The zombie is a catch-all monster encoding each era’s racial and political enemies.

Evidence

Zombies have been related to the vampire on more than one occasion. “The zombie is an utter cretin, a vampire with a lobotomy.” H. P. Lovecraft is one of many writers who used the theme of vampire pollution in his tales about the zombie. In the short story titled In the Vault, the zombie infects a victim with a vampire bite. This is not the only vampiric zombie. In 1954, Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend, a Cold War–era apocalyptic horror tale about the last man on earth, was published. The monsters in this story are preceded by a number of other plagues: “Between the storms and the mosquitoes and everyone being sick, life is rapidly becoming a pain.” The monsters smell bad because they cannot excrete waste, “[b] ut the vampires didn’t breathe; not the dead ones, anyway. That meant, roughly, that half their blood flow was cut off. This means, further, that a considerable amount of waste products would be left in the vampire’s system.” The monsters are also described as “the plague.” These references to the vampire-zombie “odor” and the “plague” of the creatures are situated in racial discourse, where smell and disease play a prominent role. Like the anti-Semitic discourse surrounding the diseased and smelly bodies of Jews, a similar language surrounding African-Americans was popular during the writing of Matheson’s book. For example, an African-American woman is depicted as “ugly,” with “an unbearable odor and an oily skin.” Matheson’s creatures are but one example of the zombie’s ability to stand in for a variety of social, religious, and political enemies, and in many of these cases the zombie functions as the “catch-all monster”—the Communist, the African-American, the Jew, the Muslim. As film critic Maitland McDonagh has stated, zombie films reflect “a cultural subtext” of “the world at that time.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 714

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘catch-all monster’ concept — Communist, African-American, Jew, Muslim — directly shows the reader how one monster template gets recycled across social enemies, the same manufacturing logic as the Muslim monster in earlier chapters.
• SEED: The odor/disease racialized language shared across anti-Semitic and anti-Black discourse fascinates — a possible essay on how monster bodies are always rotten, diseased, smelly across eras and targets.