Of the films that Isabel Pinedo uses to help illustrate the characteristics of the contemporary horror film, I found the most compelling to be Night of the Living Dead, in particular because of the way in which zombies seem to easily fit within her definitions of postmodern horror. Pinedo describes that in contemporary horror, the margins between living and dead and good and evil are sometimes indistinguishable (20) and that uniquely, “the postmodern horror film locates the horror in the contemporary everyday world (20).”
It is clear that a zombie disrupts the boundaries between what is living and what is dead, but perhaps more strikingly the idea of a zombie brings into question what is human and what is not. The zombies of Night of the Living Dead clearly have no recollection of who they were, nor do they seem to have any complex motivations beyond to kill and destroy whatever they come across. Yet, when they have the same bodies as the people that they were when they were alive, it becomes hard to distinguish whether they are victim or villain. For me, as a viewer, this makes the zombies’ deaths feel not so much like a wholesome victory, but rather creates further horror at the violence the protagonist must participate in to survive. Pinedo writes that this is another distinguishing characteristic of the horror film (20).
Moreover, when the people who became zombies were previously known to the remaining human characters in the film, it adds a further element of the breakdown of traditional roles. For example, the young girl who becomes a zombie in Night of the Living Dead is depicted as eating her father and slaughtering her mother. This speaks to Pinedo’s description of postmodern horror occurring in the everyday. There is nothing more mundane than family and friends, and so when the little girl becomes the monster, it feels almost more horrifyingly possible than a mysterious monster might. Moreover, while the zombie girl’s fate is never specifically addressed, the protagonist of the film is forced to kill the girl’s parents as they begin to reanimate as zombies. Here, again it is hard to stomach because the zombies are in many ways inseparable from the devoted, if stubborn, parents they were before they were killed.
Below is the clip of the young girl as a zombie eating her father from Romero’s Night of the Living Dead:
[Movieclips]. (2016, Oct. 27). Night of the Living Dead (9/10) Movie CLIP – Get in the Cellar (1968) HD. Retrieved from www.youtube.com/watch?v=komxaWgJ8O4.Finally, in considering the zombie as an excellent example of postmodern horror, I could not help but notice that in many ways, robot Ash from Black Mirror fits several of these characteristics. First, he is particularly unsettling specifically because he retains many of the superficial aspects of what Ash was like, but clearly is not Ash, just as the zombies in Night of the Living Dead appear superficially the same before and after reanimation. Additionally, robot Ash is not some foreign entity, but rather a conglomeration of something so familiar to Martha and something that is distinctly not human. While he appears strikingly similar to Ash, just as the zombies lost their human motivations and memories, robot Ash reveals himself to be creepily single minded in his desire to keep Martha happy. Also, in the same way that killing off the zombies in Night of the Living Dead is bit morally murky, Martha struggles to order robot Ash off the edge of the cliff because he retains just enough of the real Ash to remove the moral and emotional clarity of the situation.