Zombies are often portrayed in popular culture as energetic but dim, more interested in chomping on someone than discussing Tolstoy. If they could only read what they are missing!
Florida Tech’s Angela Tenga, an associate professor of literature in the School of Arts and Communication whose research interests include representations of the monstrous in fiction, has recently added fascinating scholarship to this area with a new article and collection of scholarly essays.
“Angel or Vampire: The unholy dichotomy of Midnight Mass,” was published in April in the journal Horror Studies. Tenga was lead author and worked with longtime collaborator Jonathan Bassett, a professor of psychology at Lander University in South Carolina, on the paper, which examines the eerie, dark 2021 Netflix series “Midnight Mass” from acclaimed writer and director Mike Flanagan.
“Like much of Flanagan’s work, “Midnight Mass” depicts supernatural events that provide a catalyst for exploring moral dilemmas and existential challenges,” the authors wrote in the abstract. “The heart of the series is its deliberate ambiguity about the ontological nature of the supernatural entity – is it an angel offering a gift of immortality or a vampire bringing a curse of destruction?”
Tenga has a distinguished canon of papers and collections touching on not just vampire studies, but also zombies and other supernatural topics in popular culture. Her analyses have generally focused on cultural touchstones such as “The Walking Dead” and George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead,” but she has also examined the moral complexity in the TV series “The Americans,” which focused on a real-world horror story, the Cold War.
In addition to being an author, Tenga is an accomplished editor. Her newest collection, “The Post-Zombie: Essays on the Evolving Undead,” from McFarland Press, is co-edited with C. Wylie Lenz and Kyle William Bishop (the book affectionately refers to all three as ‘undeaditors’).
It is available for pre-order ahead of its May 21 publication.
Featuring pieces such as “Rebel for Life: Has Our Obsession with Zombies Prepared Us for the Reality of Ecological Collapse?” and, “You Are Who You Eat: iZombie, Passing and the Role of Food in Modern Zombie Television,” the collection “considers recent and contemporary examples of zombies in fiction, literature, popular culture, and politics from around the world and makes the case that, because of the evolution of the undead, the zombie remains an important allegorical feature of horror fiction, satire, and ideological perspectives,” according to the publisher’s synopsis.
