Is That Zombie You?
October 24, 2011
CONTINUING the discussion on horror, Daniel H., from the blog “Out of Sleep,” writes:
I think part of the explanation for the popularity of zombies, at least, is very simple and close to the surface. Zombies are animated corpses without souls. They are shaped like people, but they are not people because they have no spark of life within them.
This fantasy reflects one fear and one reality. The fear is that we truly are all zombies: soulless, meaningless, just meat-bags walking around. This is the ultimate teaching of materialism, of course. It’s not true, but most people these days are convinced that it is, on the intellectual level. The fascination with zombies is the heart (which knows itself to be ensouled) reacting to the modern world which “knows” souls to be a myth. Zombies are terrifying because they are reality exactly inverted, and yet they are plausible in a way because we are told over and over that yes, essentially, we are all zombies. The most thrilling scarifiers are always the things that seem most plausible. Still, it’s only a myth.
The one reality which zombie tropes reflect is the numbness and deadness of modern people. We all have souls, but that does not mean that we are all currently alive to reality. Our sparks are dim and obscured. Mass media, rejection of history and tradition, atomism and individualism, love as a “lifestyle choice” … you know the litany. So it’s natural for people to get a nagging feeling they are surrounded by zombies.
Not to say this is a healthy phenomenon, but it’s certainly understandable.
— Comments —
Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:
There are “dead soul” movies that are not “zombie” movies. The classic example is The Body Snatchers (1956), in which “pods” from outer space take over human beings, who retain their human shape but become emotionless cells in the alien collective.
“Zombie” films, going back to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) are “gross-out” films the point of which is to represent cannibalism and blood-spraying violence with cinematic ultra-realism. The Body Snatchers is amenable to “Spengler’s” thesis. First, it’s a genuinely frightening film (with no blood-and-guts element whatsoever), and second, it makes obvious comment on conformism whether of the totalitarian or the consumerist variety. Immense contemporary popularity belongs, not to scary films like The Body Snatchers (there is nothing like it today), but to ultra-realist torture-and-murder films like Saw and Hostel. The spate of Night of the Living Dead spin-offs, like the current AMC television series The Walking Dead, is more closely related to the ultra-realist torture-and-murder genre than to the “dead soul” genre.
The pornography of explicit violence shocks me more than the pornography of sex. In the hierarchy of perversity, the desire to look at nakedness is salacious but understandable; the desire to look at other people having sex is genuinely perverse; but the desire to be a spectator of torture and murder is alarmingly perverse.
