Conor Heffernan, Emma Tonkin and Linda Flores Ohlson (eds), Zombies in Contemporary Culture: Journeys, Bodies, Pandemics and Politics (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2025) 256 pp. £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781837723034
Zombies in Contemporary Culture: Journeys, Bodies, Pandemics and Politics, edited by Conor Heffernan, Emma Tonkin and Linda Flores Ohlson, is a timely contribution to the expanding field of zombie studies and studies of the speculative. Published in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and its uneven global consequences, the collected essays do not simply or unequivocally respond to the immediate political discourse surrounding contagion, inoculation, and control. Instead, they collectively offer a broader cultural and theoretical reflection on the social anxieties that the zombie figure has long mediated. This volume productively mirrors its own subject. Just as the zombie destabilises boundaries between life and death, self and other, and individual and collective, the volume crosses boundaries of time, space, and discipline. Across fourteen essays, the contributors demonstrate how zombie media continues to function as a pliable analogue through which contemporary cultural, political, and existential tensions can be examined.
The collection is divided into four sections – ‘Journeys’, ‘Bodies’, ‘Pandemics’, and ‘Politics’ – categories that the editors acknowledge to be overlapping and unstable. Indeed, most chapters highlight that the zombie is an intrinsically political figure whose meanings emerge through the tensions it exposes within social and political structures. These essays engage with Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry’s argument that the zombie is not a metaphor but an analogy, as the zombie ‘suggests only the form, not the substance of the figural relationship between humanity and its antitheses’.[1] This ‘relationship between humanity and its antitheses’ is mapped out along different axes across the contributions, where the zombie does not simply stand for a particular social group or condition, but instead illuminates relations between categories such as the domestic and the migrant (Tonkin), the (hyper)individual and the masses (Mohammadzade), the social elites and the disenfranchised majority (Hamilton), the capitalist and the proletariat (Gonsalves), and the urban and the rural (Goodall), to name a few.
Across the volume, the zombie functions less as a symbolic substitute than as a figure that reveals the arbitrariness and instability of these boundaries. A few essays point out how certain boundaries are reinstated through zombie figures, including female zombies who become part of incel fantasies in which women only become available to them by turning into lesser-than-human (Berry), the fetishisation of bodily and territorial immunisation in the zombie apocalypse (Hamilton), or zombies as the abject counter-image of a pandemic hero figure (Becker). Others emphasise the instability of the boundaries and how they are traversed. In these cases, the zombie, as Caroline West observes, ‘has neither ontological stability nor corporeal stability’ (78). It becomes an ambiguous figure residing in the liminal space between life and death, pleasure and disgust, desire and fear, where it embodies the indeterminable boundary itself.
In other words, Zombies in Contemporary Culture is as boundary-crossing as its main subject of study. The volume’s attention to temporal shifts in zombie representation is evident in the essays by Robert Curran, Rodrigo Gonsalves, and Violeta Alarcón Zayas, which map diachronic shifts in technological, social, and cultural contexts. Curran’s analysis of communication technologies in George Romero’s Dead trilogy (1968, 1978, 1985), for example, examines how Romero’s films reflect evolving cultural attitudes towards media and technological mediation across two decades. Gonsalves similarly situates zombie narratives within broader transformations in capitalist labour regimes, arguing that the zombie offers a particularly apt figuration of intensifying exploitation across distinct historical moments of capitalist development. Such analyses position zombie narratives as historical diagnostics that reveal shifts in technological infrastructures and economic relations.
Other contributions explore how recent cultural texts complicate the classical conception of the zombie as a purely mindless body. Violeta Alarcón Zayas’s discussion of the Mexican film Halley (Sebastián Hofmann, 2012) highlights the emergence of a new typology of zombie protagonists who retain emotional depth and reflexive awareness of their condition. Such figures challenge the widely cited formulation by Lauro and Embry that the zombie’s ‘twofold terror’ lies in bodily degradation coupled with the loss of consciousness.[2] In Halley, zombification produces not the disappearance of subjectivity but its unsettling persistence. The horror resides less in the eradication of consciousness than in the realisation that zombification may already be embedded within the structures of contemporary life. En-Chi Chiou identifies a similar dynamic in the television series Santa Clarita Diet, where the suburban mother Sheila continues to perform familiar social roles – wife, mother, employee – while embracing her undead state. Here the zombie no longer simply marks the collapse of the human but gestures towards the ambiguous possibilities of a posthuman subjectivity.
If these essays highlight the zombie’s capacity to traverse temporal boundaries, the collection also foregrounds the figure’s geographical mobility. Zombies have often been treated as a primarily U.S.-centred genre phenomenon, despite their Haitian origin, yet several chapters expand the field by examining transnational contexts. Tonkin’s contribution introduces a data-driven methodology for mapping the spatial mobility of zombie narratives in contemporary fiction, revealing patterns of movement and transportation that connect the genre to traditions of travel writing and the Western. Other essays explore how zombie narratives circulate and mutate across national cinemas and television cultures, including Mexican, French, and South Korean examples. Grace Jung’s reading of the South Korean film The Wailing (Na Hong-jin, 2016) offers a compelling example. The film’s antagonist is a hybrid creature combining traits associated with vampires, demons, and zombies. Jung interprets this generic hybridity as reflecting Korea’s historical position between geopolitical powers during the Cold War, suggesting that the film’s monstrous ambiguity processes unresolved historical trauma while simultaneously domesticating and subverting familiar Hollywood topoi.
The collection’s boundary-crossing ethos is further reflected in its interdisciplinary scope. Contributors draw on film and media studies, cultural theory, political economy, psychology, and sexuality studies to examine the zombie as both a representational figure and a cultural artefact. Catherine Pugh and Nikki Foster-Kruczek place the television series The Walking Dead in dialogue with psychological frameworks such as terror management theory and models of grief and trauma, illuminating how zombie narratives can function as cultural spaces for negotiating collective experiences of loss. West’s essay moves beyond textual representation by examining zombie-themed sex toys as material artefacts that unsettle the normative assumptions of sexual desire, masturbation, and the ontological fear of death. By shifting attention from the zombie as a narrative figure to the zombie as a consumer object, West’s contribution exemplifies the collection’s willingness to explore unconventional analytical terrain.
As the editors suggest, ‘zombie media continues to proliferate’ (3). Media here refers not only to representational technologies but also to mediation itself, to the in-between and the ambiguous. Zombie infection, as the essays demonstrate, often reflects the malaise of humanism itself. Zombie media points towards ‘a post(mortem) humanity’[3], raising the possibility of the extinction of a certain form of humanism.[4] Zombies in Contemporary Culture is not only an original addition to zombie and horror studies but also contributes to broader debates about the cultural imaginaries through which societies grapple with questions of survival, extinction, and the future of the human.
Dong Xia, Leiden University
[1] ‘A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism’, boundary 2 35, no. 1 (2008): 95. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-2007-027
[2] ‘A Zombie Manifesto’: 89.
[3] ‘A Zombie Manifesto’: 92.
[4] Sam Haddow, ‘Fungal Bogeymen’, in We All Die at the End: Storytelling in the Climate Apocalypse (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2025), 99–117.
