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Abstract
Reading the zombie as an essentially ecological figure, this article argues that zombie aesthetics are necessarily animated by the combined exploitation of alienated labour-power and appropriation of unpaid work/energy, material resources, agricultural lands and fossilized fuels. Though oil had always been crucial to the globalization of the zombie via the film industry, an overt preoccupation with oil only belatedly seeped into zombie aesthetics, just a few years before the global oil crisis of 1973. Marking a clear shift in zombie aesthetics, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) transformed the zombie-labourer into the human flesh-consuming petro-zombie horde. It is with Romero’s now canonical film, therefore, that the zombie truly enters the age of petromodernity.