Night of the Living Dead (1968)

The zombie is an empty vessel to be filled with all manner of misanthropic impulses. George Romero’s zombies are filled with sheer prejudice. It is as if they are animated by prejudice itself, automated into thoughtless motion by biases and bigotry. This is a structural argument. Racism and sexism are structural in that they are built into language. Prejudice is space that we inhabit and that we are in turn inhabited by. The inhabitation of these biases is mindless in the sense that we do not know when we are expressing these biases; we do so automatically, as if, indeed, we were a zombie. But the film is not coy about indicting the real zombie here which is none other than the killer cop. The cop is a zombie in the sense that law-enforcement is the structure of prejudice made manifest in actual brick and mortar, uniforms, and handguns. The cop, valuing property over life, succumbing to the gravity-well of the firearm that reduces all humans to threats to be eliminated, is, like the living dead, unable to think. This is the very definition of ACAB. The cop is automated, running on a set of programs that by their structural position prohibits them from knowing; mindless, restless, and lethal.