The publication of Zone One in 2011 coincided with a noticeable, and curious, surge in novels, TV shows, and films about zombies. Indeed, over the two decades, zombies seem to appear everywhere. Notable examples include the hit television show The Walking Dead (2010-), the Resident Evil video game franchise (1996-), and successful films like Shaun of the Dead (2004), I Am Legend (2007), Zombieland (2009), and World War Z (2013). After coming into prominence in the late 1960s and fading in popularity in the subsequent decades, it was clear that the zombie genre had been revived. As Sarah Juliet Lauro notes, "Today, one can find the image of the zombie emblazoned on a wide variety of items, including, but not limited to, lunch boxes, backpacks, pencil cases, wristwatches, iPhone cases, guitar picks and guitar straps, bottles of hand sanitizer..." and the list goes on (p. vii).
In an interview with Joe Fassler of The Atlantic, Whitehead questioned "Why are zombies important or interesting now? I have no idea." For Whitehead, Zone One was the fulfillment of a childhood interest in the horror and post-apocalyptic genres. Yet it is worthwhile to consider why Whitehead and so many others returned to the zombie genre around the same time. In other words, why all the zombies, and why right now?
A number of scholars have turned their attention to these questions. Andreu Domingo, for example, argues that the increased popularity of the genre "can be interpreted as a response to the escalating climate of terror since the 9/11 attacks in 2001, after which media has routinely been permeated with images of death and destruction" (p. 445). Domingo also makes reference to the AIDS pandemic, which, beginning in the 1980s, caused widespread fear of the "infected" individual (p. 449).
Scholar Henry R. Giroux offered an influential analysis of this very question in his Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism, published in the same year as Zone One. For Giroux, the return of the zombie is primarily linked to the economic conditions of the present–which Giroux terms "casino capitalism"–in which "particular individuals and groups are treated as groups are considered simply redundant, disposable" as though they were zombies (p. 2). As Giroux writes, "the twenty-first century zombies no longer emerge from the grave; they now inhabit the rich environs of Wall Street and roam the halls of the gilded monuments of greed such as Goldman Sachs" (p. 2). Giroux's connection between the risky and ethically-questionable operation of casinos, the larger global economy, and the zombie proves particularly relevant when considering Zone One. In the novel, Mark is gambling at a casino while the plague breaks out and is so consumed by the pursuit of more winnings that he fails to realize that society is collapsing.
Evidently, zombies have been analyzed in a number of different ways. Here, Sarah Juliet Lauro remarks in her introduction to a collection of scholarly articles about zombies on the "zombie's fluidity" (p. xi). By this, she means that the figure of the zombie can take on different connotations and symbolize different things at different times and in different contexts. "Looking at the surge in zombie cinema and its increasing diversity" in the 21st century, Lauro lists "the global economic downturn; the advent of new, anesthetizing pocket technology... [and] the looming sense of ecological disaster" as possible explanations (x). As these matters so no sign of resolving it is likely that the zombie will continue to trudge into the future, however it may look.
