Spinning Grave
10-11-2007, 06:35 AM
This is an article I wrote on zombies back in spring of 2005. It was written for the now deceased web site FrightMedia.com. It is minus a few of the photos originally included with the article and has had a couple of typos fixed but otherwise appears here as it did two and a half years ago. Enjoy!
From Snake God to Your PlayStation:
The Evolution & Persistence of Zombies in Pop Culture
By Tom Gleason
For Menard.
Special thanks to Robert Reay, Chris Pallace, Eric Machan Howd, Calico, John Dedeke & my wife for their various conversations and contributions that led to this article.
From the Webster Comprehensive Dictionary International Edition, 1992:
zom•bi (zom′bë) n. 1 In West African voodoo cults, the python deity; also the snake deity of the voodoo cults of Haiti and of the southern United States. 2 The supernatural power by which a dead body is believed to be reanimated; specifically a corpse reactivated by sorcery, but still dead. 3 Loosely, a ghost. Also zom′bie. [<West African. Cf. Bantu (Congo) zumbi fetish.] –zom′bi•ism n.
zom•bie (zom′bë) n. A large, strong cocktail made from several kinds of rum, fruit juices, and liqueur. [<ZOMBI]
Zombies. They are everywhere. No, don’t panic. They aren’t massing outside your home—they are already inside. They are in our movies, our books, our video games, our music, and our conversations. Zombies make appearances in commercials selling beer and cell phones. On the oldies stations, UK band, The Zombies croon Time of the Season. A Resident Evil disc sits in the game console, a Twilight Creations zombie board game waits in the closet, and a brand new George A. Romero zombie flick is coming to our theaters soon. Zombies are everywhere.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y131/Spinninggrave/Junk/zombies.gif
Where did these undead fiends come from? How have they changed over the years? Why do they scare us? Why do zombies continue to gain in popularity? How have they gnawed their way into our hearts? Let’s start from the beginning.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y131/Spinninggrave/Junk/voodoozombie.jpg
The Beginning: Religion & Slavery
The origin of the zombie lies in the former kingdom of Dahomey (now Benin) in West Africa. The primary Dahomean religion was vodun. Vodun featured a number of deities, including Zombi, the python spirit. The king of Dahomey profitted from selling captured enemies and even his own people to the slave trade.
Slave owners sought to drive out the influence of tribal religions by breaking up slaves from the same tribe; mixing them with slaves from other tribes. What this accomplished was the formation of a new religion, voodoo, the co-mingling of many tribes’ religions. Since many slaves in Hispaniola were from Dahomey, many of the vodun beliefs dominated voodoo. The name voodoo itself is a variation on the word vodun. The leaders of this conglomerate religion were houngans (priests) and mambos (priestesses).
Zombi became a word to describe the reanimated dead. A corpse raised from the dead by a bokor. In his book, Vodou Shaman, Ross Heaven describes a bokor as, “A Houngan or sorcerer who works with ‘both hands’ that is, one who will cast spells that may harm as well as heal”(195). The zombi would then be used as a slave or other sinister purpose. In her 1928 book, Spirit Cult in Hayti, Elsie Clews Parsons told stories of zombis being magically turned into animals which were then slaughtered for meat. A British consul who was struck ill in 1908 blamed his sickness on having inadvertantly eaten zombi flesh sold in the marketplace in Port-au-Prince.
It is easy to see how the Haitians would develop a mythical creature based on the concept of slavery. Only properly worshipping the loa (gods of voodoo) could protect one from a fate of unending slavery even in death. Voodoo and zombis likely struck fear into the visiting foreigners and local whites as something that was alien to their own religious beliefs and cultural practices. It is very interesting that people were afraid that they might eat zombies, rather than zombies eating them.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y131/Spinninggrave/Junk/voodoozombie2.jpg
Early 20th Century: Voodoo Goes Hollywood
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y131/Spinninggrave/Junk/Walked.jpg
Xen•o•pho•bi•a (zen′ә•fö′bë•ә) n. Dislike of strangers or foreigners.
Films like White Zombie, I Walked with a Zombie, Revolt of the Zombies, Revenge of the Zombies, and King of the Zombies hit American movie theaters during the 1930s and 40s. The posters for the films would proclaim slogans such as “FORBIDDEN VOODOO SECRETS SENSATIONALLY REVEALED!” (I Walked with a Zombie) and “With his zombie eyes he rendered her powerless. With his zombie grip he made her perform his every desire” (White Zombie). The second poster slogan sounds like a ****age boy’s wet dream rather than a horror film.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y131/Spinninggrave/Junk/walkedzombie.jpg
The voodoo films relied on the same fears of foreign culture and religion that bothered visitors to Haiti. Ironically perhaps, the villains in these films seem to always be white men. Bela Lugosi in White Zombie is just another version of Dracula as he commands his zombies. Dr. Sangre in King of the Zombies is trying to use zombies to extract military secrets to help the nazis in World War II. The zombies vary between being actual undead and just being people who are hypnotized. The scares often don’t come from the zombies themselves, but rather from their master. A white man who has been warped by the black magic of another culture.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y131/Spinninggrave/Junk/Kingzombies.jpg
The Late 20th Century: They’re Coming to Get You
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y131/Spinninggrave/Junk/NOTLD.jpg
“There was complete silence. A little girl across the aisle from me, maybe nine years old, was sitting very still in her seat and crying…..I don’t think the younger kids really knew what hit them. They’d seen horror movies before, but this was something else.”
-Roger Ebert describing his first time watching Night of the Living Dead in a theater.
In 1968 George A. Romero forever altered how zombies were perceived by the public—and he didn’t even use the word zombie in his film. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead presented a world in which the dead have mysteriously risen and are eating the flesh of the living. While the film primarily shows just the local area around the farmhouse it is set in, Romero accomplishes a feeling of world-wide apocalypse through the television broadcasts and the sheer chaos of what transpires at the farmhouse. Romero’s ghouls struck a nerve with viewers, and launched a new subgenre of horror that continues to thrive. Why did Romero’s new form of zombie have such an impact?
Agoraphobia
The voodoo zombie represents a fear of enslavement or of foreign culture, but Romero’s creatures cover a broader range. The Romero zombie has no master other than its hunger. These zombies aren’t just some threat in a foreign jungle, these zombies are everywhere. They are in the jungles, the cities, suburbia, and are even lurking outside rural farmhouses. The Romero zombies are liberals, conservatives, gays, straights, Muslims, Christians, bad drivers, they represent everyone who worries you—and face it, people are scary. The voodoo zombie is to xenophobia what the Romero zombie is to agoraphobia.
Agoraphobia is a fear of open or public places. Agoraphobics fear leaving their homes or places of safety and venturing out in public. Romero’s zombies play heavily on this fear. Night of the Living Dead is all about trying to defend a home from outsiders, both the dead ones and the living ones. Tom and Judy would have been better off if they had blocked the doors and windows and turned everyone away (the Coopers, Ben, Barbara, the mobs of deputized hicks). They should have just hid in the basement until after the screams, breaking sounds, moans and shooting stopped.
Agoraphobia literally translates from Greek into “fear of the marketplace.” Fittingly, Romero chose a shopping mall as the setting for his second zombie film, Dawn of the Dead.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y131/Spinninggrave/Junk/Dawn.jpg
The Unnatural Disaster
At their most basic, Romero’s zombie films are disaster flicks. The essence of the films is the survivor’s reactions, interactions and their fight for survival. Try watching Night of the Living Dead and The Poseidon Adventure back-to-back. You will see the characters go through similar choices and interactions. Gene Hackman’s Reverend Scott continuously faces doubts and accusations as he tries to lead his small band of survivors to safety and gets a few killed along the way. In Night of the Living Dead, Ben faces similar confrontations with Harry in his own attempts to save everyone. The irony being that the unlikable Harry was correct all along. Ben’s heroics get everyone killed.
Disaster films cause viewers to question what they would do if placed in the same situation. The modern zombie film causes the same reaction. If you spend time hanging around a group of horror fans, eventually they will end up talking about their own survival plans in case of zombie attack. In case the dead ever actually rise, legions of Romero fans will be able to lead the rest to safety. That is, if they don’t get wiped out by a flood, earthquake, or other disaster that can’t be solved by shooting it in the head.
The Uncanny Valley
The uncanny valley is a term invented by Doctor Masahiro Mori in the late 1970s. Dr. Mori’s research dealt with human psychological reactions to machinery that is increasingly getting closer to emulating human movement perfectly. Dave Bryant, in his internet article about the uncanny valley, describes how Dr. Mori plotted an emotional response to non-human entities with similarities to human appearance and movement. Mori’s results had an unexpected find as Bryant writes, “the curve is not a sure, steady upward trend. Instead, there is a peak shortly before one reaches a completely human ‘look’. . . but then a deep chasm plunges below neutrality into a strongly negative response before rebounding to a second peak where resemblance to humanity is complete.” This chasm is the uncanny valley.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y131/Spinninggrave/Junk/uncanny.jpg
An example of the Uncanny Valley in action: http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2005/0613/nedo0153.mov
Essentially when something bears no appearance to a human being, people tend to focus on any human-like qualities it possesses. We attribute human qualities to pets because something they do is similar to our own behavior. However, when we see something that is very human-like we will focus more on the qualities about it that are not human and it will disquiet us. While this research was meant to be applied to the construction of robots, it is finding application in CGI animation as well, and it also explains why groups of slowly shuffling, jerky-moving zombies might disturb viewers. They look human, but they aren’t moving naturally. While Dr. Mori’s research covers motion and appearance, zombies may also accomplish the uncanny valley through sound, or actually the lack of it. Most zombies shown in movies are on the quiet side, with only the occasional moan escaping them. Seeing large groups of people being quiet does not feel natural.
Even animals pick up on this to some degree. Here’s an experiment you can try at home, kids. Lurch around like a zombie around your pets. Dogs and cats will pick up on your odd body language and motion and react with suspicion. Your fish will probably just ignore you. It’s not exactly a demonstration of the uncanny valley, but it’s fun to make your pets look at you weird.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y131/Spinninggrave/Cats/experiment.jpg
We take experiments very seriously at Fright Media Labs. See? Exposure and reaction. Where is our government grant money?
The zombies in Return of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later and the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead don’t really take advantage of the uncanny valley. They exchange their inhuman motions for speed. While the loss of the uncanny valley may upset some horror fans, running zombies do play more on agoraphobia. When the zombies can run, there really isn’t any leaving your shelter.
Cannibalism & the Loss of Identity
People are afraid of cannibalism. It’s only natural. What life-form wants to be eaten (barring that guy in Germany a couple years back who answered that personal ad)? Being eaten by animals is scary. Being killed, cooked and eaten by people is scary. Being eaten alive by animalistic hungry people is terrifying. Getting torn apart and bitten to death while watching people play tug of war with your intestines has got to make the top ten list of sucky ways to die.
If the zombies don’t fully consume you, you become one yourself. You lose your individuality and join the teeming masses. One way or another, you become part of them.
It Can Be a Loved One
Two characters in Night of the Living Dead are killed by their own family members who have gone zombie. A third gets munched on by a relative after he’s dead. Your own daughter or brother could become one of THEM, those bad people outside. They can turn on you worse than that dysfunctional family Christmas when your uncle had too much to drink and decided to tell everyone what their problem was.
Zombies in Pop Culture: They Aren’t Going Away
“Yeah, I know I'm ugly... I said to a bartender, 'Make me a zombie.' He said 'God beat me to it.”
-Rodney Dangerfield
Zombies have stumbled their way into our lexicon. You can spend the night drinking zombies. Then the next day when you stumble into work, lacking in sleep and hung-over, your co-workers may comment that you look like a zombie—and odds are they aren’t even horror fans. The term can describe someone’s appearance, their subservience or a general lack of awareness. Most recently the term, “zombie effect”, has come to describe the effect that cell phones and lap tops have had on people in social situations. People focus their attention on things and conversations that aren’t actually present. They become tuned-out zombies.
Zombies make appearances in music. There is Rob Zombie and his former band White Zombie singing Die, Zombie, Die. Delores O’Riordan screams “Zuh-ahm-bi!” in the Cranberries song about violence in Ireland. Michael Jackson turned into a zombie to boogie with the undead horde in his Thriller video. In retrospect, the video seems to foreshadow Jackson’s transformation into a monster in real life.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y131/Spinninggrave/Junk/thriller.jpg
Zombies make frequent appearances in movies, even when they aren’t immediately recognizable as such. The Stepford Wives (1975) may have been robots, but at the heart of the film is the slavery zombie fear and loss of identity. The gang members in the original Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) are just zombies with guns. They might be alive, but they still have that lack of humanity and silent drive to kill. Assault may have been John Carpenter’s take on Rio Bravo, but the similarities to Night of the Living Dead are numerous.
This article actually came about from another article I was writing about the numerous zombie games that have been produced over the years. From the Atari 2600’s game Entombed, to Zombies Ate my Neighbors for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo, to the Resident Evil and soon Romero’s City of the Dead. When SPI released its Dawn of the Dead board game in 1978, it started a trickle of zombie board games that has grown into a small stream. These days Twilight Creations Inc. has built a business based on zombie board games. Their Zombie!!! series of games has proven very popular with horror gamers. Twilight’s newest zombie game, All Wound-Up: Escape from the Cemetery, features zombie wind-up toys that are just adorable.
On-line you can play with the Zombie Infection Simulator: http://kevan.org/proce55ing/zombies/
Or learn how to protect your home from zombies: http://www.loris.net/zombie/
Or join the Federal Vampire & Zombie Agency: http://www.fvza.org/
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y131/Spinninggrave/Junk/survivalguide.jpg
Zombie humor is prevalent. Being basically mind-less humans or representatives of our fear of other humans, the zombie lends itself well to satire. Mel Brooks' son, Max Brooks is now more known for his book, The Zombie Survival Guide, than for being Mel Brook’s son. Philip Nutman used zombies to saterize the government under George H.W. Bush. in his novel Wet Work. A tradition continued when recently Aaron McGruder’s comic strip, The Boondocks, used zombies to explain the re-election of George W. Bush.
Zombies also have made more serious horrific appearances in various forms of literature. From Russo’s Night of the Living Dead novelization, to John Skipp & Craig Spector’s Book of the Dead anthologies, to the comic books Deadworld, The Walking Dead and Joe R. Lansdale’s On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with the Dead Folks.
A zombie also makes a notable non-appearance in the 1902 classic short story The Monkey’s Paw by W.W. Jacobs. In the story Mr. & Mrs. White accidentally cause the death of their son Herbert through making wishes on an enchanted mummified monkey paw. Their son is mangled horribly by the machinery at the mill at which he works. Mr. White wishes on the paw for his son to return. The story has only to describe the knocking the Whites hear upon their door. It does not even have to describe what shape poor mangled reanimated Herbert looks like. It leaves it entirely up to us to imagine.
Where are Zombies Headed?
My guess is that we haven’t seen the last of the sprinting zombie. Sprinting zombies probably work more for today’s young generation, who has been raised in a culture where everything is fast and “X-treme.” Be on the lookout for zombies on snowboards.
Romero has shown us humans struggling to keep zombies out of a home, trying to keep zombies out of a shopping mall, and trying to keep zombies out of a military base. Now, in Land of the Dead, it seems that we will see humans struggling to keep zombies out of a city. His institutions that we are trying to stay safe inside are getting broader. The next step would be keeping zombies out of your state or your country….then we come almost full circle back to xenophobia. So maybe zombies are headed back to their beginning.
Bibliography
Bryant, Dave. “The Uncanny Valley: Why are Monster-Movie Zombies so Horrifying and Talking Animals so Fascinating.” Glimpses: Written Nonfiction. 2005. http://www.arclight.net/~pdb/nonfiction/uncanny-valley.html
Dash, Michael J. “Culture and Customs of Haiti.” 2001. Greenwood Press. Westport, Conneticut.
Ebert, Roger. “Just Another Horror Movie—Or is it?”
Reader’s Digest (June 1969)
Heaven, Ross.”Vodou Shaman.” 2003. Rochester, Vermont. Destiny Books.
Heinl, Robert Debs & Nancy Gordon. “Written in Blood.”
1978. Houghton Mifflin Company. Boston.
Kendrick, Walter. “The Thrill of Fear.”1991. Grove Weidenfield. New York
Laguerre, Michael S. “Voodoo and Politics in Haiti.” 1989. St. Martin’s Press. New York.
McCarty, John. “The Fearmakers.” November 1994 New York, St. Martin’s Press
Parsons, Elsie Clews. “Spirit Cult in Hayti,” Journal de la Societe des Americanistes de Paris, vol XX, 1928.
Rathus, Spencer A. “Psychology: Concepts and Connections.” 2004. Belmont, California. Wadsworth.
Vieira, Mark A. “Hollywood Horror: from Gothic to Cosmic.” Harry N. Abrams, Inc. New York.
From Snake God to Your PlayStation:
The Evolution & Persistence of Zombies in Pop Culture
By Tom Gleason
For Menard.
Special thanks to Robert Reay, Chris Pallace, Eric Machan Howd, Calico, John Dedeke & my wife for their various conversations and contributions that led to this article.
From the Webster Comprehensive Dictionary International Edition, 1992:
zom•bi (zom′bë) n. 1 In West African voodoo cults, the python deity; also the snake deity of the voodoo cults of Haiti and of the southern United States. 2 The supernatural power by which a dead body is believed to be reanimated; specifically a corpse reactivated by sorcery, but still dead. 3 Loosely, a ghost. Also zom′bie. [<West African. Cf. Bantu (Congo) zumbi fetish.] –zom′bi•ism n.
zom•bie (zom′bë) n. A large, strong cocktail made from several kinds of rum, fruit juices, and liqueur. [<ZOMBI]
Zombies. They are everywhere. No, don’t panic. They aren’t massing outside your home—they are already inside. They are in our movies, our books, our video games, our music, and our conversations. Zombies make appearances in commercials selling beer and cell phones. On the oldies stations, UK band, The Zombies croon Time of the Season. A Resident Evil disc sits in the game console, a Twilight Creations zombie board game waits in the closet, and a brand new George A. Romero zombie flick is coming to our theaters soon. Zombies are everywhere.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y131/Spinninggrave/Junk/zombies.gif
Where did these undead fiends come from? How have they changed over the years? Why do they scare us? Why do zombies continue to gain in popularity? How have they gnawed their way into our hearts? Let’s start from the beginning.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y131/Spinninggrave/Junk/voodoozombie.jpg
The Beginning: Religion & Slavery
The origin of the zombie lies in the former kingdom of Dahomey (now Benin) in West Africa. The primary Dahomean religion was vodun. Vodun featured a number of deities, including Zombi, the python spirit. The king of Dahomey profitted from selling captured enemies and even his own people to the slave trade.
Slave owners sought to drive out the influence of tribal religions by breaking up slaves from the same tribe; mixing them with slaves from other tribes. What this accomplished was the formation of a new religion, voodoo, the co-mingling of many tribes’ religions. Since many slaves in Hispaniola were from Dahomey, many of the vodun beliefs dominated voodoo. The name voodoo itself is a variation on the word vodun. The leaders of this conglomerate religion were houngans (priests) and mambos (priestesses).
Zombi became a word to describe the reanimated dead. A corpse raised from the dead by a bokor. In his book, Vodou Shaman, Ross Heaven describes a bokor as, “A Houngan or sorcerer who works with ‘both hands’ that is, one who will cast spells that may harm as well as heal”(195). The zombi would then be used as a slave or other sinister purpose. In her 1928 book, Spirit Cult in Hayti, Elsie Clews Parsons told stories of zombis being magically turned into animals which were then slaughtered for meat. A British consul who was struck ill in 1908 blamed his sickness on having inadvertantly eaten zombi flesh sold in the marketplace in Port-au-Prince.
It is easy to see how the Haitians would develop a mythical creature based on the concept of slavery. Only properly worshipping the loa (gods of voodoo) could protect one from a fate of unending slavery even in death. Voodoo and zombis likely struck fear into the visiting foreigners and local whites as something that was alien to their own religious beliefs and cultural practices. It is very interesting that people were afraid that they might eat zombies, rather than zombies eating them.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y131/Spinninggrave/Junk/voodoozombie2.jpg
Early 20th Century: Voodoo Goes Hollywood
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y131/Spinninggrave/Junk/Walked.jpg
Xen•o•pho•bi•a (zen′ә•fö′bë•ә) n. Dislike of strangers or foreigners.
Films like White Zombie, I Walked with a Zombie, Revolt of the Zombies, Revenge of the Zombies, and King of the Zombies hit American movie theaters during the 1930s and 40s. The posters for the films would proclaim slogans such as “FORBIDDEN VOODOO SECRETS SENSATIONALLY REVEALED!” (I Walked with a Zombie) and “With his zombie eyes he rendered her powerless. With his zombie grip he made her perform his every desire” (White Zombie). The second poster slogan sounds like a ****age boy’s wet dream rather than a horror film.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y131/Spinninggrave/Junk/walkedzombie.jpg
The voodoo films relied on the same fears of foreign culture and religion that bothered visitors to Haiti. Ironically perhaps, the villains in these films seem to always be white men. Bela Lugosi in White Zombie is just another version of Dracula as he commands his zombies. Dr. Sangre in King of the Zombies is trying to use zombies to extract military secrets to help the nazis in World War II. The zombies vary between being actual undead and just being people who are hypnotized. The scares often don’t come from the zombies themselves, but rather from their master. A white man who has been warped by the black magic of another culture.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y131/Spinninggrave/Junk/Kingzombies.jpg
The Late 20th Century: They’re Coming to Get You
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y131/Spinninggrave/Junk/NOTLD.jpg
“There was complete silence. A little girl across the aisle from me, maybe nine years old, was sitting very still in her seat and crying…..I don’t think the younger kids really knew what hit them. They’d seen horror movies before, but this was something else.”
-Roger Ebert describing his first time watching Night of the Living Dead in a theater.
In 1968 George A. Romero forever altered how zombies were perceived by the public—and he didn’t even use the word zombie in his film. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead presented a world in which the dead have mysteriously risen and are eating the flesh of the living. While the film primarily shows just the local area around the farmhouse it is set in, Romero accomplishes a feeling of world-wide apocalypse through the television broadcasts and the sheer chaos of what transpires at the farmhouse. Romero’s ghouls struck a nerve with viewers, and launched a new subgenre of horror that continues to thrive. Why did Romero’s new form of zombie have such an impact?
Agoraphobia
The voodoo zombie represents a fear of enslavement or of foreign culture, but Romero’s creatures cover a broader range. The Romero zombie has no master other than its hunger. These zombies aren’t just some threat in a foreign jungle, these zombies are everywhere. They are in the jungles, the cities, suburbia, and are even lurking outside rural farmhouses. The Romero zombies are liberals, conservatives, gays, straights, Muslims, Christians, bad drivers, they represent everyone who worries you—and face it, people are scary. The voodoo zombie is to xenophobia what the Romero zombie is to agoraphobia.
Agoraphobia is a fear of open or public places. Agoraphobics fear leaving their homes or places of safety and venturing out in public. Romero’s zombies play heavily on this fear. Night of the Living Dead is all about trying to defend a home from outsiders, both the dead ones and the living ones. Tom and Judy would have been better off if they had blocked the doors and windows and turned everyone away (the Coopers, Ben, Barbara, the mobs of deputized hicks). They should have just hid in the basement until after the screams, breaking sounds, moans and shooting stopped.
Agoraphobia literally translates from Greek into “fear of the marketplace.” Fittingly, Romero chose a shopping mall as the setting for his second zombie film, Dawn of the Dead.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y131/Spinninggrave/Junk/Dawn.jpg
The Unnatural Disaster
At their most basic, Romero’s zombie films are disaster flicks. The essence of the films is the survivor’s reactions, interactions and their fight for survival. Try watching Night of the Living Dead and The Poseidon Adventure back-to-back. You will see the characters go through similar choices and interactions. Gene Hackman’s Reverend Scott continuously faces doubts and accusations as he tries to lead his small band of survivors to safety and gets a few killed along the way. In Night of the Living Dead, Ben faces similar confrontations with Harry in his own attempts to save everyone. The irony being that the unlikable Harry was correct all along. Ben’s heroics get everyone killed.
Disaster films cause viewers to question what they would do if placed in the same situation. The modern zombie film causes the same reaction. If you spend time hanging around a group of horror fans, eventually they will end up talking about their own survival plans in case of zombie attack. In case the dead ever actually rise, legions of Romero fans will be able to lead the rest to safety. That is, if they don’t get wiped out by a flood, earthquake, or other disaster that can’t be solved by shooting it in the head.
The Uncanny Valley
The uncanny valley is a term invented by Doctor Masahiro Mori in the late 1970s. Dr. Mori’s research dealt with human psychological reactions to machinery that is increasingly getting closer to emulating human movement perfectly. Dave Bryant, in his internet article about the uncanny valley, describes how Dr. Mori plotted an emotional response to non-human entities with similarities to human appearance and movement. Mori’s results had an unexpected find as Bryant writes, “the curve is not a sure, steady upward trend. Instead, there is a peak shortly before one reaches a completely human ‘look’. . . but then a deep chasm plunges below neutrality into a strongly negative response before rebounding to a second peak where resemblance to humanity is complete.” This chasm is the uncanny valley.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y131/Spinninggrave/Junk/uncanny.jpg
An example of the Uncanny Valley in action: http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2005/0613/nedo0153.mov
Essentially when something bears no appearance to a human being, people tend to focus on any human-like qualities it possesses. We attribute human qualities to pets because something they do is similar to our own behavior. However, when we see something that is very human-like we will focus more on the qualities about it that are not human and it will disquiet us. While this research was meant to be applied to the construction of robots, it is finding application in CGI animation as well, and it also explains why groups of slowly shuffling, jerky-moving zombies might disturb viewers. They look human, but they aren’t moving naturally. While Dr. Mori’s research covers motion and appearance, zombies may also accomplish the uncanny valley through sound, or actually the lack of it. Most zombies shown in movies are on the quiet side, with only the occasional moan escaping them. Seeing large groups of people being quiet does not feel natural.
Even animals pick up on this to some degree. Here’s an experiment you can try at home, kids. Lurch around like a zombie around your pets. Dogs and cats will pick up on your odd body language and motion and react with suspicion. Your fish will probably just ignore you. It’s not exactly a demonstration of the uncanny valley, but it’s fun to make your pets look at you weird.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y131/Spinninggrave/Cats/experiment.jpg
We take experiments very seriously at Fright Media Labs. See? Exposure and reaction. Where is our government grant money?
The zombies in Return of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later and the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead don’t really take advantage of the uncanny valley. They exchange their inhuman motions for speed. While the loss of the uncanny valley may upset some horror fans, running zombies do play more on agoraphobia. When the zombies can run, there really isn’t any leaving your shelter.
Cannibalism & the Loss of Identity
People are afraid of cannibalism. It’s only natural. What life-form wants to be eaten (barring that guy in Germany a couple years back who answered that personal ad)? Being eaten by animals is scary. Being killed, cooked and eaten by people is scary. Being eaten alive by animalistic hungry people is terrifying. Getting torn apart and bitten to death while watching people play tug of war with your intestines has got to make the top ten list of sucky ways to die.
If the zombies don’t fully consume you, you become one yourself. You lose your individuality and join the teeming masses. One way or another, you become part of them.
It Can Be a Loved One
Two characters in Night of the Living Dead are killed by their own family members who have gone zombie. A third gets munched on by a relative after he’s dead. Your own daughter or brother could become one of THEM, those bad people outside. They can turn on you worse than that dysfunctional family Christmas when your uncle had too much to drink and decided to tell everyone what their problem was.
Zombies in Pop Culture: They Aren’t Going Away
“Yeah, I know I'm ugly... I said to a bartender, 'Make me a zombie.' He said 'God beat me to it.”
-Rodney Dangerfield
Zombies have stumbled their way into our lexicon. You can spend the night drinking zombies. Then the next day when you stumble into work, lacking in sleep and hung-over, your co-workers may comment that you look like a zombie—and odds are they aren’t even horror fans. The term can describe someone’s appearance, their subservience or a general lack of awareness. Most recently the term, “zombie effect”, has come to describe the effect that cell phones and lap tops have had on people in social situations. People focus their attention on things and conversations that aren’t actually present. They become tuned-out zombies.
Zombies make appearances in music. There is Rob Zombie and his former band White Zombie singing Die, Zombie, Die. Delores O’Riordan screams “Zuh-ahm-bi!” in the Cranberries song about violence in Ireland. Michael Jackson turned into a zombie to boogie with the undead horde in his Thriller video. In retrospect, the video seems to foreshadow Jackson’s transformation into a monster in real life.
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Zombies make frequent appearances in movies, even when they aren’t immediately recognizable as such. The Stepford Wives (1975) may have been robots, but at the heart of the film is the slavery zombie fear and loss of identity. The gang members in the original Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) are just zombies with guns. They might be alive, but they still have that lack of humanity and silent drive to kill. Assault may have been John Carpenter’s take on Rio Bravo, but the similarities to Night of the Living Dead are numerous.
This article actually came about from another article I was writing about the numerous zombie games that have been produced over the years. From the Atari 2600’s game Entombed, to Zombies Ate my Neighbors for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo, to the Resident Evil and soon Romero’s City of the Dead. When SPI released its Dawn of the Dead board game in 1978, it started a trickle of zombie board games that has grown into a small stream. These days Twilight Creations Inc. has built a business based on zombie board games. Their Zombie!!! series of games has proven very popular with horror gamers. Twilight’s newest zombie game, All Wound-Up: Escape from the Cemetery, features zombie wind-up toys that are just adorable.
On-line you can play with the Zombie Infection Simulator: http://kevan.org/proce55ing/zombies/
Or learn how to protect your home from zombies: http://www.loris.net/zombie/
Or join the Federal Vampire & Zombie Agency: http://www.fvza.org/
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Zombie humor is prevalent. Being basically mind-less humans or representatives of our fear of other humans, the zombie lends itself well to satire. Mel Brooks' son, Max Brooks is now more known for his book, The Zombie Survival Guide, than for being Mel Brook’s son. Philip Nutman used zombies to saterize the government under George H.W. Bush. in his novel Wet Work. A tradition continued when recently Aaron McGruder’s comic strip, The Boondocks, used zombies to explain the re-election of George W. Bush.
Zombies also have made more serious horrific appearances in various forms of literature. From Russo’s Night of the Living Dead novelization, to John Skipp & Craig Spector’s Book of the Dead anthologies, to the comic books Deadworld, The Walking Dead and Joe R. Lansdale’s On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with the Dead Folks.
A zombie also makes a notable non-appearance in the 1902 classic short story The Monkey’s Paw by W.W. Jacobs. In the story Mr. & Mrs. White accidentally cause the death of their son Herbert through making wishes on an enchanted mummified monkey paw. Their son is mangled horribly by the machinery at the mill at which he works. Mr. White wishes on the paw for his son to return. The story has only to describe the knocking the Whites hear upon their door. It does not even have to describe what shape poor mangled reanimated Herbert looks like. It leaves it entirely up to us to imagine.
Where are Zombies Headed?
My guess is that we haven’t seen the last of the sprinting zombie. Sprinting zombies probably work more for today’s young generation, who has been raised in a culture where everything is fast and “X-treme.” Be on the lookout for zombies on snowboards.
Romero has shown us humans struggling to keep zombies out of a home, trying to keep zombies out of a shopping mall, and trying to keep zombies out of a military base. Now, in Land of the Dead, it seems that we will see humans struggling to keep zombies out of a city. His institutions that we are trying to stay safe inside are getting broader. The next step would be keeping zombies out of your state or your country….then we come almost full circle back to xenophobia. So maybe zombies are headed back to their beginning.
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