This essay won prizes in both the Eve Festival and After Festival of Rags Drum 2020.
Contents: Foreword: The Working Body and the Bound Soul I. Transformations of the Zombie Image
- The “Enemy of the Open Society”: The Zombie Horde
- Norse and Haitian Zombies: Body and Soul
- Monster Rally: Modern Rewriting and Modern Fear II. The Zombie Image in Film
- Radical Times and Romero’s Specter
- The Overturning of Abjection and Nobility: Human No More
- “Zombies”: The Answer of Post-Apocalyptic Fiction III. Reading the Zombie Image
- The Return of Frankenstein’s Monster
- Why Are There So Many Zombies on the Lawn?
- “Just Another Monster”: The Future of the Fallen Other Conclusion: “Planetward”—The Dawn of Monsters
Foreword: The Working Body and the Bound Soul
The zombie is an enduring cultural subject. Film, fiction, and games repeatedly enlist it as the catalyst for crisis and hostility. Yet the figure did not arise from nowhere. Anthropological and sociological readings of zombies in art allow us to sketch something like its earlier form. Recovering that “original form,” however, does not set the modern zombie apart from its model. On the contrary, this essay follows one continuous thread—labor—through the zombie’s past, present, and future. How did a creature of sorcery, whose body labors while its soul remains in bondage, become a modern fear? And might that walking corpse still contain a captive soul today?
I. Transformations of the Zombie Image
1. The “Enemy of the Open Society”: The Zombie Horde
If one were to search Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies for definitions of the open society’s enemy, the zombie horde would, I fear, satisfy most of them. Popper gives special prominence to tribalism and anti-cosmopolitanism.1 Unless we count going “planetward”—a malicious play on planetarization, here meaning the spread of the horde across the planet—as one form of globalization, little could fit his phrase “enemy of the open society” better. What, after all, looks more tribal than a massed and merciless hostile Other? Yes: they are the ones. They carry the possibility of harming the open society.
People grasped this point as early as the 1930s and 1940s, when the zombie film had only begun to flourish. Nazi propaganda bitterly charged that the Weimar Republic had stifled the free nature of German society and reduced Germans to witless zombies. In the American film Revenge of the Zombies (1943), meanwhile, a bloodless, pitiless zombie army under Nazi command appears in New Orleans. Is this a coincidence? Or did the zombie image already contain an element demanding clarification, one that invited such identifications before the figure itself was complete? The following sections investigate the question by tracing its origins.
To examine those origins closely, however, we must look beyond the images found in contemporary film and games and attempt something like an ethnographic survey. The figure has a point of departure. It was profoundly shaped by the folk cultures of particular regions, which not only laid its foundations but continued to build upon them. None of this arose by accident. It was produced through social operations: beneath those operations, history found its place in memory, while images began to take their assigned places in the marks history left behind.
2. Norse and Haitian Zombies: Body and Soul
From a Euro-American-centered folkloristic perspective, the modern zombie might not appear to originate in Haiti at all. If we isolate such key elements as “cannibalism,” “corpse,” and “resurrection,” a search across texts in many languages yields a mass of seemingly zombie-like cases, yet all prove near misses. The return of the dead is common enough; how many Lazarus-like resurrections are there? Widen the scope still further and even Snow White meets some of the conditions: she is taken for dead, then revives and lives happily ever after. What we need is not merely a dead person restored to life, but a “demon entering a corpse”—a resurrected body that is no longer a human subject, and not a wandering spirit returned for a particular purpose. With that distinction in place, we may finally find the desired motif in Euro-American folklore: the undead warriors of Norse tales.
In Icelandic, the act of “sending” names not only the exchange of gifts. In tales of sorcery, it also describes an evil spirit’s reanimation of a corpse. Warriors are “sent” back to life, not to fulfill a wish or return to the everyday world, but for a single, specific purpose: to go on fighting. Corpses of warriors slain by day stir at night and climb from battlefield or grave. The narrative resembles the modern ghoul, but these bodies exist to fight one another, not to devour corpses. In this particular sense of “work,” we can perhaps glimpse one germ of today’s zombie: the working corpse. The corpse serves a designated task without acting of its own will—if it has any will at all.
The same germ appears in Haitian zombie lore. Yet through a mixture of prejudice and neglect, Haitian zombie culture came to be regarded as a perilous and terrifying sorcery, as though it were more “fearsome” than other folk traditions. In these narratives, an evil sorcerer called a Bokor deprives a person of the soul, leaving a zombie behind to serve the sorcerer. But this is a fortuitous misreading. The evil sorcerer is no longer present, and what the legendary figure takes is not the body but the soul. In this vocabulary, the soulless body is not itself the zombie but the reanimated corpse, the Zombie Corps Cadavre. The stolen soul is the true zombie, something more terrible than the corpse: the spirit-zombie, the Zombi Jardin. This resembles the Kongo etymon of zombie: Nzambi, “the spirit of the dead.”
And yet it was the corpse that entered mass culture under the zombie’s name. The separation of body and soul likewise follows from a property of the body: its capacity for labor. Why labor? Because labor itself is the punishment. What Haiti truly fears is not the appearance of a zombie but becoming one. To be made a zombie is punishment inflicted upon a violator of social order by the sorcerer who acts as that order’s reach. It is not a matter of walking the border between life and death, nor of becoming a cannibal monster, but of completing one’s work on the plantation. Mercy, or discipline? In the West Indies it is unmistakably the latter, for it awakens the deepest fear of all: the fear of enslavement. Within the context of “working under enslavement,” colonialism’s scars produced the zombie’s earliest terror—and that terror continues to extend itself.
3. Monster Rally: Modern Rewriting and Modern Fear
Like the transformations it underwent, the zombie image is not nearly as ancient as it looks. Indeed, almost every frightening supernatural figure familiar to us today has been rewritten and revised in the modern period before arriving in its present form. The zombie, whose outward appearance had largely stabilized by the 1930s, was among the earlier figures to mature. Many seemingly medieval images we know well—the werewolf, the vampire, the crone in the forest—owe much to the writing and reworking of Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm. Nineteenth-century intellectuals collected the ancient spirit of the nation, but in their hands that spirit also took on a modern form. As the dense forest shed its mystery, the spirits within it ceased to inspire the same terror and became other images, better suited to the so-called Zeitgeist. Writers and scholars thus wrote modern stories and modern fears with their own pens.
After Nosferatu and Dracula, the traditional vampire shifted from a demonic enemy of humankind into a complex character combining the demonic and the human—an unmistakable operation of modernist consciousness. Nosferatu spreads plague and terror, violating German women through brutal, defiling acts of bloodsucking; his screen successors, however, are far more courteous, displaying reserve even when they drink blood. Modern inhabitants, confident of science’s protection, no longer feared a pure specter, so the image turned toward subtler description and characterization. Werewolves and vampires have little intrinsic relation, yet because both were closely tied to “forest and soil”—or, in another formulation, “land and people”2—the Nazis recruited them for propaganda, hoping to rally Germans against the marrow-sucking Slavic vampire.
The zombie underwent a similar reconstruction. Traditional zombies were caused not by the microbes so often emphasized today but by sorcery, drugs, and even radiation. Their contagiousness came not from the transmission of a pathogen but primarily from natural influence or magical control. Why, then, did virus-driven zombies prevail over their kin? Advances in pathology fed back into mass culture, but microbes also embody a particular image: as pathological agents, they reproduce and transform. For humanoid predators that eat human flesh, the emergence of the prion added still more dread. Fear of cannibalism has been written about since the Middle Ages, yet the prion supplied a form of “scientific horror.” To be eaten by an unnameable monster threatens life; to have one’s flesh consumed by one’s own kind awakens, on top of that threat, the modern subject’s profound sense of the uncanny.
When we speak of joining zombies to microbes, David Cronenberg’s remark about viruses may therefore illuminate the issue: some diseases are understood as destroying a machine that was operating properly, when in fact they transform it for another function. Once the human body is assumed to be a machine, the zombie draws closer to its source: the intensification and deepening of enslavement. The machine caught in everyday life—the human—is enslaved by the microbe—the zombie virus—and made to shoulder an endless new task: voraciously consuming the flesh of its own kind. Amid the overturning and division of human subject and zombie subject, the microbe, supported by modern pathology, once again becomes the medium of cognition. Perhaps no other cause could be more apt. A reproductive working machine—reproduction is crucial here—and the perfect Other: the fear it inspires no longer arises from danger in itself but from within, no longer from its horror but from our dread.
II. The Zombie Image in Film
1. Radical Times and Romero’s Specter
Only after passing through the alien and radiation crazes of the 1950s and 1960s did the zombie truly assume the form more familiar to us. We might call this the period in which the screen zombie transformed. One step was its departure from an ordinary human appearance. Until Romero, its laboring property remained explicit: like its ancestors in folklore, zombies were controlled and put to work on plantations and in mines. In Hammer’s 1966 The Plague of the Zombies, the creatures have already acquired the decaying look of the walking dead, yet remain subject to a master who treats them as servants. They work as Haitian plantation slaves and Welsh coal miners worked. Without the creations that followed, perhaps the enslaved character of the zombie would have remained equally explicit.
Then Romero arrived. To put it playfully, “he broke the zombies’ chains.” As Peter Dendle, compiler of The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia, observes, Romero “invested his zombies not with a function … but rather a drive (eating flesh).” By combining the zombie with other ghoul-like figures, Romero diluted its defining connection to labor. Labor remains crucial, but loses the element of human command. If the zombie is a working machine, that machine has now acquired “freedom.”
This freedom is a specter. Romero found it within the enslaved corpse and released it upon Europe. No wonder Dawn of the Dead provoked such a response in Italy; one need only recall the country’s condition in 1974. In the early 1970s, Italian neo-fascists launched broad campaigns of intimidation, pursuing a Strategy of Tension in the hope that bombings and other atrocities would help establish authoritarian rule. Revelations of the close ties between these neo-fascists and Italian state intelligence only heightened the resulting cultural anxiety. In that sense, the Strategy of Tension succeeded as a tactic. Yet the response was not simple submission: left-wing underground organizations, including the Red Brigades, took the stage, and Italy became a “frontline state.”
Life in this “frontline state” produced still deeper cultural anxiety, and Dawn of the Dead reached Italian screens in its midst. The apocalyptic life depicted in the film, and a terror exceeding the zombie’s own image, perfectly met the unease of people living through radical times. The innovation of zombies controlled by no one yet still trapped in servitude supplied inspiration and vocabulary for the resistance of the period’s left-wing movements. Italy almost instantly embraced a subject at odds with its religious background. Italian productions such as Zombi 2 carried the terror of the zombie-as-zombie still further within that framework. But as the radical tide ebbed under repression in the early 1980s, the Italian zombie film likewise stagnated. Given such antecedents, could this really be coincidence?
2. The Overturning of Abjection and Nobility: Human No More
In any event, Italian zombie cinema definitively established the zombie’s image in film history, and its successors enlarged it. 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, but their escape also means that the zombies have expelled them. London—the head and heart of the British Empire—loses its vitality and becomes a machine that has stopped running. “The zombie is a working machine.” We have already seen the zombie’s mechanical character; here, however, the machine itself expands. The city remains a city. Traffic lights still blink and car alarms still sound. But the lights no longer blink to direct traffic, and the alarms no longer sound to protect cars. The city is dead, just like the zombies walking through it. In this sense, zombies do not merely exist within the city: they “zombify” the city itself.
A familiar technique of horror cinema is to introduce into a scene—or mark upon it—the abject that bodily survival must expel: blood, filth, germs. What could be more abject than zombies in the city? The dead wander the streets covered in blood, grime, and pus. They are not only “humans” excluded from social order but monsters that combine filth with brutality, predators governed by contagion. These walking abjects threaten the life of humans and cities, yet it is precisely by the abject that humans and cities are overturned. This is an overthrow, a struggle between first and last. The new order after that struggle reserves no place for the human subject. Must we pose, with a little of Homi Bhabha’s deliberate mystification, the question: what has the violence of binary struggle brought humankind?
Whatever Frantz Fanon’s answer might be, the zombie likely has only one: itself. The film industry has, in one sense, treated the zombie’s existence as an overturning. It is a posthuman image. Human subjectivity has been subverted; the human subject should now perhaps be called the Human Abject. The formerly well-ordered urban organism expels humans from its tunnels as an organism expels waste. The human element, once dominant in the city, becomes a variable to be regulated, a synonym for what was once abject. This is a premeditated overturning, as well as the result of the zombie image’s approach toward the human. Overturning itself shaped the zombie, and perhaps this explains why so many post-apocalyptic works choose it as their material.
3. “Zombies”: The Answer of Post-Apocalyptic Fiction
What, then, is an “apocalypse”? We might seek an answer in the Revelation to Saint John. When God lifts the veil of time before John’s eyes, the apocalypse becomes the culmination and end of human time, marking the decisive and genuine ultimate meaning of human history. Afterward a New Jerusalem will be born: an indestructible, ineradicable Jerusalem, a supernatural world-space. This is a conversion from time to space. Chronos,3 the end of time, does not signify mere termination but the birth of a perfect space—and that space can suffer no damage.
What does this mean for our discussion? Consider post-apocalyptic works and one unsurprising conclusion emerges: the rhetoric of apocalypse centers not only on destruction but also on safety. As God foretells, all those who rise again from the death of the apocalypse enjoy glory and safety. Glory and safety! These are precisely what most characters in post-apocalyptic fiction lack, and safety thus often becomes the genre’s theme.
We must of course ask whether genuine safety exists in such works. In most, stable safety does not; yet its faint mirage remains. On the journey toward that illusory future, whatever caused the post-apocalyptic situation will almost inevitably give rise to conflict along the way. Beyond the overturning already discussed, zombies provide the perfect principle of contradiction because they too exist beyond time. Given their slow decay, it makes sense that they enter into a work’s conflicts. Philosophically, as Steven Shaviro writes, “The slow meanders of zombie time emerge out of a paralysis of the conventional time of progressive narrative.” Their slow walk is, in a sense, also beyond time. They persist after the end, surviving longer than the brief span of a life. They are therefore perfect apocalyptic objects: beyond time, dispersed throughout space.
Whether it exists or not, the “New Jerusalem” remains a possible destination in post-apocalyptic fiction. Can a new world really be built after the apocalypse? The answer—yes or no—marks the author’s imagination and inclination. In some works, zombie bodies persist stubbornly and settle into time, untouched by dim hope or comforting fantasy. Survivors will find shelter somehow; yet they—the monsters—keep coming. This is where authors begin to write contradiction and futurity.
III. Reading the Zombie Image
1. The Return of Frankenstein’s Monster
Before we truly begin the reading, perhaps we should review the story of Frankenstein. Frankenstein’s monster and the zombie possess an inner as well as an outer homology. In one sense, the two share an origin; in another, a Frankenstein-like monster returns in the zombie, and now there are “Frankensteins.” Across texts endlessly rewritten, remade, and refilmed, this seems a fitting conclusion.
Like Frankenstein, zombies are born from an imagination of horror. Even in their earliest form they are Frankenstein-like monsters. The thing called “it” has no name of its own, is reduced to moans and roars, and lurches with a staggering gait and the mechanical movement of a sleepwalker. All of this signifies the “repetition compulsion” under disability and the death drive. They are monsters; the discovery of the monster is also the process that proves it monstrous. The grotesque and the savage—this is the zombie image’s exterior. A monster, the fall of a monster: why question it?
Yet as noted above, the zombie’s interior is likewise homologous with Frankenstein’s monster. The monster resembles its maker, Victor Frankenstein, but also surpasses him, for it is forced to accept the world’s definition of it: an unnameably evil and filthy thing. As a moral monstrosity that restores the dead to life in an absurd, uncanny, anonymous body, its guilt is settled in advance. It is sin, it is Satan, it is death. Possessed of consciousness atop this filthy trinity, it inevitably brings more death into the world. The monster’s rage scorches its creator and drives him to write still more tragedy. Frankenstein’s monster is a conjunction of innate filth, yet cannot seek an overturning within its story. When the zombie—the abject and filthy thing—finds such an overturning, Frankenstein’s monster returns with it...
2. Why Are There So Many Zombies on the Lawn?
For a long time, the zombie has played the part of an emotionless monster. That role is not beyond challenge. But before asking the question in this section’s title, we should ask another: why were zombies never so endearing before Plants vs. Zombies? Or, to put it differently, games had let players become zombies before Plants vs. Zombies; what kind of experience did that produce?
The zombie’s presence in video games is hardly limited to horror. Since Resident Evil burst onto the scene, zombie elements have been difficult to separate from action and shooting. Slow-moving zombies with specific weaknesses, like those in the early Resident Evil games, make excellent targets. Faster zombies appear as enemies in more intense combat games such as Left 4 Dead. In either case, they are physical, killable obstacles that players must overcome to master the game’s objectives. Their urgency arises from the zombie image, and as zombies they also exclude every possibility of communication. Recall Left 4 Dead’s classic tagline—“CURING THE INFECTION... ONE BULLET AT A TIME”—and the urgency and antagonism are palpable.
The design thus suits developers’ needs. Even where a competitive mode lets us experience being a zombie, that experience has little value beyond reproducing zombie behavior: playing an ordinary, weak zombie offers little to inhabit, while playing a “Special Infected” separates it from the rest. Players understand that they are playing as zombies, but the experience remains scant. Plants vs. Zombies, by contrast, does something exceptional: it places nontraditional zombies inside the game. Rather than modern zombies, they more closely resemble Romero’s original model, creatures that combine traits of ghouls and Haitian zombies. They possess a measure of intelligence and can climb out of graves—things that modern zombies seldom accomplish. It is difficult not to see the shaping influence of traditional undead imagery here.
They remain monsters, but their features are blunted, making them gentler enemies. They still assault your garden, but now you know that they are assaulting your garden: in other words, they have begun to follow determinate rules. Thought, rules, communication—though weak, these elements make the game’s nontraditional zombie image different. That difference in thought will be crucial to challenging the fixed image of its prototype, and from it we will seek a new interpretation. Has the zombie begun to shake off its bonds and escape the slavery of labor? The answer is still no. Yet this relative transformation lets us glimpse the possibility of change.
3. “Just Another Monster”: The Future of the Fallen Other
Despite the preceding example, most zombies remain Romero’s monsters. They are savage cannibals, strangers to fatigue, pain, fear, or reverence. In Haiti, the original Caribbean inhabitants were designated as cannibals. Under a corresponding logic, the zombie embodies savagery, ruthlessness, and ethical transgression. Yet Caribbean inhabitants still retained the possibility of redemption through the Gospel, while the zombie can possess no such possibility. Put more plainly: the native does not understand civilization but can be transformed by it; the barbarian understands civilization yet refuses to accept it. As a fallen Other, the zombie plays an unprecedentedly powerful yet weak barbarian: it neither pleads, retreats, nor flees, giving any participant the experience of controlling an inner progressiveness.
It hardly needs saying that this experience shares much with colonial experience. In The Conquest of America, Tzvetan Todorov notes that when Columbus set out to “civilize” the Indigenous people, he wanted them to “speak,” not to “speak Spanish”; this was also why he captured them. The problem is that Columbus recognized no kind of relativism, nor did he acknowledge that the inhabitants of the Caribbean already spoke in their own languages. The zombie follows the same logic. Here, of course, we discover that the zombie “cannot speak”—the most ingenious part of its design as a fallen Other. The barbarian remains forever a barbarian, unable to utter a discourse of its own; the subaltern remains forever subaltern, and ought not make its voice heard.
The fallen Other thus remains the fallen Other. One sometimes hears that there is no harm in keeping fictional images at a distance—and indeed no immediate harm is visible. But fictional images also draw upon real ones. Mary Shelley did not begin writing ghost stories only after dreaming of a ghost. The zombie image may have no single correspondent, yet the fallen Other still exists. Perhaps the prototypical Other is itself a spirit-zombie, bound inside its corpse by the sorcery called society and history, compelled to keep its place.
From the zombie to “the zombie,” analysis has returned us to the Other regarded as a monster, bound and made to labor. This Other is the thing abjected, an echo extending from the Indigenous people of the Americas. Its future remains unclear: will it continue to exist as the constitutive outside of progress, or struggle to leave its otherness behind? Perhaps there is a final answer. Hostile heterogeneous space will ultimately be destroyed; the Other regarded as a monster will one day remove its mask. Could this become the “zombie’s” strategy?
Conclusion: “Planetward”—The Dawn of Monsters
Do monsters have a dawn of their own? Will they ever greet it? In the real world, protests sometimes organize by dressing as zombies, invoking the figure’s mass character to represent the resistance of the multitude. Humans can play zombies—but whom do zombies play? We have admittedly gone beyond the limits of the preceding discussion, yet that discussion was never confined to the zombie image alone. To speak of overturning and resistance is to place a hope beyond the monster.
How should “they,” designated, insulted, and injured from the very beginning, reclaim their souls from the sorcerer? The Bokor has gone, yet the bonds of the “Bokor” have not weakened for a single day. The fallen Other’s dawn may lie nowhere else than in going planetward like the zombie, seeking the overturning of end and beginning. One day even the abject will dare to say: “When the city wakes in an unpeopled dawn, this will be the dawn of monsters—and also the dawn of the multitude forced to bear the name ‘fallen.’”
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