Foul Waters

Contemporary Zombie Apocalypse Narratives and the Elemental Turn

Abstract

The contemporary American zombie apocalypse narrative engages aspects of the elemental world, and fluid elements in particular, in ways that reshape our views of both the pre-apocalyptic worlds of zombie terror and the post-apocalyptic worlds that emerge from the ruins. Two such shows, the AMC television series The Walking Dead (2010-2022) and its first major spinoff, Fear the Walking Dead (2015-2023), circulate polyvalent images of three particular fluid substrates—blood, water, and oil—that structure the violent collapse and agonizing rebirth of the contemporary world. I argue that these fluids reshape the zombie apocalypse narrative as an elemental apocalypse that exposes certain forms of ongoing social and ecological violence. They mobilise the material realities and rigid forms that constitute our sense of a shared society and planet and transform them into a set of softened, malleable structures that make us more attentive to the uncertainties, ambiguities, and uncomfortable complicities that characterise the shows’ allegorisations of global catastrophe. Contemporary zombie apocalypse narratives like The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead re-establish the centrality of the fluid elements that have long structured the zombie mythos and its intersecting histories of violence toward human subjects and the nonhuman environment.