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ABSTRACT
The primary purpose of this essay is to survey the recent zombie craze in Northeast Asian films from Japan and South Korea. While the concept of the zombie may have originated in colonial Haiti, with its ghoulish images and supernatural lore, zombies were later imported to North America and reformulated as popular cultural entertainment by Hollywood. They are now flourishing in an East Asian cinematic context preserved in a globalized form. The films under investigation – I Am a Hero and Train to Busan – share similar cultural subtexts despite their incommensurable experiences of global capitalism in Asia and its latest ideological phase, neoliberalism. Both films critique the current neoliberal order and were nurtured by historical traumas experienced by both countries as well as the pandemic spread of viruses, both real and imaginary, that have ravaged the region. Nevertheless, the most prominent issue explored by Japanese and Korean zombie films is the continuity of society and its reproduction: as cultural artifacts of the neoliberal world, these films offer dystopian visions in which exploitation accelerates to such an extent that states cannot protect themselves against the viral and capitalist onslaught.
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Jaecheol Kim is an associate professor of English at Yonsei University, South Korea. He has published widely on early modern English drama, postcolonial literature, and critical theories. His essays on early modern cultural studies and biopolitics were recently published in Studies in Philology, Comparative Drama, and Journal of Postcolonial Writing.
Notes
1 Some critics believe in the African origin of zombies and their diaspora; they claim the word is from “Nzambi” (Boon Citation2011, 50). Still, most critics trace their origin back to Haitian folklore. For instance, among many, Embry and Lauro’s (Citation2008, 87) “Zombie Manifesto” stresses their Haitian origin and the master-slave relationship on the colonial plantation. Degoul (Citation2011, 24–38) explores the Haitian identity of zombies in depth. Of course, we need to consider the non-American origin of the undead narratives, as East Asia has a distinctive culture of the undead. For example, jiangshi (“hopping zombie”) formed a very long tradition in Asian culture predating Western zombie works and should be duly considered. Yet, I trace back to Haitian origin of zombies to discuss contemporary Korean and Japanese undead films as their representations of the undead are close to those of Haitian zombies.
2 See Lauro’s (Citation2015) monograph, The Transatlantic Zombie, for a discussion of zombies as a representation of slavery and rebellions against it. Dendle (Citation2007, 47) argues that zombies are a product of America’s colonial occupation of Haiti between 1915 and 1934. Bishop (Citation2008) associates Vodou zombies with the American imperialist hegemony.
3 Bishop (Citation2006, 204) interprets George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead as a “metaphor for both the horrors of the Vietnam War and the civil inequality and unrest of the 1960s,” and he finds images of zombies were developed by the traumatic experiences of the Vietnam War.
4 According to Kapur and Wagner (Citation2011), neoliberalism has become a hegemonic order that produces global social conflicts, and they argue that current cinematic forms respond to tensions produced by neoliberalism. The book edited by Kapur and Wagner, Neoliberalism and Global Cinema, is helpful to understand the influence of neoliberalism in Asian cinematic visions, as it includes essays analyzing Asian films negotiating experiences of neoliberalism. For the relations between neoliberalism and global cinematic forms, see Kapur and Wagner (Citation2011, 1–16).
5 According to IMDb, during the 1970s, 35 zombie films were produced in North America.
6 Boon (Citation2011, 57–60) classifies zombies into nine categories: (1) zombie drone, (2) zombie ghoul, (3) tech zombie, (4) bio zombie, (5) zombie channel, (6) psychological zombie, (7) cultural zombie, (8) zombie ghost, and (9) zombie ruse.
7 Japanese horror movies have been well explored by Jay McRoy. Yet, his essay collection, Japanese Horror Cinema (Citation2005), which traces Japanese horror imagination from Noh and Kabuki to The Grudge, does not mention any zombie work.
8 For analysis of the effects of the Japanese asset bubble burst in the early 1990s, see an essay collection entitled, Japan’s Bubble, Deflation, and Long-term Stagnation, edited by Hamada, Kashyap, and Weinstein (Citation2010).
9 Stratton (Citation2011, 189) compares zombies with bare lives held in concentration camps. For Agamben’s definition of homo sacer and bare life, see Agamben (Citation1998, 1).
10 For statistical studies on clinical and socioeconomic effects of 2009 H1N1 pandemic outbreak, see Kim (Citation2016, 70–73).
11 For the film’s box office record, see “Train to Busan” in Box Office Mojo (IMDb Citation2018).
12 Song (Citation2006, 38) rightly observes that homelessness “provides an effective opportunity to understand the prevalence of neoliberalism in South Korea.”
13 In his forthcoming work, Wagner (Citation2019) points out that post-IMF Korea has produced disaster movies dealing with “family suffering and states of emergency for its citizens,” and Train is one of them. Interestingly, he claims that Train represents the society’s most recent traumas, including the Sewol ferry disaster in 2014, where more than three hundred people were killed.
14 See Jack’s (Citation2015, 1–2) opinion that the major reason for the MERS crisis was the Korean government’s faulty information as well as infection controls.
15 See Esposito’s (Citation2008, 45–77) concept of immunity, which is widely applicable to issues of immigration and disease control.
16 Elsewhere, Wagner (Citation2019) reads Train as “a family-rescue-drama-cum-zombie-survivalist-contamination-anti-neoliberal tale,” and he situates zombie films as a new subgenre of critical examinations of neoliberal social order in post-IMF Korea.
17 Marx (Citation1976, 233) defines capital as a “vampire” that lives by “sucking living labor.” For a reading of Marx’s Capital in terms of a Victorian monster story, see Kornbluh’s work (Citation2014, 113–136).