Legendary filmmaker George A. Romero died last Sunday. News of his death was overshadowed somewhat by Game of Thrones gossip, outrage/joy over Doctor Who’s new gender, and whatever Trump said that night.
Although zombie folklore, stories, and films existing long before Romero, he popularized and created the zombie/vampire hybrid that we know today. He recognized that zombies are more than bags of blood and gore; the ravenous masses can tell satirical stories about society.
Fans of the late director should read Edgar Wright’s heartfelt tribute to the man who inspired him, and so many others.
Romero’s passing inspired me to reflect on the zombie phenomenon, and how the creatures have evolved to reflect the fears of the public.
It all began with a fear of …
Slavery
The original zombie is a figure of Haitian folklore, and is somewhat incorrectly tied to voodoo, which is nothing like as malicious as pop culture pretends it is. The idea of a zombie was exclusive to the island of Haiti, and does not appear elsewhere in voodoo traditions.
The Haitian zombies were believed to be normal individuals who had died and been resurrected by a Bokor (Sorcerer). Upon resurrection, the zombie was stripped of their identity and free will, forgetting their past life and completely subject to the whims of the Bokor.
The Haitian zombie isn’t necessarily a corpse; some legends are more “rational” than others, and state that zombies are actually victims of magic potions that induce them into a coma-like state. The Bakor merely wakes them up and drugs them into an obedient stupor.
Regardless, the idea is that their body is no longer their own; whether they are dead in a metaphorical sense, or a literal one, is irrelevant.
The Haitian zombie reflects an obvious fear; to be enslaved by a powerful figure, and forced to do their bidding. Given that the Haitians are the descendants of African slaves, it’s unsurprising that this was the monster that arose from their collective subconscious.
Haiti managed to overthrow their colonial oppressors, but the memories of those dark days of slavery remained, and manifested into the now-famous figure of folklore.
Consumerism
George A. Romero’s first zombie film Night of the Living Dead is credited with popularizing the zombie, though it never actually uses that word. The “ghouls” in the film are mindless flesh-eaters that have little in common with the Haitian zombie other than rising from the grave.
Really, Romero was inspired by the vampires from the novel I Am Legend. In that story, the world has been overrun with vampires and a single survivor holds out against them. Romero blended the vampire’s endless hunger with the zombie’s mindlessness, and created the modern-day zombie we know and love today.
In his sequel, Dawn of the Dead, Romero had his survivors hold out inside a shopping mall, while waves of zombies bang on the glass, desperate to enter.
It was a perfect metaphor for consumerism, so simple that even a child could understand it. The herds of brainless dead have no individual desires, other than unquenchable hunger; they will consume the world until there is nothing left to eat.
The shopping mall, temple of capitalism, served as both a fortress and a prison. The zombies retained much of their Haitian DNA; slaves to their appetite and subject to the movement of the herd.
The public saw themselves in those crowds of zombies, and it frightened them.
General anxiety
The zombies remained almost unchanged for years after Dawn of the Dead. Romero’s blueprint became standard formula; the zombies were always carriers of a virus (usually spread by biting), they would destroy civilization, and the ensuing chaos would consistently bring out the worst elements of humanity.
The zombie virus element can perhaps be attributed to mankind's primordial fear of disease; our civilization has suffered heavily from plagues before, and the modern world has created boundless opportunity for another to spread.
But aside from spikes of swine or bird flu, fear of viral infection more or less remains in the background. The societal collapse that accompanies a zombie outbreak is also deeply frightening, but it provokes a question - what would I do in that situation?
The Resident Evil video game series provided players with an opportunity to live out that dark fantasy. Zombies, an enemy that is both human and not, almost seem designed for video games. They can provide wave after wave of cannon fodder, or they can jump out of the shadows, frightening the player with their disfigured features.
Through video games, zombies could experiment with their appearance and behavior. They twisted into ever more contorted forms, proving to be highly malleable across different stories and genres. They could play cowboys, soldiers, and even alien invaders (Dead Space).
Nowadays, it’s expected that a video game will have a “zombie mode.” But the evolution of zombies in video games are more representative of changing gameplay mechanics and storytelling opportunities than they are of deep-rooted cultural fears.
Video games kept the creatures alive and well, incubated them in a sense, until they were ready to make a return.
The next cinematic zombie evolution would enable the creatures to run.
Terrorism
For decades, zombies walked with a slow, drunken gait. Their invasion was creeping and inevitable. By the time anybody realizes there is a problem, it is too late. This fits in well with the “slaves to consumerism” allegory, but eventually, somebody had to speed them up.
28 Days Later conceived a new kind of zombie, quite different from their stiff, shuffling ancestors. These zombies could run, as agile as a human pursuer, and were as animalistic as a madman. This infection wouldn’t gradually turn its victims, but transformed them in a blink of an eye. Suddenly, they were one of them. But who are they?
28 Days Later was released one year after the Twin Towers fell, and played into the idea of dangerous individuals walking among us. For these zombies were unsettlingly human, difficult to spot. They were imbued with a kind of anger that was different from the zombie’s traditional desperate hunger. It was almost like a hate-fuelled ideology, an invisible madness.
But 28 Days Later didn’t just reflect our increasing paranoia of strangers; it reflected our distrust of the government. We longer trusted them to protect us. Indeed, the events of 9/11 seeded a ridiculous conspiracy that remains popular to this day.
When the survivors of 28 Days Later finally find shelter, it’s in the hands of the military; the face of the establishment. And they quickly prove to be vicious predators rather than saviors. The survivors cannot count on the government to save them; the only survivors they can trust are their friends.
Zombies have now become so ubiquitous that their presence is unsurprising. We’ve seen them in just about every shape and form imaginable, we’ve seen them do just about everything a living corpse can do. It’s no longer about the threat of zombies, but the way humanity responds to them.
The most notable recent example is The Walking Dead, which broadened the “fear of the stranger” concept. Their zombies, or Walkers, are not the primary antagonists of the story, but an environmental hazard, like a hurricane. No less dangerous, but predictable, and easily avoidable; it is the humans who are depicted as the real danger.
It makes sense. Our current era is one of bitter ideological disagreement; the gulfs are widening between us. We pose the most threat to ourselves, while zombies are just another incoming catastrophe, like war, or climate change.
There’s something sad about that.
But evolution is a never-ending process; perhaps the zombie is due another major transformation. Hordes of hungry zombies will always induce a visceral reaction of disgust, and fear, but also, a peculiar sense of familiarity.
