Semi-Sentient Zombies Looking For Love

This week on Pop Culture Boner, we’re taking a deep dive on zombies. We trace their origin from Haiti to Hollywood and take a look a why we have so many different types. How did we go from shuffling corpse to rage fuelled meatsack to organised corpse syndicate?

Visit the website for episode notes and a full transcript: www.popcultureboner.com

Visit the website for episode notes and a full transcript: www.popcultureboner.com

Transcript

I spent all weekend watching the Taken trilogy, where people keep taking Liam Neeson’s daughter and he keeps trying to get her back, and I was like “how can I use this for the podcast?” Because what would be the point of watching all three of those movies back-to-back if not to meticulously unpick them? But I’ll be honest with you – all I really got out of them was the fact that this poor woman has been kidnapped three times in like 4 years and it’s still a shock to her every time, and the ensuing killing spree would absolutely have caused an international incident but Liam Neeson appears to suffer no negative repercussions. That and that the villains in these things always have really great hair. ‘Are American directors afraid of well-groomed men?’ is a note I have written many times. 

But those two things are just lists of fabulous haircuts and crimes committed on foreign soil, neither of which are very interesting in 20 minute stretches. Alas, my watching of the Taken trilogy will just have to be chalked up to more wasted time. But I’ve turned to my next best option – I missed the chance to talk about horror movies on the 13th episode because I was too busy penning a love letter to Keanu Reeves. And after I finished watching Taken I watched Zach Snyder’s new zombie movie Army of the Dead, and its depiction of smart zombies with organised leadership got me thinking about where the hell we’re at with zombies now. We’ve gone from shuffling reanimated body, to speedy flesh eaters, to organised rotting corpse syndicate. Seems like a weird shift that’s worth investigating. And it gives me a chance to redeem the time lost watching 4 movies about the walking dead immediately following my turn with Taken. 

I’m Alex. This is Pop Culture Boner – the podcast edition, and today I’m thinking about zombies. 

The zombie apocalypse is one of those things that doesn’t really scare me, I think because it feels very removed from reality – except for that brief moment in 2012 where there were like 5 homicides involving cannibalism in the space of a week… does anyone else remember the one where that dude from New Jersey sliced out his own intestines and threw them at the officer trying to arrest him? Anyway, like I said, I watched Army of the Dead when it came out the other day, and it made me remember that we are living through a pandemic. Obviously, I haven’t forgotten – I’m still wearing a mask in public and flinching whenever there are more than three people in a grocery store. I’m really waiting on the Australian government to get a cohesive vaccination strategy together because I just bought My Chemical Romance tickets for 2022 and I need to throw my back out in a mosh pit with other ageing emo kids so I can feel normal again. 

I digress – what I mean to say is that while zombie movies are really concerned with infection, as with all horror, it’s usually a metaphor for some other form of social issue like war, consumerism, violence, poverty or terrorism. But we’re currently living in a world that has been fundamentally altered by the almost totally unchecked spread of a virus that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. We’re still working out the logistics of how this impacts us all long term. Which means the time is ripe for some insensitive, excessively heavy-handed Hollywood commentary to beat us repeatedly over the head and ask if we get it yet. Cos like… it has layers of meaning? You know? I think Army of the Dead might be the first zombie movie to be released post-pandemic, and I’ve gotta admit it definitely coloured how I looked at it.

So, I thought today we could look at the history of zombies and zombie movies. Should they shuffle slowly, or zoom at you like rage fuelled sacks of gore? Why are there so many pieces of media obsessed with smart zombies now? What is the relationship between the human soul and the human body, and is that question too heavily rooted in Catholicism for me to adequately answer in 20 minutes? Probably. Let’s get into it, shall we? 

When I talked about vampires on this podcast, I started with vampire mythology, which has a really long history, much of which was recorded as it was happening. The first English usage of the word vampire was in 1734, and it’s easy to track its non-English origins across most of Eastern Europe. In contrast, the first recorded English usage of the word zombie was a hundred years later in 1819, in an unrelated history of Brazil, referring to an Afro-Brazilian rebel leader named Zumbi, and discussing his name’s roots in the Kongo word nzambi, meaning ‘god’. The zombie that we’re familiar with, and which is dredged up from time to time, usually in extremely bad taste supernatural themed television episodes, is derived from Haitian voodoo. Essentially, it involves a bokor (a kind of sorcerer opposed by voodoo priests and priestesses) physically reviving the dead through necromancy. The zombie then remains under the control of the bokor, with no will of its own. There are actually two types, the physical zombie and the astral zombie, which is part of the captured soul of the deceased. This incorporates soul dualism, which is a belief in Haitian voodoo, where humans have two souls housed in the flesh and in the spirit. Therefore, each type of zombie is missing one essential piece of their soul. 

So, in case you couldn’t tell, we’re getting further and further away from the white parts of the world responsible for colonising the history books, and closer to the bits that make white people uncomfortable. Specifically, that voodoo developed in Afro-Haitian communities during the Atlantic slave trade from the 16th to 19th centuries. It blends traditional religions from enslaved West Africans, particularly the Yoruba and Fon peoples, and the Roman Catholic form of Christianity from French colonialists. The zombie association with voodoo, and voodoo’s roots in slavery mean that a lot of what you get when you start digging into zombie folklore, are some extremely offensive dispatches from white anthropologists and ‘adventurers.’ And that’s in part how the concept of the zombie came from Haiti to the cultural consciousness of the good old US of A.  A book called The Magic Island by William Seabrook, published in 1929, was an account of his experiences with occult religions in Haiti. It was a best seller and features descriptions of so-called zombies. 

Now, for a brief aside here – while I was trying to find the zombie pathway from Haiti to Hollywood, I came across The Magic Island title, and was like, “Hmm, I wonder who William Seabrook was? Anthropologist? Missionary? Some other type of asshole?” Anyway, I clicked on his Wikipedia page, which I will read some excerpts from. It says: “William Buehler Seabrook (February 22, 1884 – September 20, 1945) was an American occultist (ok?), explorer (I guess you could still be one of those in the late 1800s), traveller (sure), journalist (totally normal profession) and cannibal.”  Sorry what? What’s good? So, I looked at the contents of his Wikipedia page, and it says early life, family life, cannibalism, later life and death. Naturally I clicked on the link to the bit about cannibalism and it says:

“In the 1920s, Seabrook travelled to West Africa and came across a tribe who partook in the eating of human meat. Seabrook writes about his experience of cannibalism in his novel Jungle Ways; however, later on Seabrook admits the tribe did not allow him to join in on the ritualistic cannibalism. Instead, he obtained samples of human flesh from a hospital and cooked it himself.”

You know? Like a normal person. I think the thing that really gets me about that is that it’s definitely just a guy who wanted an excuse to try human meat, and was pissed when he wasn’t allowed. What I’m saying is he fell into the “some other type of asshole” category. Anyway. That’s where the word zombie made its way into popular culture, and there were a few films from around that time period that used the Haitian voodoo tradition as the basis for their story – most notable is the Bella Lugosi-lead White Zombie in 1932. 

But like I said, while they didn’t use the word zombie, most cultures have folklore around raising the dead, and these other traditions also leeched over into popular culture. Things like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein influenced a tradition of fusing mad science with the reanimation of the dead, or Lovecraft’s Herbert West – Reanimator­, which defined the reanimated dead as uncontrollable, violent and mostly mute. Both of these things continue to pop up in contemporary zombie films. 

But zombie cinema as we know it really found its footing in 1968, when George Romero released Night of the Living Dead, in which rag tag group, led by a man named Ben, attempt to survive the night by buckling down in a remote farm house while hordes of the living dead swarm outside. While Romero referred to the monsters as ghouls throughout his script, Night of the Living Dead basically introduced every trope we associate with Hollywood zombie films today – the zombies are reanimated corpses of the deceased, they move slowly and are killable only with a shot to the head, there is no immediately obvious cause for the disease but it moves quickly and causes widespread chaos. It’s actually kind of funny to go back and watch this movie now, because a lot of the time in newer zombie films characters will have some other frame of reference for what’s happening, so there’ll be one character who is like “these are zombies, aim for the head” or “try not to get bitten, I think it’s an infection”. In Night of the Living Dead everyone is completely baffled about what’s happening or why, to the point where they’re just hanging out with someone who’s been bitten, blissfully unaware that the second the infection takes them they’re toast. Basically, every person in a zombie movie post-1968 is living in a post-Romero world, where we know the horror of the zombie apocalypse to come. 

So, if George Romero’s zombies built the genre then what do they mean? A lot of people read it as a critique of the Vietnam War. I think I say that some piece of genre cinema was a critique of the Vietnam War like every second episode at this point, but to be fair, Americans had a lot of anxiety about it and they made a lot of movies about how pointless wars are bad. But indirectly. So, it’s all a metaphor. Anyway, by setting the fairly extreme (for the time) violence in an all-American suburban home, Romero has reflected the sudden realities of the war being beamed back into living rooms every night. The film begins with the deconstruction of the all-American household, first literally, as Ben and co. pull apart furniture to barricade the doors, and then symbolically as the lone child in the film is taken by the virus and devours the flesh of her father. Visually, a lot of the shooting style reflects news reels – at one point the film even cuts to an extended clip of reporters on the scene, filming armed men trotting off into the firing lines. The horror of the outside is seeping in through the TV screen, and then through the door and it’s not something otherworldly – it looks just like us. It is us. At the end of Night of the Living Dead, Ben, a black man and the lone survivor of a night of hell with the aforementioned living dead, is shot between the eyes by vigilante rednecks picking off the remaining zombies. The film’s final shots show him being dragged out with a hook to be burned with the rest of the bodies, highlighting the recent memory of civil rights protests. 

Romero went on to make two more films in his zombie trilogy, proving the versatility of this type of monster – Dawn of the Dead, released in 1978, offers commentary on hedonism and consumerism, with the characters holed up in deserted shopping mall, living out their wildest consumer dreams in an odd liminal space as the world collapses outside. Day of the Dead, released in 1985, give us Cold War commentary and paranoia, but also manages to offer up philosophical questions about life, death, sentience and the human soul. While it’s the least well-received of the three films, I think Day of the Dead actually provides one of the more interesting questions about zombies as a concept. It features a semi-sentient zombie named Bub, who is able to be dissuaded from his immediate desire to rip someone to shreds by interacting with remnants of his old life like razors, books and music. At the film’s climax he even shoots the Captain who killed the kindly scientist who was working with him. Part of the fear of zombies is based not only the fact that they look like us, but that they could be anyone – our mother, our friend, our lover, our neighbour. At what point do they become unsalvageable? If the brain is still there, then surely there can’t be nothing left? And if there is something left, at what point do you cave your dead boyfriend’s skull in with a shovel? As soon as he’s infected, knowing that there’s no help coming? Or once he’s trying to rip your throat out with his teeth? Romero indicated that there was some semblance of personhood that remained, but we are never given the opportunity to explore how much as the dead overrun the facility. 

Zombie movies went fairly dormant in mainstream cinema throughout the 80s and 90s – I think at least partially because there was less room for the kinds of hippy gothic social commentary Romero had popularised. The 80s was kind of a capitalist playground, and America’s various international conflicts felt more removed than they had in the 1970s. People felt safer. But then of course, 9/11 happened. I might start a Bingo card for every time I mention 9/11 or the Vietnam War on this podcast. Anyway, 9/11 introduced the threat of violence on people’s doorsteps, and launched a spate of zombie renaissance movies. The best example is Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later. The film follows Jim, who wakes up from a coma 28 days after London has been decimated by virus unwittingly unleashed by environmental activists in their quest to save lab animals. The film features zombies fuelled by rage, unstoppable and spewing blood. Despite being set in London, the film’s relationship with 9/11 feels obvious – the deserted streets Jim wanders through feel eerily similar to New York’s emptiness following the collapse of the Twin Towers. The anxiety of bioterrorism and martial law also looms large, with the virus originating in what we can only assume is a government lab similar to anthrax, and the last hold out found by survivors being a military platoon with their own nefarious ideas of how to survive in the new world. Many of the zombies in these new films were fast movies and rabid – as in World War Z – or evolving – as in the Resident Evil films (which get progressively sillier the further you get into the franchise). There’s a pretty heavy focus on science both as a cause and a solution, hinting at some underlying anxiety around government weapons development and its possible close-to-home consequences. Similar to Romero’s zombies, these films offer a commentary on the state of the world and often, a fairly nihilistic view of how escapable these conflicts are – many end with uncertain futures or out and out obliteration.

Which is why I think it’s so interesting that as we move through the 2010s we start to see zombies with some form of sentience and organisation. I’m thinking specifically about Warm Bodies, which is a zombie rom-com where a zombie falls in love with a human girl, which brings him back to life. The zombies maintain relationships with each other and friendships, and they begin to regain their humanity when they start interacting with surviving humans. Which sort of implies that they could have been saved all along, if only we’d been less afraid and more willing to interact with the infected.  Fear of visible disease and our proximity to it is really ingrained in our psyche. Cecilia Petretto says that our fear of the zombie imagery lies in a deep-rooted association of the ugliness of visible disease with a kind of Biblical evil or punishment, and we instinctually try to separate ourselves from it. Lepers for example, were declared legally dead throughout the late Middle Ages, and were forbidden to speak or own possessions. Or in more recent memory, people suffering from AIDS were shunned early throughout the 80s and 90s and became a target for religious conservatives who considered it a punishment for their sinful lifestyles. If we’re starting to ignore that kind of Catholic disconnect where the body is simply a vessel carrying you through life, and we’re instead starting to see the body as something that forms part of your humanity and that its connection with and proximity to others as something that saves us rather than perpetuates harm, then where does that leave the zombie movie. Does the mass scale killing of zombies become something that is ultimately unethical? Is it suddenly wrong to take a chainsaw your younger sister just because she was trying to consume your brains? 

At the climax of Army of the Dead, despite the zombie’s organisation and the many snippets of their humanity and relationships that we’re presented with throughout, the decision to nuke Las Vegas by government forces ultimately takes precedent. It feels kind of odd, post-pandemic, to look at a walled off city teeming with zombies and know that despite the infection that’s overrun their body not ultimately muting all parts of their humanity, the government still ultimately opts to flatten the city rather than work on a solution. It’s like the film is weirdly torn about which side of the room evil sits on – the infected hordes or the government.

Overall, Snyder’s film doesn’t really offer enough commentary on anything to come out with anything overly meaningful, which is a shame. But it did really make me think about what the fear of death and the walking dead – I like this quote from Petretto’s article. “The dead are part of us. We just do not want to be any part of them…”

Well, that was my zombie episode. While I was writing this I went down a rabbit hole on those so-called zombie murders in 2012 that I mentioned at the top of the episode. Do you member that guy in Florida I think, who ate the homeless man’s face? Here are a quick list of things that I did not know about that crime specifically: despite the fact that he was naked and unarmed, the gentleman doing the face eating was shot several times. So many shots were fired, in fact that the victim whose face was being consumed was also shot twice. He survived both having his face consumed and being shot by police. Police told the media that the perpetrator was on bath salts, although the toxicology report came back negative. Everyone got so caught up in the zombie aspect that no one questioned the police shooting. So there you go. Defund and dismantle baby. If you have any thoughts on the nature of the human soul, talk to me about it next time you see me at the pub. Peace!