Is the public losing interest in the zombie as an icon of horror? Are audiences and readers abandoning the zombie narrative because it is no longer "fresh," or because it has lost its edginess and ... brains? As a reviewer for the "Days Gone" game recently noted: "Times have changed. People don’t just gobble up any old crap with zombies in it anymore."I hope the overkill of mediocre zombie productions--in film, publishing, and gaming--will actually result in a return to the zombie as an icon of Otherness. As scholar Elizabeth Aiossa argues in her new book The Subversive Zombie, the zombie narrative used to be radical enough to serve as a vehicle for the critique of "the very real diseases of racism, sexism, materialism, and individualism."
The resistant quality of the zombie narrative has been watered down, Aiossa suggests, as the dons of the Entertainment industry see money in the restoration and promotion of masculine power, female dependency, racist assumptions, heteronormative stereotypes, and monocultural flatness.
This is a topic that I will frequently return to in this blog as it seems essential to my hope of applying a more academic analysis to the zombie narrative.
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