28 Days Later and the Zombie Film

English 165EW
Guest lecture by Steven Pokornowski
(with additional links added by Patrick Mooney)
13 February 2013

Cultural History of the Zombie (asterisks indicate important moment)

• 1929 — W.B. Seabrook *****
• 1932 — White Zombie *****
• 1936 — Ouanga (Haiti, black woman raises zombies for revenge on white neighbor marrying white lady)
• 1936 — Revolt of the Zombies
• 1941 — King of the Zombies
• 1943 — I Walked with a Zombie *****
• 1943 — Revenge of the Zombies
• 1954 — Richard Matheson's I Am Legend ***** (made into a film as 1964's The Last Man on Earth, 1971's The Omega Man, and that 2007 Will Smith flick)
• 1968 — Night of the Living Dead*****
• 1978 — Dawn of the Dead
• 1979 — Zombie (aka Zombi 2) *****
• 1981 — The Evil Dead
• 1985 — Day of the Dead
• 1985 — Return of the Living Dead
• 1987 — Evil Dead 2 *****
• 1992 — Dead Alive (aka Braindead)
• 1996 — Resident Evil (video game)
• 2002 — Resident Evil
• 2002 — 28 Days Later
• 2003 — The Walking Dead (comics)
• And everything since then has probably been at least SOMEWHAT on your radar. Now I've just highlighted films that were either groundbreaking in their time, or are retrospectively seen as important moments for the genre.

I want to highlight major genre shifts, use these to set up a narrative about the genre and the zombie, and use that to begin to think about 28 Days Later, the contemporary cultural moment, and the ubiquity of zombies.

Discussion

I will stress how the zombie and the outbreak narrative (and historically the virus and the zombie) are bound together.

Let's just open a discussion about the film here:

• Is it a zombie film?
• Based on what you've seen — and what you've heard — what are the tropes of a zombie film?
• How might 28 Days Later be different?
• Why might Danny Boyle WANT it to be different?
• How is it similar?
• Selena's machete (and her name, racializes her even more)
• The military as security versus the military as autoimmunity
• Racial politics of the film
• The end of the film

Suggested reading

Criticism/Ethnography

• Better off Dead, edited by Sarah Juliet Lauro and Deborah Christie (on the zombie as a post-human figure)
• Contagious, by Priscilla Wald (on outbreak narratives)
• Cinematic Prophylaxis, by Kirsten Ostherr (on the interaction between PSAs/educational films and cinema in relation to outbreak narratives, offers some great readings)
• Excerpts on zombies from The Magic Island by W.B. Seabrook and from Tell My Horse by Zora Neale Hurston
• The Serpent and the Rainbow (especially the conclusion) by Wade Davis
• The postcolonial theory of Édouard Glissant.

Fiction

• Max Brooks, World War Z
• Richard Matheson, I am Legend
• John W. Campbell, Who Goes There?
• Robert Kirkman, The Walking Dead comics
• Ian Edginton, Victorian Undead (Volume 1)

Suggested viewing

• Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero (the original, 1968 version, not the remake)
• Outbreak
• Contagion
• Fido
• Zombie (aka Zombi 2)
• A Little Bit Zombie
• AMC's The Walking Dead
• Dead Set (British miniseries)