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  • Essay / Zombies in film, television and popular culture and their...

    In a recent episode of the hit Fox show Glee, the show's choir children staged a impressive costume and makeup performance of Michael Jackson's “Thriller”. mixed with “Heads Will Roll” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. What made the show remarkable, besides the quality of the zombie outfits and, of course, the singing and dancing, was the context of the show itself. The episode aired in February, so no connection to Halloween makes sense, nor does the episode suggest any particular nostalgia for the 1980s. Given that the zombie routine wasn't just the centerpiece of episode, but also played a central role in the plot (as a ruse to win the big match), how can we understand the use of such a seemingly out-of-the-ordinary phenomenon? location reason? A closer look at the episode yields a potential answer. This February episode centers on several twists and turns in the status of the main characters. The football players, who have spent the first season and a half tormenting the Glee Club, are forced to join them for a performance and quickly become victims of the hockey team's all-too-familiar bullying (with Slushee attacks). As a result, footballers decide not to play and lose their eligibility to play the big game. Their absence is filled on the field by the girls of the show choir, who prove to be a valuable asset in their own way. As the football team/choir/zombie horde scores the game-winning touchdown, the most talented cheerleaders (the Cheerios) quit instead of abandoning their Glee friends, triggering the downfall of the cheerleading coach, Sue Sylvester, who not only loses the national competition she was supposed to win, but is humiliated by a Katie Couric interview... in the middle of a newspaper... that they want to be in here. Francine: What are they? Peter: It's us, that's all, when there's no more room in hell. Stephen: What? Peter: Something my grandfather used to tell us. Do you know Macumba? Voodoo. Grandfather was a priest in Trinidad. He told us: “When there is no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth. Romero not only criticizes our rampant consumerism (see Figures 1 and 2), but he also connects this lifestyle to a kind of cosmic punishment. If hell is full, then many people have been damned for their wrongdoings. The zombie plague becomes a kind of punishment for our rampant moral failures, big and small. This point is underlined by the mimicry of the zombies; what they do is not so different from what we do, but we more easily recognize the monstrosity of the action when it is carried out by a monster.