MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Although the wave of Italian Westerns made during the 1960s and 70s was a reaction to the wide influence and commercial success of that most American of film genres, the Spaghetti sub-genre was also influenced by the popularity of horror films with contemporary Italians. This helps to explain the close association of extreme violence and gore-filled close-ups with Spaghettis. Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 Django—the original in a “franchise” of several dozen films made in several countries—not only makes ample use of these two elements common to the horror genre in his remake of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1962) and Leone’s Fistful of Dollars (1964), Corbucci also chooses to use imagery often associated with the zombie sub-genre. For example, to portray the 50-some Klansmen making up most of a gang of Confederate veterans competing to control a small border region between Texas and Mexico, Corbucci directs these figures to walk slowly and stoically, gives them no lines, and no independence of action or thought. Unlike the Mexican rebels, who are portrayed as the traditional anarchic bandolier- and sombrero-wearing stereotypes, when they are wearing their red hoods these Southern-Americans are portrayed as walking dead. The effect of this, especially given Corbucci’s use of the triello (trio) narrative structure made famous by Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) is to make the Southerners, the white supremacists, look like the Other rather than the Mexicans (merely “other”). Put more bluntly: in what ways are the white supremacist ideology and the practice of chattel slavery like the zombie drive? For that matter, what does the popularization of zombie myth say about the relationship of European and African cultures in the “modern” imagination? Django paves the way for the racial dimension of Night of the Living Dead (1968) and the spaghetti-slave narrative, Django Unchained (2012).