MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Boris Sagal’s The Omega Man, a “zombie” film starring Charlton Heston (the second major adaptation of Richard Matheson’s novella, I Am Legend), was released in the early 1970s, a period of American history marked by incredible progress and bitter strife in the struggle for racial equality and justice. This period gave rise to the Black Power Movement, and screenwriters John William Corrington and Joyce Corrington wrote the black female lead, Lisa, as a tribute to the movement.

While Lisa does resemble iconic Black Panther Angela Davis, the tribute was largely aesthetic. Refracted through the lens of white racial anxiety, it is members of the Family – the clan of infected, vampire-like plague survivors – who are coded as a stand-in for the Black Power Movement, with their calls for militarism, separatism, and non-cooperation, while Lisa represents nonviolence and racial integration, the values of the earlier Civil Rights Movement.

Lisa’s romantic involvement with Neville, the white male protagonist, offers a glimpse of hope for a future beyond the apocalypse, through interracial union and reproduction. (It was also an echo of American social mores, as one of the earliest portrayals of interracial sex, just four years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia.)

However, this hope is lost when Lisa, “turned” by the plague, betrays Neville and becomes a member of the Family – following the popular narrative that the Civil Rights Movement’s vision for an idyllic, unified utopia was usurped by the militant Black Power Movement. Through the relationships between Lisa, the Family, and Neville, we can trace mainstream America’s figuration of the two movements.

This abstract is respectfully submitted to be considered as part of Professor Sylvia Tomasch’s panel, “American Zombies.”