Zombies, Conspiracies, and Esthetics in Crisis. A Computational Engagement with Genre Esthetics

This chapter analyzes narrative representations of political crises in two different genres—the zombie film and the political thriller—by focusing on the question whether a movie only speaks of such societal disruptions, or if it also develops an esthetics of disruption that provokes or challenges its viewers. A political esthetics of disruption would be one that could show reality as not-yet-framed, as something that is open for interpretation, meaning and conflict. Such moments of esthetic and political in-determination can appear on different levels of cinematic representation; they can refer to the formulas and stereotypes of genre, to the semantics of space in mainstream cinema, to pictorial traditions or to the political imaginary as a whole. In their analysis, the authors approach movies on at least three different levels: on the level of content with a focus on the political crisis the film presents; on the level of narrative structure; and on the level of esthetic design, which they analyze by a computational calculation of the course of esthetic parameters across the movies. Based on these case studies, the article summarizes methodological implications of the demonstrated digitized approach by advocating an organic and embedded application of computation in film genre analysis.