It's the End of the World : But What Are We Really Afraid Of? (9781783964758) by Roberts, Adam (reading in the dark .TXT) 📗

Why is it that zombies have become one of the most popular portrayals of the end, more so than any other monster? Partly perhaps because the zombie genre is so versatile; its themes of death, decay, mass-destruction and loss of control can be a useful metaphor for many things. Clearly they speak to our anxieties about death, both as individuals and as a species, but their reanimated corpses can also point to fears of cannibalism, the supersession of thought by empty craving, brainwashing, speechlessness and the herd instinct, to name a few.

So while the ‘zombie’ trope has become somewhat ubiquitous, there are plenty of examples of writers and directors using the zombie to brilliant and unique effect – although in fear of provoking a ‘whatever’-shrug of world-weary readers resistant to cliché they often steer clear of the Z-word itself. So it is that The Walking Dead (2003–19), a series of graphic novels written by Robert Kirkman and illustrated by Tony Moore, and later adapted into a successful TV series, talks not of zombies but of ‘walkers’. These gruesome figures provide a constant backdrop of threat and menace to The Walking Dead’s post-disaster gritty soap opera; even when they’re not the main focus of the storyline, and the survivors are busy grappling with each other, they’re lurking round the edges, almost fading into the background. The walkers could be said to represent our dread of the real world around us; our sense that outside our small circles of life and work the world is a horrible and dangerous place.

Likewise, Justin Cronin’s blockbuster trilogy, The Passage (2010), The Twelve (2012) and The City of Mirrors (2016), explores our fears of plague and disease – presciently so for works written before the Covid-19 global lockdown – with his zombie–vampire hybrids as ‘virals’. Colson Whitehead’s novel Zone One (2011), set in a New York overrun with ‘skels’, uses its premise powerfully to explore the anxieties of contemporary urban America, including immigration. And M. R. Carey’s deftly handled novel The Girl with All the Gifts (2014) is written from the point of view of an intelligent and self-aware zombie girl, a ‘hungry’, being studied in a facility. With the characters searching for a cure by any means necessary, including killing and dissecting these almost human-like child zombies, the story thoughtfully explores conflicts between scientific endeavour, ethics and compassion, as well as the struggle for survival and evolution.

Whether cliché or unique, our modern portrayals of the zombie have evolved considerably since its origins as a specifically Haitian, voodoo idea, in which a sorcerer is able to reanimate the dead, but they are fully under his control. As the science fiction writer Charlie Stross* notes: ‘The zombie myth has roots in Haitian slave plantations. These stories are fairly transparently about the slaves’ fear of being forced to toil endlessly even after their death.’

Shuffling out of the margins of empire, from Haiti and the French Antilles, zombies made the leap from folklore to film in director Victor Halperin’s surprise hit White Zombie (1932) in which Bela Lugosi plays a mill-owner in Haiti who uses voodoo not only to control his black zombie workers, but to control a beautiful young white woman too – ‘With These Zombie Eyes He Rendered Her Powerless,’ screamed the posters, over a lurid representation of the creature’s stare. ‘With This Zombie Grip He Made Her Perform His Every Desire!’

As times and society gradually changed, signalling the end of slavery and of white supremacy, so the idea of the zombie changed with it – unleashing them from their masters, and leaving them free to run rampant across the world. As Stross says:

This narrative got appropriated and transplanted to America, in film, TV and fiction, where it hybridized with white settler fear of a slave uprising. The survivors/protagonists of the zombie plague are the viewpoint the audience is intended to empathize with, but their response to the shambling horde is as brutal and violent as any plantation owner’s reaction to their slaves rising, and it speaks to a peculiarly American cognitive disorder, elite panic.*

In its origins, the zombie is undeniably a racialised figure, but in the last half-century its connotations with race have largely disappeared. An echo of the original narrative still exists in its own guise, as concerns regarding racial discrimination in its many forms have not gone away. Particularly in America, the Black Lives Matter protests have spread across the country in response to police brutality and the targeting of the black population, and this continuing struggle for equality is still discernible in popular culture. Get Out (2017) may not have featured the characteristic zombies we have come to recognise today, but in the horrifying kidnapping and brainwashing of its black victims, we can certainly recognise the zombie in its original form, and related fears of domination and oppression.

Nowadays, of course, the word ‘zombie’ conjures a different picture. The general consensus of their characteristics is that they look like us – ordinary people in dressed-down clothes – but in some state of decay, their flesh rotting, body parts missing, blank-eyed and void of consciousness. In most cases they move with a stumbling, forward shuffle. They are motivated not by rational thought but by hunger to reach us, the living: to devour our brains and to make us like them.

George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead is the movie that set in motion the rise of the zombie as we know it in popular culture. It features the African American actor Duane Jones as protagonist, leading the survivors. This was a bold casting choice by Romero, and works as a deliberate inversion of the racist connotations that Stross identifies. But Romero’s many zombie sequels, and the many more films made by other directors, move beyond race as a focus.

As we’ve seen, in its modern concept that focus can vary considerably, but a consistent theme is disease. The next chapter will