Your Words Here: Zombies Run Rampant at Columbia

For a course that catches a lot of raised eyebrows and smirky “uh-huhs,” you'd not expect to look back on your, “welcome to the class …” email from instructor Brendan Riley and wish that the friendly “… it’s going to be intense” precaution had actually been a flashing roadside billboard blurting out “Undead! Turn Back!”

Zombies in Popular Media is arguably one of the most distinctive and rigorous, yet rewarding classes offered at Columbia College. Though highly informative and entertaining for the horror enthusiast and academic alike, the title of the course might be a smidgen misleading. While undoubtedly the curriculum addresses zombies in popular film, television and literature, simultaneously, zombies are cleverly used as an access point for discussion about human rights, identity, cultural awareness, personhood, the AIDS crisis, politics, issues of gender, race and class and a variety of philosophies.

Additionally, the course offers a brief and intensive overview of the history of the rise of zombies to their status as cultural and literary icons; a history that reveals several parallels to events in American history, while visiting some of the first anthropological accounts of Haitian voodoo and Creole culture. With an onslaught of daily readings, online journal writing in discussion forums, film screenings, pop quizzes and in-class discussion, each student can really get to the meat of how essential the zombie’s role has been in helping to shape cinema, television, video games and science fiction and fantasy literature as we know them today.

Even if blood, gore and rotting bags of walking flesh don’t turn your crank, 'Zombies in Popular Media' offers enough material addressing cultural and historical concepts that you might become immersed in enough not to notice the severed hand crawling out from the movie screen. Even the squeamish find a way to connect with the undead through articles by the likes of Susan Sontag, Maya Deren and Dale Jacaquette – only to name a few who help to tie up all the loose giblets. With Brendan Riley at the helm, there was never a moment short of a humorous quip about the living dead or a pause less a factoid about current cultural occurrences relating our daily lives with the un-lives of the characters we were studying. The lineup of films and texts change with each semester that the class is taught as Riley keeps with the ever-putrefying mass of zombie media. But the basic mode of the class is to really flesh out some big ideas, knuckle down, work hard and occasionally have the crap scared out of you. The folks at the blog Notoriously Conservative may have listed Zombies in Popular Media as a “colossal waste of time” based on their reading of the course description, but this class is definitely not for those with a weak stomach or a weak work ethic.

As Kaufman puts it from George Romero’s Land of the Dead, “Zombies, man. They creep me out.” Take Zombies in Popular Media for the fright and thrill, and perhaps to step outside of your comfort zone, but be prepared for the challenge of some heady ideas and a neck-breaking workload.

Tannar Veatch
Fine Art

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