Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy

by Richard Greene; K. Silem Mohammad

  Nowadays, many of these decorations are store-bought, rather than homemade. And the entertainment industry uses this celebration of death as a marketing ploy. Horror movies, like the recent remake of The Fog, a ghost story, are released around Halloween, as was John Carpenter’s classic Halloween, in order to exploit the seasonal taste for death. You’ll recall that Michael Meyers becomes one of the Undead in the course of that film. For similar reasons, the DVD of George Romero’s Land of the Dead, a zombie thriller, was released on October 18th, 2005, so as to give everyone who desired a copy time to buy one in order to horrify themselves and their friends on Halloween night.

  And, of course, broadcast television literally goes into its vaults to exhume a veritable bestiary of the Undead for the weeks approaching Halloween night. Starting at noon of October 23rd, 2005, the American Movie Channel ran a solid week of horror films. Obviously, the programmers at this station were quite confident that there are, at any given moment at this time of year, a sufficient number of viewers eager to have the bejesus scared out of them to warrant a non-stop fright fest.

  Though AMC—and, of course, the Science Fiction Channel—may be the most extreme examples here, other stations feature an upsurge of horror fictions during this season. It is, for example, a perfect occasion for marathon re-screenings of The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits. Nor was it an accident that Showtime chose the beginning of the 2005 Halloween weekend to premiere its new series Masters of Horror. For on and around Halloween has come to be the time of year when people gather before their flickering hearth not to tell ghost stories, but to watch them.

  And finally, another frequently observed trend is that Halloween is becoming more and more of an adult holiday—an opportunity for masquerade parties, where the traditional costumes of the Undead are never far from sight. The fancier parties may even have TV monitors scattered about, re-running favorite monster movies continuously.

  The Paradox of Halloween

  A great deal of what I’ve just said is not news to most of you. Except for the bits about the history of Samhain, the rest is widely known and very familiar. But—and this is where this chapter really begins—it is so familiar that I think we lose sight of the fact that this is all very peculiar, even paradoxical. Many derive some strange kind of pleasure or satisfaction from the horror films that bombard them during this season. Indeed, they seek them out. They revel in spectacles of corpses and decomposing bodies.

  But how many among them would jump at the opportunity to spend the afternoon in the city morgue viewing dead and decaying bodies, and, even if they did, would they derive the same sort of satisfaction they get from the horror movies? If some of those stiffs could be re-animated, would they be willing to dance with them? The Undead in reality would be pretty revolting, not entertaining.

  Moreover, the paradox extends beyond the motion pictures customarily marketed around this time of year. It pertains to Halloween itself. For, the strange pleasure or satisfaction that we take in these movies prefigures the larger mystery of how we can enjoy Halloween. For, Halloween is about death, perhaps the most fearful aspect of human life. According to the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), it’s the source of Angst so deep that most of us spend our lives denying the inevitable fact of death. Rather than face it, we turn ourselves into social robots.

  And yet on Halloween, we appear to embrace death’s imagery. Many thrill at the prospect of the representatives of death reeking evil and mayhem in our popular entertainments, and we derive a strange satisfaction from our fellow citizens wandering the streets in the make-up of the Undead. Of course, not all this imagery is, so to speak, “straight.” Much of it is parodic, from Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy to the capering skeletons in Halloween parades. In 2005, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride and Wallace and Gromit’s The Curse of the Were-Rabbit arrived just in time to satirize the myths of Halloween horror. But isn’t it just as anomalous that we should laugh at mortality as that we should find any satisfaction in being, as we say, “scared to death”? These are the paradoxes of Halloween that philosophy needs to address.

  Needless to say, this is not an issue that most schools of philosophy have broached. However, since many of the traditional figures of Halloween are associated with the kinds of creatures who haunt nightmares, and since psychoanalysis has advanced hypotheses about the significance of these figures in our dreams, psychoanalysis is an obvious place to look for suggestions about our attraction to imagery of the evil dead which, one would think, should repulse us. One book that would appear to be especially pertinent is On the Nightmare by Ernest Jones,149 perhaps best known as Freud’s biographer and the person responsible for bringing Freud to England in his flight from the Nazis.

  A Psychoanalytic Solution

  Jones’s book employs Freudian analysis in order to plumb the symbolic portent and structure of such nightmarish figures of medieval lore as the vampire, the devil, the witch, and so forth. Since many of these imaginary beings correspond to the recurring figures of Halloween, some may be tempted to adapt Jones’s analysis of the relevant dreams to the costumes and entertainments of October 31st.

  Jones’s account, moreover, seems initially promising, if only because it has the right structure. For he appreciates that the fantastical beings that concern us are simultaneously attractive and repellant. As a hard-line Freudian, Jones is committed to the notion that all dreams involve wish-fulfillment. However, many wishes are for things forbidden. So dreams driven by forbidden desires putatively camouflage their objects in symbolism—often symbolism that makes the objects appear to be anything but desirable—indeed, sometimes symbolism that transfigures the objects of desire into something loathsome. It’s as if the dreamer is saying to his psychic censor “I can’t be desiring this, because I find it so repulsive.”

  That is, the selfsame item may be both the subject of a wish and of an inhibition. The inhibition component takes the form of negative imagery or affect. The function of the dreamwork, including the nightmare, is to construct situations that, in a manner of speaking, forge a compromise between our wishes and our inhibitions.

  Jones writes:The reason why the object seen in a nightmare is frightful or hideous is simply that the representation of the underlying wish is not permitted in its naked form so that the dream is a compromise of the wish on the one hand and on the other of the intense fear belonging to the inhibition (p. 78).

  For example, on Jones’s analysis, the vampires of lore have two essential characteristics: they are Undead revenants and they subsist on the blood of the living, which they extract orally. According to the vampire legends that serve as the basis for Jones’s investigations—and as opposed to the way in which the vampire is represented in contemporary popular culture—vampires first return from the dead to visit their relatives and to feast upon them. This imagery, Jones hypothesizes, can be interpreted initially as the wish, on the part of the living, for the dearly departed relative to return from the dead. But the alleged loved one is a horrific figure. Specifically, what is fearful about the revenant is bloodsucking, something that Jones associates with sexuality and seduction. Moreover, since the revenant is a relative, the sexuality in question is incestuous. So the wish that underwrites the symbol of the vampire is a wish for incest. However, this wish is simultaneously inhibited by the dreamwork inasmuch as the vampire is represented as an abominable and dangerous predator.

  That is, the forbidden desire for an incestuous liaison with a dead relative is transformed, by a process of denial, into something very different—a vicious attack. Attraction and love for the relative is alchemized into fear and disgust. Instead of yielding lips, the living quarry imagines himself or herself to be penetrated by merciless fangs. The humans portray themselves as passive victims and the Undead as aggressors. It’s the vampire who is the active agent, not its prey. This supposedly allows the pretended victim to consummate, in the dream, a sexual, indeed an incestuous, relation with the vampire without blame. For, in this
scenario the mortal must be innocent, since she is being ruthlessly savaged. The sexuality here, on Jones’s account, is primarily regressive, a blend of the sucking and biting characteristic of the oral stage of psychosexual development. But all this nuzzling can be indulged without guilt, since it has been reconfigured as an unwanted onslaught.

  Jones then goes on to analyze the iconography of other fantastic beings, many of whom are the staples of our popular entertainments, including Halloween. Given his Freudianism, in case after case he discovers that the imagery masks sexual wishes. The horrific imagery functions to deflect the sanctions of the psychic censor, also known as the super-ego. For the wish is disguised as its negation, namely as fear and disgust, and delight masquerades as aversion. In the case of the nightmare, the dreamer putatively cannot be charged with sexual transgression, because she is having the attentions of the vampire, the ghost, the ghoul, and so forth forced upon her. As anyone can see, she is not enjoying herself; she is being violated. Her predominant feeling is ostensibly not pleasure, but horror, though, according to Jones, this horror is actually the price that she has to pay for pleasure that comes from the dreamland gratification of her sexual desires.

  In favor of Jones’s hypothesis is the fact that sexual themes are germane to some of the figures that concern us. Often witches are first encountered as beautiful young maidens, only to reveal their horrific aspect the morning after. And Dracula is usually depicted as a handsome seducer, though not when he sports his Nosferatu look. Satan is a seducer too, but not a carnal one. Some of these monsters abduct women; maybe that is supposed to insinuate rape. Perhaps all the rough-house to which these nightmare figures subject their victims belies the childhood confusion over sexual congress and violence of the sort that Freud maintains occurs when children witness the primal scene.

  Furthermore, with special reference to Halloween, the notion that all these figures are fundamentally transgressive fits with the ritual suspension or carnivalesque inversion of the rules on the holiday. For, like April 1st, Halloween is an evening when tricks are permitted, as well as being a time when excessive eating and drinking is the order of the day (or night). One might also say that Halloween is a period when a major ontological role-reversal occurs: the living “become” the dead.

  But there are also problems with expanding Jones’s hypothesis to cover Halloween. Some of the figures at the intersection of the nightmare, Halloween, and popular culture may have explicit sexual connotations, but just as many do not. Skeletons, on the face of it, are not sexy. The suavely attired Count Dracula may be alluring, but the case is less convincing with zombies, ghouls, milky wraiths, and creatures or demons from outer space like the Predator and the Alien from the film series bearing those names.

  The psychoanalyst may reply that these examples are beside the point, since, according to Jones, the sexual significance of these figures is concealed by design. It is precisely the fact that these creatures strike us as the opposite of sexually inviting that enables them to trick the censorious super-ego into admitting them into the bedroom. The advantage of this “black means white” mode of interpretation is that it can account for from whence the pleasure or satisfaction comes with regard to this otherwise vile imagery. However, it does require the presupposition that these fantastical beings always stand for a wish, indeed a sexual wish, often one connected to the putatively universal desire for incest, and that the horror that accompanies exposure to these figures is only ever a diversionary tactic cloaking a deeper source of satisfaction.

  And yet, might it not be the case that sometimes a zombie is just a zombie, and being devoured by one is simply cannibalism? That is, might it not be that frequently we are just horrified by our Halloween entertainments? When the leprous revenants in the re-make of The Fog pummel Mayor Malone into the cemetery to the sound of startling claps of thunder, my blood runs cold, which is not a tingle of sexual arousal. Nor does it seem plausible to speculate that I have any incestuous inclinations toward these ghosts, since they are not my relatives. Likewise, as Moonface drills out the eyes of his victim in “On and Off a Mountain Road” (the first installment of the aforesaid Masters of Horror), I am squirming, but not with pleasure. Isn’t it possible that I am just horrified by the spectacle?

  It may be alleged that I am merely in a state of self-deception here. My ego, along with my super-ego, has been duped; only my id knows and it’s not talking. Moreover, if I say that I’m simply horrified by the spectacle, how are we to explain the satisfaction that I take in it? But again, notice that this explanation comes with an expensive theoretical price-tag.

  One has to presume an awful lot of hypothetical states, laws, and processes, including a universal desire for incest, the reducibility of all the pertinent desires to sexual desire, the idea that all such fancies are wish-fulfillment fantasies, the mechanics of repression, the homuncular behaviors of the different parts of the psyche, indeed, the supposition that the psyche is partitioned in this way, the existence of the unconscious, and so on. In short, one must accept large portions of psychoanalytic theory in order to get this hypothesis off the ground, including the idea that we are always in a mental state of disavowal regarding what is really happening to us as we consume horror fictions.

  This is a very elaborate—some might unsympathetically say “Rube-Goldberg-like”—explanatory apparatus. Would not a simpler model be far more compelling? For example, might not the notion that we are literally terrified by the appropriate moments in The Fog be a better account of what is going on, especially if we could say how that terror can be satisfying without resorting to the complex paraphernalia of psychoanalytic theory? All things being equal, a more economical explanation of the phenomenon should make us less confident of the more Byzantine psychoanalytic account. So let us see if we can find one.

  The Meta-Fear of Fear

  We can start to evolve an alternative explanation to the psychoanalytic one by focusing on part of the phenomenon before us in order to see what the part can tell us about the whole. So let’s ask: what is it about the popular entertainments, like horror movies and television programs, that seem to yield pleasure or satisfaction at the same time that they are designed to raise negative emotions—emotions of fear and disgust? 150 It is perhaps useful here to recall the primary audiences for such entertainments—adolescent and young men, though, in recent decades, more young women are joining their ranks. What is it that they might derive from horror spectacles?

  The adolescent male viewers—who often tramp to the Cineplex in groups—are engaged in a rite of passage. Speaking as one who enacted this ritual himself, they wish to demonstrate to themselves and to their peers that they can endure spectacles of substantial amounts of violence, carnage, filth, and impurity. They come to the theater with a certain fear of their own fear, namely that their feelings may swing out of control when subjected to particularly gruesome stimulation. For the adolescent horror aficionado, Franklin Roosevelt’s aphorism—that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—might be amended to say “we, untested as we are, are very afraid of being afraid.” Exposure to the horror spectacle, then, confirms that the viewer will not lose it, at least in the culturally controlled situation of the movie theater where the viewer has been insulated from genuine danger by the ontologies of fiction and the screen.

  Adolescence is a time, at least in our culture, when one is especially prone to anxiety about one’s emotions This is true not only of fear but of anger, love, desire, and so forth. The fear is that one will be unable to handle one’s emotions—that they will take control of us with untoward consequences. With the changes in our bodies, attendant to adolescence, our emotions and desires begin to seem mysterious to us. We develop a nagging fear of what might occur under their aegis.

  A large part of that fear is that we are entering an emotional terrain that is, as of yet unknown, a terra incognita. Various aspects of adolescent popular culture enable us to explore that country to a limited degree and to
become familiar with it in such a way that we no longer feel utterly “out of it” and helpless with respect to our affects. Perhaps electronic shooter-games enable us to play with rage in this manner. It is my hypothesis that horror fictions, especially audio-visual ones, allow us to test our own fear factor. Its power over the viewer—at least to the extent that that power rests upon the fact that our emotional dispositions are frighteningly obscure for being untried—can be reduced by giving our fear a reassuring trial run.151

  One objection to this is that an adaptive account like this overlooks the obvious. We are never going to encounter vampires, ghosts, ghouls, Undead skeletons, and the like, so the fears we test at horror screenings are not really relevant to the experience of any kind of fear-producing situation that we are going to encounter in life. What we see in horror fictions are scientifically impossible events; they are not the right sort of things to test our authority over our feelings.

  Nevertheless, the imagery of the Undead does combine many elements of legitimate anxiety. First, there is the prospect of death. Halloween spectacles of the Undead invite us to confront the fact of death itself. The Undead, moreover, are often in some pronounced state of decay or deterioration. This too is a fact of life that horror fictions bring to the fore. The impurity of the zombie is connected to an automatic fear of corpses that most of us feel, while the misshapen and twisted bodies of many Halloween horrors are exaggerations of actual abnormalities that may affront us in the real world. Likewise the aggressiveness and ferocity of many fantastic beings have real world parallels. The war of the worlds, in the film of the same name, is a form of intergalactic genocide.