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Woman as Evolution: The Feminist Promise of the Resident Evil Film Series

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Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Post-Apocalyptic TV and Film

Abstract

Global warming? Alien invasion? Nuclear war? Machine overlords? Global plague? Pandemic virus? Contemporary post-apocalyptic films and television programs provide us with multiple potential world endings, and, as if the world ending wasn’t bad enough, our neighbors in the after-world seem likely to be the flesh-eating undead. Largely silent at the end of the twentieth century, zombie hordes can once again be heard moaning in movie theaters and living rooms. Perhaps the clearest evidence of a zombie revival is the record-breaking 17.3 million viewers who tuned in to watch the season 5 premiere of The Walking Dead on cable in October 2014. Today’s zombie flicks are the descendants of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead—“the Patient Zero of zombie movies and the patron saint of every horror film made after 1968.”1

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Notes

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Barbara Gurr

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© 2015 Andrea Harris

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Harris, A. (2015). Woman as Evolution: The Feminist Promise of the Resident Evil Film Series. In: Gurr, B. (eds) Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Post-Apocalyptic TV and Film. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-49331-6_8

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