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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Impellation of the Undead
A brief statement of position on the current cultural consensus regarding the creative and thus impelling force responsible for zombie attacks.
Tuesday, 2009-01-06 | Film, New Athens, Social Studies
| ...braaaaaaaaaaaaaaains... |
The following is based on a NewAthens.org forum post in response to Artie's conjecture that zombies are "usually science based, ergo not fantasy."
He continued, "Actually I don't know if that's true. I mean, I know they are often science based, but I guess the original Zombies were magic based. Still in the modern post-Romero interpretation ... they are thought of as scientific mishaps."
My evaluation of the situation is that zombie "essence" (i.e. the creative and thus the impelling force within the zombie) forked in 20th century film; where once there was only one explanation for the presence of zombies (i.e. magic), during the 20th century there came to be two increasingly separate and well-defined types of zombie.
In Romero's original Night, a magical explanation for the presence of zombies is suggested only very briefly and only then because scientific explanations all seem to be deeply improbable given the recent fact of the undead. You can actually see that the fork has already happened by this point, as the the biological zombie has clearly split off from his thaumaturgical cousin and is already in the midst of his meteoric rise to filmic eminence. From the film:
I don't know what's going on, but I know it's not a prison break.
No chemical I ever heard about can make a dead man walk.
This is something that nobody has ever heard about or seen before.
...
This is hell on earth: this is pure hell on earth.
No one is sure exactly why or how the dead were given "life", but one thing is certain: the lucid, capable characters are sure that it's some kind of cutting edge, secret science while the panicky, incompetents are convinced that the cause and therefore the motive force within each zombie is fundamentally magical.
But, returning to this idea that that the biological zombie gained eminence If you consider Wes Craven's Serpent and the Rainbow, that's probably the last, feeble effort (i.e. the media that is the de facto go-to for all things zombie-related, in spite of Max Brooks's noble efforts to the contrary) to use an explicitly thaumaturgical zombie in a major motion picture. There are, of course, still magical undead (e.g. vampires, ghosts, malefic revenant forces etc.) in movies, but even that's decreasing in popularity in favor of a scientific or biological explanation: witness True Blood and, to a certain more limited extent, Underworld.
It's also worth mentioning that in most cases where the cause of undeath is not explicitly named, the implication is generally that the cause is biological in nature. A vampire film like 30 Days of Night, if considered as a wholly separate entity from its comic book source, is one such movie. Magic is neither explicitly claimed or disclaimed, but the clear implication is that the organized vampire-zombie hybrid creatures, which are capable of speech, manipulating tools and also of something like undeath as it is generally understood, are a phenomenon of the natural world. One can easily imagine an "origins" prequel to the movie that shows ancient vampires emerging from some primordeal pit in the Amazonian rainforest where they are venerated by the scantily-clad indigenous peoples (whose practice of human sacrifice has been greatly misunderstood by the Western anthropological tradition) as gods.
A movie like 28 Days Later, though it was amateurishly conceived and very poorly executed, is an example of a film that stretches this idea about as far as it will go and completely extracts the so-called Alamo-principle1 from the context of zombies qua the reanimated dead.
You can, of course, still find magical zombies in role playing games, but even in those instances, the zombie is almost never the subject of the game and, furthermore, as most role playing games take place in a world characterized by its magical hypostasis (i.e. by the fact that it takes place in a fantasy world in which real-world occult or religious writings are interpreted literally and taken as ontological givens capable of affecting game play as much as if they were Newtonian physics, basic biology, etc.), the zombie is usually among the least magical things about that sort of game.
But my point is that he's still out there, our magical zombie, which means that there was, in fact, a fork. It just so happens that one prong of the fork is much more popular than the other.
And personally, I think it started with Frankenstein. Until man began to genuinely believe in Science (with a capital S), the idea of the non-magical undead was about as silly as dipping toast in soda (but that's another essay for another time).
- The idea that the real sine qua non of the zombie movie is not zombies at all, but instead is the fact that a small number of survivor-defenders must fail to overcome personal and political differences as they fail to hold an unsupplied and unsupported position against a vast, ravening horde of cannibals whose morale is uninterruptible.
Generally speaking, this is where semiotics experts with postcolonial training attribute the current popularity of zombie movies in America to westward expansion and the lingering after-effects of the cultural and social implosion and backlash caused by Manifest Destiny and the subjugation of the native American people.
