Monstrous Mothers and Abominable Infants: Undead Pregnancy and Zombie Newborns
摘要
Although typical zombies are able to exponentially produce more of their kind through infection, they can only assimilate victims rather than creating entirely new beings. The rare cases that feature a zombie pregnancy and/or birth therefore magnify the already abject threat of zombie (re)production with a collision of abject anxieties over both the monstrous maternal body and the monstrous infant. As with all transformative bodily states, pregnancy complements horror, with the supposedly excessive and uncontrollable body becoming a site of grotesqueness and evil. However, a zombie pregnancy confuses borders with a fetus that is simultaneously dead and undead and the threat that either the infant will attack the mother or the mother will consume the child. While most cases focus on the grotesque spectacle of undead birth and infected infants, there are cases where the liminality of a zombie pregnancy can lead to positive post-human transformations. Pregnancy makes the already uncanny zombie body even more abject—a dead body that not only lives but also creates life. An investigation of three twenty-first-century films that feature pregnant zombie mothers and their offspring—the remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004), The Girl with All the Gifts (2016), and Army of the Dead (2021)—suggests that horror manifests here in three ways: the fear of the zombified maternal body, fear of the zombified newborn, and fear of potential hybridity and/or a new species that will overtake humankind. This work argues that a zombie that can reproduce a second generation redefines social norms and bodily borders, carrying within it the potential for post-human transitions as well as grotesque abominations.