Viral Monsters: Reimagining the Zombie after COVID-19

This article reframes the contemporary zombie as a viral monster that unveils and recreates certain aspects of the inconsistent and disruptive workings of COVID-19 and other global pandemics, both real and imagined. This viral idiom, which implicates even modern archetypal zombie narratives like George A. Romero’s genre-defining horror film Night of the Living Dead from 1968, amplifies the classic ontological ambivalence of the zombie as it lumbers in a murky liminal space between life and death, familiarity and abjection, form and chaos. But, in the age of COVID-19, the zombie-virus composite mobilizes and intensifies many of the cultural anxieties and ideological clashes that the current global pandemic goes on to provoke. This is particularly true, and even more troubling, in recent zombie television franchises that offer more sustained visions of long-term suffering and traumatic adaptation in a world irreversibly changed by such viral monsters. To this end, this article offers close readings of one of the most popular incarnations of the viral zombie appearing in recent cultural memory, the so-called “walkers” of The Walking Dead television franchise, whose production and storytelling mechanisms in its final season have been shaped in large part by COVID-19 safety protocols. This article argues that the viral monsters of The Walking Dead television series incarnate a unique and timely iteration of the global outbreak narrative, one that detaches itself from the lingering hope of containment and restoration of an older order and links it instead to ongoing crisis and uncertain futures such as those that accompany what we might call the culture of COVID-19 and its contested concerns about risk, protection, politicization, and power.