The zombie is a perhaps only slightly exaggerated version of the slave or other member of the lower orders from the perspective of the privileged. Like the hungry poor, the zombies confront the responsible citizen as insatiably ravenous mouths to feed, the "unreasoning mob" itself, human as less than human, pure destructive appetite. At the same time, the terrifying joy of the zombie movie, like the terrifying joy both of other apocalyptic genres and of the slave revolt, lies in the destruction of one form of inhumanity by the other that it has produced, or is produced from it. We witness or continually re-experience the liberating annihilation of the whole constricted, compromised, and evil world, all of its inequities, and all of its false values.
Continued
