Abstract
‘The return of corpses has become trivial in import’, despairs Robert Neville, the protagonist of I Am Legend (Matheson, 2010: 54), during his barricaded torment as the last man on an earth overwhelmed by the living dead. ‘How quickly’, he notes, ‘one accepts the incredible if only one sees it enough!’. Zombies: A Cultural History begins by presenting its reader in a similar situation: our popular cultural consciousness has been seemingly infiltrated by the inescapable figure of the zombie. The zombie has a simple origin tale, mode of operation and set of desires, and no clear cultural home – bereft of the literary traditions of many other horror counterparts. The author asserts this has led to a distinct oversimplification of the much-nuanced terrors and histories provided by the living dead. A popular and populist cultural fascination is given the literary, cinematic, social and anthropological analysis needed to remind a zombie-weary audience of the true import and significance of this particular textual horror.
Luckhurst reveals the very specific cultural history of the zombie, tracing its trajectory across multiple media and generations of storytellers. From Haitians killed by zombi under the enchantment of Vodoun priests, through William Seabrook’s breathless accounts of the rising undead in the late 1920s, to Hollywood’s various imaginings of these apocalyptic possibilities, Luckhurst’s detailed research works its way methodically across cultures and eras. A comprehensive discussion of American pulp fiction from the 1930s onward is a particularly useful addition to the scholarship on the undead, while the studies of George A. Romero’s and Lucio Fulci’s respective cinematic visions of the undead are lucid and compelling. The analytical work combines to affirm and reinforce the scholarship’s approach to the undead as signifiers for various social, cultural or political maladies over time: latent racism and Othering in the early accounts, socioeconomic inequalities as Hollywood’s engagement matured, or the perils of late capitalism and consumerism in Fulci’s era, for example. Throughout, the many connections between the different periods of zombie mediation are elucidated, correcting the perception of a traditionless monster.
New arguments are found within the author’s methodical retelling of the zombie’s evolution, including locating the zombie thriving in unexpected post-Second-World-War media ecologies. Survivors of the atom bombs (Japan’s hibakusha) and of the atrocities perpetrated in Nazi concentration camps in Europe are cast as a type of zombie – a ghoul in half-life – and a collective trauma is to be overcome with the aid of the zombie and its power for signification. Luckhurst engages, later in the book, with the increasing ‘normalization’ of our media encounters with the living dead. A significant connection is overlooked: between the perpetual state of conflict brought on by the West’s hyper-mediated ‘War on Terror’, the racial and neo-colonial discourses surrounding contemporary conflicts and the struggle of this era’s perceived combatants and victims and their desire to catalogue and process shared, contemporary traumas. This omission reinforces the function of a zombie largely as a figure to be read and understood in terms of analogy and social commentary, at the expense of its potential as a psycho-cultural tool.
It is the author’s concluding discussion of the contemporary iteration of the zombie that is, unfortunately, least innovative. The 2013 film World War Z and the television series The Walking Dead (2010–present) are offered to epitomise this era of the zombie and connect this monster to audiences’ globalized sociocultural contexts and to muse on a nascent routinization of the mediated apocalypse. This discussion would be enhanced by more extensive research drawing on the plethora of graphic novels, comic books, television shows and films produced in the last two decades, both popular and obscure. Video games, alongside real-world group participation events, are relegated to a similarly cursory treatment. A handful of titles are acknowledged, but the Resident Evil series (1996–2016) and its continuities with zombie cinema occupy much of the brief discussion. The ludic zombie is, in fact, defined as much by its discontinuity with its generic predecessors as it is by its continuity. Experienced through interactive media, its significance is the potential for distinct and sometimes radical approaches to storytelling (capitalizing on player immersion, avatar perspective and multiplayer sociality, for example) as well as for making the ontological disruption of the zombie as a post-human figure more starkly manifest than in previous media. Zombies are, as Luckhurst notes, ‘threshold people’ (p. 9) – biologically, culturally and symbolically. Contemporary, interactive media grant audiences new forms of access to, and agency within, these metaphysical questions, at times inviting the player to experience Robert Neville’s despair, at others the algorithmic and exhilarating experience of acting as a zombie, scrubbed of the soul, mind and will of the human. The author reinvigorates the ambling corpse of the traditional zombie, but passes over the opportunity to complicate the role of the modern, potentiated zombie.