Zombie Films with Todd Platts
Episode 71 - July 23, 2021
Todd Platts (Piedmont Virginia Community College) joins Merle and Lee to discuss his work on zombie films over the past half century. He begins by offering a history of zombie movies and the changing features and definition of the zombie. Todd points to a few key films – in particular George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead which eventually resulted in the explosion of zombie-related material in the 21st century. The conversation then moves to discuss disease movies more broadly and in particular in the context of Covid – why did these disease movies become so popular at the beginning of Covid? And what purposes did they serve for their viewers?
Further Reading
- Dahlia Schweitzer. 2018. Going Viral: Zombies, Viruses, and the End of the World. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
- Emma Jones. 2020. Plagues, Zombies and Vampires: How Hollywood Handles Deadly Viruses. April 5. BBC News.
- Mark Sumner. 2020. A Look at Social Distancing…with Zombies. April 16. Daily Kos.
- Todd K. Platts. 2013. Locating Zombies in the Sociology of Popular Culture. Sociology Compass 7(7): 547-560.
- Todd K. Platts. 2016. “From White Zombies to Night Zombies and Beyond: The Evolution of the Zombie in Western Popular Culture” Pp. 219-235 in The Supernatural Revamped: From Timeworn Legends to 21st Century Chic, edited by Barbara Brodman and James E. Doan. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Our Guest
Todd Platts,
Associate Professor of Sociology
at Piedmont Virginia Community College.
