someone (or something) is a villain, it infuses the encounter with paranoia, tension, and real scares.
Monsters as Social Commentary
“Zombies in storytelling are all about social commentary, not about evil. They are the perfect vehicle for allegory. To the writer, zombies can represent anything they want them to, but nothing works better than tapping into what a society is afraid of at any given point in history. A zombie trying to destroy a family barricaded away in a farmhouse could represent the decline of marriage or the destruction of the housing market. A band of the undead overrunning a city, with the way our country is now, may represent the terrorists that have been working to destroy our freedom. The zombie oozes no sexuality, like the vampire. There are no undertones there. It is not meant to seduce you, but just flat-out ruin everything you value. For a writer delving into zombies, they leave a lot of room for commenting on society and tuning into the frequency of what scares us as a collective group.”—James Melzer is the author of Escape: A Zombie Chronicles Novel (Simon & Schuster, 2010).
MINDLESS EVIL
Monster stories of all kinds, from mythological tales of hydras and sea serpents to folktales about werewolves to modern tales of zombies, often present all threats as evil. That’s not always accurate and it isn’t fair. Evil is measured by intent not by the degree of harm done. It can’t be judged according to body count because a fighter pilot in war who sinks a ship may be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of enemy soldiers, but that’s the nature of war. Dracula only killed a handful of people in Bram Stoker’s novel and yet we can all agree that he’s evil.
The challenge in determining whether something is evil or merely dangerous crops up a lot when talking about monsters. The Creature from the Black Lagoon (Universal, 1954) is an animal and a natural predator. Are we right in calling such a creature “evil” because it kills humans? It isn’t breaking any set of laws that apply to its species. No more so than a scorpion or a snake. The mistake is to equate “dangerous” with “evil.”
Zombies are another good example. In George A. Romero’s classic 1968 film, The Night of the Living Dead, the zombies kill over and over again without remorse. By the second film in the series, Dawn of the Dead, zombies had killed nearly every man, woman, and child on the planet. They are certainly threatening, relentless, and unnatural. So…does that make them evil?
Almost certainly not. Zombies, according to the Romero model, are unthinking. They are dead bodies that have been reanimated. They walk; they can use very simple tools (we see them picking up bricks or pieces of wood); they can problem-solve in a limited way (the zombie who attacks Barbara in the graveyard picks up a brick to try to smash the window after he has been unable to open the door using the handle). They can even pursue. And yet Romero—and other writers in the genre like novelists Max Brooks (World War Z), Joe McKinney (Dead City, 2006), and Robert Kirkman’s ongoing comic book The Walking Dead—have clearly established that there is no personality, no emotions, no higher consciousness of any kind.
Billy Tackett, Dead White & Blue
“When I painted Zombie Sam I thought I’d piss some folks off. That didn’t happen. The broad range of people that have become Dead White & Blue fans continues to amaze me. My Zombie Sam image is embraced equally by both the political left and right! I’ve sold shirts to both anti-war protestors and to soldiers voluntarily heading off to Iraq. Everyone seems to be able to put their own spin on him and personally I love it!”
—Billy Tackett is an illustrator and creator of the popular Dead White & Blue series of images where he zombifies iconic American images.
“Zombie stories are like a photograph in that they capture a society in a moment of time and freeze it there,” observed the late Z. A. Recht, author of The Morningstar Strain, a duology of zombie novels. “No further progress will be made. Nothing more will be manufactured. Life will go on—mostly—but the society has broken a cog and stopped in place. What remains are the echoes of that society, and now that it’s frozen, and we, the survivors, have become something more, we can look back at it and really see what we were. It also forces the human characters to expose themselves: a greedy person might successfully hide behind a curtain in a civilized society, but in an anarchic one, they will have to be openly greedy and grab what they can when they can…Similarly, a generous character might be open-handed to the extent that they do not eat enough. The situation forces the morality of the character, for good or ill, to surface and take over. A person’s morals—their principles—are the cornerstones of their personality, and I truly think that in an extreme situation, an individual will tend to revert to these cornerstones almost unconsciously, and cling to them.”
Zombie Appeal
“Zombie stories appeal to a wide set of groups on a lot of different levels. There are the darkly beautiful feelings of hopelessness and bleakness that run rampant in the genre, but there’s also the fantasy escapism of being one of the last people alive with everything left to you but also being free from the rules of a civilization that no longer exists.”—Eric S. Brown is the author of Season of Rot (Permuted Press, 2009) and The War of the Worlds Plus Blood, Guts and Zombies (Coscom Entertainment, 2009).
“You cannot judge zombies in a moral sense,” argues Dr. Kim Paffenroth, associate professor of religious studies at Iona College and author of Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth (Baylor, 2006). “Before the modern era, there was talk of something they called ‘natural evil’—things we’d call natural disasters or just facts of life (earthquakes, fires, diseases, etc.). Zombies would seem to fit there. It also means that zombie tales have to go one of three ways, it seems to me: either they humanize the zombies and give them more of a sense of mind and soul, or they treat them as a natural disaster (which makes some zombie movies look more like disaster movies than monster movies), or they have to focus on the evils committed by human survivors against one another.”
Jacob Kier, the founder and editor of Permuted Press, one of the most successful publishers of zombie and apocalyptic fiction, agrees. “The classic Romero-style zombies are neither good nor evil, they’re driven by pure instinct. You wouldn’t call a shark that attacks a human ‘evil,’ so neither would you call a Romero-style zombie evil. There as dangerous as a tsunami but equally innocent of malicious intent.”
Night of the Living Id
“Freud described the id as ‘The dark, inaccessible part of us that has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of instinctual needs.’ That sounds like a zombie to me. At least the reanimated dead we’ve come to know and love over the past four decades. Creatures not driven by any agenda or motivated by any amoral sense, but operating completely on instinct. Zombies are all id, just like newborn children. True, most children aren’t born with the instinct to consume the flesh or brains of their parents, but that’s no justification to label zombies as evil. They’re just a collection of involuntary drives and impulses demanding immediate satisfaction.”—S. G. Browne is author of Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament (Broadway Books, 2009) and Fated (NAL, 2010).
Though, admittedly, it might be hard to remember that when a zombie is chomping on your arm.
“Blameless,” Kier adds, “does not equal ‘harmless.’”
Part of the popularity of zombie and apocalyptic stories stems from the joy of seeing people survive against overwhelming odds. Seeing a great bit of ingenuity is thrilling in any context, but in an apocalyptic scenario the opportunity for ingenuity is boosted to a whole new level. Take the ultimate survival challenge combined with the new level of freedom due to society’s collapse and out pops a whole new horizon of solutions to all manner of problems. Go ahead and take an axe to the staircase. Build a wall out of wrecked cars. Construct catwalks between rooftops. Trap and train the zombies (or aliens, or infected). Nuke a city to eliminate just one person (or creature, or building). Fight to get into prison. Fans of the apocalypse eat up these scenarios that can only really play out in a world that’s already gone to hell.
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