As any astute cultural observer will tell you: Zombies are (pardon the pun) dead. After a seemingly endless glut of zombie films, comics, and video games, we (as a culture) have moved on. Vampires remain popular, although their reign is waning as well; witches seem so 2013. No one knows what monster will rule next, although Ryan Murphy's American Horror Story is putting its money on circus freaks. While it seems inevitable that certain cultural zeitgeists shift at the capricious whims of the masses, what is more difficult to understand is why and how. The zombie presents, perhaps, the most interesting case study in this area.
What killed the Zombie? Twee kids did.
Almost synonymous with mustaches, birds, and hoodies, the zombie has become a trope of the New Sincerity movement. Destroyed by acoustic guitar solos and vinyl records, there are more than one ways to cut the head off a ghoul.
Let me be more specific. Innocent Zom-Rom-Coms like Warm Bodies and the upcoming Life After Beth (alongside annoying novelty books like Pat the Zombie and Zombies Have Issues or the horror-hipster music of Ryan Gosling's band Dead Man's Bones) have stripped the zombie genre of any politically subversive potentiality, rendering the zombies as harmless as the bumbling humans they attack. These movies reinforce or recapitulate hetero-patriarchical hegemony rather than attack it. This stands in stark opposition with the politically significant zombie films of yore, which explored certain social issues with a certain kind of ultra-violent acumen.
It would do us well to remember the origins of the zombie, looking back towards George Romero's series of films. Starting with Night of the Living Dead, a film which bravely featured an African American lead when such things were still relatively unheard of and which quixotically addressed race relations in the guise of horror, Romero made sure to focus on a specific theme per film. Dawn addressed the rampant consumerism of the 80's, depicting the ravenous capitalist masses as blue-faced monsters. Day attacked the increasing wealth disparity seen in post-9/11 America. Diary explored the ubiquity of media and surveillance technologies. And so on... Alongside Romero's political relevance were shocking displays of ultra-violence and sub-cultural style in films like Dead Alive and Return of the Living Dead. Horror as a wider genre, perhaps inspired by Romero, stretched its sights outwards to address other social anxieties in films like The Crazies and The Hills Have Eyes.
Of course, not every (horror) movie has to be political to be interesting. What is uninteresting, however, is the reflection back of mainstream values and tropes in the guise of supposedly subversive aesthetics, as seen in Warm Bodies. What we are given is hardly horror at all, instead it is the story of a (straight, white) couple learning to love each other despite their (boring) differences. The protagonists quirks (vinyl loving, hoodie wearing, zombie-ism) are supposed to be endearing, not scary. This is almost the direct opposite of something like Fido (a stylish critique of Americana) or an experimental art film like Otto; or, Up With Dead People, which takes the trope of zombies and re-imagines it as a metaphor for a kind of queer condition: zombie-ism as the internalized alienation of a gay identity. While I haven't seen Life After Beth, the joke-y pandering of the twee zombie seems not far from the ubiquitous manic-pixie-dream-girl trope. The only difference is that the pixie is undead.
Attacking a horror movie as not-horrific-enough seems oddly purist or essentialist. The problem is not that these films aren't scary: they clearly aren't supposed to be. The problem is that they systematically reinforce the gendered, racial, and classist relations that prior films in the genre had always sought to subvert. Once again, white heterosexuality is portrayed as an ideal; once again a middle-class male is lifted out of his zombie-like depression by a quirky female counterpart.
