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WHETHER ONE LOOKS AT FILMS, SONGS, GAMES, OR BOOKS, THE ZOMBIE GENRE IS clearly on the rise. According to conservative estimates, well more than one-third of all zombie films have been released since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks (Bishop 2008). By any observable metric, the living dead have become the hottest paranormal pop culture phenomenon of this century. As the pace of zombie movie production has accelerated, the 2013 film version of World War Z has grossed more than half a billion dollars worldwide. Robert Kirkwood's AMC series The Walking Dead has become a ratings powerhouse. Pundits, corporations, interest groups, and even government agencies have embraced the living dead as a tool for developing and advancing their own ideas and interests.
Why do zombies continue to ride so high in the cultural sky? And, frankly, is this good for the humans? The spread of the living dead reflects a variety of anxieties in an American body politic buffeted by asymmetric threats and economic uncertainty. Surfing the cultural Zeitgeist, a number of actors have adopted the zombie trope to advance their own political message. There are clear advantages in using the living dead as a pop culture hook for promoting political and policy ideas. The superficial homogeneity of the zombie canon, how- ever, also poses some drawbacks for its use going forward. Simply put, zombies are unique in genre literature in emphasizing the breakdown of modern society in the wake of an external threat. In propagating this narrative, constant references to the zombie canon can reinforce an apocalyptic perception about the future of modern society. As interest groups also appropriate and exploit the zombie narrative to pursue their own political agendas, their millenarian rhetoric helps to lay the groundwork for the societal breakdown that they claim to fear. The best solution to this conundrum lies in an embrace of more heterogeneous zombie narratives.
THE ZOMBIE REVIVAL AND ITS MEANING
It does not take much effort to demonstrate that zombies have become increasingly popular in the twenty-first century. Even prior to the Great Recession, flesh-eating ghouls -as opposed to the more historically accurate definition of zombies as slaves (Wilentz 2013) -had become one of the most important sources of postapocalyptic cinema (Phelan 2009). The strong growth...