Surviving the Climate Apocalypse: How Zombie Narratives Reflect Society's Collective Fear of Environmental Collapse
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2023-06-15
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en
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This thesis aims to find an answer to the question of how climate change fear, as depicted in zombie outbreak films, has functioned and developed differently between the 1950s and now. In order to do this, three cinematic productions – Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Dawn of the Dead (1978), and The Last of Us (2023) – have been analyzed through the lens of climate change fear, while also relating them to general fear culture. The findings of this thesis demonstrate that the three zombie outbreak films mentioned above function as increasingly powerful analogies for climate change fear. While the first two films use zombies to comment on political and societal concerns in relation to climate change fear, the final film can be seen as a reflection of the contemporary anxieties surrounding the changing climate.
Keywords: climate change fear, fear culture, zombie outbreak films, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dawn of the Dead, The Last of Us.
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