Resisting Bodies: Power Crisis / Meaning Crisis in the Zombie Film from 1932 to Today

Abstract

Critics have repeatedly focused on the political subtexts of the living dead films of George A. Romero, revealing, notably, how they reflect specific social concerns. In order to determine what makes the zombie movie and the figure of the zombie so productive of political readings, this article examines, first, the classic zombie movies influenced by voodoo lore, then Romero’s initial living dead trilogy (1968-1985), and finally some of the most successful films released in the 2000s. Resorting to a post-structuralist framework including Althusser’s notions of state apparatuses, Foucault’s distinction between subjection and subjectification, and Butler’s analyses of subversive resignification, the author argues that, while the classic zombie is entirely subjected to the master, and thus to the meanings the latter imposes, Romero’s living dead resist and sometimes create meaning, revealing both the contingency of the structures they disrupt and the constructiveness of the identities projected onto them. Resistance, then, is no longer directed at an “unnatural” order, as in the classic zombie movie, but at the “natural” order and is enabled by the contingency and multiplicity associated with the outbreak. The recent trend of zombie movies, whether survival horror or zombedies, confirms the diversity of complex, sometimes contradictory meanings enabled by the figure of the zombie.

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