The Rise and Fall and Rise of The Walking Dead. Od Nocy żywych trupów do 11 września

Abstract

The subject of the chapter The Rise and Fall and Rise of the Walking Dead – from “Night of the Living Dead” to September 11 is the figure of the zombie in mainstream filmography. The zombie is a kind of “uncanny body”—a figure used in the cinema, but also a phenomenon whose origins should be sought in the beliefs of the West Af-rican communities which, together with slaves, found their way to the area of today’s Haiti. The subject of this article is the figure of zombie in mainstream filmography, with the main objective to show the zombie as a metaphor (used in films from the 1930s) and the correlation of such metaphors and the cyclical emergence of zombie films. The article presents three metaphors: the zombie as a metaphor of slavery, as an external threat, and as an ideology; and four cycles of periodicity: the beginning, flour-ishing, decadence, and renaissance. The correlation between cycles is used to link zom-bie discourse with conspiracy theories and magical thinking.