Postcolonial Theory and Late Capitalist Criticism Aplied to The Night of the Living Dead Trilogy

Postcolonial Theory and Late Capitalist Criticism Aplied to The Night of the Living Dead Trilogy

"Turn and Turn about; in these shadows from whence a new dawn will break, it is you who are the zombies."

* Jean-Paul Sartre, Preface to The Wretched of the Earth

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It is fitting that Sartre uses the zombie as a metaphor for both the colonized and colonizer. He states in the preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth that European colonizers had relegated natives living in colonial states to the role of zombie. The colonizers’ power structure has rendered the natives as a mute subaltern, suitable for slave labor and exploitation. But he goes further to say the natives’ rebellion will render the colonizers as zombies – the native will no longer see their dominators as human beings, and they will assign the Europeans to the role of subordinate, dehumanizing and incommunicable. All of this is fitting because the colonizer, whatever his national origin, has adopted a stance toward natives that follows the Hatian tradition: The zombie is a human who has been killed and ressurected as slave labor, a much more docile and controllable beast of burden.

It also makes sense that Hollywood adopted the metaphor. Throughout the 1930s and 40s films like White Zombie, Revolt of the Zombies, King of the Zombies, Revenge of the Zombies, Zombies on Broadway, and Voodoo Man reinforced the traditional view of zombies as ultimate Other. These zombies are without culture or free will, controlled by a mystical villain, often played by Bela Lugosi, who runs a sugar plantation or some other such exploitive business. These films are tales of the oppressor, bringing to light the hardships and uncertainty faced by colonizing forces. It is possible for the zombie slaves to revolt, but for the most part these films warn of the perils embedded in shoddy colonial governing.

In 1968, George A. Romero set out to rework the zombie archetype. He created the flesh eating zombie, a monster born not out of religious or mystical effort, but created by the faults and flaws of the society. With his first film, Night of the Living Dead (1968), he began a trilogy that would deal with the ills of our contemporary American society. Influenced by the turbulent 1960s, events such as Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and rampant consumer culture, Night lays the groundwork for a series of cultural critiques.