Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, zombie movies have become more popular than ever, with multiple remakes, parodies, and sequels. This renaissance of the subgenre reveals a connection between zombie cinema and post-9/11 cultural consciousness. Horror films function as barometers of society's anxieties, and zombie movies represent the inescapable realities of unnatural death while presenting a grim view of the modern apocalypse through scenes of deserted streets, piles of corpses, and gangs of vigilantes-images that have become increasingly common and can shock and terrify a population that has become numb to other horror subgenres.
Keywords: apocalypse, Danny Boyle, infection, George A. Romero, September 11, zombie
Wars and other tragedies affect cultural consciousness like the blast from a high-yield explosive or a massive earthquake. The ensuing shockwaves reach far and wide, and one of the best ways to recognize and understand these undulations is by analyzing the literature and film of the times. For instance, the use of atomic weapons at the end of World War II ushered in nuclear paranoia narratives like the films Godzilla (1954) and Them! (1954), and fear of the encroaching Communist threat inspired alien invasion stories like Jack Finney's novel Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955) and the movie Invaders from Mars (1953). The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, caused perhaps the largest wave of paranoia for Americans since the McCarthy era. Since the beginning of the war on terror, American popular culture has been colored by the fear of possible terrorist attacks and the grim realization that people are not as safe and secure as they might have once thought. This shift in cultural consciousness can be most readily seen in narrative fiction, particularly through zombie cinema.
Since 2002, the number of both studio and independent zombie movies has been on a steady rise. Hollywood has re-embraced the genre with revisionist films like 28 Days Later (2002), video game-inspired action movies like Resident Evil (2002), big-budget remakes like Dawn of the Dead (2004), and comedies like Shaun of the Dead (2004). The zombie craze continued with 2007 seeing the theatrical releases of Planet Terror, 28 Weeks Later, and Resident Evil: Extinction-the Sundance Film Festival even featured two zombie films that season1-and with a remake of Day of the Dead, Romero's own Diary of the Dead, and Zombie Strippers all coming out in 2008. David Oakes's Zombie Movie Data- Base Web site confirms this increased interest in zombie cinema with data showing a marked rise in all kinds of zombie narratives over the past ten years; more than 575 titles are listed for 2006 alone.2 Peter Dendle, Pennsylvania State University professor and zombie scholar, observes that the number of amateur zombie movies has "mushroomed considerably" since 2000 (interview). Although the quality of many of these backyard, straight-tovideo, and Internet-based productions remains a matter of debate, the striking surge in the genre's popularity and frequency cannot be denied.
The fundamental genre conventions of zombie cinema fit post-9/11 cultural consciousness well. During the latter half of the twentieth century, zombie movies graphically represented the inescapable realities of unnatural death (via infection, infestation, or violence) and presented a grim view of a modern apocalypse in which society's infrastructure breaks down. The twentyfirst- century zombie movies are no different from their historical antecedents, but society has changed markedly since the World Trade Center towers were destroyed. Scenes depicting deserted metropolitan streets, abandoned human corpses, and gangs of lawless vigilantes have become more common than ever, appearing on the nightly news as often as on the movie screen. Because the aftereffects of war, terrorism, and natural disasters so closely resemble the scenarios of zombie cinema, such images of death and destruction have all the more power to shock and terrify a population that has become otherwise jaded by more traditional horror films.
The Developmental Cycle of Zombie Cinema: Establishing the Renaissance
The modern zombie movie has been around for almost forty years and, like other genres, it has gone through periods of feast and famine.3 According to film scholar Darryl Jones, the genre was born in 1968 with the release of George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (161), in which a motley group of people, led by an African American antihero named Ben (Duane Jones), must spend the night in a besieged country house, waiting for the authorities to arrive. When the county militia finally does show up, its first response is to shoot and kill Ben, the only survivor of the supernatural abattoir. The violence and graphic images in this low-budget horror film were unprecedented at the time, and the movie functions largely as a metaphor for the atrocities of Vietnam and racism.4 Called "hippie Gothic" by film theorist Joseph Maddrey (51), Night protests the war by graphically confronting audiences with the horrors of death and dismemberment and by openly criticizing those who use violence to solve their problems. The politically subversive film gained a cult following and eventually made more than $30 million worldwide ("Business Data for Night").
Recognizing the potential market and profitability of such movies, other filmmakers began to experiment with the story line in little-known films like Garden of the Dead (1972), Return of the Evil Dead (1973), and Horror of the Zombies (1974). In 1978, Romero released Dawn of the Dead, a lampoon of capitalism and rampant consumerism. It depicts a group of reporters and SWAT team members forced to barricade themselves for weeks into an abandoned shopping mall surrounded by zombies.5 Dawn was almost immediately followed by Lucio Fulci's unofficial sequel Zombie (1979), about a global zombie infestation originating on a voodoo-laden Caribbean island. The two films firmly defined the genre, with Dawn becoming a huge hit that grossed $55 million worldwide ("Business Data for Dawn"), and they spawned a veritable surge of classical zombie movies, such as Night of the Zombies (1981), Revenge of the Zombies (1981), Mansion of the Living Dead (1982), and Kung Fu Zombie (1982).
In spite of the proliferation of these movies and their success on B-reel screens, they seem to have played themselves out by the mid-1980s, especially after the arrival of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video in 1983. This campy short film tried to be uncanny and frightening, but once the walking dead started to dance and jive with the King of Pop, zombies became nothing more than a joke. Although Romero tried to revitalize zombie films in 1985 with Day of the Dead (the metaphor this time addressing Cold War fears and paranoia6), the genre was in its death throes. Day failed at the box office, and Maddrey supposes that "audiences in the carefree, consumerfriendly 1980s apparently did not feel the need for such a serious examination of personal and societal values" (129). Instead consumers wanted comedic movies like Dan O'Bannon's Return of the Living Dead (1985), which flagrantly abuses Romero's genre rules by featuring zombies that can talk and by introducing the now-quintessential eating of brains. With such unmemorable titles as Zombie Brigade (1986) and I Was a Teenage Zombie (1987), things only got worse as budgets plummeted and camp took the place of scripts.
Historically, zombie cinema had always represented a stylized reaction to cultural consciousness and particularly to social and political injustices, and America in the 1990s saw perhaps too much complacency and stability for zombie movies to fit the national mood. The Cold War was over, the Berlin Wall had fallen, Ronald Reagan's Star Wars defense system was proven unnecessary, and George H. W. Bush's Gulf War had apparently been resolved. In fact, aside from some skirmishes in third-world countries, Americans were largely insulated from global warfare. Furthermore, in the Clinton decade, sexual impropriety took headlines away from global genocide and tyrannical massacres. With nothing specific to react to or protest against, cinematic versions of the zombie genre declined steadily throughout the 1990s, although Peter Jackson's Dead Alive (1992) provided some fresh ideas by inventing a subgenre commonly called "splatstick" comedy, where blood and guts are the primary comedic medium. Nevertheless, virtually no new or original stories were produced in the decade at all, although Dendle observes that no-budget, directto- video productions continued to flourish (Zombie Movie 10).
Even though zombies were no longer a source of terror on the silver screen, young people found renewed interest in zombies through violent video games. In 1993, id Software released a revolutionary first-person shooter game called Doom, which features zombified marines; however, these basically two-dimensional foes use guns instead of teeth, and the game's plot is more science fiction than horror. While zombies continued to play bit parts in other games, the first true zombie video game-Capcom's Biohazard (since renamed Resident Evil)-did not appear until 1996. This game takes its central story line directly from Romero's movies, for players must explore an isolated country manor while shooting reanimated corpses and trying to avoid being eaten-although unlike Romero's movies, there is a lot more "fight" than "flight." Nevertheless, the terror and action of zombie movies translated quite logically from the big screen to the video screen, and a nontraditional form of narrative incubated the genre until it was ready to reemerge in theaters in 2002 with the release of two mainstream movies.
By returning to the classical form of Romero's films, British director Danny Boyle began the zombie renaissance with the first truly frightening zombie movie in years. Riding high from his Trainspotting (1996) success, Boyle created a new version of the zombie story with 28 Days Later, in which a man wakes from a coma to find London abandoned and full of decaying corpses. Boyle also introduced faster, more feral zombie creatures, keeping the monsters alive rather than dead, and audiences responded as if the genre were new, instead of just newly re-visioned. The film's $8 million budget eventually resulted in a $45 million gross in the United States alone ("Business Data for 28 Days Later"). At about the same time, mainstream Hollywood was also trying to kick-start the genre by capitalizing on the popularity of the video game circuit with Paul W. S. Anderson's Resident Evil, an action-packed science fiction movie that is more video game than narrative. More big-budget films have followed, like the two Resident Evil sequels (2004 and 2007), remakes of Dawn of the Dead (2004) and Night of the Living Dead (2006), the revisionist comedy Shaun of the Dead, and Romero's return with 2005's Land of the Dead.
The popularity of the zombie continues to inundate other media as well. The shooting-gallery nature of zombie survival-the more you kill, the more keep popping up-still spawns new video games every year in which players become part of the action. The Biohazard series now has over a dozen titles, and Romero's latest zombie movie inspired the game Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green (2005). The zombie also found a logical home in graphic novels, most notably Steve Nile's George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (2004) and Robert Kirkman's ongoing epic series The Walking Dead (2004-present). Zombies can be found outside of narrative fiction in the humorous yet strangely eerie Zombie Survival Guide (2003). This parody of popular survival guides is a straightfaced, seemingly nonfiction effort by Max Brooks to prepare the public for an actual zombie infestation. Even a number of hard-rock bands have jumped aboard the zombie bandwagon (e.g., Zombie Ritual and their 2004 album Night of the Zombie Party).
However, in spite of this evidence of a resurgence in the popularity of the zombie monster, no one identified the movement as having an official "renaissance" until Romero-the "Shakespeare of zombie cinema" (Dendle, Zombie Movie 121)-re-entered the game with Land of the Dead. In early 2006, Steven Wells wrote an article reacting to Showtime's made-for-TV movie Homecoming (2004), in which "Americans killed in Iraq rise from their flag-draped coffins and slaughter their way to the polling booths so they can vote out a warmongering president" (2). Wells shows an even broader impact, claiming that "there were zombies everywhere in 2005," from an all-zombie production of Romeo and Juliet to online zombie blogs and a zombie appearance on American Idol (2). Zombies even showed up in the sixth Harry Potter novel, if only for a brief cameo.
The appearance of zombies in print media other than graphic novels is perhaps the most notable evidence of a renaissance for the more mainstream public. According to Don D'Auria, an editor of horror novels, "Until three years ago [zombies] were really unseen. Then they just seemed to pop up everywhere" (qtd. in St. John 2). In a 2006 New York Times article, Warren St. John provides a number of examples of the zombie literary invasion: Brian Keene's The Rising, a novel about "smart zombies"; David Willington's Monster Island, about a zombie infestation in Manhattan; and World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, another faux nonfiction creation from Brooks (1, 13). In addition, Stephen King, the unequivocal master of modern literary horror, finally released a full-blown version of the zombie story with his 2006 novel Cell, a chilling morality tale in which unnamed terrorists turn the majority of Americans into enraged cannibals by brainwashing them with a mind-scrambling cell phone signal.
While the zombie renaissance is basically a given to zombie scholars and fans, such coverage from mainstream publications like the New York Times gives Wells's observations greater credibility as well as publicity. The return of the zombie, most obviously and prolifically in film, has fully come to the public's attention. St. John summarizes the renaissance: "In films, books and video games, the undead are once again on the march, elbowing past werewolves, vampires, swamp things and mummies to become the postmillennial ghoul of the moment" (1). All this evidence points to one unavoidable fact: "zombies are back" (2).
The Primary Characteristics of Zombie Cinema: Understanding the Genre
The twenty-first-century zombie movie renaissance seems fueled in part by the popularity of zombies in other media and by the relatively low cost and ease of making splatterfest films.7 But to explain this phenomenon and to understand the post-9/11 social relevance of zombie cinema, the essential characteristics of such films must be examined and the genre must be differentiated from other horror genres. Unlike many other tales of terror and the supernatural, the classical zombie story has very specific criteria that govern its plot and development. These genre protocols include not only the zombies and the imminent threat of violent deaths, but also a postapocalyptic backdrop, the collapse of societal infrastructures, the indulgence of survivalist fantasies, and the fear of other surviving humans. All of these plot elements and motifs are present in pre-9/11 zombie films, but they have become more relevant to a modern, contemporary audience.
The most conspicuous feature of zombie movies is naturally the zombies themselves-both what the creatures are and, perhaps more important, what they are not. Audiences fear these ghouls for a number of obvious reasons: they are corpses raised from the dead, and, more significantly, they are the corpses of the known dead, what horror scholar R. H. W. Dillard calls "dead kindred" (15). In addition, the zombies pursue living humans with relentless dedication and kill people mercilessly by eating them alive. Because zombies are technically "dead" rather than the more romantic "undead" (i.e., ghosts and vampires), they possess merely a rotting brain and have no real emotional capacity. Toward that end, zombies cannot be reasoned with, appealed to, or dissuaded by logical discourse. Other supernatural foes devised by authors and Hollywood filmmakers are generally conscious, thinking individuals. In fact, in recent years, traditional supernatural monsters have become sympathetic protagonists and misunderstood heroes, like the ghosts in The Sixth Sense (1999) or The Others (2001), the vampires in Anne Rice's tales, or characters like Angel and Spike in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) and Angel (1999- 2004). Such qualities for zombies are logical impossibilities.8
What's more, in contrast to other supernatural or undead creatures, the zombie directly manifests the visual horrors of death; unlike most ghosts and vampires, zombies are in an active state of decay. Simon Pegg, cowriter and star of Shaun of the Dead, observes, "Metaphorically, this classic creature embodies a number of our greatest fears. Most obviously, it is our own death, personified. The physical manifestation of that thing we fear the most" (133). It is no coincidence that the modern cinematic zombie cycle began "on the eve of the Tet offensive in Vietnam" (Maddrey 122), when the general populace was being exposed to graphic images of death and violence on the nightly news. In addition, the inescapable realities of mortality ensure that every viewer could both fear and relate to the zombie; although no one expects to rise from the grave as a cannibalistic ghoul, everyone will die and rot.
As audiences have become more familiar with special effects and more accustomed to images of violence, cinematic depictions of zombies have had to become progressively more naturalistic and horrific. In Night of the Living Dead, the ghouls are basically just pasty-faced actors; even the scenes of cannibalistic acts are less shocking because the film is in black and white rather than color. By Dawn of the Dead, the zombies have become more realistic (yet strangely blue), and scenes of death and dismemberment are shockingly graphic and naturalistic-thanks for the most part to special effects wizard Tom Savini, who claimed that "much of my work for Dawn of the Dead was like a series of portraits of what I had seen for real in Vietnam" (qtd. in Skal 311). Now, after thirty more years of global warfare and bloodshed, the twenty-firstcentury audience, largely desensitized by graphically violent video games and other media, almost demands an upping of the ante. In response, 28 Days Later and Land of the Dead feature zombies with missing limbs, decaying flesh, and only partially constituted heads and faces; even the rather light Shaun of the Dead (a self-proclaimed "romantic comedy" zombie film) has some particularly gruesome ghouls and nauseating dismemberment scenes.9
Yet even though zombies are certainly uncanny and frightening by themselves, such monsters would not prove much of a threat if they appeared in the modern-day world; certainly the police or military would be around to exterminate the monsters. But zombie movies are almost always set during (or shortly after) the apocalypse, when those reassuring infrastructures cease to exist. In Night of the Living Dead, the zombie infestation seems limited to just one backwoods county, but by Dawn of the Dead, the impression is rather clear that the whole world is overrun. Romero's feckless survivors hide out in a shopping mall for an indeterminate amount of time, waiting in vain for the resumption of media broadcasts and for help that never arrives. 28 Days Later is based on the premise that all of the United Kingdom has been decimated in just under a month, and Land of the Dead is even bleaker: the film is set in a zombie-dominated world, where Pittsburgh has been set up as a city-state unto itself. In all of these scenarios, the virus, plague, or infestation has been so rapid and complete that cities are quickly overrun, buildings abandoned, posts deserted, and airwaves silenced.
One of the greatest-or at least the most detailed-literary imaginings of the apocalypse is King's The Stand, a novel with no zombies but with most of the other zombie motifs: the story explores both the utter fall and eventual resurrection of the United States following a devastating and global viral pandemic. 10 King's novel blames the end of modern society on the governmental military complex, tailoring the deterioration of America's infrastructure on William Butler Yeats's description of the end of the world: "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold." This poignant image is central to zombie cinema; Brooks describes the new world order in his Zombie Survival Guide:
When the living dead triumph, the world degenerates into utter chaos. All social order evaporates. Those in power, along with their families and associates, hole up in bunkers and secure areas around the country. Secure in these shelters, originally built for the Cold War, they survive. Perhaps they continue the façade of a government command structure. Perhaps the technology is available to communicate with other agencies or even other protected world leaders. For all practical purposes, however, they are nothing more than a government-in-exile. (155)
Once people start to die at an uncontrollable rate, panic rages through all levels of the government and the military, and most would be more interested in saving themselves and their families than in doing their jobs.11
The breakdown of social order leads to one of the more curious allures of zombie films: their ability to play out survivalist fantasies. Extreme followers of the survivalist credo hoard foodstuffs and ammunition in their isolated mountain cabins and basement bunkers, just hoping for the day when society will collapse and their paranoia will finally be justified. Like Brooks's book parodies, numerous survival manuals and Web sites-such as Jack A. Spigarelli's Crisis Preparedness Handbook (2002) and Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht's The Complete Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook (2007)- encourage and direct such behavior and apocalypse narratives allow their followers some cathartic enjoyment. Furthermore, as realized in movies like The Omega Man (1971) and Night of the Comet (1984), the end of the world means the end of capitalism, and everything becomes free for the taking. As a matter of survival, looting becomes basically legal-or at the very least, there is no law enforcement presence to prevent wanton theft. Anyone can own a Porsche, wear the latest Paris fashions, or go on an unbridled shopping spree.
The best depictions of this contradictory "fun amidst the terror" are found in the 1978 Dawn of the Dead and the 2004 remake by Zach Snyder. Both films take place primarily in shopping malls, locations that afford both security and sustenance. In the '78 version, Romero presents a light-hearted montage showing the four remaining survivors at play among the many shops available to them-playing basketball, eating exotic foods, and putting on makeup and expensive clothes-living out what horror scholar David J. Skal calls "consumerism gone mad" (309). Snyder's film includes a similar montage: finding themselves relatively safe from everything but boredom, the survivors play games, try on expensive clothes and shoes, watch movies on big-screen televisions, and even play golf. In a sick way, the mall is the ultimate vacation resort-they just can't ever go outside. An abbreviated version of the same idea is present in 28 Days Later: in a parody of game shows like Supermarket Sweep (1990-2003), the four survivors race around a grocery store, filling their carts with all the goods they can carry.
Such sequences show that once the survivors take both the law and their protection into their own hands, establishing some kind of defensible stronghold-like a shopping mall, a bunker, an ordinary house, or the neighborhood pub-the zombies cease to be much of a direct threat and become more animals to be avoided. Instead, the real fear comes from the other human survivors-those who can still think, plot, and act.12 As Dillard points out, "The living people are dangerous to each other, both because they are potentially living dead should they die and because they are human with all of the ordinary human failings" (22). In most zombie films, the human protagonists eventually argue, fight, and even turn against one another; cabin fever can make those inside the strongholds more dangerous than the zombies on the outside (Jones 161-62). In addition, the journey from survivor to vigilante is a short one; with the total collapse of all governmental law-enforcement systems, survival of the fittest becomes a very literal and grim reality. Those with power, weapons, and numbers simply take whatever they want. However, in the new zombie economy, everything is free-except other humans, of course. For lawless renegades, the only real sports left are slavery, torture, rape, and murder, which appease base appetites that cannot be satisfied by simply going to the mall.
In the 1978 Dawn of the Dead, the peaceful haven of the shopping mall is destroyed by the violent arrival of a vigilante biker gang. These bandits, whose primary aim is to loot the stores, disrupt the careful balance established between the zombies and the remaining survivors; as a result of the bikers' intrusion, more people die and all security is lost. In 28 Days Later, this vigilante scenario is all the more frightening because the primary threat comes from the military, soldiers who are supposed to protect citizens, not abuse them. In a misguided attempt to repopulate the world, the soldiers threaten the female protagonists with rape, and Jim (Cillian Murphy) narrowly escapes execution for defending them. The threat of the zombies remains a fundamentally frightening part of the movie, but because the threat of bodily harm and rape are realworld potentialities, they are all the more terrifying.
The Twenty-First-Century Zombie: Explaining the Renaissance
The post-9/11 zombie film remains remarkably true to the genre's original protocols. Although the zombies are not always literally dead, as in Romero's films, the apparent apocalypse and collapse of societal infrastructures remain central features. In addition, the genre tends to emphasize certain causes for the end of the world, including infectious disease, biological warfare, euthanasia, terrorism, and even immigration. Although the genre is forty years old, these concepts resonate more strongly with present-day Americans than ever before, where events like the September 11 attacks, the war in Iraq, and Hurricane Katrina provide comparable forms of shocking ideas and imagery.
The end of the world is the ultimate societal fear, made all the more real by current weapons of mass destruction, and Snyder's remake of Dawn of the Dead depicts this apocalypse through a sequence of shocking events most zombie films simply imply. Ana (Sarah Polley), the film's protagonist, wakes one morning to find the world she knew collapsing around her. Her husband is trying to kill her, neighbors are shooting one another with handguns, and explosions of unknown origins rock the skyline. The chaos, disorientation, fear, and destruction she witnesses are disturbingly similar to the initial news footage broadcast on September 11, 2001. Although Jim in 28 Days Later wakes after the apocalypse is essentially over, the film nevertheless presents a disturbing sequence of images of a metropolitan London void of all human presence. At the time of its conception, this moment in the screenplay was probably intended to simply shock audiences with its foreignness, but after September 11, the eerie street scenes take on new meaning.
Screenwriter Alex Garland joins Boyle on the 28 Days Later DVD commentary track, where they discuss the historical antecedents of the film's imagery. The screenplay was written and filming had begun before September 11, so Garland and Boyle drew from other international crises and disasters for apocalyptic images. The scene in which Jim picks up stray pound notes off London's empty streets was directly inspired by footage from the "killing fields" of Cambodia during and after the reign of Pol Pot. The street billboard displaying hundred of photos and notes seeking missing loved ones, which has a direct tie to 9/11 now, was based on an actual street scene following a devastating earthquake in China. The abandoned city, overturned buses, and churches full of corpses were all inspired by existing moments of actual civil unrest and social collapse.
Such images of metropolitan desolation and desertion certainly resonate strongly with contemporary audiences. According to Brooks, "People have apocalypse on the brain right now. . . . It's from terrorism, the war, [and] natural disasters like Katrina" (qtd. in St. John 13). During and after the collapse of the World Trade Center towers in New York, numerous journalists and bystanders commented on how the events seemed unreal- like something out of a movie. After Hurricane Katrina, Kevin Lair, who lived with his family near where the 17th Street levee burst, told reporters, "The whole thing looks like something out of a science fiction movie" (qtd. in "It's Like"). Additionally, John Graydon, who rode out the aftermath of the storm in the Superdome, called his father in England and said, "It's like a scene from Mad Max in there" (qtd. in Beard). Nightly news clips showed the deserted streets of New Orleans as if the city were a film set, with abandoned cars, drifting newspapers, and stray dogs. Of course, these events may not directly affect the production of zombie movies, but they certainly affect an audience's reception of those films.
Romero's movies, like all great fantasy texts, have always offered critical metaphors, and the great twenty-firstcentury zombie films continue in this vein. According to Andy Coghlan of New Scientist magazine, "Infectious diseases are indeed the new paranoia that's striking Western society" (qtd. in James); fittingly, 28 Days Later is about the risks of an unstoppable pandemic, in which a blood-borne virus can wipe out the entire United Kingdom in just under a month's time. Furthermore, the film makes the somewhat abstract potential of zombification a much more visceral reality. Boyle's characters refer to the ravenous monsters as "infecteds," not "zombies"-the creatures are not technically dead at all, but hapless people infected with a psychological virus that makes them ultra-aggressive and violent. This kind of zombie is more frightening than the traditional fantasy monster, and instead of just being a horror movie, 28 Days Later crosses into science fiction: it could happen. In fact, Boyle calls the movie "a warning for us as well as an entertainment" (qtd. in James).
The psychic plague of 28 Days Later is most likely a reference to AIDS, but it could just as easily reference cholera, smallpox, or anthrax. In fact, in an unsettling irony, England experienced a devastating outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease during the filming of 28 Days Later, resulting in the slaughter of millions of livestock (Boyle and Garland). Similarly, the Dawn of the Dead remake was shot during another scare: the SARS epidemic of 2003. Snyder noticed the alarming parallels between his film and the nightly news; both were fraught with panic and misinformation (Snyder and Newman). The threat of infestation and other biohazards is hardly less significant today; it is hard to view either film-or any zombie movie, for that matter-without thinking of the recent threat of bird flu or avian influenza.
The idea of a terminal, debilitating illness or infection leads to the less obvious issue present in all zombie movies: euthanasia. These films raise the question: is it better to murder loved ones or to allow them to become something monstrous? In Romero's Land of the Dead, those bitten by zombies are given the choice of being killed immediately, since the virus takes time to work. Like a terminally ill patient, those infected by the zombie virus have time to say goodbye, put some affairs in order, and determine the method of their own death, enacting a kind of morbidly poignant "living will."13 In 28 Days Later, however, anyone infected must be killed at once-and often brutally; the virus takes only twenty seconds to fully manifest its insanity. When Selena's (Naomie Harris) traveling companion is bitten in a zombie attack, Selena immediately hacks off his injured limb and butchers him with a machete. In an even more pathetic scene, young Hannah (Megan Burns) barely gets the chance to say goodbye to her father (Brendan Gleeson) before the British military shoot him. The slaughter of the infected living becomes an essential form of mercy killing; the choices of the zombie landscape are hard ones, but survival is the top priority.
All of these narrative motifs and cinematic images can resonate strongly with modern viewers of the zombie movie, but the primary metaphor in the post- 9/11 zombie world is terrorism. According to St. John,
it does not take much of a stretch to see the parallel between zombies and anonymous terrorists who seek to convert others within society to their deadly cause. The fear that anyone could be a suicide bomber or a hijacker parallels a common trope of zombie films, in which healthy people are zombified by contact with other zombies and become killers. (13)
The transmission of the zombie infection is a symbolic form of radical brainwashing. Because anyone can become infected (i.e., conditioned) at any time, everyone is a potential threat; thus, paranoia becomes almost as important as survival. Those bitten often hide the injury, so even friends and family members cannot be fully trusted. In fact, the first zombie encountered in the Dawn of the Dead remake is a young girl, her apparent innocence making her violence all the more shocking.
Romero's Land of the Dead depicts a post-zombied society, a world where the enemy is literally at the gates. Pittsburgh has been converted into an island stronghold, with rivers and electric fencing keeping the zombies out (and the residents safely in). Class division is more critical than in other zombie films: the upper class lives an opulent lifestyle in Fiddler's Green, a luxurious highrise, while ignoring the problem; the commoners, however, must face reality while living in the slums below. In a documentary by Marian Mansi about the making of Land of the Dead, Romero comments, "Thematically, what the film is about is a bunch of people trying to live as though nothing has changed. Or at least that's what the administration believes. The protagonists understand that the world has completely changed." To keep the wealthy properly fed and supplied, the poor and industrious must risk their lives by venturing outside the city's fortifications, scavenging the countryside in an ever-increasing radius. They see the grim horrors of death and infection every day, much like soldiers on the front line of combat.
The wealthy elite in Fiddler's Green are literally isolated from the grim facts that make their lifestyle possible. To ensure the status quo, Dennis Hopper's Kaufman, the self-appointed leader of Pittsburgh, constructs the world's most extreme border security-blown up and barricaded bridges make the rivers impassable, and electric fences and armed guards protect the area from any intrusion; in an extreme example of xenophobia, soldiers shoot any intruders on sight. These forms of immigration control have become even more jarringly familiar with recent debates about erecting a fence between the United States and Mexico and the redeployment of National Guard troops to guard the United States' southern border during George W. Bush's presidency. Land of the Dead is certainly not subtle in its critique of modern American foreign policy; in fact, in Mansi's documentary, Romero goes so far as to identify the fascist Kaufman as Donald Rumsfeld and the Fiddler's Green tenants board as the Bush administration. Like Americans in the years immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the residents in Land of the Dead are asked both to continue their lives as if no real threat existed and to behave in certain ways because of the threat that does exist.
Conclusion
Although the conventions of the zombie genre remain largely unchanged, the movies' relevance has become all the more clear-a post-9/11 audience cannot help but perceive the characteristics of zombie cinema through the filter of terrorist threats and apocalyptic reality. Dendle emphasizes that the problem is "sorting out whether the movies really are doing something different in the post-9/11 world, or whether it's simply that audiences can't help but see them differently now" (interview). Most twenty-first-century zombies are faster, more deadly, and symbolically more transparent, but otherwise the films follow the mold Romero invented back in the 1960s. Yet they are different now, at least from the perspective of reception. As Dendle says, "we all view the world differently now, and . . . filmmakers and audiences alike are inherently attuned to read themes and motifs through different lenses than they would have before" (interview).
Initially, zombie movies shocked audiences with their unfamiliar images; today, they are all the more shocking because of their familiarity. In fact, fans of horror films, particularly apocalypse narratives like zombie movies, may find that the movies even help prepare them for reality. Dendle was approached in the summer of 2005 by a law student who had survived the horrors of September 11 firsthand. Although the experience was understandably shocking, this student claimed he had been emotionally prepared for the tragedy not by his family, community, or government, but by his long appreciation for zombie movies (interview). Perhaps zombie cinema is not merely a reflection of modern society, but a type of preemptive panacea, and that potential gives the genre both cultural significance and value.
