Hearts of Darkness: On the Timeliness of Modern Zombie Cinema
What is the reason, then—in these days when a lonely country house is likely to be equipped with electric light, radio and telephone—for our returning to these antiquated tales? There are, I believe, two reasons: first, the longing for mystic experience which seems always to manifest itself in periods of social confusion, when political progress is blocked: as soon as we feel that our own world has failed us, we try to find evidence for another world; second, the instinct to inoculate ourselves against panic before the real terrors loose in the world—the Gestapo, the GPU, tank attacks, bombing from the air, and empty cities mined with booby traps—by injections of imaginary horror which soothe us with the momentary illusion that the forces of madness and murder may be tamed and compelled to provide us with mere dramatic entertainment.
Edmund Wilson, “A Treatise on Tales of Horror”
It’s only natural that every living thing actively seeks to escape death for as long as possible, but only the human animal is cursed with the foreknowledge of its own inevitable demise. Since the painful instant in early childhood when we are made to recognize that our lives are impermanent we do all we can to suppress the hateful insight deep within our psyches, eagerly recruiting the most imaginative trappings of religion and philosophy to obscure the inescapable. But death comes when we have it least in mind, oblivious to the circumstances of our lives and all our careful planning. It is this iron invariability, impervious to prayer, sacrifice or supplication, which can commit us to long nights of existential anguish.
An objective indicator of our ongoing balance of terror with mortality is an instinctive fear of the dead. Rites for the disposal of corpses differ greatly among cultures, but one consistent requirement is the removal of the deceased from the surviving populace as quickly as is possible. The most obvious reason for isolating the dead from the living is hygiene: large amounts of decomposing flesh and organ tissue necessarily generate disease-causing bacteria, and our early ancestors doubtless experienced the horrors of pestilence and infection many times over before the survivors learned to dispose of their dead with care. Furthermore the aesthetic qualities of rotting associates and loved ones are unsettling at best, and the confrontation with once familiar individuals, suddenly transformed to unmoving flesh and then, gradually, inevitably, into reeking ruin, must have sparked disquiet in even our most hardened Paleolithic ancestors.[1]
Thus the universal insistence on a speedy return to the earth, the sea, the sky—anywhere but the deceased’s former environment, still home to the living. From the bizarre Western insistence on embalming fluid, cosmetics, and leaden coffins to Sufi sky-burial and Hindu funeral pyres, humanity distances itself from its stilled compatriots for the best of reasons and in the most imaginative of methods. And when the dead, now irreconcilably the “other,” return through dream, hallucination or physical encounter, the very bedrock of our being is shaken in a way that understandably brings about the most violent reactions.[2] To be somehow confronted with a fellow human who has crossed back through what we have understood to be an impassable perimeter deals a crippling blow to our rationality, and the idea of such a traveler attempting to forcibly recruit us to their alien realm inspires a literally animal repugnance.[3]
~
The taxonomy of the “living dead” has become commonly understood today as comprising vampires (popularized by Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula), golems and other constructed automatons (venerated in Kabala and known more widely through the 1818 novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley), and the zombie, a creature without literary provenance but which arose from actual religious beliefs native to the Caribbean.[4] While most Americans were initially made aware of the vodou (hereafter “voodoo”) religion, a New World hybrid of French Catholic and West African belief and practice, during the US military occupation of Haiti (1915-1934), it was not until the release of the horror film White Zombie (1932) that we were first introduced to the bastardized and misleading Hollywood creation that has shambled so successfully through our cinema for almost eighty years. The “zombie” of modern popular culture is therefore a uniquely filmic creation.[5]
White Zombie, released the year after Universal’s groundbreaking and highly influential adaptations of Frankenstein and Dracula, depicts black islanders brought back to mindless life and enslaved by the wicked (and white) Legendre (Bela Lugosi) to labor on his sugarcane plantation. This arrangement, despite the unlikelihood of a European mastering the deeply insular occult intricacies of zombification, is actually a good deal more in keeping with Caribbean zombie practice as presently understood (though those “zombies” are living victims of powerful neurotoxins and suggestive rituals rather than risen corpses) than the brain-dead cannibals of the modern zombie film.
White Zombie’s loose plot seems rather conventional to us today, but it opened the door for a new creature to join the burgeoning American horror film pantheon, a being unprecedented in its disconcerting theological implications and, as we will see, protean in its ability to adapt itself to our contemporary concerns.
The stylized encounter of creole or expatriate whites and black undead was widely popular in the years following White Zombie, resulting in the release of films such as Revolt of the Zombies (1936) and King of the Zombies (1941), but these efforts were mainly puerile depictions of blank-eyed, ragged black peasants posing a series of threats to the white gentry. More effective by far was Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943), a drama loosely based on Jane Eyre and produced by the inestimable Val Lewton that remains a towering example of the genre. Yet even this masterpiece of ominous drums and orgiastic rites kept the zombie archetype securely confined to its Caribbean locale and exotically religious inception, comfortably remote in place and circumstance from the American filmgoer. The living dead would have to wait another quarter century before riding a wave of cultural turmoil to our native shore.
~
George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) is the foundational text of the modern zombie film, reinventing the revenant for a generation questioning everything that had gone before it. Romero’s original screenplay, entitled “Night of Anubis,” was heavily indebted to Richard Matheson’s short novel I Am Legend (1954), the initial film adaptation of which (Ubaldo Ragona’s The Last Man on Earth (1964)) effectively illustrated the ghostly post-apocalyptic urban settings that Romero would benefit from in his own films.[6] Romero’s groundbreaking realization was to transport the living dead from their obscure island genesis to modern small-town America, thrusting an image of unspeakable horror before the public with the same unsubtle brutality that the evening news was bringing the chaotic bloodbath of Vietnam into the American living room.
Among the shifts in approach that Romero used to distance his creations from their actual voodoo origin include the removal of a bokor, or voodoo priest, from the zombies’ inception; instead, vague rumors broadcast over a sputtering radio of radioactive contamination from a space probe returning [sic] from Venus are implicitly to blame.[7] The deliberately uncertain and illogical origin of Romero’s monsters, referred to as “ghouls” rather than “zombies” in Night of the Living Dead, serves to reinforce the horror of the protagonists’ situation—they are thrust into the midst of a phenomenon none of them can explain through rational thought, thereby depriving them of the use of humanity’s strongest weapon: its logic. Instead the living must combat the relentless dead through the most primitive of means, and the irrationality of their predicament coupled with the disappearance of external civil order only serves to exacerbate societally-suppressed internal conflicts of race, sex and class. The farmhouse/bunker they consign themselves to demands claustrophobic proximity with strangers, and the agonizing anticipation of the approaching dead inspires a grim cabin fever that threatens to destroy the survivors from within.
Night of the Living Dead also established a number of conventions which have since generally governed how zombies are depicted.[8] Like their Caribbean cousins, Romero’s ghouls shamble about rather slowly, as befits a reanimated corpse, though they are somewhat quicker in Night than in subsequent Romero outings.[9] The most alarming propensity of these creatures is truly revisionist: a devotion to cannibalism of the living, inducing that most ancient of pre-human fears, that of being eaten alive. A Romero ghoul can only be stopped by removing the head or destroying the brain, a directive rendered in the film by a television newsman’s brutal advice: “Kill the brain and you destroy the ghoul.” These beings are not mindless slaves but instinctual predators, unswervingly determined to attain the flesh of the living. Survivors of a zombie bite quickly become lethargic and violently ill before succumbing to a brief death and subsequent, ferocious resurrection.
This last precept is particularly repellant as it forces the victim’s caregivers—friends, family, lovers—to tend their patient with the unbearable knowledge that eventually, inexorably, the invalid will expire only to rise again and attack them without mercy or memory of their past existence. R. H. W. Dillard, a former professor of English at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, and an authority on the aesthetics of the horror genre, noted that aside from subjecting viewers to an overt fear of being killed and cannibalized, Night “takes the source of its horrors from another desire and a fear that lies certainly as deep in the human consciousness, if not deeper. This is fear of the dead and particularly of the known dead, of dead kindred.”[10]
As the referential modern zombie film, a review of the plot of Night of the Living Dead provides a succinct assessment of Romero’s adaptations of the traditional zombie ideal to fit his own era and mindset. The film opens with a slow tracking shot of a car driving down a lonely country road. It stops by a cemetery, where “(t)he graveyard is no neo-expressionistic set like that of Frankenstein with a painted sky; it is a small Pennsylvania country graveyard, flatly lit and unretouched.”[11] Barbara and Johnny, an urbane brother and sister presumably from Pittsburg (Romero’s hometown), are visiting their mother’s grave in this secluded location. Johnny complains about the long drive back to the city, and teases Barbara for her adherence to religious rituals of observance. He then begins to play on his sister’s fear of cemeteries, pointing out a man in the distance walking unsteadily among the tombstones and exclaiming, with a faux-Karloff accent, “He’s coming to get you, Barbara!” This man is revealed as our first modern zombie, and he immediately attacks Barbara with uncontrolled determination. Johnny comes to her rescue and is killed.[12] Barbara then flees to a deserted farmhouse nearby where she is shortly joined by Ben, another displaced survivor of what is slowly recognized as a widespread disaster.
Ben, reading the gravity of their situation, immediately begins to board up the house in an attempt to create a fortress of resistance until the “authorities” can presumably provide relief. The dull autumn fields and woods that surround the farmhouse, depicted in a deliberately austere black and white, are vacant of movement, but their very emptiness, knowing what Ben and the viewer now know, provides a menacing sense of waiting.[13] Barbara, having seen her brother murdered at her feet and barely escaping the same fate, slumps on a sofa in a catatonic trance. Shortly thereafter the Cooper family, Harry, Helen and their young daughter, Karen, who has been bitten by a zombie and is dying, are discovered hiding in the cellar, which Harry insists is the only safe place in the house.
Much has been made of the fact that Ben is played by a black actor, Duane Jones, who as the most articulate and authoritative among them instantly becomes the leader of the group.[14] Or at least he commands those upstairs; Harry’s unyielding belief in the security of the cellar (he is eventually proven correct on this point) leads to conflict with Ben, who prefers the openness and maneuverability of defending the several ground-floor rooms. The tension between the two boils with unexpressed racial antagonism, and initially the viewers’ sympathies are with Ben, particularly as Harry is exposed as a poor husband (“We may not enjoy living together,” his wife tells him at one point, “but dying together isn’t going to solve anything”) and a coward to boot. During the subsequent zombie onslaught, however, Ben gradually descends from his noble beginnings, both figuratively and literally: he becomes a harsh and unforgiving taskmaster, striking the hapless Barbara for failing to follow his commands and eventually shooting Harry to death – five times – in a duel for leadership of the refugees. Ben finally retreats to the cellar, the very place he had earlier condemned as a “deathtrap,” to slouch impotently in a corner as the undead contagion rages above.
Two other refugees, the teenaged couple Tom and Judy, join Ben and company in the farmhouse shortly before the zombie onslaught. “The film is, then, the story of everyday people in an ordinary landscape … the way in which Night of the Living Dead transforms that familiar and ordinary world into a landscape of unrelenting horror reveals the film’s moral nature and the deep and terrible fear that is at its heart.”[15] As the bleak daylight wanes the undead manifest themselves, first in ones and twos, then in growing numbers. They are drawn to the farmhouse like moths to candlelight; the motes of warmed breath that pulse from the living command the recently dead to seek them out and internalize their essences.[16]
Later zombie films contain a high quotient of macho survivalist gunnery, but in this simple tale the survivors make use of whatever weapons naturally come to hand in an abandoned farmhouse: boards, axes, jerry-rigged torches. They learn from experience that the ghouls may be killed by massive head trauma, and thus the undead loose a bit of their initial overwhelming ambiance. But even with the ghouls reduced to a sort of stupefied, filthy rabble of murderous man-eaters, monstrous yet stoppable, other profound fears inherent to their dilemma begin to reveal themselves.
Perhaps most disturbing is the film’s presentation of interfamilial slayings. Newscasts derive an intense emotional impact in the reporting of matricide and the murder of children by their parents, hyping the primal biological sin of destroying one’s own gene pool. The ancient Greeks recognized the ingrained capacity of these actions to mesmerize audiences, and the filmic descendants of plays such as Oedipus Rex and Electra continue to feed upon this genetic dread. In Night two characters meet their doom at the hands of reanimated family members. Barbara, startlingly confronted with her brother Johnnie tearing his way into the farmhouse, hesitates long enough for him to carry her off to be devoured. Likewise Helen, locked in the fetid cellar with her now deceased daughter, is unable to summon effective resistance when Karen arises and stabs her to death with a trowel in a frenzied montage of spraying blood and dissonant electronic noise.[17]
In a nod to the swirling social chaos of its time, the center of Night’s circle of survivors cannot hold for long. The film’s cuts become shorter and more frenetic as the ghouls break through the barricades and the defenders go down one by one. Tom and Judy, attempting to flee in the farm’s pickup, are destroyed when spilling gasoline ignites and explodes, and the ensuing sequence of zombies picking burnt flesh from the vehicle’s charred interior and settling down on the blackened grass to gorge themselves is one of the first truly gory set pieces in the film. Ben kills the reanimated Karen as he retreats to the cellar, the sole survivor.
The vague morning light brings birdsong (a singular moment of peace and normalcy) and a reassertion of civil authority in the form of a local sheriff, his deputies, and a motley assortment of rustic vigilantes armed with deer rifles and shotguns. They methodically shoot down the zombies surrounding the farmhouse and heap them up to burn. Ben, hearing the gunshots, awakens from his stupor, cautiously ascends the stairs and peers out a window, only to be neatly drilled through the forehead by an alert if mistaken marksman. His body too is then dragged away for burning in a stately closing sequence of spare and grainy still shots heavily laden with the inert imagery of martyrdom, whether deserved or not.
In the classic definition of the self-sacrificing “hero” Ben falls somewhat short. Indeed, under the moral relativism characteristic of the postmodern worldview that shaped this narrative, none of the characters in Night of the Living Dead can be said to be “heroic,” save for the simple Tom in his doomed attempt to rescue Judy from the truck before it exploded. In the impossible horror they find themselves trapped in, the circumstances that might have sparked altruist behavior in such recognizable disasters as a house fire or car wreck are erased along with the societal conventions that had made such heroic instances plausible. To be torn apart by putrefying corpses and eaten alive is too terrible to imagine, and a perhaps more realistic, though less theatrically dramatic, resolution to a crisis such as this would be a swift retreat to stark shrieking insanity.
By refusing to incorporate the standard cinematic assumptions of human behavior under extreme duress, Romero offers us a less attractive but more convincing interpretation of how a zombie apocalypse (the preferred term among enthusiasts) would unfold. The beleaguered farmhouse of Night of the Living Dead serves as an effective microcosm of not only mankind pushed to its psychological limits but also of the inevitable reversion to selfish, unrestrained behavior that the abrupt stripping away of social institutions and civic law enforcement allows. When societal foundations such as science and religion collapse under the incontrovertible weight of empirical experience any form of human behavior becomes valid, and few things can more efficiently annihilate one’s scientific and religious sensibilities than having an undead relation snapping at your throat. “To a greater or lesser degree, every zombie film poses the same questions: If God is dead and society is crumbling and supposedly civilized people are reduced to tearing at each other like wild animals, why be decent? These are not the preoccupations of escapist entertainment; they’re the foundations of a morality play.”[18]
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Why, then, if the zombie theme offers such traumatic and disturbing material, has it recently become so hugely popular, not just on film but in television, fiction, comics and video games? More broadly, why is the horror genre, one built upon fear and disgust, so perennially attractive to so many people? The academic Noel Carroll opines that “art-horror,” a representation that combines horror (terror plus physical and/or psychic disgust) with aesthetic appreciation, “is the price we are willing to pay for the revelation of that which is impossible and unknown, of that which violates our conceptual schema.”[19] Carroll’s critics argue that this is all well and good for “unknowable” monsters like zombies and werewolves, but that for “knowable” (human and therefore, presumably, comprehensible) antagonists such as serial killers this “ticket to ride” approach is less useful.
Furthermore Carroll’s somewhat fussy insistence that it is our curiosity (an instinct proven deadly, ad nauseam, in horror films) which chiefly motivates our pleasure in horror, our desire to penetrate the alien exoskeleton or stained hockey mask to learn the monster’s motivations and mentality, has the ring of speculative over-think to it. To acknowledge the simplest explanation for our love of horror—that we actually enjoy being frightened and appalled by what is onscreen or between book covers—seems the more honest conclusion. “It is not that we crave disgust,” Carroll intones, “but that disgust is the predictable concomitant of disclosing the unknown.” Certainly the pursuit of the weird, beautiful and strange, of the sublime, is among the foremost obsessions of the creative mind. Yet to reduce something as primitive and integral as love of horror to this kind of plodding scientific methodology obscures the simple fact of the pleasure we attain from being (safely) horrified.[20] As Freud would have it, because a zombie film’s uncanny subject is familiar yet strange, it creates a cognitive dissonance within the viewer that is due to a compulsory juxtaposition of attraction and repulsion. We somehow love what we fear and loathe.
So long as the horror is confined to book, stage, or film, that is. Real horror, that which in its manifold forms can envelope and destroy us at any moment, has of course lost none of its terrible power as we have journeyed through the millennia. Depictions of slaughter and mutilation experienced vicariously through representation, however, safely distances us from the horror onscreen while allowing an audience the chance to wallow in bloody revenge or insensate violence for a time, releasing some of the accumulated detritus of modern civilization in a terrible catharsis which leaves the viewer drained and, yes, satisfied.
The zombie film in particular speaks to the anxieties of our postmodern age. “What is a zombie, after all? It is something that was once human but has had the spark of life, the drive of ambition and individuality, literally drained out of it, so it is part of a mindless horde. Sound familiar? Think of the millions of people in the suburbs, stupefied in front of the television. How about the teeming masses (that) flock to malls every weekend, or those of us who spend our days in downtown skyscrapers, packed into veal-fattening pens, peering into the flicker of the data stream. That’s right, zombies ‘R’ us, which is why they serve as a perfect metaphor for life in postindustrial, market-driven civilization.”[21]
The modern zombie film, birthed in 1968 (along with the present writer) in a time of escalating tumult and social disintegration, is more popular than ever. The post-911 existential threat of an unknowable, omnipresent Other, one that heeds neither reason nor mercy and which directly challenges our very civilization, has lent itself to another of Western history’s periodic alarums of imminent Armageddon, which in literalist Christian terms encompasses the fiery return of Christ, the bodily awakening of the dead, and the end of the world. For the consumer of today’s zombie films the images have become consistent: deserted boulevards lit by burning cars and buildings, gnawed and gutted corpses sprawled beneath an ashen sky, ransacked shops and abandoned houses, and the surreal threat of ruthless attack coming suddenly from any quarter.
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The collapse of modern civilization and the despairing struggle of its survivors touches a chord that reaches back far into our collective history, to the fall of Rome, the great plagues, the total warfare of the twentieth century, and the appalling holocausts that sporadically mar our species. The zombie film positions us in a world of utter and inescapable nightmare, where even in death the horror continues both for the living and the dead. Without dwelling overmuch on the challenges our Earth and our selves face at the moment, it seems apparent that filmic representations of the apocalyptic undead feed some deep hunger currently afflicting our psyche, gratifying our enthusiasm for distanced violence, providing cathartic escape and, perhaps, giving us just a taste of things to come.
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[1] “As such, the horror film questions the viewer’s most cherished notions about what it is to be a human being. By centering on imaginary creatures who dwell on the margins of human life and consciousness, the horror film terrifies viewers by undermining their secure sense of where human identity lies in relation to the world of the dead, of animals, or of things.” Stephen Prince, Movies and Meaning (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2010), p. 274-275.
[2] That the dead were meant to lie undisturbed and in peace is a commonly understood moral belief, and violating this most basic taboo is not meant for the merely human. In reflecting on the Lazarus story through a “zombified” lens, one scholar noted, “Christians consider him free from the torments of death, but zombification implies that Lazarus’s new reflection is the figure of the zombie voiced from the other side of the mirror. Rather than the affirmation of life postulated by a straightforward Christian reading, the zombie suggests that resurrections are degrading and humiliating acts against the individual.” Kette Thomas, “Haitian Zombie, Myth, and Modern Identity,” Comparative Literature and Culture, Vol. 12, Issue 2 (June 2010), Article 12.
[3] “Since almost all of us still think as savages do on this topic, it is no surprise that the primitive fear of the dead is still so strong within us and always ready to come to the surface on any provocation. Most likely our fear still implies the old belief that the dead man becomes the enemy of his survivor and seeks to carry him off to share his new life with him.” Sigmund Freud, “’Das 'Unheimliche’ (The ‘Uncanny’) Parts 1 & 2,” 1919, http://people/emich.edu/ecoykenda/uncanny1.html.
[4] Efforts at understanding voodoo from an informed anthropological standpoint were pioneered by two American women in the first half of the twentieth century: the novelist, folklorist and amateur ethnologist Zora Neal Hurston and the experimental filmmaker Maya Deren, both of whom learned the rituals and underpinnings firsthand from practicing voodoo priests in both the southern US and the Caribbean.
[5] William B. Seabrook’s ill-informed and chauvinistic book on Haitian voodoo, The Magic Island (1929), effectively conveyed the general concept of zombies as shambling hulks to the American reading public; however, the common tropes of the zombie film, as much as they have evolved since White Zombie, are generally absent from his meager travelogue.
[6] An Italian co-production filmed in Rome, The Last Man on Earth was the stylistic forerunner of any number of “end time” films with its gloomy realization of a depopulated earth. Vincent Price’s role as the protagonist is played with flinty authenticity, though with his ascot, snifter, and impeccable mustache, perhaps a tad too daintily for a de facto action hero.
[7] “Romero liberated the zombie from the shackles of a master, and invested his zombies not with a function … but rather a drive.” Peter Dendle, The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia (Jefferson: McFarland, 2001), p. 6.
[8] “The vast diversity of interpretations of this period [pre-Romero zombie films] suggest(s) a radical simplification and lack of uniformity in the zombie mythos, facilitating Romero’s goal of revolutionizing the dominant perception of the zombie film.” Michael Bloom, “Reanimating the Living Dead: Uncovering the Zombie Archetype in the Works of George A. Romero,” 30 April 2009, Offscreen.com, http://www.offscreen.com/index.php./pages/print_img/1186/.
[9] Danny Boyle electrified the subgenre with 28 Days Later (2002), his tale of Londoners become fast-moving, maniacal—though still living—killers through exposure to a highly infectious genetically-altered virus. The “fast zombie” was first utilized by Alien (1979) writer Dan O’Bannon in his wonderfully gruesome satiric homage Return of the Living Dead (1985), and more recently in Zack Snyder’s excellent action/horror remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004).
[10] R. H. W. Dillard, “Night of the Living Dead: It’s Not Just a Wind That’s Passing Through,” ed. Gregory A. Waller, American Horrors (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p.15. Incidentally, Dillard was the father of Annie Dillard, a distinguished Hollins University alumnus whose lyrical meditation on nature and place, A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, is widely regarded as a supreme achievement in American natural history writing.
[11] Dillard, p. 17.
[12] Oddly, the zombie that kills Johnnie does not immediately feed upon him, but instead pursues Barbara. This primacy of killing all the living in sight before feeding is overturned in subsequent Romero films.
[13] “Romero was offered a budget for color; he preferred shooting in black and white; the result is a flat murky ambience which is perfect for the ramshackle American gothic landscape upon which the events occur.” Elliot Stein, “The Night of the Living Dead,” Sight and Sound 1970, p.105.
[14] “Perhaps the only unusual thing about (the people defending the farmhouse) is that no one of them ever comments about one of their numbers being black, especially in the light of his assuming a natural leadership. But even that lack of race prejudice in a tight situation may be more ordinarily American than we might suspect.” Dillard, p. 19.
[15] Dillard, p. 20.
[16] As with religion, supernatural horror films necessarily require a deliberate suspension of disbelief, but the physical improbability of decayed corpses clawing their way through lead-lined coffins and six feet of compacted earth to emerge relatively intact and mobile is a especially difficult imaginative leap that can be accomplished only through the medium of exceptionally effective fiction and filmmaking.
[17] This instance of tool use by the undead would be largely abandoned in subsequent Romero films, indicative as it is of latent intelligence when his desired zombie archetype is utterly elemental. Likewise, the fear of fire shown by these undead is a singular instance that again detracts from their unthinking hunger, though in Romero’s Land of the Dead (2005) zombies are depicted as being entranced by fireworks. In that film the zombies are “led” by one of their number to attack the opulent Pittsburgh fortification of Fiddler’s Green (a utopian term of obscure origin also used in Neil Gaiman’s superb Sandman graphic novels) wherein the city’s elite live in decadent splendor, an overt social statement in a body of work that previously had been more subtly political.
[18] Matt Zoller Seitz, “Braaaains! The 10 essential zombie films,” Salon.com 30 May 2010: 30.
[19] Noel Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 186.
[20] The critical interpretations are multitudinous: “Recreational terror theorists claim that it is ‘fun’ to be scared, and that horror generates a particular kind of make-believe fear that is playful because it is unreal. Freudians describe monsters as embodying ‘the return of the repressed,’ gratifying the dark desires of our id and attaining a healthy catharsis of surplus repression in the process. Ideologists see monstrous forces spawned either to be destroyed, serving conservative political ends, or to survive and embody indirect social critiques. Formalists account for the pleasure in terms of the narrative structure of discovery, and feminists see the genre as a battleground on which the sex wars are being fought, and often won, by women.” Shaw, Daniel, ed. “Introduction,” Horror: Special Issue of Film and Philosophy (2001): 5-5.
[21] Andrew Potter, “Undead Like Me: Why We Love Our Zombies,” Maclean’s 4 June 2007: 14-14.
Edmund Wilson, “A Treatise on Tales of Horror”
It’s only natural that every living thing actively seeks to escape death for as long as possible, but only the human animal is cursed with the foreknowledge of its own inevitable demise. Since the painful instant in early childhood when we are made to recognize that our lives are impermanent we do all we can to suppress the hateful insight deep within our psyches, eagerly recruiting the most imaginative trappings of religion and philosophy to obscure the inescapable. But death comes when we have it least in mind, oblivious to the circumstances of our lives and all our careful planning. It is this iron invariability, impervious to prayer, sacrifice or supplication, which can commit us to long nights of existential anguish.
An objective indicator of our ongoing balance of terror with mortality is an instinctive fear of the dead. Rites for the disposal of corpses differ greatly among cultures, but one consistent requirement is the removal of the deceased from the surviving populace as quickly as is possible. The most obvious reason for isolating the dead from the living is hygiene: large amounts of decomposing flesh and organ tissue necessarily generate disease-causing bacteria, and our early ancestors doubtless experienced the horrors of pestilence and infection many times over before the survivors learned to dispose of their dead with care. Furthermore the aesthetic qualities of rotting associates and loved ones are unsettling at best, and the confrontation with once familiar individuals, suddenly transformed to unmoving flesh and then, gradually, inevitably, into reeking ruin, must have sparked disquiet in even our most hardened Paleolithic ancestors.[1]
Thus the universal insistence on a speedy return to the earth, the sea, the sky—anywhere but the deceased’s former environment, still home to the living. From the bizarre Western insistence on embalming fluid, cosmetics, and leaden coffins to Sufi sky-burial and Hindu funeral pyres, humanity distances itself from its stilled compatriots for the best of reasons and in the most imaginative of methods. And when the dead, now irreconcilably the “other,” return through dream, hallucination or physical encounter, the very bedrock of our being is shaken in a way that understandably brings about the most violent reactions.[2] To be somehow confronted with a fellow human who has crossed back through what we have understood to be an impassable perimeter deals a crippling blow to our rationality, and the idea of such a traveler attempting to forcibly recruit us to their alien realm inspires a literally animal repugnance.[3]
~
The taxonomy of the “living dead” has become commonly understood today as comprising vampires (popularized by Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula), golems and other constructed automatons (venerated in Kabala and known more widely through the 1818 novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley), and the zombie, a creature without literary provenance but which arose from actual religious beliefs native to the Caribbean.[4] While most Americans were initially made aware of the vodou (hereafter “voodoo”) religion, a New World hybrid of French Catholic and West African belief and practice, during the US military occupation of Haiti (1915-1934), it was not until the release of the horror film White Zombie (1932) that we were first introduced to the bastardized and misleading Hollywood creation that has shambled so successfully through our cinema for almost eighty years. The “zombie” of modern popular culture is therefore a uniquely filmic creation.[5]
White Zombie, released the year after Universal’s groundbreaking and highly influential adaptations of Frankenstein and Dracula, depicts black islanders brought back to mindless life and enslaved by the wicked (and white) Legendre (Bela Lugosi) to labor on his sugarcane plantation. This arrangement, despite the unlikelihood of a European mastering the deeply insular occult intricacies of zombification, is actually a good deal more in keeping with Caribbean zombie practice as presently understood (though those “zombies” are living victims of powerful neurotoxins and suggestive rituals rather than risen corpses) than the brain-dead cannibals of the modern zombie film.
White Zombie’s loose plot seems rather conventional to us today, but it opened the door for a new creature to join the burgeoning American horror film pantheon, a being unprecedented in its disconcerting theological implications and, as we will see, protean in its ability to adapt itself to our contemporary concerns.
The stylized encounter of creole or expatriate whites and black undead was widely popular in the years following White Zombie, resulting in the release of films such as Revolt of the Zombies (1936) and King of the Zombies (1941), but these efforts were mainly puerile depictions of blank-eyed, ragged black peasants posing a series of threats to the white gentry. More effective by far was Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943), a drama loosely based on Jane Eyre and produced by the inestimable Val Lewton that remains a towering example of the genre. Yet even this masterpiece of ominous drums and orgiastic rites kept the zombie archetype securely confined to its Caribbean locale and exotically religious inception, comfortably remote in place and circumstance from the American filmgoer. The living dead would have to wait another quarter century before riding a wave of cultural turmoil to our native shore.
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George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) is the foundational text of the modern zombie film, reinventing the revenant for a generation questioning everything that had gone before it. Romero’s original screenplay, entitled “Night of Anubis,” was heavily indebted to Richard Matheson’s short novel I Am Legend (1954), the initial film adaptation of which (Ubaldo Ragona’s The Last Man on Earth (1964)) effectively illustrated the ghostly post-apocalyptic urban settings that Romero would benefit from in his own films.[6] Romero’s groundbreaking realization was to transport the living dead from their obscure island genesis to modern small-town America, thrusting an image of unspeakable horror before the public with the same unsubtle brutality that the evening news was bringing the chaotic bloodbath of Vietnam into the American living room.
Among the shifts in approach that Romero used to distance his creations from their actual voodoo origin include the removal of a bokor, or voodoo priest, from the zombies’ inception; instead, vague rumors broadcast over a sputtering radio of radioactive contamination from a space probe returning [sic] from Venus are implicitly to blame.[7] The deliberately uncertain and illogical origin of Romero’s monsters, referred to as “ghouls” rather than “zombies” in Night of the Living Dead, serves to reinforce the horror of the protagonists’ situation—they are thrust into the midst of a phenomenon none of them can explain through rational thought, thereby depriving them of the use of humanity’s strongest weapon: its logic. Instead the living must combat the relentless dead through the most primitive of means, and the irrationality of their predicament coupled with the disappearance of external civil order only serves to exacerbate societally-suppressed internal conflicts of race, sex and class. The farmhouse/bunker they consign themselves to demands claustrophobic proximity with strangers, and the agonizing anticipation of the approaching dead inspires a grim cabin fever that threatens to destroy the survivors from within.
Night of the Living Dead also established a number of conventions which have since generally governed how zombies are depicted.[8] Like their Caribbean cousins, Romero’s ghouls shamble about rather slowly, as befits a reanimated corpse, though they are somewhat quicker in Night than in subsequent Romero outings.[9] The most alarming propensity of these creatures is truly revisionist: a devotion to cannibalism of the living, inducing that most ancient of pre-human fears, that of being eaten alive. A Romero ghoul can only be stopped by removing the head or destroying the brain, a directive rendered in the film by a television newsman’s brutal advice: “Kill the brain and you destroy the ghoul.” These beings are not mindless slaves but instinctual predators, unswervingly determined to attain the flesh of the living. Survivors of a zombie bite quickly become lethargic and violently ill before succumbing to a brief death and subsequent, ferocious resurrection.
This last precept is particularly repellant as it forces the victim’s caregivers—friends, family, lovers—to tend their patient with the unbearable knowledge that eventually, inexorably, the invalid will expire only to rise again and attack them without mercy or memory of their past existence. R. H. W. Dillard, a former professor of English at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, and an authority on the aesthetics of the horror genre, noted that aside from subjecting viewers to an overt fear of being killed and cannibalized, Night “takes the source of its horrors from another desire and a fear that lies certainly as deep in the human consciousness, if not deeper. This is fear of the dead and particularly of the known dead, of dead kindred.”[10]
As the referential modern zombie film, a review of the plot of Night of the Living Dead provides a succinct assessment of Romero’s adaptations of the traditional zombie ideal to fit his own era and mindset. The film opens with a slow tracking shot of a car driving down a lonely country road. It stops by a cemetery, where “(t)he graveyard is no neo-expressionistic set like that of Frankenstein with a painted sky; it is a small Pennsylvania country graveyard, flatly lit and unretouched.”[11] Barbara and Johnny, an urbane brother and sister presumably from Pittsburg (Romero’s hometown), are visiting their mother’s grave in this secluded location. Johnny complains about the long drive back to the city, and teases Barbara for her adherence to religious rituals of observance. He then begins to play on his sister’s fear of cemeteries, pointing out a man in the distance walking unsteadily among the tombstones and exclaiming, with a faux-Karloff accent, “He’s coming to get you, Barbara!” This man is revealed as our first modern zombie, and he immediately attacks Barbara with uncontrolled determination. Johnny comes to her rescue and is killed.[12] Barbara then flees to a deserted farmhouse nearby where she is shortly joined by Ben, another displaced survivor of what is slowly recognized as a widespread disaster.
Ben, reading the gravity of their situation, immediately begins to board up the house in an attempt to create a fortress of resistance until the “authorities” can presumably provide relief. The dull autumn fields and woods that surround the farmhouse, depicted in a deliberately austere black and white, are vacant of movement, but their very emptiness, knowing what Ben and the viewer now know, provides a menacing sense of waiting.[13] Barbara, having seen her brother murdered at her feet and barely escaping the same fate, slumps on a sofa in a catatonic trance. Shortly thereafter the Cooper family, Harry, Helen and their young daughter, Karen, who has been bitten by a zombie and is dying, are discovered hiding in the cellar, which Harry insists is the only safe place in the house.
Much has been made of the fact that Ben is played by a black actor, Duane Jones, who as the most articulate and authoritative among them instantly becomes the leader of the group.[14] Or at least he commands those upstairs; Harry’s unyielding belief in the security of the cellar (he is eventually proven correct on this point) leads to conflict with Ben, who prefers the openness and maneuverability of defending the several ground-floor rooms. The tension between the two boils with unexpressed racial antagonism, and initially the viewers’ sympathies are with Ben, particularly as Harry is exposed as a poor husband (“We may not enjoy living together,” his wife tells him at one point, “but dying together isn’t going to solve anything”) and a coward to boot. During the subsequent zombie onslaught, however, Ben gradually descends from his noble beginnings, both figuratively and literally: he becomes a harsh and unforgiving taskmaster, striking the hapless Barbara for failing to follow his commands and eventually shooting Harry to death – five times – in a duel for leadership of the refugees. Ben finally retreats to the cellar, the very place he had earlier condemned as a “deathtrap,” to slouch impotently in a corner as the undead contagion rages above.
Two other refugees, the teenaged couple Tom and Judy, join Ben and company in the farmhouse shortly before the zombie onslaught. “The film is, then, the story of everyday people in an ordinary landscape … the way in which Night of the Living Dead transforms that familiar and ordinary world into a landscape of unrelenting horror reveals the film’s moral nature and the deep and terrible fear that is at its heart.”[15] As the bleak daylight wanes the undead manifest themselves, first in ones and twos, then in growing numbers. They are drawn to the farmhouse like moths to candlelight; the motes of warmed breath that pulse from the living command the recently dead to seek them out and internalize their essences.[16]
Later zombie films contain a high quotient of macho survivalist gunnery, but in this simple tale the survivors make use of whatever weapons naturally come to hand in an abandoned farmhouse: boards, axes, jerry-rigged torches. They learn from experience that the ghouls may be killed by massive head trauma, and thus the undead loose a bit of their initial overwhelming ambiance. But even with the ghouls reduced to a sort of stupefied, filthy rabble of murderous man-eaters, monstrous yet stoppable, other profound fears inherent to their dilemma begin to reveal themselves.
Perhaps most disturbing is the film’s presentation of interfamilial slayings. Newscasts derive an intense emotional impact in the reporting of matricide and the murder of children by their parents, hyping the primal biological sin of destroying one’s own gene pool. The ancient Greeks recognized the ingrained capacity of these actions to mesmerize audiences, and the filmic descendants of plays such as Oedipus Rex and Electra continue to feed upon this genetic dread. In Night two characters meet their doom at the hands of reanimated family members. Barbara, startlingly confronted with her brother Johnnie tearing his way into the farmhouse, hesitates long enough for him to carry her off to be devoured. Likewise Helen, locked in the fetid cellar with her now deceased daughter, is unable to summon effective resistance when Karen arises and stabs her to death with a trowel in a frenzied montage of spraying blood and dissonant electronic noise.[17]
In a nod to the swirling social chaos of its time, the center of Night’s circle of survivors cannot hold for long. The film’s cuts become shorter and more frenetic as the ghouls break through the barricades and the defenders go down one by one. Tom and Judy, attempting to flee in the farm’s pickup, are destroyed when spilling gasoline ignites and explodes, and the ensuing sequence of zombies picking burnt flesh from the vehicle’s charred interior and settling down on the blackened grass to gorge themselves is one of the first truly gory set pieces in the film. Ben kills the reanimated Karen as he retreats to the cellar, the sole survivor.
The vague morning light brings birdsong (a singular moment of peace and normalcy) and a reassertion of civil authority in the form of a local sheriff, his deputies, and a motley assortment of rustic vigilantes armed with deer rifles and shotguns. They methodically shoot down the zombies surrounding the farmhouse and heap them up to burn. Ben, hearing the gunshots, awakens from his stupor, cautiously ascends the stairs and peers out a window, only to be neatly drilled through the forehead by an alert if mistaken marksman. His body too is then dragged away for burning in a stately closing sequence of spare and grainy still shots heavily laden with the inert imagery of martyrdom, whether deserved or not.
In the classic definition of the self-sacrificing “hero” Ben falls somewhat short. Indeed, under the moral relativism characteristic of the postmodern worldview that shaped this narrative, none of the characters in Night of the Living Dead can be said to be “heroic,” save for the simple Tom in his doomed attempt to rescue Judy from the truck before it exploded. In the impossible horror they find themselves trapped in, the circumstances that might have sparked altruist behavior in such recognizable disasters as a house fire or car wreck are erased along with the societal conventions that had made such heroic instances plausible. To be torn apart by putrefying corpses and eaten alive is too terrible to imagine, and a perhaps more realistic, though less theatrically dramatic, resolution to a crisis such as this would be a swift retreat to stark shrieking insanity.
By refusing to incorporate the standard cinematic assumptions of human behavior under extreme duress, Romero offers us a less attractive but more convincing interpretation of how a zombie apocalypse (the preferred term among enthusiasts) would unfold. The beleaguered farmhouse of Night of the Living Dead serves as an effective microcosm of not only mankind pushed to its psychological limits but also of the inevitable reversion to selfish, unrestrained behavior that the abrupt stripping away of social institutions and civic law enforcement allows. When societal foundations such as science and religion collapse under the incontrovertible weight of empirical experience any form of human behavior becomes valid, and few things can more efficiently annihilate one’s scientific and religious sensibilities than having an undead relation snapping at your throat. “To a greater or lesser degree, every zombie film poses the same questions: If God is dead and society is crumbling and supposedly civilized people are reduced to tearing at each other like wild animals, why be decent? These are not the preoccupations of escapist entertainment; they’re the foundations of a morality play.”[18]
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Why, then, if the zombie theme offers such traumatic and disturbing material, has it recently become so hugely popular, not just on film but in television, fiction, comics and video games? More broadly, why is the horror genre, one built upon fear and disgust, so perennially attractive to so many people? The academic Noel Carroll opines that “art-horror,” a representation that combines horror (terror plus physical and/or psychic disgust) with aesthetic appreciation, “is the price we are willing to pay for the revelation of that which is impossible and unknown, of that which violates our conceptual schema.”[19] Carroll’s critics argue that this is all well and good for “unknowable” monsters like zombies and werewolves, but that for “knowable” (human and therefore, presumably, comprehensible) antagonists such as serial killers this “ticket to ride” approach is less useful.
Furthermore Carroll’s somewhat fussy insistence that it is our curiosity (an instinct proven deadly, ad nauseam, in horror films) which chiefly motivates our pleasure in horror, our desire to penetrate the alien exoskeleton or stained hockey mask to learn the monster’s motivations and mentality, has the ring of speculative over-think to it. To acknowledge the simplest explanation for our love of horror—that we actually enjoy being frightened and appalled by what is onscreen or between book covers—seems the more honest conclusion. “It is not that we crave disgust,” Carroll intones, “but that disgust is the predictable concomitant of disclosing the unknown.” Certainly the pursuit of the weird, beautiful and strange, of the sublime, is among the foremost obsessions of the creative mind. Yet to reduce something as primitive and integral as love of horror to this kind of plodding scientific methodology obscures the simple fact of the pleasure we attain from being (safely) horrified.[20] As Freud would have it, because a zombie film’s uncanny subject is familiar yet strange, it creates a cognitive dissonance within the viewer that is due to a compulsory juxtaposition of attraction and repulsion. We somehow love what we fear and loathe.
So long as the horror is confined to book, stage, or film, that is. Real horror, that which in its manifold forms can envelope and destroy us at any moment, has of course lost none of its terrible power as we have journeyed through the millennia. Depictions of slaughter and mutilation experienced vicariously through representation, however, safely distances us from the horror onscreen while allowing an audience the chance to wallow in bloody revenge or insensate violence for a time, releasing some of the accumulated detritus of modern civilization in a terrible catharsis which leaves the viewer drained and, yes, satisfied.
The zombie film in particular speaks to the anxieties of our postmodern age. “What is a zombie, after all? It is something that was once human but has had the spark of life, the drive of ambition and individuality, literally drained out of it, so it is part of a mindless horde. Sound familiar? Think of the millions of people in the suburbs, stupefied in front of the television. How about the teeming masses (that) flock to malls every weekend, or those of us who spend our days in downtown skyscrapers, packed into veal-fattening pens, peering into the flicker of the data stream. That’s right, zombies ‘R’ us, which is why they serve as a perfect metaphor for life in postindustrial, market-driven civilization.”[21]
The modern zombie film, birthed in 1968 (along with the present writer) in a time of escalating tumult and social disintegration, is more popular than ever. The post-911 existential threat of an unknowable, omnipresent Other, one that heeds neither reason nor mercy and which directly challenges our very civilization, has lent itself to another of Western history’s periodic alarums of imminent Armageddon, which in literalist Christian terms encompasses the fiery return of Christ, the bodily awakening of the dead, and the end of the world. For the consumer of today’s zombie films the images have become consistent: deserted boulevards lit by burning cars and buildings, gnawed and gutted corpses sprawled beneath an ashen sky, ransacked shops and abandoned houses, and the surreal threat of ruthless attack coming suddenly from any quarter.
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The collapse of modern civilization and the despairing struggle of its survivors touches a chord that reaches back far into our collective history, to the fall of Rome, the great plagues, the total warfare of the twentieth century, and the appalling holocausts that sporadically mar our species. The zombie film positions us in a world of utter and inescapable nightmare, where even in death the horror continues both for the living and the dead. Without dwelling overmuch on the challenges our Earth and our selves face at the moment, it seems apparent that filmic representations of the apocalyptic undead feed some deep hunger currently afflicting our psyche, gratifying our enthusiasm for distanced violence, providing cathartic escape and, perhaps, giving us just a taste of things to come.
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[1] “As such, the horror film questions the viewer’s most cherished notions about what it is to be a human being. By centering on imaginary creatures who dwell on the margins of human life and consciousness, the horror film terrifies viewers by undermining their secure sense of where human identity lies in relation to the world of the dead, of animals, or of things.” Stephen Prince, Movies and Meaning (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2010), p. 274-275.
[2] That the dead were meant to lie undisturbed and in peace is a commonly understood moral belief, and violating this most basic taboo is not meant for the merely human. In reflecting on the Lazarus story through a “zombified” lens, one scholar noted, “Christians consider him free from the torments of death, but zombification implies that Lazarus’s new reflection is the figure of the zombie voiced from the other side of the mirror. Rather than the affirmation of life postulated by a straightforward Christian reading, the zombie suggests that resurrections are degrading and humiliating acts against the individual.” Kette Thomas, “Haitian Zombie, Myth, and Modern Identity,” Comparative Literature and Culture, Vol. 12, Issue 2 (June 2010), Article 12.
[3] “Since almost all of us still think as savages do on this topic, it is no surprise that the primitive fear of the dead is still so strong within us and always ready to come to the surface on any provocation. Most likely our fear still implies the old belief that the dead man becomes the enemy of his survivor and seeks to carry him off to share his new life with him.” Sigmund Freud, “’Das 'Unheimliche’ (The ‘Uncanny’) Parts 1 & 2,” 1919, http://people/emich.edu/ecoykenda/uncanny1.html.
[4] Efforts at understanding voodoo from an informed anthropological standpoint were pioneered by two American women in the first half of the twentieth century: the novelist, folklorist and amateur ethnologist Zora Neal Hurston and the experimental filmmaker Maya Deren, both of whom learned the rituals and underpinnings firsthand from practicing voodoo priests in both the southern US and the Caribbean.
[5] William B. Seabrook’s ill-informed and chauvinistic book on Haitian voodoo, The Magic Island (1929), effectively conveyed the general concept of zombies as shambling hulks to the American reading public; however, the common tropes of the zombie film, as much as they have evolved since White Zombie, are generally absent from his meager travelogue.
[6] An Italian co-production filmed in Rome, The Last Man on Earth was the stylistic forerunner of any number of “end time” films with its gloomy realization of a depopulated earth. Vincent Price’s role as the protagonist is played with flinty authenticity, though with his ascot, snifter, and impeccable mustache, perhaps a tad too daintily for a de facto action hero.
[7] “Romero liberated the zombie from the shackles of a master, and invested his zombies not with a function … but rather a drive.” Peter Dendle, The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia (Jefferson: McFarland, 2001), p. 6.
[8] “The vast diversity of interpretations of this period [pre-Romero zombie films] suggest(s) a radical simplification and lack of uniformity in the zombie mythos, facilitating Romero’s goal of revolutionizing the dominant perception of the zombie film.” Michael Bloom, “Reanimating the Living Dead: Uncovering the Zombie Archetype in the Works of George A. Romero,” 30 April 2009, Offscreen.com, http://www.offscreen.com/index.php./pages/print_img/1186/.
[9] Danny Boyle electrified the subgenre with 28 Days Later (2002), his tale of Londoners become fast-moving, maniacal—though still living—killers through exposure to a highly infectious genetically-altered virus. The “fast zombie” was first utilized by Alien (1979) writer Dan O’Bannon in his wonderfully gruesome satiric homage Return of the Living Dead (1985), and more recently in Zack Snyder’s excellent action/horror remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004).
[10] R. H. W. Dillard, “Night of the Living Dead: It’s Not Just a Wind That’s Passing Through,” ed. Gregory A. Waller, American Horrors (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p.15. Incidentally, Dillard was the father of Annie Dillard, a distinguished Hollins University alumnus whose lyrical meditation on nature and place, A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, is widely regarded as a supreme achievement in American natural history writing.
[11] Dillard, p. 17.
[12] Oddly, the zombie that kills Johnnie does not immediately feed upon him, but instead pursues Barbara. This primacy of killing all the living in sight before feeding is overturned in subsequent Romero films.
[13] “Romero was offered a budget for color; he preferred shooting in black and white; the result is a flat murky ambience which is perfect for the ramshackle American gothic landscape upon which the events occur.” Elliot Stein, “The Night of the Living Dead,” Sight and Sound 1970, p.105.
[14] “Perhaps the only unusual thing about (the people defending the farmhouse) is that no one of them ever comments about one of their numbers being black, especially in the light of his assuming a natural leadership. But even that lack of race prejudice in a tight situation may be more ordinarily American than we might suspect.” Dillard, p. 19.
[15] Dillard, p. 20.
[16] As with religion, supernatural horror films necessarily require a deliberate suspension of disbelief, but the physical improbability of decayed corpses clawing their way through lead-lined coffins and six feet of compacted earth to emerge relatively intact and mobile is a especially difficult imaginative leap that can be accomplished only through the medium of exceptionally effective fiction and filmmaking.
[17] This instance of tool use by the undead would be largely abandoned in subsequent Romero films, indicative as it is of latent intelligence when his desired zombie archetype is utterly elemental. Likewise, the fear of fire shown by these undead is a singular instance that again detracts from their unthinking hunger, though in Romero’s Land of the Dead (2005) zombies are depicted as being entranced by fireworks. In that film the zombies are “led” by one of their number to attack the opulent Pittsburgh fortification of Fiddler’s Green (a utopian term of obscure origin also used in Neil Gaiman’s superb Sandman graphic novels) wherein the city’s elite live in decadent splendor, an overt social statement in a body of work that previously had been more subtly political.
[18] Matt Zoller Seitz, “Braaaains! The 10 essential zombie films,” Salon.com 30 May 2010: 30.
[19] Noel Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 186.
[20] The critical interpretations are multitudinous: “Recreational terror theorists claim that it is ‘fun’ to be scared, and that horror generates a particular kind of make-believe fear that is playful because it is unreal. Freudians describe monsters as embodying ‘the return of the repressed,’ gratifying the dark desires of our id and attaining a healthy catharsis of surplus repression in the process. Ideologists see monstrous forces spawned either to be destroyed, serving conservative political ends, or to survive and embody indirect social critiques. Formalists account for the pleasure in terms of the narrative structure of discovery, and feminists see the genre as a battleground on which the sex wars are being fought, and often won, by women.” Shaw, Daniel, ed. “Introduction,” Horror: Special Issue of Film and Philosophy (2001): 5-5.
[21] Andrew Potter, “Undead Like Me: Why We Love Our Zombies,” Maclean’s 4 June 2007: 14-14.
