Horror and the Gothic’s utility as a cultural resource and critical tool

While cultural theory elitists have tended to write off familiar monsters as little more than cheap fads of mass culture, popular culturists often embrace them as effective barometers capable of measuring and, at times, even predicting collective sentiments and anxieties. Yet frequently ignored in this disciplinary clash is the notion that monstrous figures also serve as excellent case studies for a much broader issue: the argument for Popular Culture Studies as a pertinent division of cultural theory. This article argues that popular culture can and does respond to public needs, that consumers do indeed show the capacity for resisting cultural indoctrination and can, at times, even directly influence it. Of this there are, perhaps, no better examples than the vampire and zombie, figures who in one form or another have served primarily as maleficent beings until 21st century culture transmuted them into heroes and harbingers of social change.