This essay is Part 1 in a series analyzing the zombie racial Other in media
Following the al-Qaeda attacks on September 11, 2001, U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan to hunt down the group's leader, Osama bin Laden, inaugurating the "War on Terror" that has raged ever since. Going to war in the "Middle East"—a term with British imperial roots, much like the "Greater Middle East" political term popularized by the second Bush administration—intensified anti-Muslim attitudes and launched a far-right anti-Muslim movement led by Christian nationalists. It gave way to the Department of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act, both of which played significant roles in the Bush administration's "executive overreach and a broad range of government abuses—such as racial profiling, warrantless wiretappings, illegal detentions and secret deportations" informed by anti-Muslim racism, all acts committed under the guise of protecting U.S. Americans and ending terrorism.
Conservatives made bizarre claims that President Barack Obama was secretly a practicing Muslim (read: anti-Christian), evidenced by his middle name, Hussein, and Obama being so close to the spelling of Osama. Frank Gaffney—Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense turned Washington Times columnist and the founder of the far-right, anti-Muslim think tank, Center for Security Policy (CSP)—insisted that Hillary Clinton's aide, Huma Abedin, "[had] ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. That's the Islamist organization whose self-declared mission is 'destroying Western civilization from within.'" Terms like ISIS, jihad, the Taliban, and Sharia law struck fear in the hearts of many, words fraught with meaning in the afterlife of 9/11. The notion endlessly reiterated as an absolute fact was that Arabs, Muslims, and Islamic extremists—all interchangeable, all one and the same—were a perpetual danger to U.S. citizens and they needed to be eradicated.
In the afterlife of the first President Bush's Gulf War, Western storytelling became oversaturated with anti-Arab and anti-Muslim plots in a long list of shows—including but not at all limited to: Law & Order (1990–present), The West Wing (1999-2006), 24 (2001-2010), Bones (2005–2017), Sleeper Cell (2005-2006), Criminal Minds (2005–present), Homeland (2011–2013), 24: Legacy (2016–2017), and British mini series Bodyguard (2018). In films like Argo (2012), American Sniper (2014), London Has Fallen (2016), and Beirut (2018), Arab and Muslim characters are painted as aggressive, villainous, and terroristic. And the "Middle East" is often ignorantly conflated with South Asia.
The public's palpable distress around the "War on Terror"—worsened by fearmongering from conservative talking heads and opportunist politicians—laid the groundwork for intensified cultural obsession with disaster preparedness, and the monster that emerged as the perfect symbol amid this fear and obsession was the pop culture zombie.
Counterterrorism but make it zombies
In "Preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse and Other Neocolonial Monsters During the Endless Global War on Terrorism," Marouf Hasian, Jr. and Sean Lawson examine how the consumer's relationship with the pop culture zombie myth created the opportunity for the U.S. government to utilize the schema of "postcolonial zombie terrorism" to its imperial advantage. Hasian and Lawson argue that the U.S. government has exploited our interest in the pop culture zombie as a tactic to "further their militaristic agendas in their fight against post-9/11 enemies"—ostensibly the entire Arab and Muslim world—and specifically to help rationalize the use of extreme violence against these enemies.
"In today's counterterrorist planning, it is the zombies—with their persistence, their apparent irrational behavior, and other existential threats—that are linked to preparations to deal with Arab or Muslim threats."
In April 2011, the Department of Defense (DoD) developed a Counter-Zombie Dominance strategy known as CONPLAN 8888, a document detailing a plan for the U.S. military to mount a defense against a zombie horde. A month later, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) launched a zombie apocalypse social media campaign before releasing a zombie preparedness comic. The following September, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) hosted an online seminar called "Zombie Awareness: Effective Practices in Promoting Disaster Preparedness" as a way to engage new audiences. Each preparedness project was meant to educate citizens on survival strategies in the event of climate disasters, large-scale power outages, pandemics, and terrorist attacks—apocalyptic conditions.
Modern pop culture zombie mythology is synonymous with apocalypse: societal collapse, desolate landscapes, dilapidated structures, unbridled violence, infectious disease. Kim Paffenroth writes in Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero's Visions of Hell on Earth that "more than any other monster, zombies are fully and literally apocalyptic … they signal the end of the world as we have known it."
Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, evoked zombie mythology when he described the "surging Islamic State" in apocalyptic terms at a 2014 news conference, saying, "This is an organization that has an apocalyptic, end-of-days strategic vision and which will eventually have to be defeated." In 2015, Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush leaned into the idea of a spreading contagion while urging the U.S. to send more soldiers to Iraq to defeat ISIS, blaming President Barack Obama for "allowing the militant group to take hold in the Middle East." During a speech at the Reagan Library, Bush asserted,
"One of the gravest threats we face today comes from radical Islamic terrorists. The terrorists are possessed by the same violent ideology that gave us 9/11… It is not true, and was wishful thinking by the administration to claim, that the tide of war is receding. The reality is that radical Islam has been spreading like a pandemic."
Government entities and aspiring politicians leveraged the fictional threat of a zombie uprising to tend to the specter of 9/11 in the U.S. American psyche. Hasian and Lawson make it clear: the Western perception is that "it is places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, or other Arab or Muslim sites, that serve as the geopolitical reservoirs for zombie-like contagion" in the form of irrational, terrorist violence.
Millennium of the Dead
Post-9/11 anxieties ultimately fed into the increasing success of pop culture zombie mythology in the new millennium. Before the release of Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later and Paul W.S. Anderson's Resident Evil in 2002, the production of zombie films had waned significantly, with the number produced in Hollywood throughout the 1990s being the lowest since the late 1940s. Western culture was more interested in slow-moving, supernatural monsters, like slasher icons Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Chucky, and Candyman, or the very human Ghostface killer(s) in Wes Craven's metatextual Scream franchise (1996–present). Horror entries of this era largely dealt with internal antagonists—in response to the moral panic associated with youth sexuality and countercultures in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s—the opposite of the zombie subgenre's preoccupation with external, invasive, contagious threats.
28 Days Later came screaming into the zeitgeist a year after 9/11 and broke the Romero-established tradition of the shambling undead, instead introducing a diseased horde sprinting at full speed—though Sega's The House of the Dead video game did it first in 1997. The UK-produced entry to the zombie canon helped birth a new era of zombie horror in the West, one that began to blur the lines between the risen dead and still-dying zombie-like humans infected with raging cannibalistic urges. The rapid speed of the infected hearkened to the explosive suddenness of an unforeseen terrorist attack, while the imagery of characters wandering through the eerie emptiness of a major city spoke to the gravity of its aftermath.
Meanwhile, Resident Evil—a Western biopunk film adaptation of a Japanese video game franchise originally released in 1996—contended with a viral outbreak and the threat of biochemical weaponry. Coming less than a year after the 2001 "Amerithrax" anthrax attacks—which many officials and media personalities falsely blamed on al-Qaeda and Ba'athist Iraq—the film inadvertently played on this millennium's newfound fears of biological warfare.
Neither 28 Days Later nor Resident Evil responded directly to 9/11. Nevertheless, Western fears of real-world terrorism enacted by "angry Muslims" were easily mapped onto them. The pop culture zombie easily became a perfect metaphor for impending danger, "from the biological, to the natural, the nuclear, to the terrorist" in the post-9/11 era.
"The label of terrorist possesses an ontological blankness strikingly similar to that of the zombie, as they are both outward physical threats to western civilization whose inner motivations remain hidden from view. They are both also sufficiently Othered as Monstrous."
—Andrew Schopp, The War on Terror and American Popular Culture
After World War II began, the threat of Nazi zombies—though not yet flesh-eating monsters—haunted audiences across Revenge of the Zombies (1943), The Frozen Dead (1966), They Saved Hitler's Brain (1968), and others. A few years later, the conflict in Vietnam deeply informed critiques of the U.S. military-industrial complex, unfettered state violence, racial tensions, capitalism, and government ineptitude in George A. Romero's initial Dead trilogy: Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985). Notably, Romero's subgenre-defining Night made the significant shift to cannibalistic zombies, an element that became integral to the capitalist consumerism themes at the center of Dawn and would become a fundamental aspect zombie horror has hinged on ever since.
Just as they surged post-World War II and post-Vietnam, zombie films and other zombie media spiked following the onset of the "War on Terror" against the Arab and Muslim racial Other. With the growing prevalence of zombies on screen, Western audiences could easily project their angst about Islamic suicide bombers and sleeper cells, bioterrorism and dirty bombs, "infidels" and "weapons of mass destruction," and so on.
The films in Romero's second Dead trilogy were proper post-9/11 zombie horror. With Land of the Dead (2005), the auteur explicitly critiques national security, privatized militarized power, preemptive military strikes, and class war. Diary of the Dead (2007) takes a found-footage turn, focusing on the role of mainstream media as a tool of disinformation, as well as critiquing institutional failure and corrupt military bodies during a time of national crisis. Survival of the Dead (2009), a direct sequel to Diary, deals heavily with the decay of military structures and government abandonment while also delving into tribalism, religious dogma and hypocrisy, and how ideological differences so often—but don't have to—lead to violent conflict.
The year before Romero ended his 20-year hiatus from his Dead franchise, Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead (2004) rethought Romero's work. Its opening sequence shows a prayer session inside an Islamic mosque juxtaposed with reports about a mysterious biological threat. The visual suggests that the mosque is the origin point of the spreading zombie virus. Lars Schmeink notes in his book, Biopunk Dystopias, that this conspicuous juxtaposition underscores the post 9/11 shift in zombie mythology. Snyder's preternaturally fast zombies that appear not long after this intro evoke jihadist imagery, and the ensuing narrative idolizes U.S. military sharpshooters in a similar vein to American Sniper.
"By reinventing Romero's zombie as a fast-moving, highly dangerous and contagious organism, Snyder has embodied the media's portrayal of fanatical Islamic terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda and ISIS in the zombie. When re-analyzing Zach Snyder's Dawn of the Dead (2004) with its socio-political backdrop firmly in the mind of its audience, the relevance of the film's bizarre title sequence becomes disconcertingly clear: Snyder's zombie is a manifestation of radical Islam."
—Jordan Laub, Emergence Journal
That same year, Resident Evil began spawning multiple film sequels—subtitled Apocalypse (2004), Extinction (2007), Afterlife (2010), Retribution (2012), and The Final Chapter (2016)—as well as a prequel subtitled Welcome to Raccoon City (2021) and Zach Cregger's forthcoming project simply titled Resident Evil (2026), which will likely beget sequels of its own and continue to engage with themes of biological scourge. Not to mention the seven animated films and the bizarre 2022 Netflix series. And, of course, the many video game entries, the most recent of which was released to critical acclaim in February 2026. There are also stageplays, a musical, comics, and novels for good measure. 30 years later, the franchise is still going strong and still beloved by Western audiences.
In 2009, we got Zombieland, a comedic and satirical take on disaster preparedness, and Zombieland: Double Tap came along in 2019. In 2010, we got AMC's The Walking Dead (2010–2023), an adaptation of Robert Kirkman's comic series, and its six spin-offs came in the years following—a franchise that late historian Jeffrey Kaplan argued "flirts with [the] illness/invader trope, at times likening immigrants with zombie hordes, as contagious as they are relentless." The World War Z film and The Last of Us video game hit us hard in 2013 with subliminal pro-colonial messaging, both of which will be examined in a future installment of this essay series.
28 Weeks Later arrived in 2007, and its subsequent installments form their own (post-COVID zombie) trilogy: 28 Years Later (2025), 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026), and a still untitled finale set to begin production in 2027. 28 Years Later notably only cast non-white people as zombies/the "unwelcome other," and the relentless, recurring villain is a herculean, brown-skinned, seemingly indestructible "alpha" zombie, often nude and brandishing a formidable phallus as it terrorizes survivors. The franchise is a reflection of the racism and xenophobic attitudes in the UK, painting brown-skinned immigrants as greedy, monstrous interlopers.
These projects, and many more, make up this millennium's pop culture zombie mythology canon, one that continually draws connections between zombie hordes and foreign bodies—immigrants, terrorists, the racial Other. They engage with our post-9/11 reckoning by depicting survival, hypervigilance, and security concerns in the midst of sudden catastrophe, abundant with decimation, panic, paranoia, and mass death.
This essay series will interrogate the recurring presence of pop culture zombie mythology in various forms of media. From federally-sponsored disaster preparedness programs to film, TV, and video games, zombie media in the Western world has been one long cultural reaction to and instinctive coping mechanism for palpable fears of societal disruption, terrorism originating in the "Middle East," brown-skinned foreigners creating a "border crisis," the interruption of civilization, anti-colonial resistance, and an omnipresent sense of global insecurity.