Braaaaiiiinnnns!

Trends in popular literature come and go all the time, but ever since George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, people have had a fascination with the walking dead that has only grown as time has gone on. The funny thing is now that so much zombie media has been produced over the years many fans become defensive about what view of zombies are the “best.” Is it the slow, shambling, glassy-eyed zombies of early Romero fame, or the new generation of vicious, sprinting, diseased sort-of-undead horrors common to the newer fictional treatments of the walking dead? I have seen rather heated debates in real life and online on this very topic, but very few people know much about historical zombie lore and how influences from many cultures have created the horror icons that we know today.

As an addendum, I am also personally fascinated by the concept of “zombie apocalypse.” It’s not just the end of the world as we know it – it also comes with flesh-eating zombies! It is its own sub-genre though, with its own conventions and expectations, and I have often wondered what makes a good zombie apocalypse story. The goal of my article here is two-fold: one, to offer a history of zombies in world lore and how it pertains to the modern zombie vogue; and two, to pose the question of “what makes a good zombie story?”

A Feral Ghoul from Fallout 3 (Bethesda Games)

I started thinking about the whole zombie apoc thing a while ago, while playing Fallout 3, watching Zombieland, and then very recently watching a new anime called High School of the Dead. In each case we have zombies – Fallout has always had them, the Ghouls, who in Fallout 3 came in two flavors: Sentient, sane, but horribly mutated and radioactively charred folks perfectly satisfied with not eating your liver while you watch, and then there are the Feral Ghouls. They look like classical zombies, they charge at you at speed, and they do like to snack on peoples’ internal organs with mindless glee. They didn’t cause the apocalypse, though, but were instead by-products of all-consuming nuclear holocaust. Zombieland was a comedic treatment of the genre, spoofing on a wide-range of zombie-movie lore, sort of a film version of the “Zombie Survival Guide.” Having such a movie around, and the other similar spoof-treatments the genre gets, lets you know just how ingrained zombie lore is in our society. And then I saw High School of the Dead. It’s like Ikki Tousen meets Night of the Living Dead. Weird stuff. Now, the walking dead have been used in Japanese media before, but given the tenor of H.O.T.D (as it is known in common parlance) I remarked on just how western the concept of the modern zombie is, despite the fact that zombie lore is definitely non-Euro-American in origin. We can thank George Romero for that, taking a concept originally drawn from Voodoo (Vodoun) beliefs and Middle Eastern legends and altering it to specifically strike at something primal and fearful in human nature.

Historically the zombi of Voodoo myth was drawn from a much older Congolese word, nzambi, which refers to the spirit of a person who died. In Voodoo it refers to a trapped spirit, held in the body of the dead by a bokor (sorcerer, one who deals with the petro, or negative, aspects of the loa). The bokor uses a substance called “zombie powder,” made from a mixture of highly toxic elements, including puffer fish, toxic plants, tree frog skins, and the ashes of a human corpse, among other things. They then control the zombie with a thing called a “zombie’s cucumber,” a plant that has been filled and treated with a dozen or more narcotic, alkaloid substances such as solanine. Voudonistas believe the zombie is a true animated corpse, while others who have studied the lore believe these would-be walking corpses are actually still living people whose minds have been so corrupted by the zombie powder that they have simply lost conscious function. Voodoo zombies are not flesh-eating monsters, but were instead used as slave labor according to legends. In fact, the very concept of flesh-eating undead horrors is not a western concept at all. Few cultures have had any concept of the corporeal dead, but thousands upon thousands of myths concerning the incorporeal dead (ghosts, specters, poltergeists, etc) abound. The few myths of corporeal undead come from spiritual sources, such as the draugr of Norse myth, the ch’ing shih and k’uei of Chinese myth, and the zalozhniy of Russian folklore, all creatures dishonored or forgotten at the time of death and either filled with rage or compelled by evil spirits to do the living harm. The modern zombie concept is instead a marriage of the original zombi myth and the traditions of the Indian subcontinent and Middle East, where creatures such as the Hindu bhuta and the Arabic ghul (ghoul) originated. The bhuta was an unhallowed corpse possessed by a rakshasa and sent to savage the living. Meanwhile, the ghul (literally “demon” in Arabic) was not actually dead, but was a jinn, sired by Iblis/Shaytan (the Devil of Muslim belief) that would feed on human corpses, as well as lure the living far from help before slaying them and consuming them, possibly also stealing their material wealth. They were shapeshifters, often appearing as hyenas, rather than the slavering, pale-skinned humanoid monsters of Dungeons and Dragons fame, or the modern flesh-eating zombies. The early film White Zombie was the first to deal directly with the original zombie myth, but has since been superseded by the Romero-zombies and their successors.

28 Days Later

Why is that, though? The greatest reason in my mind is because each myth plays on different fears. Vodounistas for instance are not so much afraid of zombies as they are of becoming zombies. Remember that these are a people intimately familiar with the concept of slavery and loss of free will on a deeply cultural level. Haiti was born from slave revolt, the only nation to be created as such, and so the fear of loss of free will has to be terrifying even more so for them given their history. Certainly we non-Haitians can also understand that fear, but when George Romero made his zombies rise seemingly of their own accord and hunt and devour the living, it did something else for us that went beyond the rational fear of loss of free will. We, as a species, have worked damned hard to be on the top of the food chain, and if anything scares a human it is being hunted by something that wants to eat you. The fear is compounded when the thing that wants to eat you was once like you – cannibals evoke this sense of fear, for instance. Add to that the sense of otherness produced by something that should not be possible (a corpse that moves on its own) and you have a terror trifecta that goes right to the hind brain and rattles the heebie-geebie sensor to the point of overload.

As a society, though, we quickly become used to such things and after a while the slow, shambling zombies of the original Night of the Living Dead were just not “scary” enough for us. They were too easy to kill, even in numbers, and you could just whack them with a stick and kill them, as long as you didn’t become overwhelmed. Shaun of the Dead made light of this film-fact particularly well, and games like Dungeons and Dragons just treat zombies like common fodder for sword-slinging adventurers. So what else scares us? Shortening our reaction times for one. The fast-zombie, introduced in the remake of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead brought us the new zombie breed, and it has quickly become the preferred zombie-type among many. Modern zombies are also running into the present obsession with pseudo-scientific reasoning. Before the zombies were just there – zombies, boom, at your brains. But what made them rise? It was never defined in the early films, but sources such as exotic radiation, aliens, magic, demons, or disease are the most common sources. Disease is an especially common animating factor now, rather than the radiation fears of the 50’s and 60’s when the potential cloud of nuclear war hung over the world at the time. Disease, likewise, speaks to deeply rooted human fears, and is something we can more readily accept animating corpses than radiation or something even more esoteric. 28 Days Later brought such a change, with the zombies not even being properly dead, but instead infected to the point where their rage-response controls were so damaged that they became raving psychotics. However, they needed to eat, but couldn’t, and so their lifespans were very short. In all these cases, though, the zombies did not just kill and eat us; we could become them – very easily, too. Soon fan conflicts began to arise as to which presentation of zombies is the best.

High-School of the Dead/Gakuen-Mokushiroku

Personally, all of these variants can exist, but they all have to speak to what we fear now to be effective. Zombies have become a classic horror story device, and they reflect what is happening to us in the here and now. Good uses of zombies, like George Romero’s stories, use them as a means of expressing societal issues, while other stories focus on the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse and what happens to mankind when the dust clears. Zombie chic has coincided with the new wave of apocalypse fears as we near the end of the Mayan calendar and another fistful of doomsday prophecies, and we wonder if such a ridiculous thing were to happen, what would people do? The conflict and survival in such a case is a much smaller part of the story than what happens afterwards. Will people rise above the horror and make a better world, or will we be consumed by our own fears and finally destroy the last vestiges of our kind? Even in post-apoc stories that do don’t have zombies many of these same fears are tackled, such as in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. There the very real threat lies in cannibalistic raiders, surviving on the flesh of their fellow man since animal life also took a devastating hit in the aftermath of the global holocaust. In zombie apoc stories though, the added threat of fighting an implacable, remorseless, once-human foe that outnumbers you hundreds to one and that can wrest from you your very identity and turn you on your former friends hits even deeper fears. The fear of the “other” combines with the fear of powerlessness, and we seek to answer the question of “how can we survive this with our humanity in check?”

So there’s my question to all of you out there: What makes a good zombie story or post-apocalyptic tale, and what makes others flop? What are some examples of zombie stories you like, and what about them makes you enjoy them? Include the humorous with the serious by all means, since it’s all connected. I’d love to hear what you all think. Catch you all later, then.