Zombies and the Post-colonial Italian Unconscious

Abstract

This article analyses the relationship between the horror genre and colonialism by focusing on Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 (1979) and discusses how and to what extent the colonial overtones of this film provide a fictional representation of the Italian collective unconscious fear of African immigration, which resurrected the memory of forgotten colonial crimes in Africa. Drawing on postcolonial theory and psychoanalysis, this article also underlines how xenophobe political propaganda has employed horror imagery – and especially that provided by zombie movies – in order to discriminate against immigrants.