ABSTRACT
The rarely discussed zombie comedy, which transverses two body genres (horror and comedy), is notable for how it rejects the Cartesian mind-body divide. The postcolonial zombie comedy furthers this critique by centering narratives on animals as the source and/or perpetrators of infection, a mode of infection that in essence creates a hybrid of the animal-human. Zombie comedies are not the only postcolonial texts that display the historically subjugated in animalistic terms, as more straightforward horror examples like 28 Days Later (2002), Wake Wood (2011), and Dog Soldiers (2002) demonstrate. However, in texts like the Irish Dead Meat (2004) and the New Zealand film Black Sheep (2006), the memory of dehumanizing colonial rhetoric is directly revealed, utilizing the generic tropes and iconography of both horror and comedy to invite direct intellectual and physical engagement instead of fearful rejection. The hybrid animal-human literalizes the dehumanizing rhetoric of colonialism to narratively and allegorically relocate the grotesque and horrific away from the subjugated bodies toward the representatives of the scientific, agricultural, and governmental institutions.
