The zombie of American popular culture, a misappropriation of the ‘zonbi’ of Haitian Voodoo folklore, has long been used as a metaphor through which to express social anxieties. In this blog post, I will draw upon “‘They are not men… they are dead bodies!’: From Cannibal to Zombie and Back Again” by Chera Kee to examine how social anxieties about race and gender play out in George Romero’s famous 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead.
Arguably, fear is created by a sense that “things [are] out of place” (22). As the zombie crisis in Romero’s film escalates, the world is thrown into a state of social disorder and the racial hierarchy is upset. The hero of the film is Ben, a black man who assumes the role of a chivalrous and rational leader – a role which would traditionally be assigned to a white male character. Rather than being cast as a threat to white femininity, Ben protects Barbra, a stereotypical white woman who is irrational, vulnerable, helpless, and altogether useless. Here, the gendered nature of miscegenation fears plays out: a black man takes a white man’s place as the dominant protector of a passive, subordinate white woman. No black women are represented at all. This reflects the gendered nature of anti-miscegenation anxieties (and laws), which focused on the co-mingling of black men and white women, but not of white men and black women, as the latter was not perceived as a threat to white male supremacy.
As the zombie threat lessens, the social order is restored. In the end, Ben survives the zombies, only to be killed by white ‘saviors.’ It is unclear whether or not Ben’s killers truly mistake him for a zombie – either way, he must be killed in order to restore the status quo. The casting of Ben as a leader, and of white men and women as subordinate to him and as nonhuman zombies, speaks to the fear that “any ‘us’ [has] the potential to become a ‘them,’ and new groups [could become] the racial Other” (23). This brings to mind the assassination of Malcolm X, an influential advocate of Black Power, a philosophy which proposed a reversal of the white supremacist social order in which black people are ‘us’ and white people are the Other.