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 fixation on fictionalizing our own death, very specifically mass-scale destruction" (Geiser 2013). According to Vidergar (2013), "We use fictional narratives not only to emotionally cope with the possibility of impending doom, but even more importantly perhaps to work through the ethical and philosophical frameworks that were in many ways left shattered in the wake of WWII" (Geiser 2013). In her view, humans are still working through the anxieties of the past in present time as now they are aware of the possibility of mass extermination and global violence. In the final chapter of her thesis titled "Fictions of Destruction: Post-1945 Narrative and Disaster in the Collective Imaginary", Vidergar discusses the show The Walking Dead and shows her readers how it is one of many cultural examples of how apocalyptic obsession helps humans process the increased sense that human extinction could become a reality. The pivotal moment of the series when the protagonist proclaims, “We are the walking dead!” shows its audience that although rotting zombies are in the spotlight throughout the drama, it is really humans who are the real subject of the show. As highlighted by Vidergar (2013), "Zombies are important as a reflection of ourselves. The ethical decisions that the survivors have to make under duress and the actions that follow those choices are very unlike anything they would have done in their normal state of life." The show, based on the comic book series, "allows the audience to work through some of those difficult, threatening ethical dilemmas, or to think about their own capacity for survival. What character would I be like? What would I be willing to do in order to survive?" (Vidergar 2013). It brings us back to those historical moments that displayed both the violent side of ‘zombified’ humanity as well as its strong persistence to overcome these horrors and atrocities. Zombies post 9/11 Lowenstein contends that modern zombie films and the post-apocalyptic fiction “blast open the continuum of history” (2005: 12) through “shocking representation”. And it is these representations that allow these movies to replay history in terms of “time filled by the presence of the now” by clutching “hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (Benjamin 1968: 257, 255). Thus, in post-apocalyptic films it is not always and exclusively the
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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