White Zombie Supremacy: What The Horror Canon Reveals About Resisting Racism
The truly horrifying part of progressive zombie films is what they say about humanity.
Sometimes horror is far more than jump scares and gore — sometimes it reveals terrifying truths about humanity. Consider, for example, the entire zombie-film oeuvre of the late, great George Romero, and Jordan Peele’s recent zombie-inflected film Get Out.
Each of the two primary types of zombie — the enslaved automaton version associated with Haitian lore, and the viral, infectious zombie inaugurated by George Romero — often serve to critique oppressive power systems within the zombie canon. While Romero relies mainly on viral zombies to critique humans as monstrous, Peele draws on the enslaved zombie figure to de-normalize the exploitation of black bodies and skewer the entitlement of his film’s white characters.
While the group of white supremacists that marched in Charlottesville might not bring to mind a zombie horde given their active shouting and tiki-torch-wielding bravado, they can in fact be read as descendants of the iconic white posse featured at the close of Romero’s first zombie film, Night of the Living Dead. Though we don’t generally picture zombies marching apace and shouting racist slogans at full pitch…
