Zombieland and the inversion of the subaltern Zombie

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Who doesn’t love a good zombie splatter-fest? Appealing to commercial audiences and cultural theorists alike, the American zombie movie has been characterized as both a pariah of low art and a rich source of critical insight. In its earliest incarnations, along with much of the broader genre of horror film that preceded it, the zombie film was deemed unworthy of critical analysis. Pioneers such as George A. Romero, however, provided filmic fare that was imbued with political significance. As the zombie genre evolved and matured, it reflected increasingly sophisticated and radical interrogations against the hegemony of the patriarchal culture in which it was produced, carried through the metaphor of zombies who were subaltern in either their undead abjection or their disenfranchized social identities. Recently, however, Christopher Sharrett insisted that “[a]lthough the popularity of the zombie film today is enormous, its value as social/political commentary is not only almost totally gone, it has been transformed by neoconservative culture into its opposite.” This article seeks to elucidate the different interpretations of the somewhat nebulous term ‘subaltern’ and the way it has been co-opted by conservative factions through a thorough analysis of the 2009 reflexive zombie parody Zombieland.</jats:p>