Why We Need To Chill On Zombies And Why We Probably Won’t
Jonathan here. Yes. We know that we just announced our co-producing partnership for ‘Doc of the Dead’, but what you probably didn’t know was that my interest in the movie stems from my complete exhaustion from all things zombies. It’ll be a challenge to see if we can approach the subject from a fresh and interesting perspective. So of course when our new writer Jamie Saxon pitched me this idea for an opinion piece I was overjoyed to share it with you all! Jamie’s new, but I think you’ll see he came ready to get down… Geekscape style!
It’s the terrifyingly pathetic shadow of what a human is, without all the pesky humanity. Easy to dislike, distrust, and fear. Anything alive, sentient, and possessing even a reluctant survival instinct can agree that Zombies need to re-die or whatever your world-of-choice solution is to make them all stop.
Zombies are the easiest enemy ever. And as well they should be. Zombies typically have an appetite only satiated by the flesh of the living and possess no loyalties outside of their own survival…such as it is. Plus, typically again, they’re a fairly easy target since they are not intelligent.
I like the idea of Zombies because I’m afraid of the idea of Zombies. Simply put, their existential possibility opens the phobia door to what our idea of safety in death has come to be known. With a Zombies “reality”, there is no “peace”, even after we’ve expired (just imagine your Double-Double Animal Style™ fighting back). Tack onto that the absolute lack of control over our urges and how fucking grody it would be to eat another human, and usually one that is screaming and begging for it not to. As a human, no matter how hungry I was or if I was in a plane crash in the goddamn Alps, I would likely not try to eat a human if it were alive, screaming, begging, all that good stuff. But if I were a Zombie, there would be approximately zero fucks given as to even the slightest bit of empathy afforded to the future victim/snack. Tummy hurt = person is food. Easiest math class ever. Puke dismissed.
Zombies, the idea of them, I mean, are goddamned brilliant. We can move past the original notion of them being popularized (such that cult horror can be, at least) from George A. Romero’s early depiction. I know, I know, there’s a whole swath of info and evidence that they’ve been a part of almost every culture’s lore since there was a desire to pee behind a tree rather than hanging from it. No, let’s stick with current-era Romero-legacy usage since that’s what we’re currently being fed, if you’ll pardon the expression (you probably shouldn’t, and I’ll respect you more for it). You know, the whole “representative of communist and consumerism” ideal. We’re talking about the shambling, inarticulate, sort-of mindless being that is the ugly shell of what a human once was, but a reminder of what any human can be even without being one of The Living Dead and shit.
These Living Dead remind us, the Living Living, also of our own humanity. However, while being surrounded by the inhuman we need other story elements to inject sympathy and keep us grounded on what we identify with. The Umbrella Corporation in Resident Evil was so shitty they knowingly infected living people to run an experiment. Same for Dead Rising, and they even threw another shot to “evil corporations” by alluding to the plague being perpetuated in order to maintain sales of it’s incredibly expensive Zombrex temporary vaccine. Ya gotta wonder how hard it might have been for the design team on that series to not tie it into AIDS and the currently available and insanely-expensive medications being prescribed these days? Romero used Zombies to address the then-current concerns just as we use them now. Horror imitates life imitates horror and so on.
Story elements and arcs relating to jogging corpses have a wide berth to play with. However, the one thing that is absolutely necessary for us to give more than zero fucks is the addition of the non-infected. Being the audience, that is our anchor into immersion in their world. What would you do? Sure, if it’s some John Undead Doe than a whack on the noggin or gunshot would be fairly easy once the realization of them-or-you takes hold, preferably before the biting. But what if it was your mom, friend, or *SPOILER WARNING* (brilliantly but gut-wrenchingly depicted in The Walking Dead): Your own child. Killing a child is like killing a pet in the world of story mechanics – it serves as a broader example to give the reader a taste of how bad some thing or some things are in the world they’re witnessing since even the “innocents” can be victims. *END SPOILER WARNING*
Our emotions are always ready to be tied to something that we can either directly identify with, or would like to identify with. If you’ve ever seen the director’s cut ending of “I Am Legend”, then you’ve seen an evolution in the case of Zombies as more than a soft-target plot device (I’ll leave the spoilers out of it, I recommend checking it out).
As a physical and metaphysical plague, it’s a fucking horrendous scenario. I already gave the example of “no peace even after death” up there, but let’s drill that down further to note that it can be even more aptly stated that we, if turned into a Goddamned Zombie, would possess none of the self-control we have over ourselves right now. The things we currently care about, the rules we will not break, the relationships we work hard and suffer over maintaining like marriage, siblings, or cellphone providers would be chucked out the window faster than a Zombie chucking itself out the window in pursuit of something more alive and edible than it.
Aaaaaand…witnessing such a singular priority in “life” is horror via boredom on a scale that isn’t just morbid curiosity like car crashes or Tyler Perry films. No. Zombies do not follow the money, nor do they have a routine for chores, worry about vacations, or research the web. And they are unencumbered by benefits packages, sexual urges (ew), or politics (ew again). But part of their attractiveness, so to speak, is that it is an incredibly simplified existence.
On this side of Dawn of the Dead, Zombies have come a long way to give us a glimpse of a sickening and almost all-encompassing form of “freedom” in the simplest and most alien way imaginable. I don’t mean the patriotic rallying cry or contractual subscription-based streaming services taglines (they all have caveats, dontcha know?). I mean being a vessel that only adheres to it’s basest desire to maintain it’s existence by not only ignoring the “rules” set out in it’s surrounding environment, but being outright unaware of them. No friends, no goals, no long-term retirement plan. An entire “life” spent on only short-term solutions totalling exactly one thing: eating whatever has the shit scared out of it at the sight of a Zombie. It is difficult, if one were either a Zombie or a Robot (speaking for the understanding of humans, of course), to argue that besides consumables and air, absolutely nothing else is “essential” for personal survival (I won’t expound on procreation because we already had the “ew” thing in parentheses up there).
Alrighty, so there’s the case of Zombies in an undead nutshell. It’s what we have and more or less how they’re utilized in current mythology (movies, comics, malls). All of those points up there are why I would also like to see them go away.
Oh, no he didn’t!
Yes, I did. Stick with me, rockstars, because it’s not as wacky as you think. We’ve made it this far.
Zombies are an easy target, they don’t come across as “innocents”, which hits some of us with more delicate sympathies (animals aren’t inherently “evil” so when they’re offed in a story, some get squirmy), and they’re not really like regular people with goals and objectives that you’d feel bad about ending if you had to decapitate one. Paraphrasing Dexter’s dad: “When you kill someone, you are ending everything that they can ever become.” Truth. With Zombies, they are only one thing, and that thing is bad. “Bad” is easy to kill off and most would maybe even sleep soundly after the fact.
The plot devices where humans are set in employ some or all of the following: Human betrayal (kill a living person to guarantee survival); Loss of innocence (my mom is a Zombie and now wants to eat me no matter how loud I sing our favorite lullaby); End of the world (no more pizza delivery via internet order); Self-sacrifice (I love you all too much to let you get overrun, plus I really miss pizza delivery). These are standard and have been used effectively since they are simple and hard to fuck up. But they have all been utilized for millennia in other stories as well. Zombie stories did not invent them.
But we as a society or species or global tribe or whatever the latest pc term is, with information and opinions evolving so rapidly these days, deserve a better enemy. A smarter one. Take a look at your own past or maybe even your own current events. Every one of us, unless you lived in a cave and are still living in a cave and therefore don’t have internet and aren’t reading this and therefore I say again “every one us”, have experienced an outside entity that had the opposite of good intentions in mind for us. Maybe you slighted them or their interests in some way, whether you know it or not; maybe they were threatened by you somehow (like your parents loved to tell you to understand and pity bullying); maybe they were just fucked in the head and you were the nearest earth object for them to act out upon. Hell, maybe YOU were the enemy for them and it got all feudal with tats and tits and stuff.
Even if the fire was put out quickly, those experiences change who we are. It’s painful most of the time, but it’s an addition to our arsenal of getting through life. Hannibal’s quote from “Hannibal” is appropriate, if not creepily sterile: “People don’t always tell you what they’re thinking. They just try to see to it that you don’t…advance in life.” The human reality of our lives on this planet includes being affected by “enemies” as either obstacles or foes both seen and unseen. Just the knowledge of them, ninjas or whatever, changes how we handle ourselves. Even the act of ignoring it is in itself effectual to our actions.
Now, in movies and stories there is only so much time that a character has to develop. That character faces the second act and must work through to it’s resolution in the third act. We, as the audience, get sucked into story elements ESPECIALLY with enemies that cause our hero or protagonist to evolve as something “new” is brought to bare. Vader is Luke’s dad, Hans Gruber’s brother planted a fake bomb in a school because he’s not a monster, that hooker in Total Recall had three tits. Those are surprises and we can identify with them changing our personal understanding of the rules, because it (normally) evolves the understanding our favorite character has of the world around them. Just like we should evolve if confronted with a new understanding about an Enemy element in our lives. I say “should” because most of us can agree that a grudge runs deep and the need for punishment…to some…outweighs the relief of forgiveness. Trying not to be preachy, I’ve been on all four sides of that fucked up coin as maybe you have, too. Tyler Durden didn’t want to die without any scars, and neither do we. Plus we have the advantage of actually existing.
But Zombies. They are just the one thing. The changes a character goes through in facing a mobile corpse usually mean having to behead a thing that they know was once human. The first takedown, the first acceptance of a “Zombie Reality”, are the plot points that the story needs. After that, it’s running/panicking/trying also to not let the other non-Zombie humans get all fucky on them. The most horrifying thing that a Zombie has so far given to a living person is the knowledge that said Zombie was a familiar, in life, to the living person. We watch as their brains register the connection with the memory, and then acceptance, and then it’s a matter of their own sensibilities (probably tied into ours, as well) that the “holy fuck what would YOU do?” moment comes and inevitably goes with the live-or-die decision being made by said now-incredibly-sad living person.
The Enemies we are used to dealing with in our regular (so far) non-Zombified world are much more complex and intricate. Regardless of our responsibility as to why they feel whatever-shitty thing about us or whether we deserve whatever they’d like to or have inflicted upon us, they are also human. Our enemies in life are grey just like us, but Zombies as they are now normally remain the black to our audience’s perceived white. We don’t need to lift a finger to be “better” than them, all we have to do is root for the living to stay alive. In those stories, as long as the Alive don’t kill anything that’s similarly alive, we allow them to keep their humanity. There is little that we “earn” or grow from while witnessing these plights, no matter how empathetic we can be to whatever is unfolding on the screen or pages. We get to reaffirm ourselves but we don’t change, partly because the effort to do so isn’t really required.
This is certainly not an end-all rant that Zombies aren’t fun and some awesomegasmic stories have not or will not be experienced by us where they are utilized. But books and movies like The Road give us the human-obliterating Apocalypse, character struggles, and maintain the focus on survivors outside the need for the Undead. Even the Book of Eli avoids the magnifying glass on “horror” (kind of) and keeps us trained on the hero’s journey. The other side are things like 28 Days Later, Dead Rising, Resident Evil, [Whatever] of the (Living) Dead movies, etc. which ARE great fun and I by no means wish their end. But soft targets are no challenge.
Here’s something I’ve always found interesting working in the games industry: Do you know why Zombies remain so popular in games? Because Zombie AI is easier than having to deal with coding cover systems, scripting, and survival instincts for non-player characters (computer-controlled antagonists, thugs, various and sundry “enemy” types), along with multiple objectives that have to pay constant attention to what the player is doing – rather than just where they are. For developers, they’re fun to make (sloppy, walk funny, vacation shirts); and logistically you only need a fraction of good voice-over artists for the grunts and howls. Any good VO person can tweak their range to pull off half a dozen or more near-completely different voices – and Pro Tools can multiply that to cover hundreds more. On the publishing side, it’s usually a safer investment because consumer familiarity and popularity with anything “Zombiepocalypse”- related is easy to get press for, and a good visceral game of “killing without killing” keeps it morally ambiguous in PR’s favor. The best targets are cheap, easy, plentiful, and safe to put into the crosshairs.
Zombies, at least in the manner they have usually been employed in modern storytelling, cause our Heroes to be as stagnant in their mindset and growth just about as much as Zombies are trapped in theirs. Since we are evolving and changing so rapidly these days: shouldn’t more of the Heroes and Enemies of our mythos be able to do the same?
Then again, it would be nice if our enemies were so easy, wouldn’t it?
Now do you dare me to tackle our obsession with Bacon next?
