The Modern Zombie

From the original voodoo zombie, we turn to the modern zombie. There was quite a bit of decontextualization and recontextualization that had to happen to change this creature so much, and in a way, also brought it back to its roots. To explain, decontextualization and recontextualization is when an already existing thing is moved to a new context and made to fit in the new way (Bauman, 2004, 8). For example, with zombies they went from representing (and sometimes literally) a person who has lost their free will and individuality, to representing violent killing or consumerism.

In the early black and white cinema, zombies were still very much entangled with magic and voodoo. In what is widely regarded as the first “zombie movie”, Bela Lugosi even adds in hypnosis! This sort of zombie was seen for many years, until nineteen sixty-eight. When George Romero filmed “Night of the Living Dead”. In the film, Romero uses zombies as a criticism of the violent deaths happening in the Vietnam war, the dissolvement of the nuclear family, racism, violence against women, and the dominance of the patriarchy.

He would continue to use them as a medium of criticizing society with the much more successful “Dawn of the Dead”. This time, rather than being set in a farm house, it is in a mall. A place most Americans are very familiar with. This time the message was about economic instability and unchecked consumerism. It shifted the zombies to being killers to… us. The movie ends with several minutes of the zombies breaking through and entering the mall then… walking. Moving about stores as if they were alive again (albeit much more decomposed), even looking as if they were shopping. Giving the viewer a chilling feeling as they saw the zombies doing everyday things (Bishop, 2010, 10). Later a comic book series turned to TV series examines the idea of zombies being us with “The Walking Dead”. As the focus turns to not how the zombies are the deadliest ones, it’s the living you need to worry about more.

Zombies have even made it to video games. In fact, there are several video games that employ them as the main bad guys. One video game series that comes to mind is Resident Evil. Zombies in this game have had their own changes, starting from a virus to becoming a fungal infection. The zombies in Resident Evil are a criticism on biological warfare and the devastation it can bring. They are a statement of what can go wrong when the wrong people try to play God. They also are a criticism on consumerism and political corruption, as the company that made the virus, was doing it to make a profit from world governments (Webley and Zackariasson, 2020, 36-55).