Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2021

Abstract

William Seabrook’s depictions of Haitian zombies in his 1929 book, The Magic Island, sparked a cultural craze for the undead; even Zora Neale Hurston admitted that Seabrook’s dramatic description of zombies and masters ‘fired’ her imagination (Hurston 2018 [1938]: 134). The film industry was primed to profit from this first-wave zombie fad by producing a spate of interwar zombie films throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. These included the genre-establishing White Zombie (1932) and the subsequent Revolt of the Zombies (1936). However, whereas the racialization of early zombies and the films’ American southern settings bespoke a cultural anxiety over the legacies of plantation slavery, alternative versions of the zombie film during World War II framed zombies and their masters as participating in wartime ideological debates between fascism and liberal democracy. I will contend that, building upon the history of zombie films in allegorizing racial difference, wartime zombie films shifted their focus and began expressing anxieties about ideological differences. Within the small subgenre of the ‘Nazi zombie’ film, I suggest zombification comes to represent fear of political brainwashing and the subject’s susceptibility to fascist demagoguery. To discuss the ideology of wartime zombie films, I will focus on two of the most significant Nazi zombie films of the period: King of the Zombies (1941) and Revenge of the Zombies (1943), both of which adopt the established film trope of the zombie and the zombie master to address the way that fascist leaders command attention, mirroring contemporaneous debates about the reception of fascist philosophies. The major thread through all these films is the maintenance of western democratic values as the key to reversing the process of fascist zombification. In sum, I argue that films like these reinforce an Anglocentric vision of democratic ideologies, with American and British characters finding themselves preternaturally incapable of seduction by fascist ideologies, thus reifying the common myth that fascism remained a ‘foreign’ problem and actively working to bolster home-front security in democratic norms.

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This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

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