MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Building upon and expanding work begun as part of a presentation at the 2013 MAPACA conference, this paper will highlight further meetings between zombie characters and elements from the Matter of Britain and explicate how these contacts reflect an ongoing sub-tradition of Arthurian horror-themed fiction. The zombies of the Matter of Britain appear in a small but, nonetheless, interesting corpus and, similar to their fellow undead interact with figures associated with Arthur’s court, transform the denizens of Camelot into zombies, like themselves, and engage in quests for Holy Grails. As previously explored, zombies first make contact with the Matter of Britain in the 1940s and do not reemerge in Arthurian texts until the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, decades marked by a steady revival of the zombie figure in mass media. In recent years, the walking dead have interacted with Arthurian figures and artifacts in increasing innovative ways and deserve our attention as being more than simple mash-ups. Some offer new representations of Arthurian fantasy, as depicted in “The Avalon Trap” arc (2012) of Paul Cornell’s Demon Knights comic book series and Rob Williams’s Revolutionary War: Knights of Pendragon comic book (2014), but others attempt to depict horrific events in post-Arthurian eras, as occurs in Mark Atkin’s film Knight of the Dead (2013) and David R. Flores’s Dead Future King e-comic (2012-2015). Unlike Ron Wolfe and Dusty Higgins’s Knights of the Living Dead comic, the other major work of zombie-themed Arthuriana of the 2010s (and the central piece of my earlier investigation), these four texts do not effect radical change of the tradition, yet they still offer insight into how horror tropes can be adapted into an Arthurian context to bring new life to a fifteen-hundred-year-old legend that few seem to connect with today.