Try this: If they’re zombies, then they’re already dead, yet you have to kill them again, in a certain set of ways, or they keep after you. This postulates a viral form of “life” or “lifeforce” on a lower level and perhaps distinct from the one animating them while they were originally alive in a non-zombie way.
In NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, Romero used the tap-dance excuse of a meteor, with the implication of some strange radiation. Okay, then it’s the rads, or the space virus, or infection brought to Earth that animates the corpses, and turns people into shambling, implacable things of hunger.
So it’s the infection, not really the dead bodies, being fought. Zombies are more ANDROMEDA STRAIN than supernatural, thus are science fiction, not horror, albeit usually handled with horror style.
Zombies today are NOT the traditional zombie from Haiti’s cane fields. Those were living people dosed with chemicals to induce a death-like state from which they could be revived. Once revived they lacked any will and were desensitized to physical pain, thus perfect for working long cruel hours as slaves.
Zombies were slaves, originally. Same as the Replicants in BLADE RUNNER, Ridley Scott’s version of PKD’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, a novel much more pointedly satirizing consumerism and where that will lead. Scott made it into a paen to slave revolts, paralleling GLADIATOR and SPARTACUS.
Zombies have changed. Not only from slaves to a plague but from shamblers to runners. In 28 DAYS LATER, Alex Garland gave us fast, feral zombies. Again it was a plague, but the resultant threat was like a zoo’s worst predators unleashed en masse.
Zombies seem to be the threat-du-jour, able to change as society’s anxieties shift. Right now Zombies are trumpers, the GOP right wing conservative greed, fear, & hate cutltsts, and we are besieged by bigotry. Zombies are memes, you see. Ideas spread in viral concentric circles of infection.
Zombies R Us.
Discuss.
/ Art Wester
