Zombie Pin UpSome of our more dedicated readers may remember the very first editorial this newsblog ever published, which you can see here. The article, a question about whether you liked your horror to be Nazi or Commie (as it were) was a fairly fun look at history and its subsequent juxtaposition in modern horror cinema. The obvious reason being that the two, the Nazi Party and the Soviet Socialist Party, were considered by the West to be great evils, and as such our films tend to stand out as equating to great horrors. It was in this article that the idea of a Zombie Sociology was first really explored. What is it to be a zombie, what does society view zombies as, and are they in fact the mere work-force we can throw into machines like horses and dogs, albeit more flesh-eating? They are questions as a horror fan I’m far too happy to ask myself, because I often think that we will see just a small reflection of our own fears and desires in these films. We see ourselves. Zombie films, in particular, are of great interest to any keen sociologist, political philosopher, or psychologist, no doubt, because the enemy is you and I, not them. We, the people, are the bad-guys. It raises a lot of interesting questions, and as with any good endeavor, no real answers.

What is a Zombie?

The obvious question itself has one obvious answer, and one far less obvious. To state the obvious, a zombie is a reanimated corpse, that more often than not, has come back to eat human flesh. Some will say they eat brains, others just say they’ll eat anything, and others still argue that diet is not important. I’d argue otherwise. The massive appeal of a zombie film is the flesh-eating danger to humans, and the constant threat thereof. What’s more, before going further into the question, it seems only honest and appropriate to note that generally speaking, the best zombies are humans come back to life. Some films have experimented with undead dogs and the like, but for some reason it is a gimmick, rather than a real selling point. A great example of this is Black Sheep, which is intensely funny, but ultimately becomes a parody of zombie films where innocent sheep are made into flesh-eating ovines. For the true horror fan, a zombie will ultimately be human. These two elements are the most important aspect of a zombie film, at least for me. The antagonist in question must be me, but also want to kill me. The films can thus play with morally ambiguous ideals and decisions. Do I shoot grandad in the head, or do I run? Do I decapitate my dear old mother, or do I wait a bit and hope she gets better? On the surface these are just what they seem, choices of survival. But in reality they are so much more.

For a start, the very fact that we’ve had to ask ourselves what we should do with those we believe to be human or formerly human sets up ideal targets about how we view people and things around us. The importance of zombies being us is clear in the often difficult choices that people make in these films as to whether to shoot mom and dad or not. Zombies are still externally identified as the roles they once had, even though they no longer fulfill these roles. We as a society are taught to identify people through their roles and functions, and their appearance. A guy walking down the road wearing a post-man’s outfit delivering parcels is no more or less called a postman if it transpires he was fired the day before and is now delivering bombs to the neighborhood. We just assume one thing and carry on our merry lives. Zombies are this unknown in society. They are our grim assumptions turned against us, where form no longer dictates function and appearance is irrelevant.

Now, why as a viewer should I find that particularly interesting? Well, for all the obvious reasons, zombie films and zombies are a statement about all the most crucial things in life. They as individuals mirror what we perceive ourselves as, as individuals. They look like us, they move, albeit usually slowly, like us, and they go through their routines like us. Theirs just happen to involve devouring human flesh, although when they aren’t doing that they seem to search for a smattering of their old humanity. The obvious fun fact here being that we as people do very much the same. A lot of our focus and energy has always gone towards sustaining ourselves, towards routine, towards a certain sense of normalcy. We are creatures of habit, and we are indeed flesh-eating animals (most of us, I exempt vegetarians who it seems don’t like being human) who go about our daily routines with great verve and vigour. Many will go to their jobs, come home, have some routines there, some sleeping habits. They also orient a lot of their lives around the meals they will eat, even if just briefly. It is this comical caricature of humanity that a zombie really speaks to. It is the lowest denominator of who we ourselves really are. Of course, the comic irony being that to fulfill this most base of routined creatures, they have elected to pray on us the living, thus upsetting our daily routines, and turning us from predator to prey in an instant.

Zombie Society

As mentioned before, in a previous piece I went on to describe zombies as very much the conformist communists that slowly erode away our civility. As with the question of what a zombie really is, the answer to what a zombie society really entails is very difficult. It is an amusing thing to see many (and there have been many) directors try to answer, because every single one of them with very few exceptions tries desperately to make the zombies all very much a uniform moving mass. You see some scenes, and you realize that if you put tuxedos on all of the zombies and made it snow, you’d be watching March of the Penguins. There’s very rarely ‘leadership’ and certainly there is no official organization or tactical approach to hunting and killing humans. They are a mass, a throbbing destructive one, sure, but a mass notwithstanding. Most attacks, en masse, most scenes, a large number slowly congregating around and gently moving forward to an inevitable deadly outcome.

Of course the apt thing is that films are always a reflection on our views of the times, society, people, and current events. Always. Without exception, they are a statement about the nature of the body politic we find ourselves in. Zombie films are no different, and zombie society becomes a direct critique against human society as it is or as it is perceived. The zombies are a metaphor for us, in our bases form, and thus zombie society becomes an equally obvious extension of our society. Sure, we have leaders, but for most of us, the daily routines are the same, and our coworkers struggle through equally odd and mundane daily routines. Our cities and towns are filled to the brim with people whose constant movement is little more than the steady march towards death and taxes. The worst part about society in most every sense is the constant all-pervasive push towards conformity. It is not that most obvious of conformity, where people should do exactly as others do, dress as others dress, or speak as others speak. it is a multicultural conformity, but a conformity notwithstanding. The degrees of social diversity are still surprisingly small and the volume of people who fit into one of many different archetypes of characters is quite large. Zombie films poke fun at exactly that. Pick your favourite group, from the office-worker or postman to the rockstar, and you’ll still see trends of total conformity, of trying to stand out from the crowd by what you do best, but not much else. Zombies are no different. We see a film, and of course the zombies with the most grotesque injuries are the ones we remember. Dr. Tongue from Day of the Dead stands out, as does Bub. Fido stands out as a unique and individuated zombie, but in essence there is not much variation. Zombies highlight and mock the boredom we have in our own society, which is only broken up by small battles we wage, the little rebellions nobody really notices but us. It’s how we live our lives, and it’s how zombies mock us for it.

Our greatest rebellions, our appearances, perhaps our behaviours, are almost all directly under attack during any good zombie film. People in different clothes, with different lifestyles, who all have died, all appear in a zombie film. You get your array of old and young, preppy and grungy, tall and small. The individualization of zombies just goes on to highlight how little there is between us as people and between us and them. The small victories we claim in life are rendered to mere stylistic touches in a zombie film, because it makes the statement that ultimately what we do doesn’t matter that much, and how we try to make ourselves stand out is really just a pale and pallid change in a general uniformity. It’s the part that always saddens me with zombie films, is the fact that they drum into us just how repetative we are, and how little we will in fact stand out in a massive throng. At least on the surface, zombie films highlight our very own mediocrity.

The reflection in the window

The picture I’m trying to paint here is that we love zombie films because they are gorey and intense and kind of creepy, but sometimes we forget the stuff that is under that surface. We see the reflection of ourselves in the shop window, but sometimes choose to ignore it in order to gaze that the pretty things in the shop. To me that reflection, that look back at ourselves, is what makes a film so interesting, and what makes the zombie genre the most appealing. I’ve given a very brief overview of zombies as a reflection of us as a society, and us as individuals. I’ve avoided the more pressing questions that really not only have no answers, but almost can’t be asked as questions. Zombies are the dead reincarnated, the undead, the living dead, call them what you will. It is no surprise that really that should provoke a lot of debates about theology, biology, and philosophy. They always do. What is it to be alive or dead, what waits us in the afterlife, and why do we do what we do. But things like that are not as easy to account for. With Zombies, I think you get to paint a very clear picture of what it is to be human, and what it is about it that scares us and shapes us more fundamentally.

The fortunate conclusion from all this, however, is that zombie films poke fun at the straw men we choose to create. It’s a reflection on us, but as with any shop window, it’s a slightly distorted, very much hollow reflection without much colour or detail, and easily forgotten. More importantly, without the color, the fleshy highlights, the details, it’s just a silhouette of the reality we live in. One that it is fun to be reminded of, but which also it is fun to try to challenge. That’s why we can watch zombie films confident that we are not zombies, even though it may feel like it sometimes. We are not driven purely by base needs, even though some live like they are. We are not just a huddled mass. We are more than that, but it’s good to see the basics and remember that they aren’t always that pretty.

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