This image of the zombie as an automaton with no feelings of guilt or remorse, on a mission to kill and kill again, has a political correlate. In addition to the post-9/11 spike in zombie films, there are countless disaster, millenarian, and apocalyptic movies that do not feature these monsters but exploit the fear and anxiety that the attacks created. These movies all focus on a post-2001 sense of dread that we are never safe, amplifying the anxiety Americans feel: “It does not take much of a stretch to see the parallel between zombies and anonymous terrorists who seek to convert others within society to their deadly cause. The fear that anyone could be a suicide bomber or a hijacker parallels a common trope in zombie films, in which healthy people are zombified by contact with other bodies and become infected.”

XREF: Connects horror genre tropes to political/historical context, echoing work on how genre fiction encodes cultural anxieties.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 706