The film stages infection as a gang rape by contaminated men

Evidence

When she goes to find Oliver at Tucker’s home, she is detected, and before she can escape, her ex-husband, helped by three other contaminated men—now zombies—infect her with the virus. In addition to the manner in which they spread the virus to her, by spitting in her mouth, the scene is disturbing on another level—this is a gang rape. The zombies force Carol to the ground and hold her down. She protests and fights and then is violated with a forced ingestion of bodily fluid. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 723

Categorization

• XREF: The violation-through-contamination framing connects to how medieval tales sexualize fear of the Muslim male body and its threat to Western women.
• FICTION: This reading of contagion-as-rape as the breach of civilization by a foreign male body could inform an essay on gender and the monster.