Figure 2. Albin Grau, poster for Nosferatu (1922).
While sound came to cinema in 1929, early vampire films still tended to use it sparingly, as though acknowledging that naturalistic dialogue, in particular, would break the spell. Carl Dreyer’s beautiful, dreamlike Vampyr (1933) is a very free, imagistic adaptation of ‘Carmilla’, largely silent. A much more straightforward film, Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), is again punctuated by long silences. Subsequent popular culture would have been very different without the iconic performance of the great Hungarian actor Béla Lugosi in the title role of this film. Lugosi definitively established the dominant iconography of the screen vampire—the widow’s peak, the evening dress, the opera cape, the mannered delivery (Lugosi spoke little English in 1931, and had to learn his lines phonetically).
The monochrome world of Browning and of the Universal Studios horror stable, with their roots in German expressionist cinema, in vaudeville and carnival, and in stage melodrama, established a paradigm for horror cinema which was to remain dominant until the first horror releases of Hammer Studios in the mid-1950s. A low-budget independent studio, Hammer operated effectively as a repertory company of actors, directors, and technicians, recycling plots, costumes, and locations often to ingenious effect. Arising out of the bleak and straitened post-war British world of bombsites and urban redevelopment, national service, and scarcity and (until 1954) ration cards, Hammer clearly offered a fantasy alternative. Engaged in a constant running battle with the British censors, Hammer’s was a highly sexualized world, heightened by a lurid primary-colour palette particularly characterized by the liberal use of the deep red cinematic fake blood known as Kensington Gore, quantities of which were often smeared over the fanged mouth of the imperious, magnetic Christopher Lee.
It is difficult to overestimate how modern Hammer’s sensibilities must have seemed when Dracula was released in 1957, but by the time Lee hung up his cape after The Satanic Rites of Dracula in 1973, the studio’s output seemed stale and out of touch, formally and ideologically conservative. Two years later, vampires definitively entered the contemporary world, where they have remained ever since. Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot (1975) exchanged Transylvania, Styria, or Victorian London for a recognizably downbeat New England small town, and was, like all its author’s works, steeped in post-war American popular culture—its literary frame of reference was not the Gothic canon of Le Fanu and Stoker but rather the works of the writers which King and his generation grew up reading—Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, and Richard Matheson, whose apocalyptic vampire-zombie classic I Am Legend (1954) is an early example of a distinctive American pop-cultural interpretation of traditional Gothic monsters. ‘Salem’s Lot, in fact, enacts a clash between the aristocratic Old European vampire Kurt Barlow—who comes to New England along with his suave henchman Straker in the guise of a pair of gay antiques dealers, selling ‘old things, fine things’—and the contemporary American world of rock music, television, Vietnam, and Richard Nixon. Barlow is eventually destroyed by King’s characteristic combination of a writer and a child, but not before spawning a new breed of distinctively American vampires, democratic, demotic, proudly vulgar.
None of these are terms that would apply to Anne Rice’s vampires. Rice’s Interview with the Vampire was published in 1976, the year after ‘Salem’s Lot, and has proved no less influential. Rice’s ancient vampires clearly understand themselves as the custodians of Western high culture—they are vastly wealthy, aesthetes, commodity fetishists, and acquisitors. Whether uncanny, abject, exotic, or aristocratic, vampires before Rice had tended to be distinctively Other. Stoker’s Count Dracula gives fascinating glimpses into his history at the beginning of the novel, and then effectively disappears from his own narrative, an invisible terror to be prevented at all costs. For Rice, vampirism is an aspirational condition, and it has largely remained so ever since, as the vampire has become a major figure in the popular subcategory of horror known as Paranormal Romance. Her readers don’t want to kill vampires; they want to be them. After Rice, vampires have a rich interiority that amounts to utter self-absorption. They have their needs and desires, their losses and longings; they deserve not our fear or our hatred, but our sympathy, our envy, even our love. While some contemporary vampires often go to ingenious lengths to avoid killing innocent people (they prey on animals, they visit blood banks, they only drink the blood of criminals or the wicked), I think we should nevertheless be troubled by a vampire culture which aspires to the condition of understanding humanity as an inferior species.
Zombies
On 23 July 2011, an estimated 8,000 people gathered in St Stephen’s Green in the centre of my home city of Dublin for an extraordinary event. This was the annual ‘zombie walk’, in which members of the public parade through the city dressed as the living dead, often with extraordinarily inventive make-up—white, grey, green, or blue faces; generous deployment of ‘Kensington gore’; torn or missing bits of flesh, sometimes with teeth visible through holes in the cheek or jaw; sunken, hollow, blacked out, or even missing eyes, or eyeballs dangling out of their sockets; shabby, torn clothing—often formal suits in a state of some distress (Figure 3). Some of them appear to be munching on what look disturbingly like severed human limbs. And then—they shamble. Thousands of them, shambling through the city centre, an army of the risen dead on the march, coming to get you!
Figure 3. Brains! A Dublin zombie walker.
Dublin isn’t the only city to stage an annual zombie walk, nor was it the first; and its walk is certainly not the largest. It appears that the first ever zombie walk was staged, semi-spontaneously, in a gamers’ convention in Milwaukee in 2000. This, you might think, is just the kind of thing that Midwestern computer gamers might get up to, being semi-socialized nerds who need to get a life. But it’s not that simple. The idea soon caught on, and cities all over the US, and then all over the world, began to witness these outbreaks, as if the zombie apocalypse which films, TV, comics, and games had warned us about for the last few decades had finally arrived.
Why would people do this? The thousands of people who gather annually for these events are not all computer nerds with no friends, nor are they all hirsute adolescents with impressive collections of death metal records (and no friends). But they are mostly young people, and largely highly educated—students and youngish college graduates in their twenties and early thirties, with a fair representation of high-school kids among them too. What drives these members of the young urban bourgeoisie to gather together in these enormous flash mobs, a parade of the walking dead?
There are many answers, but one of them—and for me the most significant—is political. It’s no accident that these outbreaks of zombification have greatly intensified across Western cities since the global financial crash of 2008. Perhaps unconsciously to themselves, the zombie walkers are protesting.
If vampires, at least after Romanticism, have tended to be aristocratic individualists, feared and admired as a ‘superior’ adaptation of humanity, then zombies are a monstrous underclass, an undifferentiated, mindless lumpenproletarian mass. Though its origins are to be found in African religion, the figure of the zombie is most closely associated with the Caribbean, and particularly with Haitian voodoo beliefs. In voodoo, the zombie is a body returned from the dead by a sorcerer, completely devoid of will, there to do the sorcerer’s bidding. When the writer and ethnographer Zora Neale Hurston visited Haiti in 1936–7, she began to hear stories of zombies, and particularly the case of Felicia Felix-Mentor, who had apparently returned from the dead after having been buried for thirty years. Hurston, like other ethnographers after her, was open to the possibility that zombification was a clinical fact, brought on by the administration of powerful psychotropic drugs unknown to Western medicine.
Whether or not that is the case, it is clear that the zombie as a symbol in voodoo arises directly out of, and comments upon, the experience of slavery: the zombie is a mindless worker, completely in thrall to
a malign master. While zombies may be everywhere now, they were uncommon monsters in early and mid-twentieth-century horror cinema—but when they appeared, it was always in the context of slavery. The first zombie film was Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932), set on Haiti and starring the great Béla Lugosi as Murder Legendre, a white slaver who commands an army of zombies to work his sugar plantation. Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie (1943), one of a series of atmospheric horrors produced by Val Lewton for RKO Pictures, is a Caribbean rewriting of Jane Eyre in which meek Canadian nurse Frances Dee finds herself working on the island of San Sebastian, enmeshed in a world of voodoo and zombies (the African American actor Darby Jones gives a chillingly memorable performance as the zombie Carrefour), to the accompaniment of an ongoing musical commentary by calypso singer Sir Lancelot. As an example of what we would call today a postcolonial rescripting of Jane Eyre, I Walked With a Zombie predates Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea by over twenty years, and must surely have influenced Rhys in writing her pioneering novel. In 1966 (interestingly, the same year as the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea), Hammer Studios released The Plague of the Zombies, directed by John Gilling, in which Cornish squire John Carson returns from Haiti as a voodoo adept, and sets about creating a zombie workforce as cheap labour for his tin-mine.
Wes Craven’s 1988 The Serpent and the Rainbow is set on Haiti. The film is loosely based on Wade Davis’s ethnographic study of the same title, and comments directly on the barbarities of the dictatorial Duvalier regime, which ruled Haiti from 1957 to 1986, and which was reputed to have cemented its power through its secret police, the Tonton Macoute’s use of voodoo and zombification. But The Serpent and the Rainbow is quite self-consciously an anomaly, an historical outlier. Within a couple of years of the release of The Plague of the Zombies, the political meaning of zombie culture was about to change dramatically, and forever.
In 1968, George A. Romero, an independent film-maker from Pittsburgh of great political intelligence, released Night of the Living Dead, and the modern horror film was born. The film opens with a bickering brother and sister, Johnny and Barbara, driving to a rural Pennsylvania cemetery to visit their father’s grave. At the graveside, they see what appears to be an old man shuffling towards them, and Johnny, doing an excellent Boris Karloff impersonation, utters the film’s most celebrated line: ‘They’re coming to get you, Barbara!’ And they are. The old man is in fact a zombie freshly risen from his grave, who attacks and kills Johnny. Barbara manages to escape to a nearby farmhouse, but spends the rest of the film catatonic. In the farmhouse, a cast of characters led by Ben (Duane Jones), a heroic African American, repulses the onslaught of what seems to be a never-ending wave of the undead, who have (in the film’s most startling departure from traditional zombie lore) turned cannibalistic. But the real danger, it seems, lurks within the farmhouse itself, as the surviving characters argue and fight among themselves for leadership, and over whether they should fortify the farmhouse and stand and fight, or hide in the cellar. Over the course of a long night, the zombies attempt again and again to break into the farmhouse, turning the film into what has been described as ‘a symphony of psychotic hands’—the hands (two of them belonging to the Returned Johnny) that reach out, trying to break through doors and boarded-up windows, tearing at human flesh. (It’s the nearest cinema has ever come to rendering a genuine nightmare in its relentless sense of impending doom.) As dawn breaks, a posse arrives led by a redneck sheriff. They shoot the zombies in the head (that’s how you stop them—another pioneering invention from Romero), and burn the corpses on a gigantic funeral pyre. Ben, stumbling from the farmhouse having survived the Night of the Living Dead, is shot in the head by one of the posse. In the film’s closing shot, we see his corpse being hoisted on to the pyre with a meathook.
There is much to say about Night of the Living Dead, which might be the most influential horror film ever made. It effectively introduced in their modern forms the two qualities which define much subsequent horror—nihilism and gore. Night was made on a tiny budget of $114,000, and one of Romero’s backers was a Pittsburgh butcher, whose contribution to the film is there onscreen for all to see, as the zombies munch away on entrails and various pieces of offal (by the third instalment of Romero’s Living Dead series, 1985’s Day of the Dead, there was reputedly so much rotting offal on the set that the cast were vomiting between takes). It is also a film with a radical political critique of contemporary American society, mired in an increasingly unpopular and unwinnable war in Vietnam, and struggling domestically to assimilate the implications of the civil rights movement. The year 1968 was an American annus horribilis, with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy following on from those of JFK and Malcolm X a few years previously, and in Night of the Living Dead America seemed to have got the film it deserved, a film better-placed than any other to reflect its horror, its justified disillusionment with authority, its racism (it’s a film which ends with a heroic black leader shot by racist white authority figures). It became a major success on the American drive-in circuit, with young audiences flocking to see a film which so closely represented their own sensibilities.
In the image of the walking dead returned to devour the living, Romero clearly felt he had hit upon the great all-purpose metaphor for representing contemporary America, and so has continued to remake the film ever since: Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985), Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007), Survival of the Dead (2009). All are worth watching, but Dawn is Romero’s masterpiece, and probably the single film most responsible for creating today’s zombie culture. For one thing, by 1978 Romero had started working with make-up genius Tom Savini, the man who really brought gore and splatter to horror cinema in all its eyeball-gouging, head-severing, entrail-spilling glory (Savini had served in the US army in Vietnam as a combat photographer, an experience which he admits definitively shaped his cinematic career). But more than this, Dawn offers perhaps the most powerful, devastating, and influential critique of consumer culture in any work of modern art. Here, the Night of the Living Dead has turned into an all-out Zombie Apocalypse, as the dead have overrun America. A small group of survivors takes shelter in a gigantic shopping mall, where they spend their time alternately browsing the aisles and stocking up on consumer goods, and fighting off the zombie hordes who also want to get into the mall as it’s the place they feel most at home.
Dawn is probably best viewed as a combination of a delirious Swiftian satire and a Frankfurt School treatise: this is Theodor Adorno’s Culture Industry, once again red in tooth and claw. Dawn has, in fact, provided cultural commentators with one of the most effective discourses for critiquing consumer culture. It’s no accident that, when Curtis White wrote his own brilliant, Adorno-inflected critique of the modern American Culture Industry, The Middle Mind (2004), it should be subtitled Why Consumer Culture is Turning Us Into the Living Dead. Scarcely less brilliant was Charlie Brooker’s rebarbative attack on media culture, Dead Set (2008), in which zombies attack the studio where reality TV nightmare Big Brother is being filmed. (The previous year, Brooker had published a volume of essays entitled Dawn of the Dumb.)
Dead Set is one example of what has become a proliferation of zombie culture since the millennium. In 2003, the writer Max Brooks published The Zombie Survival Guide, a practical handbook to coping with the forthcoming zombie apocalypse. This captured the public imagination, and was the precursor of Brooks’s bestselling novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006), which used the kinds of documentary narrative techniques horror has deployed since the publication of Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde, and (especially) Dracula in the nineteenth century, but which to a contemporary readership may seem like the novelistic equivalent of horror cinema’s dominant post-millennial ‘found footage’ technique (see Chapter 6). The zombie apocalypse is at the centre of the brilliantly successful TV series The Walking Dead (first broadcast 2010), and provides the overarching narrative
threat for the even more successful Game of Thrones (first broadcast 2011). Numerous films of the 2010s have focused on the outbreak or aftermath of a zombie pandemic, from the troubled film adaptation of World War Z (2013) to the surprisingly affecting Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Maggie (2015) to the remarkable The Girl With All the Gifts (2016). Advertisements, apparently straight-faced (it is impossible to tell with certainty), have begun to appear online for ‘Zombie-Proof’ houses.
Contemporary zombie culture has, as I suggested, gained especial resonance since the global financial crisis of 2007, as an expression of personal disempowerment and apocalyptic terror. To borrow a phrase which is usually attributed to the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, but which has been deployed by commentators both on zombies and on the contemporary cultural politics: it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. And so it is that, following Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, zombification has become one of our major metaphors for thinking through the contemporary scene and our own individual helplessness in the face of vast economic forces which we may feel are inimical to the good life, or of the seemingly inevitable ecological catastrophes brought on by those forces. The zombie apocalypse, it seems, really is upon us.
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