1 Zombie Apocalypse: Plague and the End of the World in Popular Culture * By Rikk Mulligan “Something black and of the night had come crawling out of the middle ages. Something with no framework, or credulity, something that had been consigned, fact and figure, to the pages of imaginative literature.” -- Richard Matheson, I Am Legend Many prophets, seers, and writers have presented the final chapter of human civilization in apocalyptic terms. Contemporary western representations of the end of the world often draw from medieval iconography, particularly Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, as convincingly offered by Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell. 1 While scholars and theologians debate what each horsemen represents, most interpretations include death, war, and pestilence or plague. Speculative fiction and media, including science fiction, fantasy, and horror, envision the apocalypse from a number of perspectives. Science fiction frequently focuses on technology used in an attempt to prevent disaster, or on post-apocalyptic civilization; only rarely does it depict the end of all human life. Horror, on the other hand, typically portrays humanity's annihilation, often by supernatural forces; it echoes earlier fears, including plague and the hungry dead, both of which define the zombie apocalypse sub-genre. The ur-text of this genre is Richard Matheson's novella I Am Legend that tells the story of mankind's destruction by germ-born vampirism. Matheson’s end-of-the-world story rationalizes older supernatural tropes by using science to demythologize the vampire and to cast doubts on contemporary medicine and its control over disease. Matheson's plague of vampires inspired George Romero's flesh-eating zombies in the Living Dead movies; they became the template for most subsequent zombies. These films internalize the fears of disease and war, and shift their 1 Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Religion, War, Famine and Death in Reformation Europe. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).