‘What film is your film like’? Negotiating authenticity in the distributive seriality of the Zombi franchise

Abstract

Unlike its archetypal cinematic relatives, the vampire, the werewolf, and even the mummy (the creature to which it is perhaps most indebted), the contemporary zombie has had a relatively short existence. Where early iterations of the cinematic zombie, in films such as Victor Halpernin's White Zombie (1932) and Jacques Torneur's I Walked like a Zombie (1943) were drawn from Haitian mythology and the undead slaves of voodoo tradition, contemporaneous depictions across popular media like 28 Days Later (2002), the Resident Evil video-games (1996-), and the TV series The Walking Dead (2010-) have tended to follow the blueprint established by George A. Romero in Night of the Living Dead (1968) and the sequels that followed in its wake. Romero's zombie has been widely accepted as an apocalyptic cypher that provides social commentary in times of political unrest, but the allegorical nature of these film's almost came about by accident when Night of the Living Dead was released following the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King. Night of the Living Dead famously concludes with the murder of its lead, the black protagonist Ben, played by theatre actor Duane Jones. It was uncommon at that time for a film to have a black lead actor, and the combination of his death and the images of zombies 'hangin' from the poplar trees', like the 'Strange Fruit' of Billy Holiday's 1939 song, could not help but invoke lynching and the beginnings of the civil rights movement. Romero has famously rejected the idea that film was intended as an explicit political commentary, arguing that Jones was simply the best actor that they knew and that they only learned of the assassination of King after the film was competed on the journey from Pittsburgh to New York to find a distributor. Nevertheless, these parallels have given the film a political resonance that has only continued, compounded by Romero's appeals to these kinds of political readings in the subsequent entries in the series that are seen to offer commentaries on capitalism, consumerism, gender roles and social media.Since the dawn of the new millennium, there has been a noticeable rise in the visibility and profitability of the zombie across all media platforms, with many continuing to draw political parallels with the events of September 11 th in the United States and July 7 th in the United Kingdom (McSweeney, 2010, Wetmore Jr., 2011. Behind the political flexibility of the creature, as well as the potential for progressive ideological readings, also exist economic imperatives. It could be argued that the presence and heightened visibility of the contemporary zombie can be attributed to its potential for commercial success, and this is something that can be seen in the eagerness of distributors worldwide to capitalise on the genre's popularity through a process of retitling and re-releasing narratively unrelated films as sequels to popular releases in promotional strategies that began over two decades before the turn of the twentyfirst century. This chapter will co...