Please understand that the context in which I read Christie’s Better off Dead, is with the lens of being bi-racial. This will probably (fingers crossed) make more sense later.

Who would ave thunk, that scary movies that included; slow walking, brain hungry, crazed beings, come from a culturally loaded, deep history. Or how Zombie Media intentionally offers  its viewer, a social critique, if you are willing to look past the gore. Which I can’t but yeh! for those who can stomach it, and then write about it, in a safer, more visually digestible manner.

Yet whether you like zombies or not, the bottom line remains: This is a genre with a rich history that seeks to do more than just scare the living daylights out of you. (Elliot, 2013)

Professor Lori MacIntosh, introduced the idea that Zombie Media speaks to a specific moment in cultural ideology. That we can actually plot, significant moments in a culture’s history using Zombie Fiction. I am almost positive that she was just talking to Western culture, but I digress … In the case of Halperin’s White Zombie, there are concepts that still ring true today. For example, the concept that it is better “to be destroyed than to intermix (Christie, 16).

In the realm of fiction, there is no redemption for zombies AND IF, by some chance, you have managed to become a zombie-human hybrid, well—it is just better to be destroyed. So what does that mean in #reallife for the non-fiction version of a zombie-human hybrid?

Congratulations 2010s for being more progressive than the 1930s! Because, when I fill out a survey, I can now tick the “other” box.

 

Works Cited

Christie, Deborah, and Sarah Juliet Lauro. “”They Are Not Men…they Are Dead Bodies!” From Cannibal to Zombie and Back Again.”Better off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-human. 1st ed. New York: Fordham UP New York, 2011. 9-23.Print.

Elliott, Scott. “The Deeper Message of ‘The Walking Dead'” RELEVANT Magazine. RELEVANT Media Group, 15 Feb. 2013. Web. 9 Oct. 2015.