American Zombie Gothic: the rise and fall (and rise) of the walking dead in popular culture

249 Pages·2010·2.042 MB·English

by  Bishop, Kyle William

American Zombie
Gothic
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American Zombie
Gothic
The Rise and Fall (and Rise)
of the Walking Dead
in Popular Culture
K W B
YLE ILLIAM ISHOP
Foreword by JERROLD E. HOGLE
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
LIBRARYOFCONGRESSCATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATIONDATA
Bishop, Kyle William, ¡973–
American Zombie Gothic : the rise and fall (and rise) of the
walking dead in popular culture / Kyle William Bishop ;
foreword by Jerrold E. Hogle.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7864-4806-7
softcover : 50# alkaline paper
¡. Zombie films—History and criticism. I. Title.
PN1995.9.Z63B52 2010
791.43'675—dc22 2009050018
British Library cataloguing data are available
©2010 Kyle William Bishop. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
Cover image ©2010 Shannon Eberhard (after Grant Wood’s
American Gothic)
Manufactured in the United States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 6¡¡, Je›erson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
For Rachel, Xander, and Sydney.
And also for VR Magleby
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank those who have helped make this book happen: Peter Den-
dle, Charlie Bertsch, Maribel Alvarez, Jennifer Jenkins, Suresh Raval, Amy
Parziale, Jay “Maggie” Jesse, James Wermers, and especially Todd Petersen. My
deepest appreciation and gratitude go to Susan White, my wonderful and tire-
less dissertation director, and the other two members of my committee who
worked so diligently with me on the early drafts of the manuscript: the great
Gothic scholar Jerrold E. Hogle and the brilliant critical theorist Carlos Gal-
lego. Everlasting thanks also go to the Pretenyrds of Southern Utah Univer-
sity—Jessica, Robin, Kurt, Ed, Charles, and Crazy Joe—along with my other
colleagues in the Southern Utah University English Department.
My utmost thanks go once again to Dr. Hogle, who offered a much-
appreciated foreword and invaluable liner notes. For assistance in obtaining
my visuals and screen images, I thank Drs. White and Petersen, SUU Provost
Rodney Decker and English Department Chair Kurt Harris, Jerry and Dol-
lie at Jerry Ohlinger’s Movie Material Store, Derek and Todd at Photofest
Digital, and Shannon Eberhard, my illustrator. Most of all, I thank my patient
and longsuffering family: my parents Kent and Bonnie, my devoted grand-
father VR, and, of course, Rachel, Xander, and Sydney.
Some of the following material has been published previously (albeit in
much abbreviated versions) in a variety of academic journals: part of the intro-
duction appears in the Journal of Popular Film and Television as “Dead Man
StillWalking: Explaining the Zombie Renaissance” (37.1[2009]: 16–25, © Tay-
lor and Francis), material from chapters 1, 2, and 3 can be found together in
“Raising the Dead: Unearthing the Non-Literary Origins of Zombie Cinema”
in the Journal of Popular Film and Television (33.4 [2006]: 196–205, © Tay-
lor and Francis), the first half of chapter 2 is printed in The Journal of Amer-
ican Culture as “The Sub-Subaltern Monster: Imperialist Hegemony and the
Cinematic Voodoo Zombie” (31.2 [2008]: 141–152, © Wiley Blackwell), and
a portion of chapter 4 will soon be published in The Journal of Popular Cul-
ture in an article titled “The Idle Proletariat: Dawn of the Dead, Consumer
Ideology, and the Loss of Productive Labor” (43.2 [2010], © Wiley Blackwell).
vi
C
ONTENTS
Acknowledgments vi
Foreword by Jerrold E. Hogle 1
Preface 5
Introduction—The Zombie Film and Its Cycles 9
1—RAISING THE LIVING DEAD
The Folkloric and Ideological Origins of the Voodoo Zombie 37
2—THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE
Imperialist Hegemony and the Cinematic Voodoo Zombie 64
3—THE RISE OF THE NEW PARADIGM
Night of the Living Dead and the Zombie Invasion Narrative 94
4—THE DEAD WALK THE EARTH
The Triumph of the Zombie Social Metaphor in Dawn of the Dead 129
5—HUMANIZING THE LIVING DEAD
The Evolution of the Zombie Protagonist 158
Conclusion—The Future Shock of Zombie Cinema 197
Filmography 209
Chapter Notes 213
Bibliography 225
Index 231
vii
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F
OREWORD
J E. H
BY ERROLD OGLE
It is my pleasure to help present a book long overdue: a thoroughly
analytical and theory-based study of the whole development of the “zombie”
film since the 1920s from its older Caribbean roots to the stunning “renais-
sance” of zombie cinema at the dawn of the twenty-first century. There have
already been, to be sure, good professional articles and some helpful books on
this unique genre of horror, all of which are duly acknowledged here. But
none of them, from all I know, are as culturally probing, as broadly revealing,
and as comprehensive overall as the following history and analysis by Kyle
Bishop.
As he shows, zombie cinema has had increasingly important “cultural
work” to do in the highly conflicted struggle among systems of belief in the
modern and postmodern West. In the face of all that, no other study has
exposed and explained so well the many deep cultural issues that zombie films
have addressed and symbolized for their audiences, nor has any previous schol-
arship been as precise as Bishop’s on how we can see this cultural work acted
out in the visible and audible particulars of the most important zombie pro-
ductions.
This study had its formal beginning as a doctoral dissertation at the Uni-
versity of Arizona, under the excellent direction of Professor Susan White, and
I was honored to be a committee member there, along with Professor Carlos
Gallego, adding my own limited expertise to the mix that helped this study
come about. We all saw by this study’s initial completion, though, just as we
now see after some more recent revisions, that this was and is such a major
and comprehensive account of its subject, so superior to most previous work
on zombie films, that we knew it had to become a book almost immediately,
and we are now quite proud to see that it has. It makes an unusually strong
and thorough contribution to the study of a zombie phenomenon that has
been understood only in bits and pieces—often the state of zombies them-
selves—until Bishop drew all this together and argued his case for its cultural
meanings by closely examining the major zombie films in ways that will be
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