“Zombies in Popular Media,” Columbia College Chicago
Many students may feel as if college courses are eating their brains. Not a lot of courses actually examine the process.
This three-week, intensive media-studies course, taught during the winter intersession by Brendan P. Riley, an English professor, traces the roots of zombies from their beginnings, in the voodoo culture of Haiti, to their first appearance in film, in White Zombie (1932), to modern video games like Resident Evil. The undead continue to evoke fear and fascination, he says.
“There is this sense of them being the people you know — but they’re not,” says Mr. Riley. “And that’s what’s scary.”
It is no accident that zombie films typically depict claustrophobic, desolate, or postapocalyptic settings, says the professor. A good zombie, movie is less about the monsters and more about the interactions of the people trying to escape them. George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), one of the most profitable horror movies ever, explores issues of race, class, and consumerism — it is set in a shopping mall — as its living characters prepare for the inevitable attack of the zombies.
The films’ plots typically reflect the fears of the people being hunted by the monsters. Early tellings used voodoo as a mechanism for the creatures’ rise from the dead. But in recent decades, the zombies have more often become a product of a pathogen. Mr. Riley says this reflects fears of epidemics like AIDS and avian flu.
The professor says he chose to teach a course on zombies both for their cultural significance and because “they just scare me.”
Students say:
John M. Brien, 46, a nondegree student, was simply curious about the zombie genre when he signed up for the class: “You think, Hey, it’s only a monster movie, but there’s actually a lot of subtext to it.” Mr. Brien says Mr. Romero’s first movie, Night of the Living Dead (1968), questions what it means to be human and explores the nature of good and evil as the protagonists panic and turn on one another.
Reading list:
Magazine and journal articles, along with three movie screenings per week, including Night of the Living Dead, Carnival of Souls (1962), and Shaun of the Dead, a 2004 parody.
Assignments:
Daily reading assignments, with brief written analyses of the texts; one presentation to the class, examining some form of zombie-themed art; and a final original creative project. Past examples include a zombie comic book, a zombie screenplay, and a faux news article about a zombie attack.
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http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 53, Issue 25, Page A10