–18, 50 51, 63, 126, 141, 165, 179, 180, 196 and modern horror, 19–23 and Night Creatures, 24–9 and Night of the Living Dead, 31–7, 89 and science, 13–16, 41, 45, 83 I Survived a Zombie Apocalypse, 94, 98, 119 I Walked with a Zombie, 18, 63, 99 I Zombie: The Chronicles of Pain, 164 identity, 2, 19, 35, 85, 93, 95, 97–8, 102, 111–12, 120, 137, 145, 146, 148, 149, 151, 161, 162, 164, 167, 169, 172–4, 176, 179, 182, 200–1

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inde x 223 In the Flesh, 91, 94, 111–13, 119, 167, 169–76, 177, 197 individuality see identity infection, 8, 23, 43, 45, 54, 74, 80–1, 83, 85–6, 87, 89, 90, 98, 106, 117, 135–6, 137, 138, 178, 180, 182–3, 187; see also contagion; pandemic; viral outbreak Interview with the Vampire (film), 153, 163, 167, 174, 180, 191–2 Interview with the Vampire (novel), 9, 147–8, 153–4, 155, 156–7, 158, 174 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 12, 18–19, 95 iZombie, 2, 4, 94, 118–19 Jowett, Lorna, 105–6, 153 King, Stephen, 9, 10, 143, 179, 181 Kirkman, Robert, 63, 65, 104–5, 106 Kolchak: The Night Stalker, 94, 99–100 Land of the Dead, 35, 67–8, 69, 84, 164–5 Last Man on Earth, The, 9, 10, 14, 16–17, 22, 23, 26, 29–30, 35, 36, 51, 63, 82 Let the Right One In (film), 142–3, 145–6 Lord Byron, 143, 145, 155, 158 Lost Boys, The, 149, 192 Lowenstein, Adam, 72, 73, 74 Luckhurst, Roger, 57, 62–4 Lugosi, Bela, 11–12, 63, 125, 180, 181 Martin, 34–5, 148, 191 Masters of Horror, 94, 107 Matheson, Richard, 7, 8, 9–11, 13–16, 17, 19, 20–2, 23, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 41, 45, 50, 51, 63, 64, 83, 85, 89, 165, 180, 183, 196 and Night Creatures, 24–9, 34, 51 mediated gaze, 76–81 medical gaze, 39–40, 41, 44–9, 61, 64, 76, 77 Mellins, Maria, 199–200 Michael Jackson’s Thriller, 33, 65, 119, 199 microscope, 14, 37, 44, 45, 46–7, 48, 59 migrant crisis see refugee Mitchell, Dominic, 91, 112, 113, 176, 197 Mittell, Jason, 108–9, 114, 150 Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), 24–5, 27, 29, 35, 38 Mulberry St, 82 Mutants, 68, 82, 83

Nadja, 154, 157 Near Dark, 149, 157, 191 neo-liberalism, 57, 61, 183 Night Creatures see Richard Matheson and Night Creatures Night of the Living Dead, 3, 7, 9, 10, 11, 19, 23, 24, 30–3, 49, 63, 65, 74, 77, 82, 83, 89, 94, 99, 103, 110, 126, 194, 196 Nosferatu, 45, 50, 62, 181–2, 183 Nosferatu Phantom der Nacht (1979), 181 nuclear war, 11, 14, 51, 64 Omega Man, The, 9, 22, 23–4, 36 Only Lovers Left Alive, 152–3, 156–60, 181 Originals, The, 56, 57, 121, 151, 152, 157 pandemic, 6, 7, 11, 42, 49, 50, 51–2, 53, 64, 76, 88, 89, 192, 198–9; see also contagion; infection; viral outbreak paranormal romance see Dark Romance ParaNorman, 33, 81, 165–6, 167 patriarchy, 125–6, 140–1, 154–5, 156 Pegg, Simon, 65, 84 Peirse, Alison, 62–3, 125 Penny Dreadful, 47, 62 Perfect Creature, 53, 59, 179, 187, 189, 191, 193 Piatti-Farnell, Lorna, 49, 55, 61, 126–7 Polidori, Dr John, 143, 145, 155 Pontypool, 68, 69–70, 80–1 posthuman, 127, 129–31, 137, 140, 152; see also cyborg Priest, 179, 180, 191, 193–6 Quarantine, 72–4, 78–9 Rabid, 22, 83 [REC], 68, 72–4, 77, 78–9, 83, 90 [REC] franchise, 91 [REC]4: Apocalypse, 92 refugee crisis, 55, 185, 186, 197 religion, 15, 22, 23, 60, 107, 191–6; see also Christian imagery Resident Evil, 3, 65–6, 68, 83, 84, 85, 126, 129 Resident Evil: Afterlife, 130, 138–9, 140 Resident Evil: Apocalypse, 130, 131, 137, 138 Resident Evil: Extinction, 130, 137, 138 Resident Evil franchise, 91, 106, 121, 123, 129, 135–41 Resident Evil: Retribution, 130, 140

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Revenants, Les, 94, 102 Rice, Anne, 9, 10, 147, 149, 150, 153–4, 156 Romero, George A., 1–3, 7, 9, 10, 11, 19, 23, 24, 30–5, 37, 63, 66, 67–8, 69, 74, 77–81, 83, 84, 85, 89–90, 91, 93, 102, 105, 106, 108–9, 110, 118, 119, 148, 161, 162–3, 164–5, 182, 183, 191

Underworld, 50, 56, 121, 126, 128, 134, 135, 152, 187 Underworld Awakening, 59, 134, 152 Underworld Evolution, 134 Underworld franchise, 48, 123, 130, 131–5, 139 Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, 134 Ur: The End of Civilization in 90 Tableaux, 68, 81

Salem’s Lot (novel), 9, 10 Salem’s Lot (TV mini-series), 181–2 science fiction, 11, 12, 13, 18–19, 41–2, 47, 48, 64, 85, 95, 96, 97, 186, 189 sex/sexuality, 45–7, 50, 111–12, 122–3, 125, 144, 146, 172–4, 178, 201 Shaun of the Dead, 65, 67, 82 Skal, David J., 12, 181 Solos [Descendents], 9, 68, 83 Spaced, 65, 95 Stake Land, 53, 179, 180, 183, 189, 190–1, 192–3, 194 Stoker, Bram, 9, 11, 15–16, 125, 126, 147, 180, 181–2, 186, 191 Strain, The (TV series), 47, 50, 51, 55, 57, 97–8, 121, 122, 123, 177, 180, 183, 187–8 Supernatural, 94, 96, 101–3

vampire and dhampir, 121–2 and fashion, 200, 201 and folklore, 15, 31, 37, 42–3, 44, 49–50, 121, 180, 191 and race, 20, 44, 122–3, 131–5 as commodity, 57–9 as cure, 55–9 , 193 as subculture, 199–200 as virus, 36, 41, 44, 45–6, 49–55, 193 sympathetic vampire, 4, 7, 95, 121, 141, 142–60, 161, 177, 196 vampire blood see blood Vampire Diaries, The, 41, 56, 57, 58, 60, 93, 121, 151–2, 181, 193 Van Helsing, 15, 17, 42, 43–4, 46, 95, 100, 123, 125–6, 147, 196 Verdens Ende, 81 Vint, Sheryl, 58, 174, 183, 185 viral outbreak, 37, 43, 46–7, 49–55, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81–4, 102, 118–19, 129, 135, 137, 139–40, 141, 162, 164, 177, 178, 179, 183–4, 186–9, 192, 193; see also contagion; infection; pandemic virus see viral outbreak virology, 11, 19, 36, 37, 42, 46, 49, 54–5, 61, 77, 81–9, 134

television, 35, 60, 91, 93–7, 118 reality television, 98, 106–7, 108 serial television, 104–5, 106–7, 108–18, 119, 149, 152, 169 Tenga, Angela, 4, 144, 161, 163 terrorism, 6, 54, 69–71, 76, 92, 112–13, 187–8, 192, 194, 198 tissue economy, 7, 42, 49, 57, 58 tissue transfer, 56–7, 61 Town of the Living Dead, 94, 98 True Blood, 3, 56, 57, 60, 93, 97, 143, 151, 177–8, 179, 180, 187, 193, 200 Tudor, Andrew, 20–1, 22 Twilight Saga Breaking Dawn Part 1, 39–41, 55–6 Breaking Dawn Part 2, 3 franchise, 143, 144 Twilight, 3, 168, 180, 200 Ultraviolet (film), 50, 51, 53–4, 121, 123, 126, 128–9, 131, 135–41, 179, 186, 187, 192, 194 Ultraviolet (TV series), 48, 60, 61 uncanny, 48, 67, 95, 161, 169

Wald, Priscilla, 13, 14–15, 43, 49, 51–2, 53, 81–2, 135 Walking Dead, The (graphic novel), 3, 63, 65, 104–5 Walking Dead, The (TV), 3, 33, 63, 68, 84, 93, 94, 96–7, 105, 109, 111, 113–18, 126, 174, 177, 198 Walking Dead, The (videogame), 63 Waller, Gregory A., 10, 20–1, 22, 23, 26 Warm Bodies (film), 68, 121, 165, 167–9, 176, 177 Warm Bodies (novel), 121, 164 Weinstock, Jeffrey, 131, 132 White Zombie, 18, 62, 63, 99, 101, 125 Williams, Rebecca, 41, 124

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inde x 225 Williamson, Milly, 143, 144, 148–9 Wood, Robin, 21, 22, 74, 196 World War Z (film), 68, 77–8, 83, 88, 91, 174 World War Z (novel), 3, 63, 65, 84–5 X-Files, The, 94, 96, 100–1 Zimmerman, Elizabeth, 4, 144, 161, 163 Z-Nation 94, 118, 164 zombie and bokor, 19, 63, 97, 99–1, 125

and folklore, 15, 62–3, 99 and literature, 62, 63, 121, 164 and videogames, 3, 63, 65, 66, 68, 106 141 and voodoo, 18–19, 95, 97, 99–101, 109, 161 as virus 49, 77, 80–9, 162 sympathetic zombies, 4, 8, 141, 144–5, 161–76, 177 walks 3, 200 Zombie Survival Guide, The, 63, 65, 81