Zombies
No other mythical animal encapsulates the modern dilemma so well. We are hungry for life, we stumble onward unaware of how it has disappeared. Shopping malls, large cities, British pubs, and even the internet are shown for their ability to dehumanize us, to make us machines that follow patterns. When the world within the horror movie is overrun, as it always is, arms reaching in through broken windows, we recognize that feeling. Here in the destructive, hungry swarm of the undead is that long day where everything goes wrong. It’s easy to be overwhelmed.
As Americans, zombies are mostly our monsters. Whereas Dracula roosts in a dreary Transylvanian castle and the mummy repines under the Egyptian pyramids, the zombie has made multitudes of his appearances in the towns and cities of the good, old US of A. Even in Fulci’s famous Zombi, the film with the famous shark vs. zombie scene, where most of the action occurs on a tropical island, the story ties up in a New York morgue.
Night of the Living Dead and it successors often deal with the shameful parts of American society. Racism, the growing divisions in class, and rampant consumerism are reflected back in the mirror darkly. What does not matter to us in little increments becomes as horrifying as the living dead when people make choices in moments of extremis. When the ghettos are closed off as a lost cause in Day of the Dead, it presages a future in which New Orleans sat and wondered when help would come.
While the term “zombie” may have originated with the Haitian voodoo zombie, we have commandeered / appropriated it to our purposes. And a Haitian voodoo zombie is nothing more than a flesh golem, something to be commanded. The American zombie has no such controls and rituals are useless. Our zombies have forgotten their witchy past and refuse to join up with any religion (though many religions reference them as a sign of the end times.) Often, zombies in churchyards are applied as proof of what prayers are not answered and what peace cannot be found even on sanctified ground.
Every zombie movie has a touch of existential philosophy written in to it. Always the protagonists are aware of how quickly they can be deprived of life. They are fully cognizant of how little sense their own plans can make in a world where entropy is such an overwhelming force. And as time progresses, many characters cannot deal with the bleakness of a life under siege. Without the comfort of routine, faced only with raw humanity and mortality, many zombie-movie civilians go mad and kill themselves or others to grasp at control. As Sartre said, “Hell is other people.” He left off the end of the sentence, “who will dismember you and eat you alive.”
And these days, zombies feel like the light-hearted apocalypse of choice. We have so many reasonable ways the world could end: global warming, pandemic, overpopulation, pollution, and, as ever, war. It’s a long list, with many subtopics. For example, if I want to be really scared, I can spend hours reading through cdc.gov’s travel advisories. These threats are ever present, constantly in the news, and no longer the realm of theologists and poets. William Blake’s “Fire and Ice” would be a much longer poem these days; it omits so much, even what we grew up with.
When I was a child, we were ready for nuclear destruction even in the wheat fields of North Dakota. I learned duck-and-cover at Pioneer Elementary School, read A Canticle for Liebowitz from my mother’s bookshelf, and understood that our grasp on existence was transient from the start. Someone could accidentally destroy us all by pressing a button. Now the fears we face are more nebulous; today we are on orange alert. Why we are at these heightened levels of threat and what impetus brings zombies down on us are equally unknown.
And the irrationality of it all is what brings me back again and again to the zombie genre. In it, I find what causes me fear: the unexpected, illogical, inexplicable end of what I know. In my dreams I try to seal off the house, I fight through hordes, but there is an obfuscation of logic that proves my efforts will be for naught. But the fact that the zombie is a creature unto which one can never surrender gives me hope. To quit fighting is to be inhuman, to be inhuman is to lose life, personality, and joy.
As Americans, zombies are mostly our monsters. Whereas Dracula roosts in a dreary Transylvanian castle and the mummy repines under the Egyptian pyramids, the zombie has made multitudes of his appearances in the towns and cities of the good, old US of A. Even in Fulci’s famous Zombi, the film with the famous shark vs. zombie scene, where most of the action occurs on a tropical island, the story ties up in a New York morgue.
Night of the Living Dead and it successors often deal with the shameful parts of American society. Racism, the growing divisions in class, and rampant consumerism are reflected back in the mirror darkly. What does not matter to us in little increments becomes as horrifying as the living dead when people make choices in moments of extremis. When the ghettos are closed off as a lost cause in Day of the Dead, it presages a future in which New Orleans sat and wondered when help would come.
While the term “zombie” may have originated with the Haitian voodoo zombie, we have commandeered / appropriated it to our purposes. And a Haitian voodoo zombie is nothing more than a flesh golem, something to be commanded. The American zombie has no such controls and rituals are useless. Our zombies have forgotten their witchy past and refuse to join up with any religion (though many religions reference them as a sign of the end times.) Often, zombies in churchyards are applied as proof of what prayers are not answered and what peace cannot be found even on sanctified ground.
Every zombie movie has a touch of existential philosophy written in to it. Always the protagonists are aware of how quickly they can be deprived of life. They are fully cognizant of how little sense their own plans can make in a world where entropy is such an overwhelming force. And as time progresses, many characters cannot deal with the bleakness of a life under siege. Without the comfort of routine, faced only with raw humanity and mortality, many zombie-movie civilians go mad and kill themselves or others to grasp at control. As Sartre said, “Hell is other people.” He left off the end of the sentence, “who will dismember you and eat you alive.”
And these days, zombies feel like the light-hearted apocalypse of choice. We have so many reasonable ways the world could end: global warming, pandemic, overpopulation, pollution, and, as ever, war. It’s a long list, with many subtopics. For example, if I want to be really scared, I can spend hours reading through cdc.gov’s travel advisories. These threats are ever present, constantly in the news, and no longer the realm of theologists and poets. William Blake’s “Fire and Ice” would be a much longer poem these days; it omits so much, even what we grew up with.
When I was a child, we were ready for nuclear destruction even in the wheat fields of North Dakota. I learned duck-and-cover at Pioneer Elementary School, read A Canticle for Liebowitz from my mother’s bookshelf, and understood that our grasp on existence was transient from the start. Someone could accidentally destroy us all by pressing a button. Now the fears we face are more nebulous; today we are on orange alert. Why we are at these heightened levels of threat and what impetus brings zombies down on us are equally unknown.
And the irrationality of it all is what brings me back again and again to the zombie genre. In it, I find what causes me fear: the unexpected, illogical, inexplicable end of what I know. In my dreams I try to seal off the house, I fight through hordes, but there is an obfuscation of logic that proves my efforts will be for naught. But the fact that the zombie is a creature unto which one can never surrender gives me hope. To quit fighting is to be inhuman, to be inhuman is to lose life, personality, and joy.