An Apocalypse without Zombies: Alex Garland’s Civil War (2024) as Late-Cycle Horror

초록

While Alex Garland’s Civil War (2024) registers clearly as a war film, its adherence to a specific genre rests comfortably upon its use of horror film conventions, specifically those that defined the extensive cycle of zombie films during the past 20 years. One theme is crucial to this cycle: the collapse of civil society, during or after which fellow human survivors pose greater dangers than the scientific or supernatural monstrosities who brought about the apocalypse. Having inherited this central theme from earlier versions of apocalyptic fiction, the zombie film provided an allegorical blueprint easily adaptable to post-9/11 anxieties, the social destabilization following the financial crisis of 2008, and, most recently, the dread accompanying the COVID-19 pandemic. Following this thematic thread, it is hardly surprising that the current political polarization and right-wing radicalization within US politics would provide fertile ground for yet another update of the zombie film. Civil War aligns itself quite comfortably with such readings, reveling in the breakdown of civil society and the descent into lawlessness and random violence as a result of a vaguely defined political crisis. To this end, Civil War mobilizes the by-now overly familiar visual and thematic inventory of the zombie film, with one crucial adjustment: it omits the fantastic trope of the zombie. It is, in short, a zombie film without zombies. As such, the overfamiliarity of its genre conventions allows for a degree of abstraction that makes the omission of zombies possible. While Civil War is not a particularly original or innovative zombie film, its unique twist on the conventions of the horror film allows it to reflect critically on the zombie film at the end of its current cycle of cultural relevance. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2026.

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