From Rutgers University Press's Quick Takes series, Ian Olney's slim volume on Zombie Cinema offers both a pithy overview of zombie cinema and a fresh perspective on the most trenchant themes highlighted in zombie films. It comprises an introduction, three chapters (devoted respectively to “whiteness, capitalism, and patriarchy,” which Olney presents as the real bogeymen of zombie films), and a conclusion that stresses the theme of home, homelessness, and displacement in several recent television series. Olney's offering is indeed a “quick take,” but it is by no means shallow in its survey of the genre. Indeed, I was surprised at the quantity of scholarly as well as cinematic research that Olney manages to deftly weave into the lithe booklet, all while presenting his own argument. It can be read in a matter of hours, but the observations Olney puts forth are sure to stick with the reader for much longer.

Olney's offering begins like many zombie studies, with a statement on the increased ubiquity of the monster in recent years, but he quickly separates his work from those of other zombie scholars by noting a central difference: while the zombie has often been read as an embodiment of the Other, Olney puts forth in this volume an argument that “zombie culture reveals that our zombies are ourselves” (12). Emphasizing the cinematic zombie's reflection of hegemonic Western society as a means of critique, Olney argues that the zombie is essentially more about “us” than about “them,” more about the “self” and the fear of what we might become than about “the other” and threats from without. Naturally, as Olney notes, the zombie's ability to reflect the consumer culture of the US has been a platitude of zombie study since the pronouncement in George Romero's 1978 film Dawn of the Dead of the shopping mall zombies, “They're us” – restated in many zombie movies since. Olney's second chapter retraces some of these already well-worn arguments about zombies as consumers, but it offers novelty in its attention to the zombie's critique of media images and resonance with ecological themes, and especially his discussion of the RAGE zombies of Danny Boyle's 2002 film 28 Days Later and “rage” as a capitalist affect.

Olney's first and third chapters provide even fresher takes on zombie cinema. His first chapter revisits the early history of zombie film, what many think of as the “Vaudou zombie era,” but contra analyses of such films as blatantly racist, depictions of black subjugation to the Vaudou curse, Olney emphasizes the “whiteness” in the first wave of zombie cinema. As others have noted, those threatened with zombification in movies like the first ever zombie film, White Zombie of 1932, Val Lewton's 1943 I Walked with a Zombie, and many others besides, are often white women, emphasizing not the black zombie (as it was in the Haitian folklore from which the cinematic monster was adapted), but the whiteness of both zombie victims and zombifiers: it is also often the case in films of this ilk that the perpetrators behind the zombifications are revealed to be white. Murder Legendre (Bela Lugosi) is the dastardly zombie maker in the first film, and the culprit is the victim's European mother-in-law in Lewton's film. Olney sees an emphasis in these films on whiteness as death-dealing, a commentary on imperialist and postcolonial control of native populations. And while this is certainly a valid point, I'm not sure this turn in early zombie cinema truly represents a departure from Haitian folklore, in a more oblique sense: that is, I would argue that in the original folkloric narrative the zombie master (or the zombie maker, the houngan, the bokor), although literally black, is an allegorical stand-in for the captor, the slaver, the industrial profiteer off labor in the post-colony or those complicit in the system of white oppression. As such it would seem that the folkloric zombie master was always a critique of the historical white oppression of those enslaved, and thus the myth, from its inception, was in some sense “about” whiteness. Aside from this, Olney provides in this chapter several eye-opening readings of zombie films, from classics like Lucio Fulci's 1979 Zombi 2 to the often overlooked British film set in Africa, The Dead (2010.)

The third chapter, “Boy Eats Girl,” offers a treatment of gender and sexuality in zombie films, dealing explicitly with new genre mashups, like the ZomRomCom, romantic comedies that feature zombies, as well as several types of “women's films” that integrate zombie apocalypse narratives, like the melodrama, the fallen-woman narrative, the paranoid woman's tale, the rape-revenge fantasy and a treatment of a schoolgirl zombie narrative. This chapter offers some of the ripest fruit for analysis, as it treats films that have heretofore been ignored in zombie scholarship with an eye to the feminist work that such films perform, although I did feel that the dearth of treatment of homosexual zombie narratives was an omission: Bruce La Bruce's film Otto, or Up with Dead People (2008), for instance, is much more than just a gay “porn,” as Olney categorizes it.

Nonetheless, this is an exhaustively researched effort, almost beyond reproach in both its selection of central texts to investigate and the scholarly work from which he draws. Olney's conclusion to the book, which reaffirms his thesis that zombies are more about “us” than about “them,” looks specifically at the role of “the home” and the “dispossessed” in television series. On this score, a recently published article (that doubtlessly was only published after Olney had finished his manuscript), which investigates the French series he discusses at some length, Les revenants (2012–15) as a critique of the treatment of refugees in Europe, might enrich his reading of the show.Footnote ¹

Similarly, Olney's treatment of the zombie's whiteness in the first chapter would almost certainly have been bolstered by drawing from Elizabeth McAlister's address of the “hyperwhite” zombies of I Am Legend – a film Olney discusses only in regard to its capitalist critique.Footnote ² These few critiques aside, this study offers much to the field of zombie studies. And while, ultimately, I may personally disagree with the author on whether the zombie incarnates “self” more than “other” – I am inclined to state that true to the zombie's hybridity as living dead, it references both equally – Olney has added to the field in a productive manner: pointing to new areas for further exploration.

I read Camilla Fojas's book Zombies, Migrants, and Queers: Race and Crisis Capitalism in Pop Culture as an invitation to the zombie enthusiast to think more broadly about other figures in contemporary film and television (the invisible domestic servant, the white drug dealer, the prisoner) for the way they similarly offer critiques of debt culture or capitalism in crisis, and as an invitation to those unfamiliar with the zombie's importance as such a symbol, to do more investigation of the living dead. The book begins with a fabulous introduction that riffs on the figure of the freefall in capitalist boom-and-bust cycles (think of the apocryphal tales of Wall Street brokers jumping to their deaths after the market crash) and ends with the specter of the sinkhole as a kind of self-consuming catastrophe that mirrors capitalism as it thrives on and is propelled forward by disasters of its own making; these tropes will recur throughout the book as the twinned images of crisis capitalism. In six chapters and an afterword that profile (respectively) texts of literature, film, television, and popular culture that depict border crossings and white drug dealers; migrant domestic workers; capitalist zombies; queerness in incarceration narratives; sinkholes and other ecological disasters; urban ruins; and race and capital social climbing, the book offers thoughtful meditations on popular narratives as diverse as Arrested Development (2003–), Weeds (2005–12), Breaking Bad (2008–13), Real Housewives (2006–), Orange Is the New Black (2013–), The Walking Dead (2010–), disaster films like 2012 (Roland Emmerich, 2009), Jim Jarmusch's vampire tale Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), and the recent adaptation of The Great Gatsby (Baz Luhrmann, 2013). Discussions of these texts profile the roles offered characters of color in an articulation of the role of racism in capitalism, and what is especially highlighted, the opportunity for white characters to take on “racialized” roles in popular culture, which may mean those stereotypically associated with people of color, like the drug kingpin and the prisoner (chapters 1 and 4) or that allow a white character to symbolize racial concerns, like the resonance of the narrative of the nouveau riche with racial uplift in Luhrmann's 2013 Gatsby (afterword). In Fojas's intricately woven treatment of these diverse topics, depictions of border crossings are both symbolic, as in class migration, and literal, as in the flow of drugs across the US–Mexico divide. Most fascinating to me, however, is Fojas's treatment (especially in chapters 3 and 5) of the apocalyptic narrative's commentary on perpetual debt as a kind of living death.

Fojas is concerned primarily with one type of zombie narrative, and obviously, as the history of zombie cinema is nearly one hundred years old, it is more varied than her treatment reveals here: as we see in Olney's book, zombies do diverse work. Nonetheless, despite the fact that Fojas treats figures of the apocalypse and living death primarily in the chapters on zombies (chapter 3), ecological catastrophe narratives (chapter 5), and the vampires that haunt urban ruins in Jarmucsh's film (chapter 6), the whole book could be said to be animated by this figure. Her emphasis on the eternal optimism which permeates rhetoric about the economy – that its boom and bust anticipate the return of a boom, that crisis drives the engine of neoliberal capitalism to its own reinvigoration as a phoenix-like creature that will rise from the ashes – depicts capitalism itself as a kind of zombie. Further, her attention to narratives of appropriation, in which white characters inhabit roles associated with or symbolic of “others,” harkens back to the history of zombie cinema, which, as noted in the discussion of Olney's book, is about a reconstitution of a figure associated with the transatlantic slave trade to serve other narrative purposes.

The book is punctuated by powerful analysis of specifics from the diverse texts that detail, as the title states, Zombies, Migrants, and Queers. Her analyses are incredibly effective and even moving, as when she reads a servant's occupation of a child's dollhouse in the documentary The Queen of Versailles (dir. Lauren Greenfield, 2012) (chapter 2) as a meditation on the immigrant worker's homelessness, which connects to her employer's role in the housing crisis of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Even in those moments where the zombie is not explicitly analyzed, as in Fojas's fabulous treatment of the phenomenon of sinkholes in Florida (chapter 5), which she reads in relation to the real-estate crisis that resulted from subprime mortgages, the figure haunts and colors her discussion: as if capitalism was the zombie maker that has animated the various catastrophes that now threaten to swallow us whole. Although these two books are very different from each other, they both offer new lenses for interpreting the zombie's contemporary cultural capital and its uses as a mode of critique.