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As its title suggests, Danny Boyle‘s 28 Days Later is a zombie movie about procreation. While this idea – a human menstrual cycle alluding to the multiplication of the undead – may seem at first to be paradoxical, such an idea is hardly a new one in zombie mythology. Boyle‘s film borrows from the traditional Gothic through a number of standard Gothic tropes in order to define the character of the films female protagonist as one necessary for her biological or reproductive role and to ward off possible domestic chaos and invasion through her role as mother. The film acknowledges an idea of woman as objectified and violated in both a postfeminist, but strangely also traditionally Gothic definition of woman as sex object and mother who is necessary for this biological, reproductive role as well as her identity, not as survivor, but as domestic caretaker.
from the vampire mainly in that its act of going to power follows after a human future has been graphically decided through apocalypse ( 1995 : 6). The zombie’s insightful reflection of contemporary society thus lies in its essential characteristic of a violent consumption that occurs past the point when it might gain any lasting benefit from what it devours, and when
, Rob Schmidt’s Wrong Turn, Marcus Nispel’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects and Alexandre Aja’s remake of Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes all pay stylistic and conceptual homage to their 1970s predecessors in their exploration of the will to social and cultural heterogeneity demanded by the War on Terror as it was earlier demanded by the Vietnam conflict.20 The parallels between the generations is perhaps most clearly seen in Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever, a highly self-reflexive homage to the horror cinema of the past
definable, animated being occupying a human host with a desire to eat human flesh’. 27 This is already telling: it side-steps the question of the zombie’s humanity, via the wording, ‘human host’, to suggest that the zombie is, in fact, something other than (fully) human. This is consequential. It biases his normative starting point, about which he is explicit: Drezner’s ‘project is explicitly pro-human’. The distinct, less-than-human biology of the zombie is taken as given. Such an implicit assumption of unique superiority reflects the pervasiveness and power of the
.’ In this war heterotopia, a counter-site to the actual battlefield, his dead soldier encounters ‘encumbered sleepers groaning’, and while he is probing them, one springs up and stares at him with his dead smile. The final stanza explores what might be called a zombie’s fatal embrace: ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend./I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned
beyond what occurred in earlier horrors. A fairly straightforward illustration of this is provided by comparing the character of final girl Laurie Strode in John Carpenter’s original and highly influential slasher film Halloween (1978) and Rob Zombie’s recent remake, also entitled Halloween (2007). In both, Laurie (played by Jamie Lee Curtis in the original and Scout Taylor-Compton in the remake
thirty years of neoliberal experiment have done extraordinary violence to our societies and ourselves, leaving us unable, it seems, to find a way out of the darkness. Notes 1 The zombie’s cultural predominance as the new millennium’s monster of choice is witnessed by the extraordinary proliferation of novels, television
normative family informs almost all films of the family horror genre, especially those representatives that ostensibly seem to revalue familial values. Striking cases in point are, among others, Charles Kaufman’s Mother’s Day (1980), Joseph Ruben’s The Stepfather (1987), or both Rob Zombie’s The House of 1000 Corpses (2003) – a postmodern tour de force that is heavily indebted to The Texas
camaraderie of the two Vietnam veterans as his shooting skills improve. The pregnant journalist Fran’s dependent femininity transmutes into a highly autonomous parody of the female outlaw as she becomes increasingly attached to the guns that begin as an erotic accessory and end up as a means of survival for herself and her unborn child. But as Romero is keen to emphasise, a fetishisation of such weaponry is every bit as lethal as a zombie’s bite. It is the SWAT man Roger’s gun-wielding machismo that brings about his end while Stephen’s decision to take pot shots at the
, attention and reverence extended towards the pictured bodies, for a modern observer it is difficult to disentangle such morbid and extravagant visual tableaux from a myriad of horror films, Indiana Jones movies (Koudounaris has been nick-named ‘Indiana Bones’), the underground mortuary of Rob Zombie’s House of 1,000 Corpses (2003), and arthouse versions of these. Another and starker strain of Gothic