Fungal futures: eco-zombies in the twenty-first century

Fitzpatrick, Teresa ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0555-1496 (2024) Fungal futures: eco-zombies in the twenty-first century. In: Zombie Futures in Literature, Media and Culture: Pandemics, Society and the Evolution of the Undead in the 21st Century. Bloomsbury, London, pp. 205-215. ISBN 9781350285491 (hardback); 9781350285507 (ebook)

Accepted Version File will be available on: 28 May 2025. Available under License In Copyright. Download (296kB)

Abstract

In his 2006 BBC TV series Planet Earth, renowned naturalist, David Attenborough, introduced the world to the fascinating fungal phenomenon of the Ophiocordyceps, colloquially known as the ‘zombie-ant fungus’. This parasitic fungal species that targets insects, infecting their systems in a manner that controls their brain function to assist the fungus in spreading its spores, has inspired writers and directors of apocalyptic narratives for the twenty-first century. Fascination and uncanny trepidation with the fungal kingdom are nothing new; there are plenty of forerunners amidst the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century weird tales by the likes of William Hope Hodgson, H. G. Wells, and many more. Yet, given the increasing number of post-millennial fictional narratives that feature a mutant Ophiocordyceps as a cause of human apocalypse scenarios, it appears to resonate particularly with a twenty-first century audience concerned with the effects of the Anthropocene: climate change crises, global pandemics, and continued neoliberalist consumerism. Moreover, twenty-first century fungal-induced human zombification shifts the concept of the zombie figure from the abject shuffling, reanimated decaying corpse made culturally popular by George A. Romero in the 1970s and ‘80s, to living protagonists that largely remain human but with uncontrollable desires to eat human flesh thereby spreading the contagion, and in some cases empathetic, haplessly monsterised, marginalised characters. These mutated Ophiocordyceps zombieinfections offer an ecogothic turn to the zombie figure, however, with a strand of recent fungal ecohorror servings that revive the uncanny ambiguous zombie-monster through more elaborate human-fungus hybrid forms. The discussion that follows explores the fungalzombie infection in The Spore (Matt Cunningham, 2021) and HBO’s TV series The Last of Us (2023) making a case for an emerging monster that underlines the contemporary anxieties of an Anthropocentric generation: the eco-zombie.