31 The dead are rising… and rising… If every culture has its signature monster, ours is the zombie. Others have had their day in the sun (so to speak): ghosts in the 1910s, alien invaders in the 1950s, vampires in the 1990s. But even though monsters of yesteryear still skulk around in the dark corners of popular culture, scoring an occasional hit by reinventing themselves (as happened with the vampire turned Prince Charming courtesy of Twilight), zombies have won the popularity contest hands down. Zombies are everywhere these days: from blockbuster TV series, such as The Walking Dead, to bestselling books, movies and video games. Even a short list of recent zombie productions will be hopelessly out of date by the time I have inished writing. “Perhaps we can say with certainty that the zombie is more popular now than ever before; it has even seemed to have crashed the boundaries of narrative and stepped into real life” (Lauro and Christie 1). And yet the zombie is such an unlikely winner of the monsters’ sweepstakes. As opposed to the sexy vampire, the zombie is ugly, revolting and most of all, irredeemably boring. A monster must be threatening, but zombies are threatening in a particularly monotonous way: they rise from the dead, eat the living, rise again etcetera. Following the winning formula of George Romero’s ilms The Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978), zombies are depicted as mindless killing machines whose particular brand of horror is viscerally nauseating: the graphically portrayed intersection of rotting lesh and insatiable appetite. In its visual emphasis, the zombie differs from other monsters whose origins lie in narrative: as Kyle Bishop points out, “the zombie is the only supernatural foe to have almost entirely skipped an initial literary manifestation, passing Invasion of the Dead (Languages): Zombie Apocalypse and the End of Narrative elana gomel FRAME 26.1 | May 2013 | 31–46