Undead Apocalypse: Vampires and Zombies in the 21st Century by Stacey Abbott (review)

In the twenty-first century, zombies and vampires are everywhere. And, like the late capitalism they embody, it is often difficult to image how popular and academic discourse can ever escape their looming shadow. Over the past 30 years, a seemingly endless series of books and articles has focused on the ethics, politics and configurations of the zombie in popular culture, and the vampire has an even more extensive history. This is what makes Stacey Abbott's Undead Apocalypse such a timely and valuable text. Abbott's main thesis is that, in twenty-first-century popular culture, 'the vampire and the zombie are increasingly integrated and intertwined' (4). At first this might seem like an obvious statement, given the contemporary commodification (and resulting homogenisation) of these kinds of subcultural symbols, but Abbott brings these two figures together in a way that reinvigorates otherwise stale debates. Tracing the vampire/zombie hybrid back to Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend, Abbott convincingly argues that despite their historical differences in contemporary culture these undead figures have more in common than ever before (9).

Abbott argues that the union between vampire and zombie is predicated partly on the medicalisation of the monster narrative, and partly on the politicisation of the sympathetic monster in twentieth-century film, television and literature. Where the former point has been made numerous times in zombie and vampire criticism, Abbott effectively demonstrates how this medicalisation narrative paves the way for the fresh mutation and hybridisation of these otherwise hackneyed figures. With regards to vampire film and television, Abbott illustrates how 'the vampire has become the subject of the medical gaze' (39), highlighting the way the vampire transformation has been rewritten through the imagery of the hospital and the laboratory. She points, for instance, to the liberal use of 'the CSI shot, in which a virtual camera penetrates beneath the skin to explore the inner workings of the body', revealing blood cells, tissues and internal organs transformed by the vampire 'virus' (39). Abbott draws examples from across contemporary film and television, including the Twilight film series (2008–12; in particular the birth scene from Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (Condon US 2011)) and The Vampire Diaries (US 2009–17). These texts reframe the vampire as a mundane, medical subject as well as a supernatural one. In doing so, they tap into contemporary discussions of medical ethics and the tissue economy, in which the body becomes a commodity that can be bought, sold and marketed (59).

Unlike the vampire, which can often claim Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) as a touchstone, for Abbott the zombie film has no single, clear antecedent (64). It is, however, a figure long associated with capitalism and the tissue economy. In particular, Abbott focuses on the 'return' of the zombie film at the new millennium, following its initial popularity in the 1960s and 70s. Here she reiterates the popular argument linking the rise of post-millennial zombie fiction to the 9/11 attacks, but suggests that in practice the cause for this resurgence is not so easily determined, or so easily separated from the vampire craze a decade earlier (68). Through an analysis of 28 Days Later (Boyle UK 2002), Resident Evil (Anderson UK/Germany/France/US 2002), Shaun of the Dead (Wright UK/France 2004) and World War Z (Forster US/UK/Malta 2006), Abbott comments on some of the political and psychological implications of the post-millennial (and post-apocalyptic) zombie 'outbreak', ruminating on the potential of the 'open-ended' plague as a narrative device (90). She also points to some of the ways the zombie outbreak in fiction has been directly influenced by the increasingly dramatic tone of epidemic and disaster reporting. Zombie fiction frequently plays on the 'viral', clickable nature of online content more broadly (74).

Abbott uses this discussion to unpack the phenomenon of the sympathetic undead, tracing this figure's evolution from the too-friendly vampires that preceded...