Obviously, there are a lot of zombie narratives from this period which invert or subvert this trope. ( Zombieland especially hasn’t held up so great: the character Cleveland, played by Mark Zuckerberg, ends up reading as an incel, and his murder of his hot neighbor after describing what a bitch she is for not noticing him is, as the saying goes, problematic.) It’s the old line: “You’ll be begging me to use my guns when the mob comes,” where the mob is generally coded as not-white, not-us, the ultimate dehumanized them. World War Z (movie version), Walking Dead (both versions), Zombieland, etc. So many zombie narratives of the early 21st century position a white dude, often with a military or police background, and his capacity for targeted violence as the savior of domesticity and the world. I want to be clear that when I say this, I am not smearing all zombie narratives of this time period as right wing agitprop or whatever - that would be stupid and reductive.īut there are also certain inescapable through-lines to this era of zombie narrative. Every time has its monster, and I think the zombie in the Obama years largely stood in for some pretty nasty undemocratic and racist stuff seething under the surface. And while I don’t have a lot of time for this notion, I will grudgingly admit that we’re definitely out of the flurry of excellent zombie narratives that were published about a decade ago. I feel like every time I turn around, some nickel-plated idiot announces that the zombie genre is dead, har har.

Dearly, Departed – Ceridwen Anne on Warm Bodies: Romeo and Juliet Across the Grave.Dearly, Departed – Ceridwen Anne on Deck Z: Unsinkable.Book review: Love, Lust and Zombies – Ceridwen Anne on An Elegy for New York: Zone One.Zombie Children – Ceridwen Anne on Zombie Children in The Walking Dead.28 Days Later – Two Nerds Sitting On A Couch on Zombie Children.The Last of Us: When You’re Lost in the Darkness.

Spec Ops Z by Gavin G. Smith