Why Do They Come Here?
The political imaginary of the (almost) (un)dead.
The following are my opening remarks introducing George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, presented on October 29 at Whammy! Analog Media in Los Angeles. It was sponsored by DSA-LA’s Hollywood Labor committee.
For readers in London, a reminder: I’m presenting my paper “From Modern Materialism to Popular Modernism: (re-)constructing a communist methodology of aesthetics” at the Historical Materialism conference, November 6 at 4:30pm GMT. More info here.
Happy Halloween…
Before George Romero, the zombie as we know it didn’t exist. It’s not just that he sketched out the “rules” of what made a zombie, though he did — in 2025, we’re used to zombies as this unstoppable biological force, fast or slow, not supernatural but very much human-made. Without Romero’s films there would be no shows like The Walking Dead, films like 28 Days Later, no games like Resident Evil, so on.
No, what made Romero’s work such a watershed in horror was that he was the first to paint zombies – he called them ghouls at first – as an avatar for a very specific kind of doom. The modern, late capitalist zombie is both the result of human folly and, conversely, a force of nature, a preventable disaster that we can only watch unfold, powerless to stop it.
As such, you can see that the first film in Romero’s series, Night of the Living Dead, dredges up all the tensions of post-war America in its content, the monstrous detritus that we would rather not face. Here’s a quote from Evan Calder Williams’ 2011 book Combined and Uneven Apocalypse released as the post-Great Recession era of “zombie capitalism” had taken hold:
Think here of the beginning of Night of the Living Dead, where the first zombie we see – the first recognizable zombie of late capitalism – looks like nothing so much as a homeless drifter of sorts, a raggedy man. Tellingly, Barbara and Johnny, her soon-to-be-zombified brother, hardly give him a second glance: at worst, he’ll ask them to spare some change. He is not marked as undead, at least not in the technical sense. Just as unwanted. Therein lies the explosion out of and against the accepted codes of who we recognize and who we don’t: the zombie’s furious attack, which here has nothing to do with trying to eat them, is the feral assertion of the right to be noticed. Even to the end of the encounter, we can practically read on Johnny’s face the bourgeois frustration: funny, it’s not usually this hard to kill the poor…
This gesture also taps into something far more fundamental in popular culture, going back at least to the early years of capitalism itself: what it does to the human body, the human mind, the human spirit.
There’s another book from 2011, exploring very similar themes in global capitalism. It’s called Monsters of the Market, by David McNally. In it, McNally traces how the monstrous and the inhuman has been used to discuss capitalism since its inception. Marx famously compared capitalism to a vampire, an undead and deadening force that sucks the life from everything it touches.
For sure, every culture has its version of the undead ghoul in its folklore going back centuries. But the first instance of these tropes cast a distinctly modern vein is found in what many consider the first proper modern horror novel: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Shelley was of course a radical herself, an early campaigner for women’s liberation and workers’ rights. McNally also points out that Shelley grew up next to Newgate Prison in London, where public executions took place on a daily basis. These were not just executions of murderers or traitors, but thieves, vagrants, the dispossessed.
Let’s not forget that the early years of capitalism — and this is a process that took place over centuries — involved kicking huge numbers of peasants off their land, confiscating it for private use, and forcing them into the towns where all they had to sell was their labor. Not to idealize life under feudalism, but whereas most agricultural peasants were able to have almost a third of the year with no work. To become a worker under the wage system meant almost constant toil, often repetitive, with very little time off at all.
Those who weren’t able to find that work were often cast off, criminalized, brutalized, and often executed. Witnessing this clearly stuck with Shelley. After the condemned were executed, their remains were most often handed off to the anatomists, who would then sell the bodies to medical schools. It’s no coincidence, therefore, that Victor Frankenstein, the doctor whose hubris condemns both his monster and himself to misery, is shown grave robbing, searching for human parts in complete indifference to who the dead might have been.
Taking into account what capitalism does to the human being as a whole, it can’t be a surprise that tropes of undead flesh, forced to live against all desire to rest, animated by an insatiable hunger that seems to come from without, are so enduring. It would be overly-simplistic to sum up the Romero zombie in Night of the Living Dead as a one-to-one analogy. His zombies aren’t representative of the working-class or the oppressed or disenfranchised. What they are is a personification of capitalism’s death drive, given more immediacy by the time in which the particular work of art being created.
Romero himself told the story about the night in April of 1968 that they finished filming Night of the Living Dead, just outside Pittsburgh. They placed the dailies in the trunk of his car, started it, turned on the radio. The first thing they heard was the breaking news that Martin Luther King had been shot dead.
Immediately, Romero and everyone else knew that this film was going to hit differently. Its protagonist, Ben, is played by Duane Jones, an African American. Romero always claimed that he didn’t cast Jones because he was black, just that he gave the best audition. Nonetheless, the tensions of the film take on a very specific dimension in the context of the civil rights and Black Power movements. The last sequence we see in Night of the Living Dead is Ben shot by a sheriff’s posse, whose members then act like nothing particularly out of the ordinary has happened. It’s this attempt to externalize, to turn the violence of American society into an “other” — when in fact it is, in the words of H. Rap Brown, “American as cherry pie” — that is so pernicious. The movements that had come about to transform this society into a more just and equitable version of itself made that violence a very live question.
Telescope that forward by ten years, almost exactly. American capitalism is still figuring out how to stabilize itself after a defeat in Vietnam, economic shock and oil crises. It’s done so by starting to roll back the gains of the 1960s as well as shredding away at the social safety net. You start to see, even in the early years of the Carter administration, the beginnings of neoliberalism, the replacement of the social with the individual, inherent social rights with the ability to purchase. In short, capitalism was rebalancing itself by privatizing daily life, by hoarding social spending and hitting the accelerator on consumerism to substitute.
But the violence is still there, it’s unavoidable. You will note one of the first scenes in Dawn of the Dead shows a SWAT team raiding a Black and Puerto Rican apartment complex that’s become infested with zombies. It’s a brutal scene, and deliberately frames the more famous images from this film: zombies mindlessly wandering the aisles of a shopping mall. These shots are quite funny, but they’re meant to play on the more cynical, rueful, dark-spirited side of our humor.
We can’t separate the braindead consumerism from the violence and repression. In fact, each makes the other possible. When Peter suggests that the undead are returning to the mall because it’s an instinct, it tells us that the same deadening, soul-sucking forces that dominate our lives in work – accumulation, mind-numbing routine – are extending into our leisure time and into our lives in general.
Today, the mall itself is a dead space, an echo of a past form of social life that revolved around consumerism. But the forces that spurred it on are, if anything, stronger than ever. We live in this peculiar and very pronounced era where we are presented with a greater abundance than ever before, but where the challenges to access it are increasingly acute. The way our lives are weighted down creates its own kind of torpor and inertia that makes it difficult to shake off. One of the takeaways of a film like Dawn of the Dead is that confronting this doesn’t just mean seeing capitalism as an economic system but a social and cultural one that poisons our very sense of the possible.
It is certainly easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, to imagine ourselves tearing each other apart rather than living cooperatively and democratically. The point, however, is that it doesn’t have to be so difficult. There is no more urgent task for the left today than forging this alternative imagination.
Header image is from George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978).
Worms of the Senses
(what I’m seeing, hearing, and reading…)
Seeing
Weapons, written and directed by Zach Cregger (2025)
Dawn of the Dead, written and directed by George A. Romero (1978)
The Tin Drum, directed by Volker Schlöndorff, screenplay by Schlöndorff, Jean-Claude Carrière, and Franz Seitz (1979)
Hearing
Massive Attack, Heligoland (2010)
The Pop Group, Honeymoon on Mars (2016)
Slowdive, Slowdive (2017)
Reading
Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune, by Kristin Ross (2016)
An Essay On Liberation, Herbert Marcuse (1969)
Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo (1959)