Romero's Monsters: The Zombie Image and the Fallen Other

This essay was a prizewinning submission to the pre- and post-festival events of Lab on Roof’s scavenging initiative, Rags Drum 2020.

Contents:
Introduction: Bodies at Work, Souls in Bonds
I. The Changing Zombie Image
1. “Enemies of the Open Society”: Zombies
2. Norse–Haitian Zombies: Body and Soul
3. Monsters Assemble: Modern Writing and Modern Fears
II. Zombies on Film
1. Radical Times and Romero’s Spectre
2. The Reversal of the Abject and the Noble: Humanity No More
3. “Zombies”: The Answer from the Post-Apocalypse
III. Reading the Zombie Image
1. The Return of Frankenstein’s Monster
2. Why Are There So Many Zombies on the Lawn?
3. “Just Another Monster”: The Future of the Fallen Other
Conclusion: “Going Planetary”—The Monsters’ Dawn

Introduction: Bodies at Work, Souls in Bonds

Zombies are an enduring cultural subject, often used in films, novels, and games as a source of crisis and hostility. But the zombie image did not come from nowhere. Anthropological and sociological analyses of zombies in literature and the arts allow us to sketch something of their original form. Recovering this “original form,” however, does not mean declaring the modern zombie different from its model. On the contrary, we will explore the zombie’s past, present, and future by following one thread: its character as a working being. How did a creature of sorcery, whose body works while its soul is bound, become a modern fear? And today, might a captive soul still be hidden inside that walking corpse?

I. The Changing Zombie Image

1. “Enemies of the Open Society”: Zombies

If we were to look in Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies for specific definitions of an open society’s enemies, I’m afraid zombies would fit most of them. Foremost among Popper’s definitions are tribalism and anti-universalism.¹² Unless we count “going planetary”—a malicious reworking of planetarization, meaning the spread of zombie hordes across the planet—as a form of globalization, I’m afraid nothing could fit the description of an open society’s enemies better than a zombie horde. After all, what could look more tribalist than a massed, pitiless, hostile Other? Yes, we should say, these are the ones: they have the potential to endanger an open society.

People understood this perfectly well as early as the 1930s and 1940s, when zombie films were just taking off. Nazi propaganda furiously denounced the Weimar Republic’s policies for stifling German society’s naturally free spirit and turning Germans into witless zombies. Meanwhile, in the American film Revenge of the Zombies (1943), an army of pitiless, unfeeling zombies under Nazi command appears in New Orleans. Was this a coincidence? Or did the zombie image itself contain elements that need clarifying, elements that invited this identification even before the image described above had fully taken shape? We will investigate by tracing its origins in the sections that follow.

To look closely into those origins, however, we need more than an examination of the zombies in existing films and games. We also need something like an ethnographic survey. This image did not spring from nothing: it was profoundly shaped by the folk cultures of particular places. Those influences not only laid its foundations but continued to build upon them. None of this happened by chance. It was the product of social processes; through them, history found its place in memory, while images began to settle into their respective places among the marks history left behind.

2. Norse–Haitian Zombies: Body and Soul

Viewed through a Europe- and North America-centered approach to folklore, the modern zombie’s origins would not seem to lie in Haiti. Break the figure down into key elements such as “cannibalism,” “corpse,” and “resurrection,” and we can find a wealth of zombie-like examples in texts across different languages. Yet none quite seems to fit. The return of the dead is, of course, common in these stories: Lazarus-like resurrections abound. Broaden the scope a little, and even Snow White meets the criteria. She is thought to have “died,” only to come back to life and live happily ever after. What we need to look for is not so much the returning dead as “demons entering corpses”: a reanimated corpse that is no longer a human subject, nor a wandering spirit returned for a particular purpose. With this narrower category, we may finally find what we are looking for in European and North American folklore: the undead warriors of Norse tales.

In Icelandic, the act of “sending” refers not only to an exchange of gifts. In tales of sorcery, it also refers to an evil spirit’s reanimation of a corpse.³ Warriors are “sent” back to life not to fulfill their own wishes or return to the mortal world, but for one specific purpose: to keep fighting. The corpses of warriors killed in the day’s fighting stir at night, rising from battlefields or graves. This story resembles that of the ghoul as we understand it today, but the corpses are there to slaughter one another rather than to devour corpses. In this particular sense of “work,” we may find a clue to today’s zombie: a corpse at work. The corpse serves a specific task but does not act of its own will—whether or not it has one.

We can find the same clue in Haitian zombie lore. Yet through prejudice and neglect, deliberate or otherwise, Haitian zombie culture has been regarded as a dangerous and terrifying form of sorcery, even though it is “frightening” in the same way other folklore is. In this account of sorcery, an evil sorcerer called a bokor strips people of their souls, leaving zombies behind to serve him. But this is a misreading brought about by coincidence. The evil sorcerers no longer exist, and what they captured in the legends was not the body but the soul. In local usage, a body deprived of its soul is not a zombie but a reanimated corpse (Zombie Corps Cadavre). It is the stolen soul that is the true zombie, something more terrifying than a corpse: the spirit zombie (Zombi Jardin). This accords with the word’s Kongo etymon, Nzambi, meaning “the soul of the dead.”⁴

Yet it was the corpse that entered popular culture under the name of zombie. This separation of body and soul likewise stems from a characteristic of the body: work. Why work? Because work itself is punishment. In fact, what is truly to be feared in Haiti is not the appearance of zombies but becoming one. Turning someone into a zombie is a punishment for violating the social order, administered by the sorcerer as a tentacle of that order. It means neither walking the boundary between life and death nor becoming a cannibal monster, but doing one’s work on a plantation. Is this a pardon, or a punishment? In the West Indies, it is unquestionably the latter, for it awakens the deepest fear: the fear of enslavement. In this context of “working in slavery,” the scars of colonialism created the zombie’s original horror, and that horror extends beyond this setting.

3. Monsters Assemble: Modern Writing and Modern Fears

Like the transformation of the zombie itself, the zombie image is not as ancient as it looks. In fact, almost all the frightening supernatural figures we encounter today have been rewritten and revised in the modern era to take the forms we know today. Zombies, whose appearance was largely settled in the 1930s, were among the earlier ones to reach maturity. Many familiar figures—werewolves, vampires, witches in the woods—that seem to reach back to the Middle Ages owe much to the writing or reworking of Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm. Nineteenth-century intellectuals gathered up their nations’ ancient spirit, but that spirit also took on a modern form as it passed through their hands. As the dense forest lost its mystery, the beings deep within it became less fearsome. They changed into something else, images better suited to the so-called “spirit of the age.” Writers and scholars, then, were writing modern stories and modern fears with their own pens.

After Nosferatu and Dracula, the traditional vampire changed from humanity’s demonic enemy into a complex character combining the demonic and the human. This surely shows a modernist consciousness at work. Nosferatu spreads plague and fear, brutally drawing blood from Germanic women in an act of violation. His successors on screen, however, are far better-mannered; even their bloodsucking has become restrained. Modern people, who know themselves to be protected by science, no longer fear purely supernatural monsters, prompting more detailed descriptions and portrayals of them. Werewolves and vampires have little to do with each other in themselves, but both are creatures closely associated with “forest and land”—or, in another formulation, “land and people.”⁵ The Nazis therefore put them to work in propaganda, hoping to rally Germans against Slavic vampires who would suck them dry, down to the marrow.

Zombies underwent a similar reconstruction. Traditional zombies were caused not by the microbes we so often see, but by sorcery, drugs, and even radiation—causes less emphasized today. Nor did their infectiousness come from the transmission of pathogens: natural influences and magical control predominated. Why did virus-controlled zombies stand out among their kind? Beyond the way advances in pathology fed back into popular culture, microbes represented something else: as agents of disease, they can reproduce and bring about change. For humanoid predators that eat human flesh, the sudden appearance of prions added another layer of horror. Human fears of cannibalism had been written about since medieval times, but prions supplied a “scientific horror.” Being devoured by an unnameable monster threatens only one’s life; having one’s flesh eaten by one’s own kind can awaken, on top of that, a profound sense of the uncanny in modern people.

When we discuss the union of zombies and microbes, then, perhaps Cronenberg’s comments on viruses can shed some light: perhaps some diseases are understood as destroying a perfectly functioning machine, when in fact they turn it to other uses. If we take the human body to be a machine, the zombie’s existence strikes closer to its origins: enslavement intensified and deepened. That is, the machine caught in everyday routine—the human—is enslaved by microbes—the zombie virus—and takes on endless new work: gulping down the flesh of its own kind. In the subversion and split between human subject and zombie subject, microbes, aided by modern pathology, once again act as a medium of understanding. Perhaps microbes are the most fitting explanation of all. A machine that works and can reproduce—this point is crucial—plays the perfect Other. The fear it provokes no longer comes from the danger it poses, but from within; no longer from how frightening it is, but from dread.

II. Zombies on Film

1. Radical Times and Romero’s Spectre

Only after the heyday of aliens and radiation in the 1950s and 1960s did zombies truly assume a form more familiar to us. We might call this the screen zombie’s transitional period. One step in that transition was to shed the human appearance. Until Romero, the zombie’s character as a working being remained plain: like their predecessors in folklore, zombies were controlled and made to work on plantations and in mines. Although Hammer’s The Plague of the Zombies (1966) introduced the image of the decaying walking corpse, its zombies were still subject to masters who treated them as servants. They worked, just as Haitian plantation slaves and Welsh coal miners worked. Without the films that followed, enslavement might have remained just as explicit a characteristic of later zombies.

But then Romero appeared. To put it jokingly, “he broke the zombies’ shackles.” Peter Dendle, who compiled The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia, is quoted here as saying: “He gave zombies not a job but a pursuit.”⁶ By combining the zombie with other ghoul-like figures, Romero made work a less prominent trait. Work remained crucial, but the element of subjection to human control was gone. If a zombie is a machine that works, that machine has now acquired “freedom.”

This freedom is a spectre. Romero found it among enslaved corpses and released it onto the European continent. No wonder Dawn of the Dead could stir such a response in Italy. We need only recall Italy in 1974 to understand. In the early 1970s, Italian neo-fascists launched extensive campaigns of intimidation and coercion to perfect their strategy of tension. They hoped that a series of bombings and other atrocities would help establish authoritarian rule. Yet Italy’s state intelligence services had close connections to these neo-fascists; the exposure of that fact heightened the cultural anxiety still further. In this sense, the strategy of tension succeeded as a strategy. The response, however, was not simple submission. Left-wing underground organizations, including the Red Brigades, took the stage, and Italy became a “frontline country.”

Life in a “frontline country” brought Italians still greater cultural anxiety, and Dawn of the Dead arrived in Italy amid precisely that anxiety. The film’s depiction of life at the end of the world, and of a horror extending beyond the zombie image itself, perfectly matched people’s anxieties in those radical times. The innovation of a zombie controlled by no one yet caught in enslavement also gave the era’s left-wing resistance inspiration and material. Italy then embraced the zombie almost instantly, despite the subject’s conflict with its religious background. Italian productions such as Zombi 2—released in English as Zombie and Zombie Flesh Eaters—further developed, within that framework, the horror of zombies as zombies. Yet when the tide of radicalism began to ebb under the repression of the early 1980s, Italian zombie cinema also stagnated. Given what came before, could this be a coincidence?

2. The Reversal of the Abject and the Noble: Humanity No More

Whatever the case, Italian zombie films firmly established the zombie image in cinema history, and their successors developed it further. In 28 Days Later, the appearance of zombies is no longer merely an “anomalous event.” The infected take to the streets and occupy the city. Survivors may escape the city alive, but that also means the zombies have driven them out. London, the head and heart of the British Empire, loses its vitality and becomes a machine at a standstill. “A zombie is a machine that works.” We discovered its mechanical character earlier; here, however, the machinery expands itself. The city is still a city. Traffic lights still flash, car alarms still sound—but the lights do not flash to direct traffic, nor do the alarms sound to protect cars. The city has died, just as the zombies walking through it have died. In this sense, zombies do not merely exist in the city: they “zombify” it.

One familiar way some horror films produce fear is to introduce into a scene, or mark it with, the abject matter the body expels to survive: blood, filth, and germs. What could be more abject than zombies in a city? These dead bodies wandering the streets with their blood, waste, and pus are not only “humans” excluded from the social order. They are also monsters combining filth with cruelty, predators governed by germs. These walking embodiments of the abject threaten the lives of humans and cities; yet humans and cities are brought down by this very abjection. This is subversion, a struggle between the first and the last. In the new order after that struggle, no room remains for the human subject. Shall we, like Homi Bhabha, ask with a touch of deliberate mystification: what has violent binary struggle brought humanity?

Whatever Fanon’s answer, the zombie may have only one: itself. In a certain sense, the film industry has treated the zombie’s very existence as subversive. This is a posthuman image: human subjectivity has been subverted, and what was the human subject should now perhaps be called the human abject. The once orderly urban organism now expels humans through its tunnels, just as an organism expels waste. The human element, once dominant in the city, has become a variable to be regulated, a synonym for what was once abject. This is a premeditated subversion, and a consequence of the zombie image moving toward the human. Subversion—it is subversion itself that has shaped the zombie, and this may answer why so many post-apocalyptic works choose zombies as their subject.

3. “Zombies”: The Answer from the Post-Apocalypse

What, then, is an “apocalypse”? We may need to seek the answer in the Revelation of St. John. As God lifts the veil of time before St. John’s eyes, the apocalypse represents the apex and end of human time, marking the decisive and truly ultimate meaning of (human) history. Afterward, a New Jerusalem will be born: a Jerusalem that can neither be damaged nor erased, a supernatural space in the world. This is a transformation from time into space: Chronos.⁷⁸ Time’s end does not mean an ending, but the birth of a perfect space that cannot suffer any damage.

What does this mean for our discussion? Examining some post-apocalyptic works, we may arrive at a conclusion that is perhaps unsurprising: the rhetorical center of apocalypse includes not only destruction but safety. As God foretells, all who rise again from the death of the apocalypse enjoy glory and safety. Glory and safety! Precisely what most characters in post-apocalyptic works lack. Such safety, then, is often also their theme.

Of course, we must ask whether safety truly exists in so-called post-apocalyptic works. Although this lasting safety is absent from most of them, a faint vision of it remains, like a mirage. The journey toward that imagined future almost inevitably brings conflict with whatever produced the post-apocalyptic situation. Aside from the subversion discussed above, zombies are also a perfect source of conflict because they, too, exist beyond time. Given the basic premise that they decay slowly, they can plausibly enter a work’s conflicts. From a philosophical perspective, David Pagano is quoted here as saying: “The slow wandering of zombie time paralyzes the ceaselessly advancing time of conventional narrative.”⁹ In a sense, these slow-moving beings also transcend time. They maintain their existence after the end of the world, outlasting life’s brief span. They are therefore perfect apocalyptic objects: beyond time, yet dispersed through space.

Whether or not it exists, “New Jerusalem” always remains a possible destination in post-apocalyptic works. Can a new world truly be created in a post-apocalyptic world? The answer, whether yes or no, also reveals the author’s imaginative vision and inclinations. In some such works, zombie bodies stubbornly persist, taking up residence in time. Vague hopes and comforting fantasies have nothing to do with them. Whatever happens, the survivors will find somewhere to live; yet they—the monsters—keep coming. This is precisely where the author begins to write conflict and the future.

III. Reading the Zombie Image

1. The Return of Frankenstein’s Monster

Perhaps, before we begin our reading in earnest, we should revisit the story of Frankenstein. Frankenstein’s monster shares both its inner and outer nature with the zombie. In a sense, zombies and Frankenstein’s monster have a common origin. Or, to put it another way, a Frankenstein-like monster returns in the zombie: now they are “Frankensteins.” In texts repeatedly rewritten, remade, and refilmed, this seems a reasonable outcome.

Like Frankenstein, the zombie was born of a horrific imagination. Even at the beginning, it was a Frankenstein-like monster: something called “it,” with no name of its own, reduced to groans and roars, staggering and lurching along with the mechanical movements of a sleepwalker. All this signifies “repetition compulsion,” impelled by disability and the death drive. They are monsters; the very process of discovering the monster is the process of proving it monstrous. Grotesqueness and savagery… This is the zombie’s outward image. Monsters, fallen monsters—how could anyone question it?

But, as noted above, the zombie also shares Frankenstein’s monster’s inner nature. The monster resembles its author, Victor Frankenstein, yet exceeds Victor, for it is forced to accept the world’s definition of it: an unnameable, evil, filthy thing. As a moral deformity that brings the dead back to life in an absurd, grotesque, nameless body, its guilt is settled. It is Sin, it is Satan, it is Death. With intelligence added to this unholy trinity, it inevitably brings still more death into the world.¹⁰ The monster’s rage scorches its creator, making him write still more tragedies. Frankenstein’s monster is a composite being, foul by nature, yet it cannot seek a reversal within its story. When the zombie, that abject and filthy thing, achieves such a reversal, Frankenstein’s monster is returning too…

2. Why Are There So Many Zombies on the Lawn?

Zombies have long played this role of the unfeeling monster, but that role is not beyond challenge. Before asking the question in the heading, though, we should also ask: why were the roles zombies played before Plants vs. Zombies never so friendly? Or perhaps we should ask it this way: games had already let us play as zombies before Plants vs. Zombies. What did that experience give us?

Zombies in video games are not confined to horror games. Ever since Resident Evil burst onto the scene, zombies have been hard to separate from action and shooting in games. Slow-moving zombies with specific weak points—as in the early Resident Evil games—make excellent shooting targets. Faster zombies appear as enemies in games with more intense combat, such as Left 4 Dead. In every case, they play the part of bodily, killable obstacles that must be overcome to achieve the game’s objectives. These obstacles derive from the particular urgency of the zombie image. As zombies, they also offer no possibility of communication. Recall the classic Left 4 Dead slogan, quoted here as “Curing zombies, one bullet at a time,” and we can feel that urgency and antagonism.¹¹

This design therefore meets game developers’ needs. Even when a game’s Versus mode gives us the experience of being zombies, that experience can hardly be called valuable beyond letting us experience zombie behavior. Players find it difficult to get much out of playing an ordinary, weak zombie, while playing as one of the “Special Infected” separates the experience from that of the ordinary zombie. Players understand that they are playing as zombies, but as for what they can experience, there is really very little to speak of. Plants vs. Zombies, however, breaks with convention and brings an unconventional zombie image into the game. Its zombies are less modern zombies than creatures closer to Romero’s original model, combining the characteristics of ghouls and Haitian zombies. They can now possess a measure of intelligence and climb out of graves, neither of which modern zombies can readily manage. It is hard to say that this has nothing to do with traditional undead imagery entering into their design.

They are still monsters, but particular features have been softened, making them gentler enemies. They are still storming your garden, but you can now know that they are storming your garden—that is, they begin to follow specific rules. Thought, rules, communication: weak as these elements may be, they make the unconventional zombies in Plants vs. Zombies different. This different way of thinking will be the key to challenging the fixed image of their prototype, and we will look to it for a different interpretation. Has the zombie image now begun to break free of its bonds, no longer enslaved by work? The answer is still no. Yet this relative shift in the image lets us glimpse a hint of change.

3. “Just Another Monster”: The Future of the Fallen Other

Despite these examples, most zombies remain simply Romero-style monsters. They are savage cannibals, knowing neither weariness nor suffering, fear nor awe. In Haiti, the original Caribbean inhabitants were identified as cannibals. Following the same logic, the zombie’s role includes that image among others: savage, pitiless, and in violation of ethics. Yet Caribbean inhabitants still had the possibility of redemption through the preaching of the gospel. Zombies can have no such possibility. To put it more plainly: the so-called native does not understand civilization but has the potential to be transformed by it; the barbarian understands civilization but refuses to accept it. As fallen Others, zombies play this barbarian role, unprecedentedly powerful yet weak. They do not plead, retreat, or flee, giving any participant an experience of control over their own progressiveness.¹²

Needless to say, this experience shares much with a considerable part of colonial experience. In The Conquest of America, Todorov points out that when Columbus prepared to “civilize” the Indians, he wanted them to “speak,” not to “speak Spanish.” That was also his purpose in capturing them. The problem here is that Columbus recognized no form of relativism, nor did he recognize that the Caribbean’s inhabitants were already speaking their own languages. Zombies follow much the same logic. Here, of course, we find that zombies themselves “cannot speak”—and this is the most ingenious part of their design as fallen Others. Barbarians are forever barbarians and can never speak in their own terms; common people are forever common people and should not make their own voices heard.

Thus the fallen Other remains the fallen Other. Sometimes we hear the opinion that keeping purely virtual figures segregated does no harm—of course, none that is immediately visible. Conversely, though, the design of virtual images draws material from real ones. Mary Shelley did not begin writing ghost stories after dreaming of monsters. The zombie image has no counterpart, yet fallen Others still exist. Perhaps the Other that serves as the model is also a soul zombie, bound inside its own corpse by the sorcery called society and history, and forced to keep its place.

From zombies to “zombies,” our analysis of the image has returned to the Other deemed monstrous, bound, and made to labor. This Other is precisely what is deemed abject: an echo reaching back to the Indians. Its future remains unclear. Will it continue to exist as the constitutive outside of progressiveness, or strive to leave its identity as Other behind? Perhaps there is an ultimate answer: the hostile space of otherness is finally destroyed, and the Other deemed monstrous finally sees the day when it can take off its own mask. But would this be the strategy of the “zombie”?

Conclusion: “Going Planetary”—The Monsters’ Dawn

Do monsters have a dawn of their own? Will monsters greet their own dawn? In real life, protests are sometimes organized with people playing zombies, invoking the zombies’ mass character in the hope of representing the multitude’s resistance. But humans can play zombies—whom, then, do zombies play? Granted, we have now gone beyond the scope of our preceding discussion. Yet that discussion was never confined to the zombie image alone. And to discuss subversion and resistance is to express a hope that reaches beyond monsters.

How, then, should “they”—identified from the outset, insulted and injured—demand their souls back from the sorcerer? The bokor is long gone, but the bonds of the “bokor” have not weakened for a single day. Perhaps the fallen Other’s dawn lies nowhere else but in going planetary just like zombies, seeking a reversal of last and first. One day, the abject, too, will be able to declare boldly: “When the city wakes at a dawn without people, this will be the monsters’ dawn—and the dawn of the multitude forcibly branded as fallen.”

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