This chapter analyses Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies (2009) and David Lachapelle’s Romeo & Juliet (2005) as screen works that appropriate Shakespeare not through the play-text of Romeo and Juliet but instead through its screen history of networked hypertexts. I argue that both films decentre Shakespeare as a source by appropriating Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), rather than the play-text, as a key hypotext. Both Levine and Lachapelle’s works can be discussed from various perspectives of adaptation studies. They are, for example, good examples of genre films – Lachapelle’s Romeo & Juliet, a six-minute film advertising H&M denim jeans, is a commercial advertisement in the form of a music video, whilst Warm Bodies is a romzomcom.

Since the 1980s, the ubiquity of Gothic monsters across literary, filmic and televisual media indicates both a widespread need to give form to the amorphous forces that shape our lives under free market capitalism and an eschatological awareness of all that has been lost and destroyed by the dark energies of neoliberal economics. The Neoliberal Gothic, this chapter argues, adopts the conventions of the Gothic mode to indict the perpetrators of global misery while enabling us to think around our investment in the neoliberal status quo and imagine a better way of being in the world. The Neoliberal Gothic becomes, therefore, a means of both seeing and being other-wise, proffering both critique of the present and a roadmap to a future in which our cities do not lie in ruins and we do not feel hunted by dark forces that we have no power to resist. Texts under consideration include the television series: American Horror Story, (2011), Carnivàle (2003–5) and The Strain (2012–17); films Blade (1998) and Land of the Dead (2005); and Justin Cronin’s novels The Passage (2010), The Twelve (2012) and City of Mirrors (2016).

While the naming of Caribbean works as speculative fiction has enabled the possibility of this regionally specific genre to take shape in the twenty-first century, there has been a long tradition of literary works that seek to represent alternative and multiple realities by fragmenting realist forms and employing the rich folkloric and spiritual traditions of the region. Figures such as the soucouyant and mermaid often symbolize gendered realities, the zombie represents psychological trauma, and spirits emphasize the continuation of the past in the present. Drawing on elements of fantasy, these works are thus often deeply informed by socio-political concerns and traumatic events, and arguably transform, rather than bypass, the historic character of Caribbean literature. Through the utopian/dystopian scenarios recognizable within speculative literature, readers are returned to the issues of memory, history and identity, while also pushing at the imaginative limits of community and embodiment in their creation of alternate possibilities.

What remains in life’s wake? Postapocalyptic literature long has imagined the end as a kind of beginning; someone or something always survives Armageddon, if only for a time. This is the postapocalyptic condition of possibility, enabling the genre’s cathected tropes of loss and redemption, regression and advance. Even when the survivors are not recognizably human—are androids, aliens, or nonhuman animals—“life” goes on. Engaging with a range of American fiction and nonfiction (from Ray Bradbury to Octavia Butler to Ray Kurzweil), this essay argues that what unites the posthuman and the postapocalyptic is, first, a shared, vitalistic investment in what might be called “life after death” and, second, a refusal or inability to narrate a final, lasting extinction. In H. P. Lovecraft’s radical take on Darwinian evolution, however, we can see the prospect of a posthuman sublime that never reconstitutes the autonomous subject. The chapter concludes with a brief meditation on the implications—metaphysical, biopolitical, and critical—of this self-alienation.