Sweet Zombie Jesus! This Theological Study of The Undead Won’t Have You Using Any Names in Vain¹

by June Pulliam

01/31/2007

Paffenroth, Kim. Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006. 195 p.

The arrival of Kim Paffenroth’s scholarly study of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead series in the Necropsy offices this November was serendipitous—since I was preparing to set out on the maiden voyage of my zombie literature course. The book promised to be especially useful since the course would be taught in Louisiana State University’s first ever “Wintersession” (because nothing says Christmas like zombies).  So naturally, I called dibs on this book, wanting to be as fully prepared as possible before facing a class of eager undergraduates who had paid for my expertise on the undead—or just as likely, wanted what they thought would be a relatively brain dead way to get a literature credit under their belts close to graduation.

Yet I have confess that I opened Gospel of the Living Dead with a bit of trepidation for two reasons. First, when many academic scholars sink their fangs into works on popular culture, they all too often suck the life out of its subject matter, primarily because they (the scholars, as well as their editors and publishers) all too frequently suffer from cranial rectal inversion—presenting their ideas in impenetrable jargon meant to demonstrate their superior  intelligence rather than to educate the reader. And second, Paffenroth’s introduction itself gave me pause: I was a bit put off by an authorial note about omitting the middle letters of some of the most vulgar expletives used in the films  and Paffenroth's statements that he considered it nearly criminal when movie goers take small children (how small or young, I am not sure) to see some of these films.

But my fears on both counts were unfounded. I was pleasantly surprised with Paffenroth’s Gospel of the Living Dead.

This book is an accessible and entertaining close reading of Romero’s oeuvre—from a theological/religious studies perspective. Paffenroth analyzes Romero’s apocalyptic world as a vision of the End Days, where the dead now walk among the living, and there is now literally hell on earth. He observes that

zombie movies in general deal not just with a deadly attack of monsters, but with a situation in which all humans are quickly reduced to a hellish existence, either as zombies, who are the walking damned, robbed of intellect or emotion, or as surviving humans, barricaded and trapped in some place from which there is no escape (22).

So not surprisingly, zombies are embodiments of many of the seven deadly sins, particularly gluttony and rage, while the human characters embody some of the other more cerebral sins, such as hubris. Romero’s zombies “go through the motions of their earthly existence, wandering about the mall, going to work . . . And the surviving humans set up a similarly boring and repetitive world, either in the mall (in Dawn of the Dead) … or in the city/mall/ high-rise haven of Land of the Dead” (24). Thus, Paffenroth points out, Romero’s zombies are also a critique of our current consumer culture, which replaces spirituality and genuine human connection with consumer goods.

Gospel of the Living Dead will be greatly appreciated both by scholars of horror and popular culture and by lay-aficionados of the zombie film. Each chapter begins with a substantial synopsis of one of the films in the Dead series (including a chapter on the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead) which acquaints the reader with nuances that s/he might not have noticed on the first, second or even third viewing. And his analysis of each film explains how the zombie in general has become such a malleable signifier of contemporary angst.

Of course, the idea that Romero’s zombies are metaphors for our subjectivities in modern consumer culture is certainly not original. What Paffenroth adds is a liberal theological dimension to a theme that has more traditionally been riffed upon through the lenses of Marx, Althusser or Foucault. He also examines how the films explore race and gender in ways paralleling the contemporary times that each was made. The 1968 film Night of the Living Dead was made during the last days of the Civil Rights era, the year that Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were assassinated, while Dawn of the Dead (1978) was made during the middle of the second wave feminist movement in the United States. Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead continue to explore the themes of racial and gender equality, while Land of the Dead is overtly about class as well. All in all, Gospel of the Living Dead is a serious and entertaining study of one of the most influential works of popular culture of the 20th century.

¹Futurama fans are familiar with Professor Farnworth’s tag phrase “Sweet Zombie Jesus!” to describe a surprising development. This phrase was subsequently censored in syndicated episodes, prompting Adult Swim, the current home of syndicated episodes, to use the tagline Sweet Zombie Censorship as a humorous tagline for the show. We at Necropsy saw this golden opportunity to reclaim the phrase from people who obviously have no respect for the Constitution.