Impure Realism, Pure Eventness, and Horror Cinema in the Post-truth Era: A Case Study of One Cut of the Dead

Through the case study of One Cut of the Dead—a 2017 zombie-comedy about how a film crew stage a zombie-film-within-a-zombie-film for live broadcast—this article examines contemporary media’s appropriation of the meta- or hyper-realism to represent “impure monsters” in the guise of the uncanny return of the repressed. By comparison, by moving away from the anthropomorphic realism that mainstreams zombie narratives as “alternative facts,” One Cut of the Dead interrupts the production of post-truth and liberates its characters from the “anthropological machine” responsible for people’s anxiety about being impure. In this light, the article intends, by providing an interpretation of how subjectivities can be generated within the apocalyptic experience of filmmaking/filmviewing, to bring about a reconsideration of the uncanny realism as a radical openness towards zombie events’ impact. This openness requires us not to reduce the singularity of the event to preexisting means of understanding. Rather than assume that the fictional genre has become either escapist fantasy or doomsday visions, I suggest instead that today’s horror cinema has increasingly highlighted tensions between “eventness” and the post-truth illusory mechanism.