Yes, there’s such a thing as zombie porn

A decades-old internet maxim is Rule 34: that if you can imagine it, there’s porn of it. The rule came from a 2003 reimagining of a Calvin and Hobbes comic.

Decades later and generative AI means we’re only a few clicks away from not merely consuming but even creating the wildest depravity our filthy minds can concoct. Which brings us to zombie porn.

Zombies – be it as presented in classic monster movies or in long-running TV shows like The Walking Dead – have had decades to make their undead mark on the pop culture landscape.

By now, audiences are all too familiar with their stilted, arms-outstretched gait, the grunting. Show us some disintegrating clothes and decomposing flesh and we know a zombie when we see one.

Just as someone thought it could be sexy to rejig Calvin’s relationship with his tiger friend, the porn industry has been smuttying up the pop culture we know and love for decades.

George Romero’s zombie classic Night of the Living Dead (1968) for instance, has gone through all manner of debaucherous rewrites including as the Italian sexual exploitation film Le notti erotiche dei morti viventi (Erotic Nights of the Living Dead) (1980) to the more recent Night of the Giving Head (2008).

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Re-Penetrator (2004) is the kinky spin on Re-Animator (1985); Porn of the Dead (2006) and Dawna of the Dead (2008) pornify Dawn of the Dead (2004); Evil Head (2012), is the dirty spin on The Evil Dead (1981), and the porn series World War XXX (2014-2015) is the pervy take on World War Z (2013).

Not to mention the countless scenes and clips that borrow heavily from mainstream pop culture.

In my chapter ‘Hardcore Horror: Finding Arousal in the Undead’ published recently in The Palgrave Handbook of the Zombie, I examined the zombie porn sub-genre exploring what it looks like, how to understand it, and notably where the appeals lies.

Of the enticements that interest me most is the access provided to taboo. In a world where much sexual behaviour has lost its stigma, two taboos endure: necrophilia and bestiality.

Zombie porn provides an answer to them.

Years ago, I wrote a book called Part-Time Perverts: Sex, Pop Culture and Kink Management. My contention was that interest in the sexually forbidden is almost universal, but we each dabble in different degrees.

Pop culture provides the way most of us experience it, offering us a vicarious outlet, enabling us to watch and imagine and maybe get a little aroused or even get off, all the while sidelining most of the ethical, moral, psychological or legal ramifications of physical engagement.

Naturally, necrophilia and bestiality remain taboo because of law and morality.

Prohibition, however, doesn’t wholly negate the temptation – hence why pop culture regularly flirts with these sexual no-nos: the human yen to look behind the curtain, to rip open the sealed section or to touch the wet paint ensures there’ll always be an audience for the dodgy and problematic content we’re not supposed to see or be aroused by.

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Zombie porn provides an access to taboo fantasy free from the mess.

There in all their rotting glory are zombies. In porn, zombies are bonking each other, sometimes bonking and regularly infecting mortals, but death and danger hovers over each scene.

To have sex with a zombie is to quite literally risk it all for a few moments of pleasure: if any kind of sex could kill you, it’s sex with the undead.

Be it in mainstream or porn presentations, zombies are monsters. Sure, they were once human, so we know them anatomically, but their supernatural transformation has rendered them as markedly not-alive and no longer human: the gnashing, the brain-eating, illustrates this well.

Sex between a human and a zombie offers a cross-species presentation, but also sex that inherently bucks ethical and moral boundaries offering a taboo titillation within the elastic bounds of acceptable.

Zombie porn reflects the complexity of appetite: some people like watching beautiful folks making love on clean linen, others prefer ogling reanimated corpses who look like they literally just climbed out of a grave.

While such material provides an outlet for the ordinary porn consumer seeking something a little different, it can also be viewed as catering to those with kinkier tastes via its nudging of a range of traditional taboos.

This article draws on Associate Professor Lauren Rosewarne’s chapter ‘Hardcore Horror: Finding Arousal in the Undead’ published in The Palgrave Handbook of the Zombie (2025).