Locating Zombies in the Sociology of Popular Culture

Abstract

In this essay, focusing primarily on the cinema of the walking corpse, I provide an overview of zombie studies and suggest potential avenues for sociological inquiry into zombie phenomena. I argue that zombie films, comic books, novels, video games, and the like can be seen as significant cultural objects that reflect and reveal the cultural and material circumstances of their creation. Despite emanating from complex culture-producing institutions and (arguably) capturing extant social anxieties, sociology has remained quiet on zombie phenomena. Issues of significance, history, and definition are discussed. I then locate three avenues of inquiry ideally suited to the sociological toolkit: symptomatic analysis of content, production, and audience response and interaction. I conclude by calling for a multipronged sociological analysis into "zombie culture." Short BiographyTodd K. Platts is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Missouri. His research interests include media sociology, the sociology of popular culture, cultural sociology, and the sociology of race. His forthcoming publication "The Undead of Hollywood and

Zombies and a Decaying American Ontology

“…Over 600 zombie movies have been made since 1920, but over half of them have been in the last 10 years. Two great waves have lapped onto the shore of American cinema since 2000: one around 2001, and then again in 2008” (for reviews of the pop cultural phenomenon, which I cannot do justice to here, see Cameron, ; Cohen, ; Cook, ; Pielak & Cohen, ; Platts, ). The authors supply a chart that dramatically illustrates this temporal pattern, with a spike in zombies rising apocalyptically after 9/11.…”

“…The mass‐mediated trauma of the fall of the twin towers on September 11, 2001 caused an existential shadow of death and mourning to fall like dust across the country. Zombologists debate whether the event was catalyst or coincidence (see Platts, for a review of the debate). While looking to account for the rise of zombies in the twenty‐first century, they also point to the anxieties of climate change and the rise in apocalyptic experiences such as Hurricane Katrina, the Indonesian tsunami, and the Haitian earthquake.…”

Using Zombies to Teach Collaborative Scholarship and Born‐Digital Publishing

“…Zombie studies is now an emerging interdisciplinary field gathering momentum thanks to sociologists, anthropologists and scholars in media and literary studies. See, for example Platt [2]. However, perspectives on language and communication remain underrepresented in studies of the zombie genre, fandom and related discourse.…”

Awakening the "Walking Dead": Zombie Pedagogy for Millennials

“…To this point, we have interpreted the current proliferation of zombie products as metaphors for collective anxieties circulating at the current moment. Within these fantasies audiences identify, as they have for decades, with the human "we" fighting off the external threat of the "other," whether it represents fears of disease, foreigners, nature, or some other threat (Platts 2013). The Marxian critique allows us to consider whether zombie stories might be compelling for a different reason: zombies metaphorically embody our fear that we have become like zombies.…”

“…We then preview a series of texts that suggest the potential relevance of zombies to class themes (Drezner 2010, Platts 2013. Students then view the first episode of The Walking Dead (TWD), to familiarize themselves with the series" premise.…”