An Unconventional Zombie: Subcultural Genres, Global Art Cinema, and Bio-power in Sebastian Hofmann's Halley (2012)

With an unconventional living-dead protagonist and a minimalist auteur style, Halley brings to the fore how the tensions between genre movies and art cinema operate in a transnational context. Halley surprises the audience with the story of a security guard who is dead but remains alive. While his flesh decomposes, Beto goes to work and continues with his lonely life pretending that everything is fine. In this sense, the film presents an unconventional zombie: Beto is not a monster, he is harmless and he is an obedient worker, but his condition exhibits his alienation in society. This article analyses Beto’s impossible embodiment from the perspective of film categorization, taking into account the intersections between auteur cinema and subcultural genres such as zombie movies in a transnational context. To that end, I rely on Dolores Tierney’s mapping of cult cinema in Latin America as well as on Ignacio Sánchez Prado’s analysis of global art cinema in México, both of which are related to international film circuits. Secondly, this article focuses on the sociopolitical implications of Beto’s living-dead body. I trace the trope of the living-dead character and analyse its political commentary from the perspective of bio-power. Drawing from Giorgio Agamben’s exploration of the homo sacer and bare life, this article explores how Beto’s embodiment evokes his diminished agency but also its subversive potential. With a body that transcends basic medical categorizations of life and death, Beto confronts Foucault’s idea of bio-power and resists the clinic.

Draft of the article published in New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 2020.