‘Do you all want to die? We must throw them out!’: Class Warfare, Capitalism, and Necropolitics in Seoul Station and Train to Busan

The undead, and the notion of life beyond death, have long been important components of gothic literature, and, arguably, this is increasingly the case in modern popular culture. Carol Margaret Davison has noted that ‘many gothic works meditated on death and death practices as a signpost of civilisation’. This essay explores the ways in which ‘undead practices’ function as a signpost of social inequality in a society, with zombie narratives as a useful tool for theorising death and death practices. In particular, the link between zombies and necropolitics (where it is decided which people in society live and which will die) is made explicit in the South-Korean films Seoul Station and Train to Busan. As I argue here, in these films, zombies are culturally representative for a South-Korean audience that is viewing them, and moreover, are connected to South-Korean death practices. I argue that these films highlight important necropolitical practices in South Korean society today, with South-Korean audiences experiencing these zombie narratives differently to models outlined in previously published work on Western consumption of zombie narratives.