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A Very Slow Apocalypse: Zombie TV
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Book Chapter
A Very Slow Apocalypse: Zombie TV
2017,2016
Overview
The phenomenal popularity of the zombie in twenty-first century cinema now positions the zombie as a central member of the canon of classic big screen monsters, alongside its undead cousin the vampire, as well as the mummy, the wolfman and Frankenstein's monster. Many of these creatures have been making a re-emergence in contemporary cinema and television, although with nowhere near the ubiquity of the zombie. Arguably, even the vampire has not had the same level of transmedial impact as the zombie. This is despite the fact that the zombie was for many years positioned in a more marginal role alongside its monstrous brethren. Regardless of this new-found popularity, little consideration has been given to the role of television within the development of the zombie genre, despite a growing number of suitable and, increasingly, long running texts to examine. More attention has been paid to vampire TV with many book- length studies devoted to Dark Shadows (1966–71), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, True Blood and The Vampire Diaries. In comparison, the TV zombie has, with the exception of The Walking Dead, been largely ignored. This is in part because, historically, the zombie has not played a major role within television horror, primarily as a result of its generic association with a corporeal body horror. From its earliest origins, the zombie embodied the abject corpse raised from the grave seemingly devoid of a soul, which was subsequently splattered in the 1960s and 70s by George Romero (Abbott 2015). This type of graphic material has, until recently, been unpresentable on television as it has been more strictly regulated in terms of what is considered acceptable to be screened on terrestrial television. Furthermore, the zombie, by its very nature as a corpse that has risen from the grave, lacks identity and character, features that are key components of television drama. In contrast while the vampire similarly embodies the dead returned from the grave, it is not presented as a corpse but rather as immortal and usually characterised by his/her charismatic personality and past as a human. The vampire is the undead creature who blurs the line between the living and the dead while the zombie is a graphic reminder of the corporeality of death.
