As we’ve seen, in its modern concept that focus can vary considerably, but a consistent theme is disease. The next chapter will consider our fears of disease more closely, but it’s clear that zombies have become a vector for contagion – in 28 Days Later (2002) for example, they are ‘the infected’, and they sprint towards their victims with terrifying single-mindedness, an unsettling revision of the familiar ‘slow zombie’ archetype by writer Alex Garland and director Danny Boyle. There is of course one key difference from the spread of a real-life disease: viruses and bacteria are too small to be seen with the naked eye, whereas zombies, whether shuffling or hurtling after you, can hardly be missed. They make manifest, and thus visually interesting, a process that is otherwise invisible and tricky to capture dramatically. They personify plague. And that plague sweeps through the population at an alarming rate, creating the modern-day zombie horde.
That is perhaps why they are more popular than any other monster – this tendency to swarm. Compare them, for example, to another enduring monster that haunts our nightmares: the vampire. It is a popular and recurring figure certainly, but vampire apocalypse is hardly a genre in the same way. There’s no intrinsic reason why this should be. After all, vampires and zombies both spread their condition by biting, and both are driven by a powerful compulsion to seek out new victims. The combination of these two factors means that both vampires and zombies, were either actually to exist in our world, would quickly lead to apocalypse. In 2008, the University of Central Florida physics professor Costas Efthimiou calculated that if one vampire had bitten one victim each month in 1600, thereby turning them into a vampire, the law of exponentiality means that it would have taken just two and a half years for the entire original human population to become vampires, with nobody left to feed on. If you imagine a greedier vampire, apocalypse arrives even more promptly.*
But, rather than appearing in the context of an apocalypse, in our popular culture vampires tend to live hidden away in small-scale populations, and only come out from time to time to feed on us. Perhaps the difference is that vampires are rational beings and realise that if they infect all the humans they’ll exhaust their food supply, and so they restrain themselves? Brian Aldiss’s splendidly hokey Dracula Unbound (1990) is one of the few works that portrays what a ‘vampire apocalypse’ might look like: a dusty world under a weakening sun in the distant future, where the vampires that have conquered the world keep a few humans alive as food. However, this is an exception; vampires are generally marginal figures, while zombies are the means by which the world as we know it ends.
It might not be logical in terms of story, but it is in terms of cultural symbolism. The stereotypical vampire is superior, elegant, suave, sexually promiscuous, well-dressed and well-mannered – until, that is, he bites you. We think about vampires in the same way that we think about aristocracy, which is a small-scale phenomenon, if powerful and often malign. Zombies, by contrast, are not posh or sexy.* Zombies are not aristocrats. Zombies are the masses. Zombies are us. They are the mindless hordes of shopping-mall consumers, brains emptied out by late-stage capitalism and social media. Zombies know nothing except that they want, as they shuffle forward (or in latter-day versions, run) at the object of their desire: life. It is about consumption, and the way modernity has infected us all with the virus of consumerism.
There’s a reason why shopping malls and supermarkets figure so prominently in zombie apocalypses, and it’s not just that such spaces can be cheap filming locations for cash-strapped movie producers. Zombies have come to represent how we think about democratisation, consumerisation and globalisation, which are all large-scale mass phenomena. According to the critic Roger Luckhurst:
The remorseless zombie attack was bedded down as a familiar Gothic trope after Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) . . . it leaped host again in 1996, when the Japanese computer giant Capcom released the video game Resident Evil. Since the late 1990s over twenty different versions of the Resident Evil game have been released (along with an associated film franchise). These commodities have made billions of dollars of profit, and have been one of the main vectors ensuring that the zombie has become a truly global figure – arguably the central Gothic figure for globalization itself.*
Take Shaun of the Dead (2004), one of the most successful zombie films of the twenty-first century. It is a comedy – the common ground that exists between the physical contortions of slapstick and the conventions of zombie film-making provide a fertile ground for hilarity. A yell, a blow and a little blood can be sickening, because it speaks to our real-life experiences of violence; the elaborate exaggeration of that experience, on the other hand – a set of operatic screams, overly elaborate and great gouts of blood and gore – moves us in a different direction. Our response to horror is finely balanced, and can tip either into terror or into hilarity. This movie understands how to nudge its reactions consistently in the latter direction. The sequence in which the film’s three leads, Simon Pegg, Kate Ashfield and Nick Frost, are trapped in a pub by the zombie hordes outside and beat one to death with snooker cues in time to the beat of Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ (which is playing on the pub jukebox) is as hilarious as it is apposite.
But the real comedy of this movie is rooted in its mundanity, as if the end of the world were not an extraordinary eruption of the spectacular but a repetition of the everyday. In an early sequence before the zombies arrive, Simon Pegg’s Shaun – a lowly electronics salesman – goes to the corner shop one morning and returns to his flat, passing shuffling Londoners who are sleepy, hungover or homeless. The sequence is repeated once the zombie apocalypse has started, and Shaun makes the entire trip without even noticing that the sleepy, hungover or destitute Londoners he passes this time are now shuffling, groaning zombies. It is a funny joke, but also something more: it is making a profound statement about how this apocalypse is not a new thing but rather the intensified repetition of the overfamiliar old things in modern life. We’re so caught up in its mundanity that we are barely distinguishable from the braindead monsters.
The zombie genre has become, in fact, a reaction against the ubiquity of capitalism; the corruption of our minds leads to the corruption of society as these creatures – us – bring the whole system crashing down. As Michael Newton writes, ‘It would appear that we also like to see everything destroyed, Philadelphia overrun by a zombie army, Atlanta’s skyscrapers burned-out. Anything seems better than a thousand years of Tescos.’*
Don’t misunderstand me: capitalism has proven itself a powerful machine for generating material wealth (not at distributing that wealth equally, but let’s put that to one side), and adding all manner of new products and consumer durables and tech and toys to our lives. But even its most enthusiastic supporters would agree that it has done these things at a cost of social cohesion and harmony. We sometimes focus and rely on these ‘things’ more than we do on our personal relationships. We force our bodyclocks into the more rigid timetables of work, stumbling zombie-like out of bed in the morning. We live, increasingly, in isolated urban environments, experiencing loneliness, going through the repetitive motions of modern life.
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is clearly not a zombie novel in the conventional sense, but in this context it absolutely is: in Huxley’s hyper-capitalist ‘utopia’ everybody is (as we would now say) genetically engineered to work, buy things and have sex, to the point where nobody enjoys anything but their work, their shopping and their sex. If people ever feel low, they take a drug called ‘soma’ to brighten their mood. This is the whole horizon of Huxley’s imagined world, and although it is bright and high-tech and its citizens firm-fleshed and good-looking, it reveals itself as a place precisely as soulless, as hunger-driven and as dead as any zombiverse.
In a way the greatest damage capitalism does, as a system, is to prioritise one thing – wealth – over everything else. The pursuit of money supersedes all the values we might say make us human, such as compassion, justice,
empathy, honour. The ideal citizen in such a system is driven by an urge to consume, and doesn’t think too long and hard, for instance about who’s in power or what their agenda is.
And that is, perhaps, the secret core of the zombie story. It is not so much the end of the world, but the end of the values that underpinned that world – not the end of humans as a species, but of our very humanity. In the zombie landscape, the moral decay of society is no longer hidden by the façades of our gleamingly intact cities; it is clear to see in the ruinous cityscapes, in the crumbling remains of our ‘civilisations’. The survivors often still try to cling to our traditional social constructs and ideals, banding together in their little communities, helping each other navigate their way through this uncaring, chaotic world. But their attempts to do so are constantly challenged by not only the mindless victims this new order has already claimed but also by other survivors who have enthusiastically embraced the lack of social constraints. The latter are motivated by power and greed, giving in to their baser instincts in the struggle to come out on top. The zombie is not always the biggest monster in these stories; as the critic Eugene Thacker says, ‘the unhuman is more likely to reside within the human itself’.*
It is not only the flaws in our capitalist system that might drive us to this point. Zombie outbreaks have become synonymous with many of humanity’s self-destructive tendencies, from nuclear holocaust to bioengineering. Mira Grant’s ‘Parasitology’ trilogy – Parasite (2013), Symbiont (2014) and Chimera (2015) – creates a near-future world in which humans carry genetically engineered ‘SymboGen’ tapeworms in their guts to enable them to combat disease and obesity; but the law of Frankensteinian unintended consequences means that these tapeworms malfunction, become self-aware and escape their hosts’ bodies, killing some of them and turning hordes of others into ‘sleepwalkers’. In more and more portrayals of the zombie apocalypse, the outbreak is our fault, and we must accept the consequences. As Xavier Aldana Reyes says:
Zombies . . . increasingly, warn of the end of civilisation that may be precipitated by global crises exacerbated by national economic pressures, such as climate change, or by biological warfare. Contemporary zombie texts mark a significant move away from the moment of outbreak as the focal plot point and toward the long-lasting effects of catastrophes for which humans are directly responsible.*
This may also be why zombie films embody a certain hopelessness over the future. As people and resources dwindle, it becomes clear that there’s no going back to their previous way of life. The survivors are just treading water, eking out an existence with no meaning and no real future, alone and abandoned, staring into the face of the inevitable end of humanity. Even if they are able to defeat the plague of the braindead creatures, they’ll be left to contend with their legacy of a ruined landscape. Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006) tells the story of the zombie apocalypse, exploring how the world has been rebuilt and adapted, but few other stories envision this victory or how a new world could be born out of such destruction. It would be a sad thought if our existential loneliness had reached the state where we cannot see past it.
Grief and loneliness are ghastly things: brain-numbing, flesh-corrupting states that bend our lives around the lines of their force. In the French film The Night Eats the World (La nuit a dévoré le monde, directed by Dominique Rocher, 2018) the main character wakes after a party to find himself utterly alone in the aftermath of a zombie bloodbath. Despite adapting to survive in this new world, his isolation slowly drives him to madness and hallucination.
Groups fare little better: while mourning the loss of humankind, they must also constantly watch helplessly as their own members succumb to the plague, slowly taken over by death. Maggie (directed by Henry Hobson, 2015) may not be Arnold Schwarzenegger’s best-known movie, but it is one of his more interesting. In the film, a zombie pandemic – called ‘necroambulism’, another attempt to steer clear of the zombie cliché while embracing its symbolic power – has collapsed society; Arnie’s young daughter Maggie is bitten on the arm and Arnie nurses her as she descends into the inevitable zombification. For a while, and despite manifest deterioration (at one point she is woken by maggots wriggling in the dead flesh of her bitten arm), she carries on more-or-less as normal; but there is no cure, and they both know that when Maggie finally ‘turns’ her father will have to accept her ‘death’ head on – he will have to kill her. There’s real poignancy in this exploration of grief and loss. It speaks to the experiences of so many who have watched their loved ones’ lives slowly claimed by unstoppable diseases.
In reminding us of our mortality, zombies also force us to confront our physicality. They record our disgust at our own bodies’ senescence and the inevitable decay of our flesh. We are deteriorating even as we speak, transforming our physical appearance long before death takes us. But they also record a more particular terror: that our bodies’ decay will continue beyond our deaths.
This is all connected with a unique aspect of our relationship with our own bodies. There are things that we are – brave, intelligent, curious, loving, lazy and so on – and then there are things that we have, like clothes and books. But the body exists in both these categories, for we both have and are our bodies. Our culture’s fascination with body horror is one of the ways in which we address the fundamental weirdness of this fault line between having and being. On the one hand our bodies are bestial, disease-prone, decaying flesh that we yearn to escape; on the other, a life lived in the mind would be a barren sort of existence – real life involves inhabiting the real world while being mindful of the sensual richness of embodied experience.*
And while we might primarily think of our minds as being ‘us’, for many of us our bodies are a fundamental part of that identity, and the idea of leaving it rotting in the ground is not a pleasant one. What happens to our bodies after death has occupied us for millennia. Many of our burial practices are to do with grieving; but they are also to do with concern for what happens to our physical bodies. The Egyptians, for example, believed the body would be important in the next life, hence the process of mummification. In modern times, there are still processes to preserve the body, while others would rather be cremated than leave their bodies to slowly fester. Zombies perfectly capture the horror we might feel at the prospect of this, as we are forced to confront, in fascinated revulsion, these decomposing corpses outside of the grave.
So horrified are we by the knowledge that our bodies are already on that steady decline to putrefaction that there are people who undertake onerous medical and surgical intervention, and spend prodigious sums, to stamp out the signs of ageing, to project an illusion that their flesh does not and will not decay. We all know how that goes: beyond a certain point, the hysterical denial of our intrinsic fate becomes even more alarming and bizarre than simple acceptance. There is no stopping the ravaging effects of time.
Worse still, perhaps our fascination with zombies comes not from our fear of death but our fear that we won’t die, that our beings will never escape our bodies and that after our deaths we will neither move on to some spiritual plane nor cease to be, but will carry on, our souls and bodies rotting together – a terrifying idea. This is perhaps connected to the different indignities we might suffer as we age. We might be fully in command of our faculties, but trapped in a body that is deteriorating before our very eyes. Or our bodies are fit and healthy but our minds are slowly being taken over by dementia. Witnessing the gradual but unstoppable slide into the mindlessness of the zombie state is an awful experience suffered in real life by a million carers around the world, as their elderly loved ones succumb to Alzheimer’s disease.
In both their mindless and their rotting state, zombies speak to all our fears of what old age holds in store. In the stories we tell, when forced to confront what is happening to the people around them as they turn into unrecognisable creatures, the characters often question whether there is anything left of the original person.
In reality, when our minds and our bodies eventually betray us, will we lose what it is to be ourselves?
Zombies are scary not because they are dead and they want us to die too, but because they are trapped in a never-ending state of dying, and they want us to be trapped too, in our decaying and deracinated selves. We may think we want to avoid the inevitable ending, death, but we also yearn for the peace death represents – a natural death, after a natural life, is the last thing of which we should be afraid. It is the inescapable decline of everything in life – the gradual rotting of our bodies, our minds, our societies and even our humanity – that is truly terrifying.
Through their symbolistic versatility, zombies provide a place where many different stories intersect: apocalypse by plague; climate apocalypse; apocalypse by entropy. These decaying corpses have become the focal point for so many of our fears and insecurities that they have become the ultimate expression for the end of the world.
* Over the last decade alone we’ve seen Bud Hanzel and John Olson’s The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (2010), Max Brallier’s Can You Survive the Zombie Apocalypse? (2011) and Bryan Hall’s An Ethical Guidebook to the Zombie Apocalypse: How to Keep Your Brain Without Losing Your Heart (2019).
* . . . while lamenting that the Covid-19 outbreak made it impossible for him to publish a novel that he had been planning in which a fictional virus turns people into zombies . . .
* Charlie Stross, ‘Yet Another Novel I Will No Longer Write’, www.antipope.org, 2 April 2020.
* Efthimiou did not calculate the comparative rate for zombies, but as they are considerably less restrained in their feeding habits than vampires, we can assume that global apocalypse would arrive even more swiftly.
* Unless unrelenting mindlessness and rotting flesh are your kinks.
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