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This chapter offers a brief consideration of the role that the renewed popularity of the vampire and zombie plays within popular culture. Through consideration of the growing popularity of zombie walks, zombie runs, vampire fashion, vampire cosplay, this chapter argues that a fascination with the undead is a response to an unsettling cultural climate in which we are bombarded by the threat of annihilation but also serves as evidence of a cultural appropriation of this apocalyptic threat.

The introduction lays out the necessary background to the zombie in contemporary fiction. It starts by offering a general idea of the zombie’s contemporary valence and then offers a brief history of the zombie in literature, from its various potential forebears to the 21^st century. It argues for the importance of the Romero zombie as the most useful, and open, figuration of the zombie, and then lays out the way in which the book will read the zombie, read against alternative versions of zombie theory that are widely debated. It argues against symbolic readings of the zombie as such, and suggests that we must instead read it as a form, one which enables literature to engage possible futures, but does not in and of itself signify anything in particular.

This chapter probes the depiction of zombies in such contemporary novels as World War Z, Zombie Haiku, and the revisionist classic Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Authors Margo Collins and Elson Bond argue that the zombie is uniquely appealing to today's technologically savvy, fast-paced generation and, as such, can serve as a mirror for some of Generation Y's values and notions of identity. New millennium zombie-ism demonstrates an apparent divergence into what initially appears to be two distinct categories: zombie-as-comedy and zombie-as-threat, but as the chapter argues, time and again those two categories overlap in intriguing and symbolic ways. Ultimately, depictions of both kinds of zombies come to function as monstrous placeholders for potentially dangerous human interactions in an anomic society. Accustomed to instant communication with virtual strangers, insulated from the natural world and dependent on fragile transportation, communication, and power networks, millennial audiences have good reason to fear the chaotic anonymity of zombies.

For this chapter, ‘Blood Feast’ and George Romero’s ‘Night of the Living Dead’ are discussed as the genesis of the new wave of American horror cinema. Whilst the two are very different films, in terms of certain stylistic attributes, for instance their use of the close-up, they have more in common than previous studies have alluded. Five key tropes of the exploitation-horror film are also introduced and discussed.

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 examines the resurgence of the zombie genre which went from a minor figure to one of the defining pop cultural icons of the era. What might be said about the connections between this renaissance and the turbulent War on Terror decade? It offers a detailed analysis of the films of George A. Romero and I Am Legend.

This chapter argues that not only has the 21^st century seen a rise in popularity of the vampire and zombie in film and television but that this period has also witnessed an increased dialogue between these two conceptions of the undead, which highlights symmetry over opposition. This chapter argues that the increased interconnection between vampires and zombies in popular culture is a result of a growing pre-occupation with notions of apocalypse. Rather than simply presenting this development as a response to the events of 9/11, this chapter posits that since the turn of the millennium there has been a growing fascination with the apocalypse within contemporary media, responding to a range of transformative global events. It is through fictions surrounding the vampire and zombie that the trauma of these events is negotiated. Case studies include Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.

This chapter traces the 21^st century synergy between vampire and zombie back to Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend, a book that both reinvented the vampire story as science-fiction by reimaging the vampire through the language of science, and served as origin text for the birth of the zombie genre with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Through an analysis of a range of adaptations of Matheson’s novel, including his own script written for Hammer Studios but rejected by the BBFC, this chapter considers how this text marks key transformative moments within the evolution of the horror genre on film.

This chapter discusses how between 2002-2005 a selection of films emerged that sought to re-imagine the zombie film through the lens of 21^st century cultural and scientific pre-occupations. The global blockbuster, and critical, success of these films served to launch a renaissance of zombie cinema that continues to dominate contemporary horror films. Like the vampire, the new zombie film has been reconceived through the language of science via discourses of virology and pandemic, but also through the language of 21^st century media, in the form of the found footage film. This chapter discusses this new, post-Romero, zombie film in the light of 9/11 and the growing culture of apocalypse that dominates contemporary media. Case studies include [REC], 28 Days Later, Resident Evil, Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead, and Dawn of the Dead.

This chapter examines the role of the zombie within TV horror both in terms of a long established tradition of monster-of-the-week through to the increasingly prevalent place that the zombie plays within contemporary serialised television. This chapter challenges the dismissal of television as an appropriate space for horror and the political allegory often associated with Romero’s zombie films, by presenting a series of case studies in which the TV zombie serves such as narrative and thematic purpose. In particular it considers how the serialized nature of television, exemplified by the soap opera format, is well suited to the zombie narrative in which closure is traditionally denied. It also serves to structure the nature and function of allegory within the televisual zombie format. Case studies include: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, The Walking Dead and In the Flesh.

This chapter considers the increasingly prevalent presence of a ‘hybrid’ hero, a hybrid of human and vampire and/or zombie, within 21^st century vampire and zombie films and television. Through an examination of a selection of special-effects driven, hybrid horror/science-fiction films, this chapter considers how the hybrid hero celebrates notions of hybridity through the figure of the post-human, or cyborg, hero while also challenging conceptions of racial purity and the controlling doctrines of contemporary bio-politics. These heroes defy accepted behaviour, perceived racial boundaries, physical limitations and the boundaries of the body, reimaging the human as a hybrid form in which the lines between human, machine and monster are blurred. In so doing, they invite the audience to embrace hybridity in all of its forms and see the world through the eyes of the monster. Case studies include Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Blade, Underworld, Ultraviolet and Resident Evil.

This chapter examines the adoption and development of the first person narrative format within vampire, and more recently zombie, film and television. It considers how this trope has contributed to the rise of the sympathetic/romantic vampire figure from the Byronic hero within Polidori’s The Vampyre to Interview with the Vampire and Byzantium and the subsequent rise of the sympathetic zombie. This chapter questions if this first person point of view empties the vampire and zombie of symbolic agency, or manipulates the genre to explore new meanings. It considers how the genres of the vampire and the zombie are increasingly interconnected, moving away from themes of apocalypse and cultural anxiety to explore questions of identity and the self within a changing world, effectively queering the vampire and zombie for new audiences.Case studies include Let the Right One In, Byzantium, Only Lovers Left Alive, Warm Bodies, Colin, and In the Flesh.

This chapter investigates the Gothic as a mode of writing that escaped generic literary boundaries during the British debates over the French Revolution in order to express more widespread fears of cultural decline. Positing the current ubiquity of the zombie as a resurgence of this Gothic mode, the chapter explores zombie-apocalypse texts as expressing a return of Malthusian worries about population growth, climate change, financial instability, and energy insecurity. The zombie-apocalypse genre, popularized by George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), released within a few years of U.S. peak oil production, has become a mainstay of global cinema, fiction, and television in the recent international scramble for alternative energy sources. These texts, like the Gothic in its first heyday, demonstrate a conflicted desire both to confront and dismiss problems that seem as inconceivable as they appear to be insoluble. Today’s zombie stands, then, much as the envisioned undead did for earlier British writers like Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft, as the spectre of regression so unimaginable within the reigning cultural narrative of the time that its nightmarish possibility may be repressed by the very same spectacle of apocalyptic carnage used to figure it.

This chapter argues that zombie fictions enable us to reflect upon the meaning and possibility, and especially the conditions of possibility, for community. Read through Zygmunt Bauman and Jean-Luc Nancy, community becomes central to two novels less frequently read by critics, Bob Fingerman’s Pariah and Kim Paffenroth’s Dying to Live, novels which also share a thematic concern with humans who are not in danger from zombie attack. The two novels ultimately present nearly opposite versions of how community may be reconstituted in the wake of a zombie apocalypse, and so are instructive of our contemporary concern with the possibility of community.

The coda explores what the book takes to be the most expansive question about contemporary zombie fiction, its meaning for literature at large. It departs from the question of whether we will be able to read literature again without the zombie, and takes zombie fiction, in its many manifestations but especially in its appearance in ostensibly “literary” fiction, as a crucial part of the contemporary generic turn, and as a harbinger of the future of fiction. More than that, however, it suggests that the processes at work in zombie fiction prefigure a larger shift in the literary field, one which ultimately depends on the zombie’s capacity to broadly signal possibility, rather than symbolic meaning.

This chapter introduces the reader to the Splat Pack, a group of contemporary horror film-makers such as Eli Roth, Rob Zombie, Neil Marshall, and Alexandre Aja. It examines how mainstream media hyped the Splat Packers, citing articles — including the one written by Alan Jones for the April 2006 issue of the British film magazine Total Film — that portrayed them as independent, subversive film-makers who operate outside the Hollywood mainstream. One of the ways in which journalists — and the Splat Packers themselves — construct the group's image of oppositional outsiderdom is by likening them to past horror directors like George Romero and Wes Craven from the 1960s and 1970s, the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of subversive American horror films. This chapter suggests that the media hype heralding the Splat Pack's arrival offers an intriguing glimpse into how notions of independence, outsider status, and claims of subversion are used to sell films and the personalities of their directors.

This chapter examines how Splat Pack director Rob Zombie utilises extra text to dramatise and narrativise the making of his horror films — that is, to collapse the ‘fiction’ of the film's narrative with the ‘reality’ of the film's making into one supertext that encompasses ‘the story of the film’. It suggests that Zombie's films are preoccupied with monstrous denizens from the underclass attacking the middle class, and that they are seemingly subversive because of the ways in which Zombie sympathetically depicts his ‘white-trash’ monsters and does not offer the middle class any redemption. The ‘white trash’ stereotype in popular media serves to demean white people from lower economic strata by portraying them as ‘poor, dirty, drunken, criminally minded, and sexually perverse people’. However, the chapter shows that the oppositionality of Zombie's films is complicated by how it is presented on the DVD platform, and argues that Zombie's films-on-DVD and how they focus on the acting process foreground the fluidity of identity and the ultimate instability of class.