Since 1845, when Edgar Allan Poe brought the American zombie into being in the brief tale ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, this simultaneously dead and yet perversely living figure has proffered a highly gothic challenge to the primacy of instrumental rationality on which the post-Enlightenment discourse of national identity rests. For the dead should stay dead. They should not reanimate or communicate. They should certainly not affect in any way the lives, or selfhood, of the living. And yet they do. What is more, zombie narratives allow for a revisitation of a number of themes familiar from the American gothic canon. For the zombie-apocalypse narrative estranges us from the erstwhile familiarity of its setting, now uncannily populated by a range of American selves that have been transformed into agents of chaos by an external entity. With alarming rapidity, these will destroy those markers of cultural identity Americans hold most dear: the proactive individual, the home, the family, civil society and democratic individualism itself. In gothic terms, this thematic of assault on the national endeavour stretches back to Cotton Mather's warnings of satanic intervention in American life that Hawthorne would develop in his depiction of the civil body corrupted. Here is a sense of the fundamental manipulability of American subjects, the essential instability of their cultural institutions and the duplicitous complicity of their chosen mode of government with those very forces that are inimical to the interests of the people. All are familiar paradigms, characterizing the New England gothic tradition from Brockden Brown to Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. The zombie narrative, with its additional investment in discourses of bodily corruption, has brought this matrix of concerns into the present moment echoing, in the process, Southern Gothic's concern with degenerative deliquescence whilst drawing on science fiction's contagion dynamics and body horror's allegorization of the corporeal. The zombie is, then, an exceptionally gothic creature and, for all its Caribbean origins, a very American one too.