The Living Dead
In light of Halloween being just a few short days away, I think
should make a confession. I am scared, no, terrified of zombies.
Perhaps it’s the proliferation of movies and spooky stories that
spring up this time of year, but whatever the reason, nightmares
about these living corpses are keeping me up at night. Weird as it
all is, I can’t be the only one who finds these creepy creatures so
terrifying. Myths of the living dead such as zombies and their
monstrous cousins, vampires, can be found frightening to many
people in many different cultures. In examining these legends,
important ideas about why these monster myths are so powerful and
why they scare us collectively may surface.
Perhaps the greatest legend of the living dead is that of
Dracula, a vampire found in both ancient European folklore and
modern day movies. Described by the book “In Search of Dracula” as
an authentic 15th century prince in Eastern Europe called Vlad
Tepes, he was demonized and turned into a blood-sucking monster in
popular legend due to both his bloody actions and the peasant’s
feelings of being sucked financially dry by monarchs such as
Vlad.
His legend found rebirth in modern times with the publication of
Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” in 1897. Called “a great transitional
novel” by writer Brian Aldiss, Stoker’s Dracula was an “ancient
thing” when “like a disease (he) arrives in London. A barrier has
been crossed; the infection has entered the modern vein.” In this
sense, the power of the vampire to scare audiences in the Victorian
era rested upon Stoker’s Vlad as a harbinger of the terrifying
disease of (in Victorian eyes) foreign forces, and the shocking
sexuality that Stoker’s Dracula represents.
Vampire myths, like Dracula or even modern ones found in Africa,
deal with these fears, and add to them concerns about the power of
dominating forces (such as colonialists in Africa) to sap a person
or community of its “life blood.” Embodying the fear of either
powerful or sensual intrusion, these myths perhaps allow people to
channel their concerns about “outsiders” into something tangibly
terrifying.
Zombies (in my opinion the most terrifying of the undead) are
also a feature present in global cultures. Most prominent in
Haitian voodoo societies, zombies there are, as ethnobotanist Wade
Davis describes them in his fascinating book “The Serpent and the
Rainbow,” an actual feature of Haitian culture. These factual
zombies were people who were “cursed” by voodoo sorcerers and after
which “died” only to be resurrected in a mindless, hazy state of
slavery. Davis suggests that many of these “zombies” were in fact
victims of a psychotoxin made from puffin fish venom or a plant
known as “zombi cucumber,” the effects of which are a death-like
trance followed by an awakening of amnesia, confusion and delirium.
Davis says that the Haitian zombie myth provided a “template upon
which cultural beliefs and fears could go to work” with the toxin
promising to “amplify these processes a hundred times.”
More modern zombie myths and movies rest on fears present in
modern culture. Movie critics point to films such as the new “28
Days Later” as a play on contemporary terrors of bio-contamination
(remember the anthrax scare?) and concerns about the destructive
power of mindless rage that seems to be growing in our society. In
the zombie classic “Night of the Living Dead,” the dead are
resurrected as soulless brain-eaters by a nuclear spill. By
encapsulating the concerns of the day in a monster myth, we are
able to look at them and fear them in a different, less direct
way.
Both these monsters, the authors of “Blood Read: The Vampire
Metaphor in Contemporary Culture” assert “touch on the basic fears
that make us all vulnerable.” While varied in setting and reason,
vampires and zombies remain terrifying because, as writer David
Skal says, “very little about the underlying structure of horror
images really changes, though our cultural uses for them are as
shape changing as Dracula himself.”
Meg is a graduate student at CSU. She will be busy this
Halloween barricading her house out of fear of zombie attacks
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