Zombie Cinema

2017 | Essays

It's official: the zombie apocalypse is here! The living dead have been lurking in media and popular culture since the 1930s, but they have never been more popular or ubiquitous on screen than they are today. Zombies have colonized the movies, television, video games, the internet-even smartphones-and the invitation shows no sign of ending soon. Our hunger for them, like hunger for us, seems insatiable. Zombie Cinema charts the transformation of these horror film monsters into pop culture icons, exploring their enormous appeal to views in the twenty-first century. It traces the evolution of the living dead on film from the voodoo slaves of White Zombie and I Walked With a Zombie to the reanimated ghouls of Night of the Living Dead and Zombie Flesh Eaters to the rabid infected of 28 Days Later and World War Z, and surveys the present cinematic landscape, in which zombies have overrun every imaginable genre from the indie comedy, Zombieland, to the teen romance, Warm Bodies, to the animated children's movie, Paranorman.

The book also maps the recent outbreaks of zombies on television, in hit shows like The Walking Dead and Dead Set, and points to signs of an impending apocalypse in new media, including video games, Left 4 Dead, web series, Bite Me, and smartphone apps, Plants vs. Zombies. Zombie Cinema is a lively and accessible introduction to this massively popular genre. It offers an historical overview of zombies on screen that is both wide-ranging and global in scope. Surveying movies and television shows from North America, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere, it covers the "greatest hits" of zombie cinema as well as forgotten, unsung, or less familiar texts.

Ian Olney (Author)