Fast Zombies and Social Rights: The Case of Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City (1980)

In the tense atmosphere that preceded the May 1981 Italian referendums on abortion, Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City is released. Included in several ‘Best Zombie Movies’ lists, Nightmare City is important for at least two reasons; first, because it inaugurates a significant and eventually successful variation on the zombie image: the fast zombie; second, as a commentary on the most salient social debate of the late 1970s and early 1980s – the one on the self-determination of Italian women. The aesthetic and the metaphorical levels of Lenzi’s film are strictly connected and the infected people running around drinking the blood of others are the embodiment of a reactionary response to the ongoing social transformation. Nightmare City joins the Italian political dispute of the late 1970s by openly opposing the women’s freedom of choice and by channeling and amplifying the most conservative side of that quasi-eschatological battle.