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Abstract
Zombies have served as a literary and cultural narrative to depict and explain the nature of capitalism, consumerism and disease. The enslaved human, one who can literally be worked to death, represents the ultimate zombie state. While many contemporary zombie movies feature the running and hungry diseased un-dead, other films like the earliest depiction, White Zombie (1932) and the most popular recent depiction, Get Out (2017), distinctly engage with the enslaved zombie. In this paper I explore the zombie as rooted in Haiti, the role of the US on the island, and subsequently the role of the captured zombie as represented in U. S. film culture.These zombie films, rooted in the exotic othering of a mythologized Vodou-filled West Indies, are considered together with an exploration of the vulnerability of contemporary Black people to the threat of physical and mental capture. Using two theorists, W.E.B Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, this paper examines their conceptualizations of the twoness of being in the Black Body, alongside the threat of being entrapped in the Black body. These theorists illuminate a reading of the zombie experience as an extension of the threat of Black capture. I explore this alongside examples of the Black experience in the Americas highlighting not only the threat of capture, but the persistent willingness to resist capture.
Keywords: Zombies, capture, film, resistance, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, White Zombie (1932); Get Out (2017)
Introduction
The zombie genre in film features the specific horror trope of the undead or as often referenced, the 'living dead'. As most zombie1 film lovers can tell you, zombies are the perfect metaphor for seemingly anything. The zombies in films have ranged from slaves, who while slow; get the job done, to running, hungry, undead creatures, feasting on the living. Zombies have served as representatives of Nazis, capitalists, consumerism, and disease to name a few possibilities. A person quoted in an LA Weekly piece on zombies reflects about the creatures, "They didn't choose to be who they are. They're kind of helpless, they're kind of trapped...And they're always the monster for fear of something larger than yourself, whether it's the recession, or going on boats without pirates attacking, or countries far, far away plotting our doom. Zombies...