Epilogue: Resurrection and Zombies

This chapter examines the current pop culture fascination with the undead body visible in the explosion of TV shows and films about zombies. Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom tells the story of the well-known French writer’s brief but intense conversion to Christianity, in the grip of which he was involved in developing the French TV series Les Revenants, which was the model for A&E’s The Returned. Carrère’s account of his relationship to the Christian theology of resurrection as an inspiration for Les Revenants reveals the truth of the “undead” genres more generally, namely as a culture-wide return of the repressed, a protest against the increasingly disembodied, virtualized way we live today. Implicitly, the undead character (including the zombie) attacks the modern fantasy that the self is, in its essence, disembodied and therefore reducible to information, data, and code and in which people yearn for a cybernetic resurrection that will take the form of entering into the disembodied life of the digital world. In the midst of this disembodied virtualized world, pop zombie culture, like seventeenth-century culture, is a reminder of the body’s abiding vulnerabilities, limitations, and also potentials for transcendence.