Zombies in the Snow: Contemporary Visions of the Undead North

ABSTRACT: The Far North stokes the cultural imagination, particularly as new generations of writers and filmmakers reinventing the contemporary zombie apocalypse narrative look to the Arctic as a blank slate upon which to project timely concerns about environmental degradation and the exploitation of people and resources; the widening global wealth gap; and the continued resurgence of public health crises, xenophobia and authoritarian cultures of rule. In this article, I trace the different ways this much-mythologized geopolitical landscape reflects and elaborates some of these global and planetary risks in a recent spate of speculative narratives that shift the zombie outbreak into the inhospitable landscapes of the Far North. First, I argue that contemporary zombie narratives set in the Far North offer uncanny recreations, with haunting distortions, of the material histories and relations of the Global South that produced the first iteration of the modern zombie, the Caribbean zombi . Second, I argue that the images of the Far North that appear in such narratives curate a vision of what I want to call the Undead North. Finally, I offer close readings of one such zombie text of the northern variety, the Netflix streaming series Black Summer (2019–2021), which projects an image of the Undead North as an imaginary geography of the Canadian Far North, one that allegorizes larger historical and environmental processes that have reached crisis points in the twenty-first century—including the unchecked and uneven growth of the military-industrial complex and the failed project of settler colonialism.