Zombies Go to the Amusement Park: Entertainment, Violence, and the 21st Century Zombie in Zombieland and Left 4 Dead 2
2013; University of Iowa; Volume: 14; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.17077/2168-569x.1414
ISSN2168-5738
Autores Tópico(s)Violence, Religion, and Philosophy
ResumoIn 2009, not one, but two pop culture products, Columbia Pictures's Zombieland and the Valve Corporation video game Left 4 Dead 2, decided to give the "zombie-apocalypse" plot a twist.Interestingly enough, they picked the same one.Zombies arrived at the amusement park.Both works still fall neatly within the zombie apocalypse genre.Their plots focus on a rag-tag band of survivors struggling to stay alive in a world overrun by the dead.However, both locate major portions of that struggle inside abandoned American fun lands.What's interesting is that these amusement parks aren't just grim, devastated ruins, backdrops used to contrast the levity of a pre-zombie world with the horror of a post-zombie one.Instead, both parks remain the pleasure centers they once were, although the "fun" is now not just in sampling the park's offerings; it is in fighting off the undead horde.In Zombieland and Left 4 Dead 2, the survivors bask in the adolescent dream of having the run of a carnival while delighting in combat against their assailants.They laugh and whoop for joy as they see the sights and ride the rides, their automatic weapons blaring.They diverge from the task of survival on the off chance of finding an unharmed Twinkie or concession stand, hoping to be the last person on Earth to savor the ambrosial flavor of junk food.While these post-apocalyptic trips serve mostly as light-hearted entries into the zombie-apocalypse megatext, they represent a compelling site for critical consid-
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