Zombie Westerns
摘要
Death is a ubiquitous presence in works set in the Wild West, a commonality that the genre shares with the zombie film. However, despite a wealth of connections between the two generic forms, there are a few zombie Western works. This chapter explores this fact and examines why the zombie and the cowboy have rarely met in visual media. It presents an overall of the two genres’ cycles and the theoretical language used to explore them, identifying links in terms of their engagement with questions civilization vs. wilderness and their shifting depictions of monstrosity. This chapter then offers a survey of the zombie Western subgenre. It offers readings of several of the key canonical texts, including Ghost Town (Richard Governor, 1988) and Gallowwalkers (Andrew Goth, 2012), and explores how these works mobilize the aesthetic and subtextual qualities of its constituent genres. It then unpicks the depiction of zombies, religion, and civilization vs. wilderness in a selection of lower-budget works, before concluding with a close reading of Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare (2010).