By ARTHUR HIPPLER
(Editor’s Note: Dr. Hippler is chairman of the religion department and teaches religion in the Upper School at Providence Academy, Plymouth, Minn.)
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Am I the only one who has noticed the proliferation of movies and television shows about zombies? Casual browsing on Netflix reveals not only the longtime series Walking Dead (nine seasons) and Z Nation (three seasons) but also the new series Black Summer and The Kingdom (the latter from South Korea). There continues to be a steady stream of new movies as well. Why have zombie movies replaced the earlier staples of werewolves, vampires, and ghosts?
The first point to notice is the way in which zombies have changed from their origin in Haitian folklore. Originally the zombie was the creation of a witch (bokor), who brought the dead back to life as a slave. Zombies did not chase people to eat them. This is a behavior associated with a different monster — the ghoul. In Arabic folklore, the ghoul as a shapeshifting evil spirit that lived in graveyards and ate human flesh. His appearance in the West is largely through translations of The Thousand and One Arabian Nights.
Books and movies about zombies followed the Haitian tradition up to the early 1970s. That all changed with one movie. As Kevin Boon explains, “The film zombie irrevocably changed with the 1968 release of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, in which Romero fuses the mythology of the zombie and the ghoul into the ‘zombie ghoul.’ Romero’s Night gave zombies agency, a hunger for human flesh. The significance of Romero’s Night on all the zombie films that follow cannot be overestimated. Pre-Romero, you cannot find the zombie-ghoul in film; post-Romero, you find very few zombie films that do not contain zombie ghouls” (“Ontological Anxiety Made Flesh” in Monsters and Monstrous, p. 37).
Note how the modern version of the zombie has changed in essential ways from both the Haitian zombie and the Arabic ghoul. Traditionally, a zombie was the personal servant of a witch, the ghoul a demonic spirit. Zombies do not make other zombies. Ghouls, as evil spirits, do not “multiply.” But the very core of a modern zombie narrative is the fear that, if he does not eat his victim, it will “infect” him with the zombie “virus.” Soon, there are zombie “hordes” and then of course a “zombie apocalypse.”
Why has the zombie developed in this particular direction? The zombie narrative taps into a primal fear of cannibalism, the fear of becoming mere food for other men. One sees this fear memorably in Homer’s Odyssey. The Cyclops eats a number of Odysseus’ men, and Odysseus barely escapes himself. The Laestrygonians, a tribe of giants in Sicily, destroy eleven of Odysseus’ ships and eat the survivors. But of course what makes the zombies more disturbing is that, unlike these giants of Greek mythology, they were once human. Humans that practice cannibalism may do so in extreme cases for survival (like the Donner party) or as a ritual of absorbing the powers of the victim (as happened among highland tribes in New Guinea). But the zombie is different. Killing and eating is not exceptional, but their very way of life.
In this way, the zombie narrative seems further to tap into the basic fear that men have that “man is a wolf to man.” This is a fear common to all times, but it has a special poignancy in the modern world. Thomas Hobbes begins his political reflections in Leviathan with the principle that in all men there is “a perpetual and restless desire of Power after power, that ceases only in Death” and that without the restraint of force and civil law, “they are in that condition which is called War; and such a war, as is of every man, against every man.”
Contrary to Aristotle’s claim that man is by nature a social and political animal, Hobbes insists that nature dissociates men, and renders them “apt to invade, and destroy one another.” Hobbes was an atheist and a materialist, and his understanding of human nature reflects these principles.
The psychology present in Hobbes is made explicit by later writers, such as Sigmund Freud. In Civilization and its Discontents, he argues that because of man’s natural aggression, “their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus [Man is a wolf to man]. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?”
These observations help us to understand the “apocalyptic” element in many modern zombie narratives. Most zombie stories involve a breakdown of civic order. There is no longer rule of law or government. (In the Walking Dead series, one of the main characters is a former deputy sheriff.) Of course, it is the spread of the virus that has caused the breakdown. But that appeals to our sense that, without the restraints of law, men would be wolves to other men.
Certainly, Aristotle would agree that man, separated from law and justice, is the worst of animals. But Aristotle does not deny a natural order that should guide men, and that reason should rule our passions and desires. (Aristotle’s Ethics is a detailed application of this principle.) For Hobbes and Freud and so many others in the modern world, there is no order of perfection for man in virtue, no Providence in nature, no divine ordination in man to higher goods. Civil order provides the only principle of order once we have abandoned virtue and religion.
The “zombie apocalypse” is our modern conception of human nature, turned into horror cinema.
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