Zombie fascination after World War II The recent fascination with the apocalypse and zombie scenarios can be traced back to the advent of nuclear warfare during World War II, as argued by Stanford literary scholar Angela Becerra Vidergar. After the destructive events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the horrific violence of the Holocaust and World War II, human collective visions of the future were drastically altered and the disturbing realisation of human capacity for mass violence was brought to light. Vidergar (2013) points out that humans no longer "imagine[d] the type of positive future that was more prevalent in centuries past, for example, during the Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution” and instead “we are left with this cultural
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Romero which his film Night of the Living Dead in 1968 revolutionized the zombie myth and created a monster that replicates itself through a flesh-eating infection. He further replaced the voodoo zombie and instead focused on the morbid consumer. “Embodying the hungry gaze capitalism directs toward humans and commodities, the zombie consumer satirizes a mindless, manic consumer system collapsing under its own excess. This insatiable monster both consumes and produces more consumers” (Zimbaro 2014: 274-5). As pointed out by Kyle William Bishop in American Zombie Gothic, Romero showed his audiences not a dystopian vision of the future but a dystopian version of the present. From the late 1960s, zombies became a criticism of what Naomi Klein terms as “disaster capitalism”. In Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, the zombies wandering around the shopping mall behave very habitually, replicating their behaviours from when they were human. In this sense, Romero wanted to show his audience that the zombie catastrophe inhabits various degrees of familiarity. Through portraying the everyday as something susceptible to invasion, Romero shows his viewers that zombies are not supernatural and thus terrify us because of their eerie similarity to
Romero which his film Night of the Living Dead in 1968 revolutionized the zombie myth and created a monster that replicates itself through a flesh-eating infection. He further replaced the voodoo zombie and instead focused on the morbid consumer. “Embodying the hungry gaze capitalism directs toward humans and commodities, the zombie consumer satirizes a mindless, manic consumer system collapsing under its own excess. This insatiable monster both consumes and produces more consumers” (Zimbaro 2014: 274-5). As pointed out by Kyle William Bishop in American Zombie Gothic, Romero showed his audiences not a dystopian vision of the future but a dystopian version of the present. From the late 1960s, zombies became a criticism of what Naomi Klein terms as “disaster capitalism”. In Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, the zombies wandering around the shopping mall behave very habitually, replicating their behaviours from when they were human. In this sense, Romero wanted to show his audience that the zombie catastrophe inhabits various degrees of familiarity. Through portraying the everyday as something susceptible to invasion, Romero shows his viewers that zombies are not supernatural and thus terrify us because of their eerie similarity to