The zombie-virus utopia mirrors the millenarian promise of Islamicate Universalism

Evidence

When her boyfriend Ben shows up, purportedly to help them, it is clear he has been infected as well. This is where the film gets really interesting. Ben tells Carol that it is no use to resist, that “they” offer a new world absent of pain, war, and suffering. “We were wrong to fight them,” Ben argues, insisting they offer “a world without war, poverty, hate… rape,” then suggesting, “You know it’s true. Our world [that is, their world] is a better world.” This vision of the world is very millenarian—the old will be wiped out and a new order will take place. Like the vision of Islamicate Universalism, everything will be just and peaceful. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 725

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘utopia as infection’ inversion is a strong essay angle: how Western cinema makes the enemy’s promise of peace itself the horror — an ideology that even claims peace becomes a contagious disease.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the film’s own framing of the infected world as sincerely utopian expose an anxiety that the West’s better-world claim is not self-evidently superior?