The shameful fascism of "The Walking Dead"

The show’s fans — fewer than there used to be after season six’s bat-swinging cliffhanger, but still enough to put the series in the upper echelon of TV’s most-watched programs — are often quick to point out that the savage surroundings of the characters require this vicious mind-set. But even a passing familiarity with the zombie subgenre of horror, let alone non-zombie post-apocalyptic narratives like Mad Max and The Road, shows this to be bogus.

“The zombie trope in the United States emerged with the zombie-as-slave phenomenon around the turn of the 20th century, when American capitalism and colonialism led to ethical conflicts about labor and human rights,” Gencarella says. The zombie as sociopolitical critique picked up even more steam when writer-director George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead tied the trope to racism and consumerism, respectively. “For that reason,” Gencarella went on, “many zombie flicks of the late 20th century could be seen as critiques of consumerist desires, or calls for cooperation between disparate groups.”

The Walking Dead, Gencarella asserts, “is part of another shift, post-9/11, in which the ghouls fill in for presumed ‘outsiders’ to the nation — but a nation that is limited only to a worthy few.” 9/11 imagery cropped up unintentionally, and largely incidentally, in Danny Boyle’s innovative fast-zombie film 28 Days Later, made before the attacks; its sequel, 28 Weeks Later, was in essence a critique of America’s militaristic overreach in the attacks’ wake. But the opening credits of Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake wed the terror of its depiction of the zombie apocalypse’s first harrowing hours with pointed stock imagery and mockumentary footage of Muslims and Arabs, setting a precedent for the rightward swing of the subgenre’s “us against them” political undertones. It’s here where The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead pick up: The former has adopted a narrative structure of total war between miniature nation-states, while the latter quite explicitly invokes menacing Mexicans as a threat to its core group.