Mark Goodall
University of Bradford
Live Ate: Global Catastrophe and the Politics and Poetics of the Italian Zombie Film
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This paper explores some of the political and socio-cultural aspects of the much maligned horror genre of the Italian zombie film. The paper will explore how such films, aside from the genre’s traumatic and spectacularly violent shock and gore tropes, are sometimes concerned with creating metaphorical stances regarding environmental politics, pollution, globalisation and the encroachment of advanced technologies into so-called ‘primitive’ cultures. The paper focuses in particular on Bruno Mattei’s 1981 once-banned film Zombie Creeping Flesh a film constructed around the tagline “when the creeping dead devour the living flesh”. Despite (artistically) being a prime example of trash film, Mattei’s work tries to address 1980s fears regarding over-population of the Third World, fears pertinent to contemporary debates now (there is even a crude and hilarious UN style debate about Western exploitation of the poor incorporated into the narrative of the film). The paper will use theoretical positions drawn from film and cultural theory (such as ‘reinventions’ of film theory (Ray); the debate about ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture in the academy) and literary studies (for example the movimento antropófago or ‘cannibalistic movement’ in Brazil, which itself used the notion of flesh-eating metaphorically for political means) to contextualise these ‘bad’ films within European cinematic history (the ‘mondo’ and ‘cannibal’ cycles, Pasolini’s Porcile). This in turn will act as a pointer towards present/future examinations of eco-politics using the vehicle of horror and zombie aesthetics (George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later).
