"How Do You Not Understand a Word?": Language as Contagion and Cure in Pontypool

Zombie stories typically hinge on some post-apocalyptic conceit and challenge readers and viewers by holding up an analytical, at times satirical, lens on the ruins of the world we know—or think we know—to reveal some damning pathology in this transformation. Depending on the tale, zombies, embattled survivors of the zombie plague, or some combination of the two, reveal social ills and cultural anxieties through the savagery of their actions: the rampant consumerist society in Dawn of the Dead, the Cold War isolationism and racism in Night of the Living Dead, the unchecked militarism in 28 Days Later, or the global pandemic in World War Z, to name a few. Typical of the genre in film and fiction, what we will refer to as post-Romero political satire, is this return to everyday spaces, with their quotidian geographies that, when populated by mindless, savage, remorseless, and tormented beings, might strike us as unnervingly reminiscent of our own reality. The 1968 release of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead introduced the iconic modern zombie: a slow-moving, flesh-eating reanimated undead creature that can only die if its brain is destroyed. Romero’s films are credited with invigorating the genre as a vehicle for social commentary, and he is widely recognized as “a radical critic of contemporary American culture [who] gleefully uncovers the hidden structures of our society in the course of charting the progress of its disintegration” (Shaviro 82).2 This essay maps one trajectory of the post-Romero genre within the zombie narrative tradition at a