Quick Takes

Movies and Popular Culture

By: Ian Olney

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Paperback | 17 March 2017

At a Glance

Paperback
160 Pages

Age
16+

Grade
11+

Dimensions(cm)
17.78 x 11.18 x 1.27

Paperback

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It’s official: the zombie apocalypse is here! The living dead have been lurking in media and popular culture since the 1930s, but they have never been more popular or ubiquitous on screen than they are today. Zombies have colonized the movies, television, video games, the internet—even smartphones—and the invitation shows no sign of ending soon. Our hunger for them, like hunger for us, seems insatiable.

Zombie Cinema charts the transformation of these horror film monsters into pop culture icons, exploring their enormous appeal to views in the twenty-first century. It traces the evolution of the living dead on film from the voodoo slaves of White Zombie and I Walked With a Zombie to the reanimated ghouls of Night of the Living Dead and Zombie Flesh Eaters to the rabid infected of 28 Days Later and World War Z, and surveys the present cinematic landscape, in which zombies have overrun every imaginable genre from the indie comedy, Zombieland, to the teen romance, Warm Bodies, to the animated children’s movie, Paranorman. The book also maps the recent outbreaks of zombies on television, in hit shows like The Walking Dead and Dead Set, and points to signs of an impending apocalypse in new media, including video games, Left 4 Dead, web series, Bite Me, and smartphone apps, Plants vs. Zombies.

Zombie Cinema is a lively and accessible introduction to this massively popular genre. It offers an historical overview of zombies on screen that is both wide-ranging and global in scope. Surveying movies and television shows from North America, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere, it covers the “greatest hits” of zombie cinema as well as forgotten, unsung, or less familiar texts.

Industry Reviews

"Zombie Cinema is a brisk, informative read that gives us a zesty tour through an amazingly prolific and popular contemporary film cycle. He's clearly done his homework in excavating-or disinterring, as the case may be-zombie movies from disparate cultural and historical contexts."- Stephen Prince, author of Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality
"What the vampire was to the 1980s and 90s, the zombie has become for early twenty-first century audiences, the monster of choice, spreading through a multitude of media texts. Ian Olney organizes the history of the zombie in popular culture from Haitian voodoo practice to the present, providing clear analysis of its evolution and development. Theoretically informed, the writing is engaging and accessible throughout."- Rick Worland, Southern Methodist University, author of The Horror Film: An Introduction
"Zombie Cinema offers both a pithy overview of zombie cinema and a fresh perspective on the most trenchant themes highlighted in zombie films. Olney manages to deftly weave [a quantity of scholarly as well as cinematic research] into the lithe booklet, all while presenting his own argument. It can be read in a matter of hours, but the observations Olney puts forth are sure to stick with the reader for much longer."- Journal of American Studies

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