Epidemic of the Living Dead: Zombies as Metaphor

Richard Bamattre

Abstract:

Horror films offer monsters as metaphors for social fears, ranging from external

threats to internal disorders. The zombie film has long served as an allegory for and a

representation of contagious disease; the genre matured during the AIDS epidemic, and “new

zombie” movies arose in the context of SARS, avian flu, and H1N1 with the films

28 Days

Later

Planet Terror

, and the remake of

Dawn of the Dead

. This cinema plays with

metaphors of the human body and its relation to disease, offering both catharsis and terror.

By depicting the failure of core social institutions and the inability of medicine/science to

address epidemics, they represent a contemporary lack of trust in government's maintenance

of security in the outset of terrorism and infectious disease. Finally, they set forth a critique of

urban space and position it at odds with a post-apocalyptic return to the idealism of nature."They are looking for food; we are their meat in one sense or another. How do we competewith them? There are so many of them, they reproduce much more quickly than we do, theytolerate vast fluctuations of population size as part of their natural history. They lack theemotional apparatus to grieve whenever their population significantly declines. We aredifferent from them in every respect." (Lederberg, 13)Horror, as described by Colavito, is "an active essence that captures our fears andcrystallizes them into a shape we can understand" (2008, 6). The horror genre, manifest instories, art, and film, is a voyage into the darkness unilluminated by the knowledge andscientific progress of the era. It is distinct from science fiction in that its monsters are setloose upon contemporary spaces rather than the shiny utopias of the future. In the classichorror films of the 1930s and 40s, mythic monsters were given great powers or immortalityand occupied physical or spectral bodies. These creatures operated in an unexplainable terrainoutside of science, and their narratives tended to be patterned: "A monster is discovered, its properties deduced, and the duration of the film is spent trying to put it down" (267). Asscience and technology has undergone rapid and dramatic change since then, new terrors arerequired to populate the contemporary territory of fear. The new zombie is a metamorphosisof the classic monster, which has multiplied in number and adapted to reflect new fears insidethe shadow of science and medicine.The zombie can be considered a child of Frankenstein's monster and a distant cousin to thevampire. Both the vampire and zombie are backgrounded by the development of germ theoryin the 1870s and epidemics of cholera, influenza, and tuberculosis. Barber contends that themyth of vampirism was constructed in pre-industrial societies to offer explanations for therelatively unknown process of death and decomposition (1988, 1-4). While the vampire isoften a demonic seducer, the bringer of either death or immortality, the zombie has evolvedinto a desexualized embodiment of disease. The first film to use the term "zombie",

White Zombie

(1932), starring Bela Lugosi, elaborated on Haitian myths of the undead withmindless beings controlled by a voodoo sorcerer. It wasn't until the publication of RichardMatheson's book

I Am Legend

(1954) and the release of George Romero's

Night of the Living Dead

(1968) that zombies were released from the control of the evil sorcerer or scientist and presented in a context of autonomous and inexplicable contagion. As

Night of the Living Dead

begins, quite ironically, in a cemetery, and ends in an abandoned house, zombie filmsin general have relocated horror from the periphery of laboratories, exotic locales, and thecountryside to the space of the domestic and the territory of the contemporary city.With his trilogy of films -

Night of the Living Dead

(1968),

Dawn of the Dead

(1978), and

Day of the Dead

(1985) - George Romero not only urbanized the monster, but at the sametime presented them as a satirical reflection on American values. While

Night of the Living Dead

has been noted for representing the frustrations of the Vietnam War and containing afairly potent civil rights message,

Dawn of the Dead

critiques modern consumerism by posing the zombie as a mindless and alienated consumer driven to cannibalistically consumeothers. The monster acts as a "totalizing metaphor which took material culture together with

its gospel of narcissism and 'having it all' to its logical conclusion in entropy, cannibalism,and self-consumption" (Badley 1995, 74). According to Harper,

Dawn of the Dead

featuresradical social critique which positions its zombies as the masses within a Marxian classhierarchy (2002). This is expanded in Romero's return to the zombie genre,

Land of the Dead

(2005), where the undead mass invades a wealthy utopian community in order to avenge theexploitation of its own. The zombie film as political satire has been adopted, albeit lesssubtly, in Joe Dante's episode

Homecoming

for the series

Masters of Horror

(2005), wheredeceased Iraq war soldiers return from the dead to protest the war.Within the last decade, the zombie film has had a resurgence. While the remake of

Dawnof the Dead

(2004) mirrors the consumerist critique of the original, the films

28 Days Later

(2002), its sequel

28 Weeks Later

(2007), and

Planet Terror

(2007) focus more on themedical aspect of contagion and institutional response to epidemics. Although they areundoubtedly inspired by Romero's trilogy, political and philosophical theories surroundinghis movies cannot simply be transplanted to these new zombie films. One significantdifference is the form of the monster: new zombies are faster and smarter than Romero'sslow, mindless cannibals. Muntean and Payne argue that the new zombie is representative of fears of the terrorist among us within post-September 11th culture (2009). Another theoryrevolves around the politics surrounding the contemporary epidemic and their effects onmedia culture: after Surgeon General William Stewart declared the end of the "war against pestilence" in 1969, fatally contagious diseases - in particular AIDS, but including SARS,avian flu, and H1N1 - have emerged, creating a culture of fear and quarantines both formaland informal within and between populations. Faster and more infectious filmic monsterswere required to epitomize growing fears of illness within the supposed post-epidemicsociety. Connections between the new zombie film, disease, and epidemics will be exploredin length in this analysis. Horror no longer represents the enemy from beyond, particularlyRussian invaders or the atomic bomb, but the darkness has expanded to the space of our dailylives, our families, and especially our bodies.In analyzing zombie films of the last decade as reflecting and intersecting with thecontemporary epidemic, Kellner's concept of diagnostic critique, which "uses history to readtexts and texts to read history" (1995, 116) will be applied to both film and its surroundingcultural context. Also used is a multiperspectival approach which is interested in a wide rangeof strategies to critique and interpret cultural objects; this method is interested in variousdisciplines but does not respect the boundaries which typically separate them. To examineconvergences between biology, medicine, and culture, Morris' biocultural model is particularly relevant; it sees "illness as a mental, emotional, bodily event constructed at acrossroads of biology and culture" (1998, 19). The zombie film as an allegory operates on avariety of territories; this analysis is broken down into the various scales of the metaphor: the biological body; disease and societal response to the epidemic; urban space and nature.

The Biological Body

Particular metaphors have been used to explain bodily functionality and interactions withdisease. The context of industrialization has provided an allegory of the body as a machine or as a site of industrially organized activity. Fritz Kahn's series of illustrations

Der Mensch als Industriepalast

(Man as Industrial Palace) in 1926 imagines the body as a factory where fuelis taken in, processed, and outputted. The head is a site of bureaucratic activity, where themessy biological brain is replaced by a department of memory and managers of speech. Thisvisual metaphor internalizes industrialization and mechanizes bodily functions, and offers atthe same time a simplified and inaccurate view of our biology. Yet it is still used recently, inchildren's educational material: the program Schoolhouse Rock features a song called "TheBody Machine" to explain nutrition: "Look at those moving parts/as the body machine churnsup ... I'm a machine, you're a machine/Everybody that you know/You know, are machines"(Ahrens 1979). An issue of this metaphor is that it places the physician in the role of themechanic, and supposes a complex yet ultimately solvable process of diagnosis andtreatment: this oversimplifies science's relation to the functioning body and the dysfunctionor "incoherence" (Morris 22) of disease. While medical transplants often embody themachine metaphor, acting as parts being replaced in order to restore the functionality of thewhole, the biological body is too messy to fit conveniently within this industrial allegory;

rather, a variety of metaphors and illustrations about the body's function and its relation withother organisms can be recognized at the same time.With the sophistication of germ theory and the establishment of modern medicine as aninstitution at opposition with disease and bodily disorder, a metaphorical view arose whichsaw the body as the terrain on which a battle is fought between foreign and domestic agents.Cancer, in particular, is "an illness experienced as a ruthless, secret invasion" (Sontag 5); thismetaphor is expanded as patients are described as "fighting" or "at war" with their internalconditions. AIDS represents another battleground with similar metaphorical language: "thevirus is winning ... why is the war against the virus proving so difficult? ... the virus attacksthe very cells that should defend the body against it ... know your enemy" (Brown 1992). TheCenter for Disease Control's website for children features an "Immune Platoon" which fightsagainst anthropomorphized common diseases; H1N1 is what appears to be a humanoid bulldog on steroids. Thus, it is not a great theoretical leap to see zombie films as presentingembodiments of infectious disease, especially in the context of recent epidemics that havereceived a large amount of media attention.The zombie as an undead version of ourselves not only poses a physical threat within thespace of the film, but reminds the spectator of his/her own mortality. This phenomena can beseen through Freud's concept of the

unheimlich

(the uncanny): he describes it as "that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar." Not only doesFreud consider the humanoid monster uncanny, but pieces of the body as well: "dismemberedlimbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist ... especially when, as in the last instance,they prove capable of independent activity in addition" (1919). Terror comes not from theforeign, but from the familiar; walking corpses demonstrate the human body as nothing morethan a meat machine, or pure biology without consciousness or spirit. As much as philosophers, most prominently Descartes, attempted to distinguish the spaces of mind and body, the latter of which is constituted as "all the system of members composed of bones andflesh as seen in a corpse which [is] designated by the name of body" (1970, 151), theexistential logic of contemporary horror has united us with our bodies: anything in addition toour biology is mere philosophy and conjecture. The undead body is the same as ours, butwithout an upper layer of philosophical justification. "We're them and they're us," a character in

Dawn of the Dead

(1978) concludes.The zombie body does not necessarily fit into the machine metaphor, because even thoughit is to some extent broken, it still manages to function on a basic level. Rather, the undead body is a site for the existential messiness of disease which contradicts the internal laws of the body; its terror is located in the mystery of its own functionality. Much like the invasionof cancer, the zombie's origin is often unknown and its activity is unpredictable, but its threatremains real and inevitable. To fully understand the zombie phenomena, a journey is requiredoutside of the singular body to the macro realm of collective disease and epidemic, where themonster is multiplied and becomes an agent of contagion.

Disease and the Epidemic

Metaphors, in particular those constructed or reinforced in the media, can be multifacetedand hold simultaneous meanings; often they do not survive their phenomenon (Sontag 88)and, existing as social constructions, they are are modified, expanded, and deconstructed todifferent contexts and times. While Sontag wanted to remove metaphor from publicunderstanding of illness, an elucidation of the concept is useful in exploring not only socialrepresentations of disease, but its embodiment in the horror genre. A diagnostic critique of sickness which focuses more on popular perception of disease and treatment outside of thecomplex and often unapproachable terrain of the field of medicine is useful. This analysis isconcerned more with the conceptualization of and responses to disease, rather than themaintenance of health; illness, according to Morris, "always seems to tell us more about a person or an era than health does" (52). Because a threat to the body also endangers thestructure of local society, a multiperspectival approach sees sickness as being inextricablytied to social institutions and the relationships between bodies.In

Illness as Metaphor

, Sontag lays out the territory of the kingdom of the well and thekingdom of the sick; movement is allowed between territories: "everyone who is born holdsdual citizenship" (3). However, it is impossible to occupy both at the same time, and there are