As COVID-19 spreads across the globe, reports on the crisis evoke many tropes of horror cinema, reinforcing the role of pandemics in apocalyptic imagination. More tied to the zombie film subgenre, horror tropes re-emerge daily in the news and mainstream culture: the unexplainable disease, the silence or denial of the authorities, the political disarticulation, the buzz of the media, the government conspiracy, the collapse of the social order, and the big cities as vast, ruined spaces. Considering the profound changes in urban landscapes, the analogy I intend to establish with a specific horror subgenre highlights the stigma of the infected, the quarantine as a social and cultural experience, and the segregation inherent in it.
No Safe Space_ Zombie Film Tropes during the COVID-19 Pandemic