The zombie is now a household word, thanks to mainstream television like The Walking Dead and blockbuster films like World War Z. We are all familiar with the zombie as a Romero monster—an undead, mindless creature of hunger, wanting only to feast on the flesh of the living, whose bite carries contagion.
We are perhaps less familiar with the film trope of the Nazi zombie, which got its start in the pulpy and often forgettable Nazisploitation films like Zombie Lake and its doppelganger Oasis of the Zombies, but which is rising in popularity, the last decade alone featuring three Outpost movies, Nazis at the Center of the Earth, two Dead Snow movies, Frankenstein’s Army, and a host of short films. Why is the Nazi zombie seeming to peak in popularity—what does it say to the modern imagination? The purpose of this paper will be to explore the sudden rise in the Nazi zombie trope, through comparisons with the more typical zombie, and also with another fictional science supersoldier from the Second World War, Captain America.
The Nazi zombie is teleologically ‘safer’ than the more typical ‘zombie apocalypse’ type, because we know the end of WWII, that we’re not overrun with swastika’d undead. Thus, his ‘threat’ is not one of despair and fragility of the human race, but a threat of another, ideological, sort. The Nazi zombie is unsympathetic, a monster even before his monstrous transformation, trailing in his wake the memories of Mengele’s unholy experiments and an ideology of imperial Western superiority. Above all the Nazi zombie speaks less to an inherent ‘we’re all infected’ condition of mortality, but the fear of a resurgence of history, our own ugly past come back to bite us…literally.
About the presenterAJ DeLong
AJ Delong is a Professor of English at Suffolk County Community College. She completed her graduate work in 2003, with a PhD in Medieval Crusader literature and gender. She has a lifelong interest in science fiction, fantasy, and war movies.