Between torture Porn and Zombie apocalypse: Horror and utopia in British-themed biopolitical films after 9/11

Abstract

This chapter offers a theory of the British-themed post-9/11 biopolitical film genre as a synthesis between American torture porn and apocalyptic zombie horror. This genre imagines the dystopian totalization of what Giorgio Agamben calls the biopolitical paradigm of the camp, the precarious zone of indistinction where human beings fight without end to establish the boundary between political life worth living and bare life void of value. While Hollywood horror films tend to avoid the full gravity of the camp paradigm by leaving one side of the political-biological binary intact, their British counterparts perform what Fredric Jameson calls a totalizing critique of these two moments, laying bare through an apocalyptic perspective the fundamental inconsistency of today’s global biopower, its inability to control all forms of life.