Once almost an extra, with no fitting motive

Among the creatures that turn up again and again in recent science-fiction films, this reading begins, the zombie may be the one that is never missing. At first, though, it was not a star. Beside the vampire and the werewolf, in Hollywood horror, it was one monster among many, almost an extra.

It has no free will or thought, they write, and its unlimited will to attack people has no fitting reason — not survival, not revenge, not even the basic drive, common to animals, to flourish and multiply. It can look like a robot programmed only to attack, bite, and claw.

A brain that ends it, and a fear that starts to multiply

It has none of the special powers of other horror beings, this reading writes; it only does not die easily. Even that is a weakness in plainer view than the vampire’s fear of sunlight or the werewolf’s silver bullet: if the body is attacked and the brain is badly damaged, the zombie dies.

As time changed, they go on, the look at the zombie changed too. It became a fixture of horror, as famous as the vampire and the werewolf, and unlike those two it sits close to politics, economy, social types, and human nature. It bites, infects, eats flesh, and multiplies — a form of fear that, they write, moved to the centre of twenty-first-century popular culture and gained a force beyond a subculture.

Romero’s trilogy, and a horror that reads its time

Zombies, or something like them, had appeared now and then in other films, this reading writes, but the first works to put the zombie proper on screen are George A. Romero’s. In 1968 Night of the Living Dead drew critics and audiences; it treated social unrest and the collapse of the nuclear family inside a horror film, and was recognised, they say, both as entertainment and as a film that gave the zombie its shape.

Dawn of the Dead in 1978 and Day of the Dead in 1985 completed what they call Romero’s zombie trilogy. Horror, they write, often does more than startle or disgust: it ties itself to the politics, economy, and society of its moment and carries a message. Romero’s three films, they say, do the same. Among the works they list at the end are Korean studies dated 2014 and 2016, left here on the dates given in this reading.

The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. This reading, a student account of zombie films: a creature once almost an extra, killed by a badly damaged brain, and George A. Romero’s trilogy of 1968, 1978, and 1985, read as films tied to their time.

Last updated: 15 November 2026