I bring zombies into my English classroom, and not The Night of the Living Dead, one of the first instances of a black man as a hero in an American horror movie, where we feel the tensions of 1968 play out: a new world and an old world. The new world embodied by our strong, brave hero and the old by the cowardly white man who hides in the basement, eventually killed by the sickness he brings there with him.
It’s a good movie. You should watch it. Tonight.
No. I bring in more recent zombies. The Walking Dead.
Many people, maybe you, just decided something about me or my teaching. In part because you’ve already decided something about horror, especially modern horror, especially T.V. zombies. These are the pulp novels of the modern era, the penny dreadfuls of 2019.
It isn’t that you’re wrong. Zombies are silly. They don’t make sense. In 1968 one could have gotten away from the zombie horde by walking briskly. In the modern world of fast zombies they can be deceived by a quick bath in zombie guts. They are, you surely understand, not very bright.
And just as The Night of the Living Dead had problems with sexism (they literally had to slap some sense into those women) The Walking Dead comes with its own host of problems. Stereotypes from the violent black man, the dangerous strong woman, to white trash hillbillies. It is, in part, those problems that make it worthwhile.
Television is not created in a vacuum. It reflects the culture in which it was created.
But it is the wild popularity of the show that tells us so much more.
You might be too high minded to enjoy The Walking Dead. You may have seen it and not enjoyed it, or heard of it and known without needing to see a single episode that that watching post-apocalyptic survivors cut zombie heads off with a katana is not your cup of tea. Cool. No judgment.
But America, coast to coast, North Dakota to Miami, America loves this show. And that tells us something important about ourselves, about what we fear and what we desire, about the racism and sexism interwoven in our culture.
I can say that all Americans are equal, but frankly, I have started to wonder why, in The Walking Dead, all the black men keep dying or subverting their own strength and desires in order to help the group. If we know it’s a trope, why does it keep happening?
Through The Walking Dead, my students are able to see themselves. From it they are able to write about the fears that make the show effective. Zombies let us talk about social issues with a freedom that articles on a post-racist society do not allow. How can you be worried about taking risks in your own writing when it takes Rick almost 33 minutes to realize that the zombie apocalypse is here?
Get it together Rick!
In the face of that sort of slow, deliberation, taking a risk in your essay doesn’t seem so overwhelming.
Just as Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein shows us the world balanced on the edge between belief in God and in science, in the power of men and the powers of overwhelming, still unpredictable nature, our modern horror exposes today’s truths to the flickering light of late night television screens.
We are exposed.