Staking Monsters: Killing the Racist Trope in Horror and Reality

Published at Sacred Matters on October 28, 2016.

In this age of white police killing black people, Romero’s unintentional message about racism still resonates today, though I wish it wouldn’t. I wish the film were less relevant with every passing year. Yet Romero shows us in a film about zombies the high costs of dehumanization in the form of racism. When we imagine other people to be less than human, less like us, they die. We create them as monsters, and then, we find ways to destroy them.