Zombies: An Origin Story (Part II)

The story of zombies as unwilling somnambulists serving voodoo masters still appears in popular culture today, mostly in comics or comic based TV shows, like the show Constantine or the Hellblazer series that inspired it, or in pulp fiction or B-movies, like I Walked with a Zombie (which was used as the basis for the zombie film discussed in Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman). When most people think of zombies, however, they are referring to a creation very different from the Haitian zombies I referenced in my last post. I use the word creation for a reason: these things, formerly human, are an amalgam of many different traditions, cultures, and literary tropes, re-formed through the medium of film. There is a history of zombies on Wikipedia, if you want to look at it, though it is mostly just a list and not an explanation of how things come together to create the zombies we recognize in popular culture today. The post, like most of Wikipedia, is partial and flawed, but nonetheless useful as a starting point.

The zombies we know today have roots reaching back to the Enlightenment and 19th century literature, adding layers to their relationship with Haitian culture and slavery. The idea of reanimation - using science to bring people back from the dead - is a large part of our zombies today. Novels like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or texts by authors of Weird fiction (including Ambrose Bierce, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs) form part of the foundation for 21st century zombie fare. This obsession with science re-animating corpses can be seen in the way infection drives so many of our zombie films - though we don't try to bring people back to life (we have learned from our literary predecessors in many ways), we are still haunted by the idea that bodies that come back to 'life' leave the soul behind (if there is really anything like a soul in the first place). This is a commentary on our times as much as on our incorporation of a literary heritage, as it presents a very postmodern approach to the idea of reanimation.

There is a specific text, however, that marks a turning point in the evolution of the zombie as a trope, though zombies are never specifically mentioned in the book. Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, written in 1954, is a post-apocalyptic novella based on the premise that the main character, Robert Neville, is the last man standing after a virus has turned everyone else into vampires.* Matheson's vampires, however, though they have the usual aversion to sunlight and garlic, and can be killed by a stake through the heart, do not act like archetypal vampires should. I won't set up too many spoilers here, as the book is definitely worth reading (the science in it is very suspect, but the way Matheson portrays Neville's loneliness is the progenitor for so many of the post-apocalyptic Last Man narratives that come after). What stands out about these vampires is the way they interact with each other and with Neville. They create a mob, mostly mindless, attracted to the activity and life they find in the last man on Earth. They want to kill Neville, for no other reason than the fact he is alive. They come in waves, with no end in sight, and are supremely hard to kill. George Romero used Matheson's novel as inspiration for his 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, which is usually considered the first modern zombie film. For both Romero and Matheson, the focus is not so much on the monsters menacing society, but instead on how individuals and society reacts to those monsters. The mob mentality, the Otherness of the creatures, the fact that those who are killed will return as monsters themselves - all these features say more about the society that created or reacts to the threat than about the threat itself. Of course, most monsters are reflections of the cultures that create them, but zombies, especially these iterations of the zombie trope, are more akin to aliens than to werewolves or Dracula. They are completely unknowable, inhuman things that cannot be reasoned with and cannot be understood.

This is why the zombie has become such a draw over the years since Romero's first zombie film - it gives filmmakers and authors a very interesting way to deal with symbolism and thematics. The zombies are, in some way, a blank slate that can be overwritten with almost any agenda. And zombie fiction becomes a way to critique society at large by creating an apocalyptic event that highlights our worst fears (losing ourselves without the hope of some kind of salvation, as we become zombies ourselves). The second film in Romero's Living Dead series, Dawn of the Dead, is considered by some to be even more influential than the first film, as it very specifically introduces a connection between the zombies as trope and capitalistic mass consumption. The survivors in Dawn of the Dead barricade themselves into a shopping mall (this is what I like to call "let's hit everyone over the head with a baseball bat" symbolism - it's very obvious, but you definitely get the point). This film, and the franchise that extended out from Romero's work, transformed the loose conglomeration of films about zombies into a fully fledged genre. I could go on for quite a while about symbolism and thematics in zombie fiction and film, but I think I'll leave that for another post (looks like we'll have a part III to this series).

To continue with the evolution of the zombie leading up to how we view zombies in the 21st century, there is at least one more iteration that deserves mention. Most of the zombie fare in the1980s and 1990s followed the archetype set out by Romero's films, though the cause of each outbreak differed and symbolism was not consistent. The 2000s brought several different approaches to zombie fare, including films that used the zombie as comedy (see Shaun of the Dead) or as part of larger family dramas (see Fido). 28 Days Later, one of the more important additions to the zombie genre, introduced zombie-like creatures that reference the zombie's reanimation roots. These monsters are not dead, but are instead scientifically infected with rage. The infection creates twitchy, incredibly fast moving predators who, like zombies of the past, are drawn to light or human activity, only subsist on raw flesh, mindlessly attack anyone in proximity, and spread their disease through bites or blood. Though some critics don't consider 28 Days Later to be a true zombie film, as the creatures aren't actually the dead brought back to life, the movie incorporates countless genre tropes and greatly influenced later zombie fare. In part, the film reminded viewers what zombie fiction is supposed to be about: the survivors (the second half of the film is more about how society will kill itself, even without the help of zombies). It also showed filmmakers and audiences that the zombie as a trope is still viable today, even after its connection to consumerism seems cliche. The Walking Dead, both the comic and the tv show, continue that idea, changing small parts of expected zombie genre norms, yet emphasizing the focus on survivors, not zombies, that is so important to the genre as a whole. I'll use The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead as the main examples in the third post in this series...

*Interestingly, I Am Legend isn't just post-apocalyptic because of the vampire threat. The novella alludes to some kind of nuclear explosion that has turned much of California into a wasteland and that may have had some kind of influence on the virus that causes the vampirism. This is just one of many examples that point to WWII and the Cold War as important influences on why zombies have become such an important contemporary popular culture trope. Our fear of mass destruction on a global scale, introduced dramatically by the atomic bomb in the 1940s, has direct influence our fear of the zombie apocalypse.