You might expect that after being repeatedly overrun by hordes of the undead in recent years, we’d need a break. At some point, vampires and zombies will have been bled dry as a cultural resource. But the undead are notoriously hard to kill off, in part because they’re useful tools to think with.
Vampires tend to be elite, foreign, rich, queer, and intellectual. Zombies, by contrast, tend to be lumpen, local, poor, gruntingly conventional in their desires, and stupid. Vampires are cartoonish one-percenters, in other words, and zombies are cartoonish ninety-niners. If whenever you see a vampire you think “elite” and whenever you see a zombie you think “the masses,” even splatter-by-numbers genre exercises can get more interesting.
Comments
I think the article is wonderfully written and a panic. It almost makes me decide to go to see it. Great sense of humor. I never heard of Carlo Rotella before, but now I'm going read all his articles. It made my evening!