Zombies in America and at Qumran: AMC's The Walking Dead, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Apocalyptic Redux
The surging popularity of zombies in modern American fiction, film, and television is rooted in a form of a-religious apocalypticism: a fatalistic view of the world and the future without any hope for deliverance. This worldview contains a handful of intriguing similarities with the ancient Jewish...
| Published in: | Journal of religion and popular culture |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
University of Saskatchewan
[2015]
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| In: |
Journal of religion and popular culture
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| Further subjects: | B
Apocalypticism
B Zombies B Dead Sea Scrolls B modern American horror films and television B Early Judaism B Biblical Interpretation |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Verlag) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | The surging popularity of zombies in modern American fiction, film, and television is rooted in a form of a-religious apocalypticism: a fatalistic view of the world and the future without any hope for deliverance. This worldview contains a handful of intriguing similarities with the ancient Jewish eschatological expectations that appear in the Dead Sea Scrolls. This study surveys four prominent themes that are shared between the scrolls and the American hit television series, The Walking Dead: (1) expectations for the last days; (2) a persecution complex that produces doctrines of a remnant; (3) need for social preservation through ritual purity; and (4) insider / outsider polemics. This comparative exercise attempts to show how zombies in popular culture are one reflection of our own existential, socio-economic angst that finds expression in a post-modern, post-Christian context. |
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| ISSN: | 1703-289X |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of religion and popular culture
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.3138/jrpc.27.2.2910 |