State of the Zombie

Zombies have been a mainstay of the popular imagination for decades. But the reasons why seem to be shifting.

Growing up with the undead

I’ve loved zombie movies since I was a kid. In the ‘80s, they were a way of talking frankly about the horrors of the occasionally promised nuclear apocalypse, without talking about it—the only way to talk about the biggest, most important things.

Dawn of the Dead—the original—was no doubt my favorite. I rented the tape again and again. I picked up and read the novelization. I made sure all my friends saw it. The movie informed our conversations—what would be the best possible structure to barricade against the shambling, hungry hordes, how would we do it, and how we would survive there.

This was a favorite pastime of me and my childhood best friend, Joe Martin. We decided on the Greendale YMCA. It had a fence around it, and a lake adjacent. In hindsight, I think we underestimated the zombies’ ability to traverse the shallow lake, and probably also the abundance of fish. But we planned on how to do it, through endless afternoons. Stacking weight benches against doors, and ransacking the vending machines. Maybe we should have been planning for something other than the end of the world.

Now they’re wearing sneakers

We argued and piled plans on plans, with each post-apocalyptic solution making us better friends. The last movie we saw together was 28 Days Later. It was different, crazier. The zombies weren’t just nodding crowds the walking dead, animated vaguely by a hunger for human agency, also known as brains. The new zombies were angry. They could hide. They ran. Just one might be enough to kill you.

That was 2002. The zombies have been running—arms flapping at their sides—ever since. In ‘04, they redid Dawn of the Dead, all full of running zombies, and it was different from the original, but it was great. I remember watching it in the theater and later on DVD with a bottle of Maker’s Mark while working on my own apocalyptic novel The Last Bad Job (now available as an audiobook wherever you might imagine). In 2007, Joe Martin was shot dead in a bar fight.    

When The Walking Dead came out, I gave it a shot. But the long scenes of undeveloped characters dramatically mourning the death of even-less-developed characters seemed like the kind of clever pretentiousness that has turned every schlock genre into a self-serious but-imagine-how-alone-Superman-must-feel shitfest, from moody, prestige-flavored Batman until the if-Ant-Man-can-change-then-we-all-can horseshit of today.

Why would you make this up?

I was born in 1977 and lived most of my young imaginative life in the expectation of nuclear war. And that’s the dread was in the VHS copy of Night of the Living Dead that I got out of the library when I was eleven or twelve. This was the half-dead world of raw survival that awaited. And it all made sense, as did my loss of interest in the genre after the early ’90s.

But the idea of zombies didn’t originate in the Cold War. The term is older - first recorded in the early 1800s in Haiti, associated with voodoo and exotic poisons. I’m no expert. But I was working on Ms. Never, which hinges on a new kind of servitude after death,  I was reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. And he had this to say about zombies and the culture that created them. “Tiv (a people in Africa) horror stories about men who are dead and who do not know it or men who are brought back from the grave to serve their murderers, and Haitian zombie stories, all seem to play on this essential horror of slavery: the fact that it’s a kind of living death.”

This was way a way of talking about all the horrors of something by not talking about it.

In Graeber’s Debt, that paragraph was embedded in a millennia-spanning section about global slavery, and how a slave had no actionable relationships with anyone but their master and had been made socially powerless—effectively dead. I’d recommend the book, whether you’re a surly teenager or a C-suite joker wondering how, exactly, to land this plane.

The undead work for someone

The idea of men who are brought back from the grave to serve their murderers reminded me of how someone can have their identity stolen.

To anyone with a private, well-developed sense of who they are, the notion of identity theft seems a little ridiculous at least at first. It takes a few years for a child to understand that there is a separate social identity - a reputation - that we create via our actions, which has a life of its own.

But then comes the identity that can be stolen.