Zombies

“Zombies are the real lower‐class citizens of the monster world” (Beard 1993: 30) – George Romero definitively establishes the zombie's place in the hierarchy of monstrosities thrown up by fiction and film. Unlike Frankenstein's monster, there is nothing sympathetic about a zombie's condition – nothing more ugly, rotten, and inhuman in its desperation to feed. Unlike vampires, zombies have no aesthetic, rebellious, or sexual appeal; their bloodlust is without charm, tradition, or history. Romero's series of films, starting in the 1960s, made a decisive mark on the popular cultural development of the zombie and, asfilms, distinguish zombies less as creatures of written fictions (though that is where they first appear) than as things activated visually and cinematically in a subgenre of the horror movie (seefilm). Shambling across screens since the 1930s, zombies are more suited to being objects of vision rather than subjects of speech or writing: without will, self‐consciousness, agency, or, indeed, any higher human functions at all, these barely animated corpses seem determined only to feed en masse on others' blood and brains. Language – or self‐reflection – is, it is generally and generically agreed, beyond their capacities.