by Tom Clark
I hate zombies. Yes, I know hate is a strong word for having only four letters, and one should use it sparingly. The three words, used in conjunction, are probably not the words one wants to preface a blog post on a tour called “The Summer of Zombie” with. But use them I have, and I can’t back peddle without seriously harming my integrity. You see, it’s worse than I’ve already indicated. I really fucking hate zombies. My vehemence towards the horror sub-genre is so strong it requires an adverb. Maybe it’s because they’re everywhere? Maybe it’s because I’ve had the concept of the zombie shoved down my throat like a vegetable I don’t want to eat at dinner? Is it because they’re the most prolific, and perhaps popular, undead monster of all time now? Or maybe, just maybe, it’s something else, an underlying issue with the genre.
As if that means anything. Pop culture in the new millennium has been bludgeoned by zombies on the screen and page. It’s part of a flux, the constantly changing interest patterns of John Q. Public, or the Middle America consumer machine, if you prefer. You see, monsters have long been a part of pop culture. Vampires had their century, literally, and the werewolf got his 15 minutes once a month, too, over the years. The slasher killer had a creative kill grip on cinema visitors throughout the 80’s. So bitching about zombies, a relatively new “monster,” in the grand scheme of things, is useless. They’re only shambling about, following a pattern laid down before them. And like a song you don’t like on the radio, they’ll eventually pass, right? Wrong. Zombies haven’t gone anywhere. They’ve endured. And it makes me want to scream.
Maybe we can find the answer to my emotional outburst by breaking down the trope, by asking ourselves, “Why do zombies strive?” How were they able to subjugate the writing populace, propelling the likes of Brian Keene and Robert Kirkman into the public spotlight? What caused the horde to grow, allowing mid list horror authors like Armand Rosamilia the luxury to quit their mundane day jobs and spend their days writing about… zombies? How is it the trope, a former plot MacGuffin, rose to prominence as a focal character in survival fiction?
Perhaps it’s the diverse uses of this particular monster. With such a deep pedigree, we’re almost predisposed to like zombies and the stories surrounding them. Hell, zombies can be used in a myriad of settings. Not to mention they’ve also got bucket fulls of metaphor they can be associated with. This flexibility allows creatives a bit of license with the monster. Any story can have zombies easily shoehorned into it. This isn’t because of the zombies. You see, fundamentally, zombie stories are studies in human character, not in the science behind the actual zombies. This is why, in most zombie narratives, including the Walking Dead and the venerable 50 year old cinema classic that may have started it all, Night of the Living Dead, we never learn “why.” None of them explain the “how.” This paradox goes back some 200 years to be precise, if you want to get a zombie story telling us how it happened.
Zombies are technically the first monster to endear to the public in written horror fiction, well, after fucking Lucifer and his lot of devils. But this isn’t the Summer of Exorcism, is it? No. It’s the Summer of Zombie. Frankenstein’s monster, albeit technically a “flesh” golem (to utilize a D&D term), fundamentally Adam is a risen dead body. That makes Frankenstein not only the first science fiction novel, it makes it the first zombie novel of the modern era. If you want to get technical, because it’s a series of diaries, Frankenstein can even be considered the first found footage horror story. But I digress.
There’s plenty more to it, because zombie fiction has a spiritual connection with the public. We can’t forget the esoteric implications of zombies, either. They’re a deep, ingrained part of Afro-Caribbean religious beliefs. Movies and books, such as The Serpent and the Rainbow or the Believers, have addressed the horror of Voodoo zombies and their worshipers. Whereas Frankenstein is a study on man’s spirituality and place in the universe, Voodoo zombie horror is often a a reflection of our own fear of other cultures and religions.
Seventy years after the publication of Frankenstein, we got our first survival horror story, hidden inside more cross genre fiction, with H.G. Wells’ revered War of the Worlds. Every zombie novel since has, in some manner, copied something from this sci fi classic. Someone is calling bullshit on this right now and I don’t care. We’re breaking things down to bare bones here so I can justify the crappy comment I started this blog post with. If you take it a step further and push the issue, if you reverse the anti-climatic MacGuffin that neatly tidies up the end of Well’s novel, what you get is the creation of your zombie virus. It was another half decade before the zombie trope, as we know it today, got its final pretreatment.
1954 saw Richard Matheson growing tired of the overused horror and sci fi trope “This is the last monster, all the humans want to kill it.” Out of this came the grand daddy of modern zombie horror, another sci fi and horror amalgamation, I Am Legend. Instead we have the last human fighting all the monsters. It establishes the lingering riddle present throughout modern zombie horror, “who is the real monster?” Now, yes, I know the monsters in this story are technically vampires (or it is Neville, if you understand the metaphysics behind it), but the human study of isolationism and survival within the genre is established with this novella. It’s also the catalyst of the “last stand” scenario used in Night of the Living Dead and everything “of the Dead” since. I Am Legend is not only my favorite horror story of all time, it’s been pillaged for horror as much as my likewise beloved Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter books were for science fiction adventure. I have unabashed adoration for I Am Legend. In fact, I love it as much as I hate zombies.
There I go again, using that fucking word. HATE… in reference to zombies.
Move ahead another half a century and we find ourselves in the midst of a zombie resurgence like none that came before it. In the shadow of the all too real horror of 9/11, Danny Boyle used his Oscar winning creative clout to put fast zombies on the screen in 28 Days Later. At the same time, unknown writer Brian Keene, suffering through a divorce, expressed his angst by putting them on the pages of The Rising. Boyle went back to Shelly and gave us a reason for the RAGE virus. Keene took it a step further by dipping instead into our first monsters, the aforementioned religious demonic entities, to inhabit his zombies. Then there was the unassuming comic book creator Robert Kirkman, who kept it simple and stupid, literally, going back to basics with slow zombies and no reason why, in a comic book put together under minimalist production. The end result was the Walking Dead, now a multimillion dollar marketing and pop culture juggernaut.
And I hate all of it.
I hate zombies, but not because of their prolific impact on culture or for any of the reasons I’ve already offered as examples. No, dear reader, I hate zombies because they tell me what is worst in my fellow man. Zombies tell me that if it wasn’t for readily available food and toilet paper, we’d kill each other for a scrap. I want to love my fellow humans, I want to believe there is good in the world and people are nice to each other because they want to be. But they aren’t, let’s face it. We exist in a cold world, one with no empathy to our individual wants or needs. As an American, living in a country that’s been polarized by social and political division, it’s blatantly clear, and fiction has followed suit, as good fiction should. You see, that’s the answer you’ve been waiting for.
I hate zombies because they remind me of the real world, all too much.
Be on the lookout for Good Boy coming soon from Tom Clark.
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