Post-Apocalypse Now. Cinema e serialità zombie come pre-mediazione del contagio

The article aims to analyse the relationship between post-apocalyptic imagery of cinema and TV series and the reality of the Coronavirus pandemic focussing on the zombie as an allegory of the biological virus. Broadening this allegoric perspective, zombie fiction will be used as an epistemological model to explain unpredicted manifestations of catastrophic large-scale phenomena in a way that resembles Richard Grusin’s notion of “pre-mediation” (2010; 2017). In detail, the analysis will focus on the viral media representations of open and closed spaces during the 2020 lockdown, aiming at illustrating the capacity of cinema and TV series to offer the tools to interpret the symbolic interaction between humans and the virus.