A zombie walks towards the camera.
You hear Dr. Thomas Doherty, a professor of American History at Brandeis saying, "So how far back in zombie history do you want to go? There's a 1932 film called 'White Zombie.'" You see a poster of the film "White Zombie" and then a scene from the film begins to play. In the scene there is a young man sitting at a table across from an older man. The young man says, "Are you mad? I saw her die. The doctor signed the certificate. I saw them bury her."
Dr. Doherty says,"The 1943 film called 'I Walked With A Zombie.'" You see a young woman screaming and running away from an undead figure.
Dr. Doherty says, "The most influential zombie film and the film that really starts off the whole genre is the 1968 film by George Romero called 'Night of The Living Dead.'" You see a more traditional looking zombie walking through a doorway while a woman screams for her life.
Dr. Doherty says, "I think one of the appeals of the zombie apocalypse is that we no longer have all our modern technology, and that might seem to be something that we would hate. We're sort of fronted with the essential facts of survival in a zombie landscape, and that's a nice, imaginative place to go to." As Dr. Doherty speaks, you see silhouettes of zombies walking by and an image from the show "The Last of Us." In the image, a younger woman and an older woman stare at each other in an old, run down, room.
Dr. Doherty continues,"The identity politics that we're obsessed with in modern life tends not to operate in the zombie apocalypse. There are only two kinds of beings: there's you, the alive, and then there's the undead. You can be sort of sadistically violent to a zombie without any kind of moral compunction at all. Like, no matter how evil a villain is, it's a human being, right? But if you're destroying zombies, you can just shoot away. Whether in motion pictures, Netflix series, graphic novels, The Zombie has been one of our favorite monsters." While Dr. Doherty is speaking, images from "The Last of Us," "Zombieverse," "iZombie," "Zombies a Brief History of Decay," and "The Walking Dead" are quickly shown.
The video ends.