33 [Inter]sections 25 (2022): 33-52 Atalie Gerhard * The Monstrous Return of the Commodified Female: How Zombie Strippers (2008) and From Dusk Till Dawn (2014) Transgress Foundational American Cultural Values Keywords: frontier, horror cinema, feminism, Gothic Studies, eroticism Abstract: This article examines how the film Zombie Strippers (2008, dir. Jay Lee) and the first season of the series From Dusk Till Dawn (2014, created by Robert Rodriguez) deploy the Gothic mode to stage monstrous transgressions of commodified females in the American historical and cultural contexts of the home front and the borderlands. By transforming into monsters, the erotic dancers in the two films above challenge the patriarchal foundations of their culture by subverting their objectification, literally consuming the bodies of male consumers. I further explain how their rebellions reference the frontier history of America, which provided Western horror cinema with tropes of evil “otherness” that blend stereotypes of Native Americans with Gothic fantasies of excess. My readings cite canonical theories from the fields of cultural and literary studies, but also more recent scholarship on the philosophical paradoxes of the eternal zombie condition or the sexually transgressive dimension of vampirism. In this paper, I analyze how the film Zombie Strippers (2008) and the first season of the series From Dusk Till Dawn (2014) deploy the Gothic mode, specifically the tropes of zombie- ism and vampirism, to explore how the figure of the monstrous female challenges those American cultural values that are rooted in foundational patriarchal and frontier fantasies that denigrate “others.” In response, the monstrous, commodified females here presented are shown to transgress the typical notion of “otherness” that is foundational to and developed throughout the horror genre in film and TV. Furthermore, I identify the opposites constituting the Western * Atalie Gerhard is an adjunct lecturer at Paderborn University and a PhD candidate at Saarland University where she worked in the International Research Training Group “Diversity: Mediati ng Difference in Transcultural Spaces”. The working title of her project is “Diversity and Resistance in North American Women’s Containment Narratives from the 21st Century.” She is a member of the Emerging Scholars’ Forum of the Association for Canadian Studies in German-speaking Countries. Her interests include Black and Indigenous resistance and North American women’s self-representations. She received an M.A. in North American Studies as well as a B.A. in English and American Studies and French Studies from the Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen- Nuremberg, where she worked as a student research assistant. A previous version of this article was published as “The Monstrous Return of the Commodified Female: How Zombie Strippers (2008) and From Dusk Till Dawn (2014) Transgress Foundational U.S. Cultural Values” in Transgressive Femininity and Contemporary Gothic. Ed. Rachid M’Rabty. Spec. issue of The Dark Arts Journal: New and Emerging Voices in Gothic Studies 4.1 (2018): <https://thedarkartsjournal.wordpress.com/transgressive-femininity/monstrous-return/> (defunct).