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In the episode 'The Grove' (4.14) from AMC's The Walking Dead, Lizzie and Mika Samuels, sisters and two of the child survivors of the zombie apocalypse, brutally meet their ends. Lizzie, no longer able to distinguish between life and death, kills Mika, and Carol in turn shoots Lizzie, claiming that Lizzie 'can't be around people'. These characters call into question the dividing line – if one remains, as established society crumbles – between human and animal, feral and civilised. The texts analysed in this article, AMC's The Walking Dead and Max Brooks's novel World War Z, include themes of re-socialising children and forming communities, or packs, in which the children can perhaps become rehabilitated into productive contributors. Viewing children in this light summons up viewer and reader responses to 'horror' that are more in keeping with reactions to real-life cases of abused and neglected 'feral' children than with the 'horror' produced by a zombie-themed text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The popular cultural ubiquity of the zombie in the years following the Second World War is testament to that monster's remarkable ability to adapt to the social anxieties of the age. From the red-scare zombie-vampire hybrids of I Am Legend (1954) onwards, the abject alterity of the ambulant dead has been deployed as a means of interrogating everything from the war in Vietnam (Night of the Living Dead, 1968) to the evils of consumerism (Dawn of the Dead, 1978). This essay explores how, in the years since 9/11, those questions of ethnicity and gender, regionality and power that have haunted the zombie narrative since 1968 have come to articulate the social and cultural dislocations wrought by free-market economics and the 'shock doctrines' that underscore the will to global corporatism. The article examines these dynamics through consideration of the figure of the zombie in a range of contemporary cultural texts drawn from film, television, graphic fiction, literature and gaming, each of which articulates a sense not only neo-liberalism itself has failed but simply won't lie down and die. It is therefore argued that in an age of corporate war and economic collapse, community breakdown and state-sanctioned torture, the zombie apocalypse both realises and works through the failure of the free market, its victims shuffling through the ruins, avatars of the contemporary global self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With reference to films such as The Terror Experiment (2010) and Osombie (2012), this paper explores the figure of the zombie terrorist, a collectively othered group that is visually identifiable as 'not us' and can be slaughtered with impunity. In cinematic treatments, the zombie terrorist operates within a collectivity of zombies, erasing the possibility of individuality when the transformation from human to zombie takes place. The zombie terrorist signifies otherness in relation to selfhood, and is characterised by a mind/body split. Emerging from the grave in the archetypal zombie primal scene, this reanimated corpse is undead in its animate corporeality coupled with a loss of all mental faculties. The erasure of individual identity and memory along with broader human characteristics such as empathy or willpower coincides with the zombie terrorist's physical movement and action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that Stephen King's 2006 novel Cell explores the age of terror with the aid of two concurrent Gothic discourses. The first such discourse belongs to the tradition that Patrick Brantlinger has termed Imperial Gothic. As such, it imagines with the War on Terror that the threat that the (Gothic) Other constitutes is most usefully managed with the help of massive, military violence. The other, and more traditional, Gothic discourse radically imagines such violence as instead a War of Terror. The essay then argues that Cell does not attempt to reconcile these opposed positions to terror. Instead, the novel employs the two Gothic discourses to describe the epistemological rift that terror inevitably creates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many vampires in popular fiction have developed a conscience that mitigates their monstrosity and makes them objects of human love and admiration. With the advent of the reformed vampire, Western culture has, perhaps, lost an icon of true horror. As the vampire has become increasingly humanized and sympathetic, the zombie has stepped up to take its place. Zombies remind us that we will soon be decomposing flesh; the zombie horde embodies fear of loss of self and individuality; zombies expose the dark side of mass consumer culture; and zombies highlight the fragility of human identity in an advanced, globalised society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the increase in media representations of zombies during the first decade of the 2000s. It argues that a connection can be read between the new preoccupation with zombies and anxieties over the apparent threat posed by those without rights attempting to enter Western countries. The article sets up a theoretical argument using the work of Giorgio Agamben. Taking on board Agamben's discussion of 'bare life', the article follows Agamben in making a link between this idea and the Muselmann, the Jew reduced to the walking dead in the concentration and death camps. For Agamben, bare life is central to the functioning of the modern state. The article suggests that bare life is a way of connecting the Muselmann with the zombie as that monster has been elaborated in films since George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968). Indeed, where Agamben argues that the werewolf was the characterising monster of the premodern era, this article argues that the zombie is the characterising monster of the modern era. The article goes on to make the connection between bare life, Muselmänner, zombies and displaced people, most commonly understood as asylum seekers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]