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In Robert Kirkman’s graphic narrative The Walking Dead, the zombie apocalypse acts an equalizing force, bringing together disparate groups of survivors from all walks of life, who join forces to combat the living dead. Yet Kirkman’s emphasis on each character’s work history sheds light on the divisive class and economic power that continues to haunt protagonist Rick Grimes and a host of minor characters who display a profound sense of disillusionment and worker alienation in attempting to achieve the American Dream. Kirkman’s anti-capitalist slant as demonstrated by many of the characters’ relief in having escaped the endless cycle of commerce, consumerism, and capitalism that consumed their lives before the zombie invasion occurred becomes a useful tool to discuss how labor impacts lived experience.

This chapter seeks to explain the popularity of grim shows like the zombie narrative The Walking Dead, which seem to delight in portraying the destruction of the world as we know it. The Walking Dead offers a variant of the American dream, because it celebrates the independence of the ordinary people who are forced to fend for themselves in the absence of the authorities and institutions that traditionally had protected and taken care of them. Several of the characters reinvent themselves, going from the meek roles they played in pre-apocalyptic times to strong people. The show reflects widespread anxieties about social and political developments after the 2008 economic downturn. Many Americans felt betrayed by the elites who had claimed to have the expertise to run the country smoothly, and the show generally casts elites in a bad light. The Walking Dead recaptures the pioneer spirit that built America in the first place—a sense of self-reliance that harks back to the American West and frontier existence.

This chapter reads The Walking Dead through its creator Robert Kirkman’s contention that it is the “zombie movie that never ends.” Drawing on Eran Dorfman’s notion of the everyday in modern life and Frank Kermode’s parsing of the need for literary endings, it argues that The Walking Dead’s narrative endlessness and questing for the restitution of the everyday is best understood as symptomatic of a contemporary moment in which there is room for doubt what the everyday actually is. The chapter suggests that The Walking Dead reflects the way life is lived in the absence of a sense of narrative endings.

Chapter 6 pursues Freud's view of a dramatic struggle between eros as the preserver of life and thanatos as the drive toward destruction and death, and describes how this struggle is played out in Dead Man Walking. The film suggests that the death drive of the convicted murderer, Matthew Poncelet, arises from his benighted desire for the missing father who will compensate him for his sense of masculine weakness and inadequacy. Dead Man Walking valorizes the close relationship that the nun protagonist, Sister Helen Prejean, has with her mother and shows how this bond is a resting place from the dark desires of mindlessly evil crime and capital punishment. The chapter argues that the nun's capacity for empathy stems from the desire to identify with her mother, to see with maternal eyes that Poncelet is not a monster, and finally to make it possible for him to see himself through her loving eyes as a son of God.

In the third of three chapters examining Athens’ golden-age legacy, Gawlinski discusses how the “flu episodes” of The Walking Dead’s fourth season re-animate a highly influential classical plague narrative: when the civic ideals of “golden age” Athens, lauded by Pericles in the famous Funeral Oration featured in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, fall to the lawlessness (anomia) spurred by an outbreak of plague as the walled city is besieged by the Spartans. The series’ dramatization of the community’s failure to live up to its ideals interlaces with the struggle of its protagonist, former sheriff Rick Grimes, to follow an example from the Roman Republican strand of the classical tradition. Cincinnatus, the Roman leader who temporarily left his farm to save the state by taking up emergency powers in wartime, then returned to pastoral life voluntarily, has been invoked as a model for American leaders since George Washington. Grimes tries but fails to follow this Roman model, further undermining the community’s attempt at Athenian-style civic life and abandoning the communal farm. Thus two classical models promoting a turn away from strife are shown as unsustainable, like the golden age itself.

This chapter examines how popular culture might have contributed towards the shift in the public's attitude towards death penalty sentencing and execution patterns in the United States. It analyses the films Dead Man Walking and The Green Mile and explains some of the capital punishment issues to which the viewers are exposed. It suggests that both films instruct their respective audiences about fairness and the death penalty, an issue that strikes a chord with most people.

This final chapter continues the discussion of monsters by engaging with the writings of Robin Wood, who theorized monsters as fundamentally ambivalent figures who allow us to envision alternatives to the restrictive social order. It then realigns Wood’s terms to show how the recent horror genre has been structured around questions not simply of monstrosity, but of asserting or maintaining humanity—and recognizing the humanity of others—in the face of monstrosity and other inconceivable horrors. This is the explicit theme of The Walking Dead TV series, as is emphasized in its first video game adaptation, The Walking Dead: The Game (2012), but is there at the beginnings of the modern genre in the 1960s with a film like Night of the Living Dead (1968). The chapter concludes with a discussion of how understandings of “monstrosity” and “humanity” are redefined around questions of morality with two high-profile, integrated horror films, Get Out (2017) and The Shape of Water (2017).

This chapter presents a case study that highlights the intersections of religion with nation-building, race, and gender in an example from early America: the execution of four Quakers on the Boston Common between 1659 and 1661. By closely reading the discourse and ritual processes evident in these executions, it shows how overlapping constructions of authority by state and church established some basic terms around which religious violence has operated in American history from almost the first years that Europeans established settlements. It suggests that Mary Dyer was executed to solve a “crisis of differentiation.” She manifested a form of “ecstatic asceticism” that produced a mirror reaction by the established power and led to her execution in what can be described as an act of “performative violence.” She was, in short, sacrificed to produce cultural power for the Puritans. This single event set America on its course as an empire of sacrifice, in patterns that the filmmaker Tim Robbins carefully reiterated and critiqued in his 1996 film Dead Man Walking.

In the 1980s and 1990s, as death row populations were rising considerably and executions were becoming an increasingly regular occurrence, fictional films about the death penalty became an important vehicle through which punitive, retributive ideology gained power. Rather than pandering to Americans’ resentment of the criminal, though, they crafted a vision of the death penalty as an ennobling practice. In screenplays and teleplays, Hollywood writers mitigated the potential anxieties generated by the revival of capital punishment. Whether responding to anxieties about white freedom, white racism, or white dispossession, films depicted executions as occasions that redeemed the soul of the condemned and regenerated the soul of the communities affected by their crimes. In the popular imagination, executions were about more than retribution and incapacitation. They were about opportunities for redemption.

This chapter focuses on horror that prioritizes narrative over sensation to work through why the themes of horror hold fascination for viewers and gamers when not paired with visceral affective goals. The chapter theorizes this mode as “integrated horror”—works that incorporate horror tropes into existing narrative forms and structures—with recent television at the forefront of this trend. Integrated horror allows for exploration of, and familiarization with, monsters and monstrosity, of death and abjection. This mode allows viewers and gamers to conceive of and, in some sense, work through, the inconceivable fears that define horror. This chapter discusses the uses of monsters and why we embrace them over the course of the dozens or hundreds of hours that make up a television show like The Walking Dead (2010–) and American Horror Story (2011–).

This chapter examines how many new voices spoke out against capital punishment starting in the 1990s. After Warren McCleskey’s case revealed that the death penalty would not be abolished through a litigation strategy, abolitionists intensified their focus outside the courtroom. Eventually, McCleskey’s execution and other factors prompted some to reconsider the death penalty and others to raise arguments in a number of venues. Important death penalty critics who emerged in the 1990s included Sister Helen Prejean, Justice Blackmun, and Justice Powell. Their voices were joined by conservatives, judges, politicians, and others. In particular, Sister Prejean’s book, Dead Man Walking, had a major impact on discussion about capital punishment.

Curtiz was assigned a horror programmer, The Walking Dead, that he turned into a highly credible film.This picture beganhis association with Irving Rapper as a dialogue director. Rapper became a respected director who considered Curtiz his professional mentor. Wallis and Curtiz finally had it out during the production of The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936).Curtiz continued to defy Wallis by eschewing close-ups while using an excess amount of camera movement and foreground composition in his setups. Wallis eventually threatened to fire Curtiz, who acquiesced to filming more to the producer’s desired style. The chapter includes a detailed account of the alleged mistreatment of horses during the charge sequences,whichErrol Flynn and David Niven blamed on Curtiz.Author’s research revealed that these stories were grossly exaggerated; Curtiz was not even present when some horses were injured and put down. Despite a wave of bad publicity, the picture was another hit. Curtiz endured a separation from Bess and divorce proceedings that ended abruptly when the couple reconciled. He also achieved his long-sought-after American citizenship, even though he lied about the existence of his European children.