The Reanimation of Yellow-Peril Anxieties in Max Brooks’s World War Z

Max Brooks made publishing history with his World War Z, bringing bestseller status to a zombie-themed novel for the first time. Well-researched, entertaining, and massive in scope, the novel spoke to the American fascination with apocalypse and the anxious suspicion of readers still reeling from the horrors of the 9/11 terrorist attacks—the feeling that anything can happen, and probably will. But the appeal of World War Z for American readers may also have something to do with the echo throughout the novel of a nationalistic and even racist paranoia that has been a part of the American cultural psyche for over a century: the fear of Asian invasion, or “yellow peril anxiety.” This chapter reads Brooks’ novel for instances of yellow peril anxiety, which can be most easily recognized in the portrayal of China’s rulers as the source of the worldwide zombie plague.

Hybridity Sucks

This chapter argues that in his 1929 novel The White Witch of Rosehall Herbert G. de Lisser relies on Haitian voodoo combined with European vampirism to present the murderous “white witch” Annie Palmer—who is based on a historical figure—as an emblem of gender transgression and abuse of power. In addition to imbuing her with extraordinary, supernatural female power, de Lisser casts Annie Palmer as a European-Jamaican Creole. She is bolstered in her evil machinations both by the social status bestowed upon her by her white heritage and her acquired knowledge of African Caribbean culture. Thus, she also becomes a larger symbol of the colonial presence in the Caribbean. In the context of the period the novel was written in, Annie Palmer’s fusion of cultural traditions results in an evil hybridity that she cleverly uses to her own murderous advantage.

Introduction

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Undead Avatars

In contrast to other forms of popular culture, zombies have a historically consistent presence within digital games. Extending research which explores self-reflexivity across the horror genre, this chapter examines ways in which videogame zombies comment upon the nature of the digital form and its player relationship. Central to this analysis is an argument that the videogame avatar, the figure which players control, is itself zombie-like, a dead thing given life through the cybernetic interface of the player. Successful play entails the user becoming machine-like in their engagement with the videogame’s digital apparatus. Exploring games such as Quake, Resident Evil and Forbidden Siren, it is argued that zombies within horror videogames function as a metaphor for uncanny processes at work within the videogame medium itself.

“Doctor! I’m Losing Blood!” “Nonsense! Your Blood is Right Here”

This article discusses Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1931) within the larger context of the vampire film. While Vampyr is commonly believed to be inspired by J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 tale of a lesbian vampire, “Carmilla,” the film is less an adaptation of this Gothic tale than an appropriation of certain modes of narrative representation surrounding earlier vampires. In the opening credits, the film explicitly names its source: Le Fanu’sIn a Glass Darkly. This collection contains not only “Carmilla,” but four other stories as well. Dreyer uses, “The Room in the Dragon Volant,” as the model for the most iconic sequence in Vampyr in which a man meets his own corpse and faces the horror of being buried alive. Turning the representation of this experience into a depiction of the filmic condition per se, Vampyr goes beyond conventional views of adaptation and negotiates film as itself a vampiric medium.

Octavia Butler’s Vampiric Vision

Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (2005) chronicles the story of Shori Matthews, a 53-year-old vampire who looks like a 10-year-old black girl. Shori awakens with amnesia and physical scarring as a result of an attack from unknown assailants. While healing, she is hunted by clandestine factions of white-skinned vampires called the Ina. Shori later discovers that she is a product of amalgamated Ina and human blood. This chapter argues that Shori is a tragic mulatto figure in the vein of characters in novels like Iola Leroy, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,Our Nig, and Clotelle but written in the genre of science fiction and fantasy. The novel seems especially concerned with effects of familial and cultural devastation, trauma, miscegenation and xenophobia. While these are primary concerns of the slave narrative, these elements are also reflective of oppressive forces in modern societies that continue to play out master-slave relationships, often in concealed ways.

Disruptive Corpses

Before the establishment of the Code of the Comics Magazine Association of America (1954), American horror comics were violent and explicit. In the vast body of pre-Code horror comics, the living dead are used in various ways. Some stories are authentic to the Haitian origins of zombie folklore, some use distinctly historical or gothic settings for tales of the living dead, while the zombies in other stories crawl from the grave into a contemporary USA to exact their revenge or retribution. This chapter analyses the presentation of the living dead in 1950s horror comics before exploring subsequent and more recent comic achievements in underground, countercultural and mainstream contexts in an attempt to establish and evaluate the mythology, meaning and resonance of this most disruptive construct of post-war and contemporary popular horror.

The Smiling Dead; or, on the Empirical Impossibility of Thai Zombies

Thai horror films have always been all about ghosts. Zombies, on the other hand, are yet to be recognised as legitimate local figures of fear. This paper offers a discussion of the very rare examples of Thai cinematic zombies and examines a number of strategies employed by the filmmakers to justify their choice of the zombie characters for their films. This essay exploresdifferent approaches to the topic as demonstrated by four zombie films: Formalin Man (2004), Curse of the Sun (2004),Sars Wars (2004) and Bakpackers (2009), a segment of Phobia 2. While zombies feature as central characters in these films, they nevertheless remain external in relation to Thai culture. The zombies are disguised as ghosts, portrayed as foreign import, or function merely as a metaphor.

“She Loves the Blood of the Young”

This chapter situates “The Story of Chūgōrō” within the context of both Hearn’s escape from Western civilization and a growing fascination in America with Japanese art and culture. Hearn’s age witnessed not only a flourishing of Gothic and vampire literature but also, in the wake of the opening of Yokohama, the crescendo of Japonisme. In his re-writing of the old Japanese tale, Hearn circumvents Transylvanian terminology and references to the Gothic. Instead, he foregrounds the story’s Japanese-ness. What is “startling” and “strange” for Hearn’s turn-of-the-century readers is not necessarily that the protagonist of his story falls prey to a blood-loving seductress, but rather Japan itself, considered to be the exotic per se. With her similarity to the Western vampire, the bloodthirsty female proves to be a familiar figure in the midst of the unfamiliar—a figure mediating between East and West, partaking of what could be called a form of the “transcultural supernatural.”

Revamping Dracula on the Mexican Silver Screen

This chapter explores Mexican vampire movies of the 1950s and follows the vampire’s journey from the Americas to Europe and back in order to analyze the ways in which the monster is articulated in each cultural context. The specific Mexican articulation of the vampire in Fernando Méndez’sEl vampiro is modeled after Hollywood films, yet the film carries nuanced meaning having to do with national identity and borders. In this film, the vampire is a menacing figure that arrives seeking to infect, invade, and conquer. At the same time, he is potentially a subversive other that transgresses borders and threatens stability, an agent that expresses certain cultural fears at very specific social and political crossroads.