Roger Luckhurst - Zombies: A Cultural History

ZOMBIES

ZOMBIES

A CULTURAL HISTORY

ROGER LUCKHURST

REAKTION BOOKS

The blancs are blind, he said, except for zombis .

You see them everywhere.

Herard Simon in Wade Davis,
The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985)

Published by
Reaktion Books Ltd
33 Great Sutton Street
London EC V DX , UK

www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2015

Copyright Roger Luckhurst 2015

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and
Index match the printed edition of this book.

Printed and bound in Great Britain
by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

e ISBN : 9781780235646

Contents

Note on Usage

This book explores how key terms are transformed by translation, so the spelling and usage of certain words vary throughout this book. All quotations preserve the original spelling, but I use zombi for the term that was used across the Caribbean in different local dialects and zombie for the American concept, which first entered into popular usage in America in the 1920s. Similarly, the word Vodou is preferred for the complex religion and ritual practices in the Caribbean, while Vaudoux and later Voodoo refers to the Western fantasies about those practices.

You know what a zombie is.

The zombie is that species of the undead that returns by some supernatural or pseudo-scientific sleight of hand. Zombies are speechless, gormless, without memory of prior life or attachments, sinking into an indifferent mass and growing exponentially. They are a contagion, driven by an empty but insatiable hunger to devour the last of the living and extend their domain until we reach the End of Days. Zombies are the Rapture with rot.

And you know how the zombie got here.

The zombie starts out as the decomposing poor relation of aristocratic vampires and mummies, the outlier undead of horror film. It shuffled out of the margins of empire, from Haiti and the French Antilles, making the leap from folklore to film in Victor Halperins White Zombie (1932), a rewrite of Dracula set in a hallucinated Caribbean. This production, significantly enough, was a low-budget, independent shocker in the year that the Universal studio in Hollywood crowned Count Dracula, Frankensteins Monster and Imhotep the Mummy as the unholy trinity of the undead. The zombie rotted a bit more from neglect, lurking un-noticed in graveyards, sinking into the shudder pulps and horror comics of the 1940s and 50s. Then another group of filmmakers completely outside the studio system in Pittsburgh clubbed together to fund George Romeros Night of the Living Dead (1968). After years on midnight movie and cult circuits, the reimagining of the zombie as a form of mass contagion began to seep into horror films in the 1980s. The remorseless zombie attack was bedded down as a familiar Gothic trope after Romeros Dawn of the Dead (1978) in a nasty outbreak of cannibal holocaust films that chewed their way out of Italian grindhouses and reinfected American production. It leaped host again in 1996, when the Japanese computer giant CAPCOM released the video game Resident Evil , initially under the name Bio-hazard . This was conceived by designer Shinji Mikami, who coined a new term for the genre: survival horror. Since the late 1990s over twenty different versions of the Resident Evil game have been released (along with an associated film franchise). These commodities have made billions of dollars of profit, and have been one of the main vectors ensuring that the zombie has become a truly global figure and arguably the central Gothic figure for globalization itself. In 80 years, the zombie has ground down the bones of the opposition and lurched out of the shadows to become the dominant figure of the undead in the twenty-first century.

It is now impossible to move without stumbling over zombie apocalypse films, comics, novels, TV series, computer games and cosplay. Zombie parades began as a local phenomenon in Sacramento, California, in 2001, but have become an annual feature of many cities around the world. A television adaptation of The Walking Dead , an episodic, open-ended comic series, has become one of the most successful cable TV series ever made, surrounded by a host of imitators such as Dead Set and In the Flesh in Britain and (a little more dubiously) The Returned in France. The global reach of the zombie figure is represented not just by the colossal budget of Hollywood disaster films like World War Z (2013), but in the way it has fused with very local supernatural tales of the undead around the world, in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Zombie has become a standard adjectival modifier, too: we are in a world of zombie computers, zombie stocks and shares, zombie corporations, zombie economics, zombie governments, zombie litigation, zombie consciousness, even zombie categories (concepts or terms that are dying out but still lingering on). These things all become zombified because they are marked by loss of agency, control or consciousness of their actual state of being: they are dead but

Because of this ubiquitous presence, you also know what the zombie means . There are several basic interpretations of this creature that circulate in different registers, from the often highly informed but informal online discussion boards among fans to the arcane worlds of competing academic schools of thought. Zombies are what the anthropologist Victor Turner calls threshold people, those anomalies that straddle crucial cultural boundaries, necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. categories of purity and pollution, the sacred and the profane, the living and the dead. The zombie tests the limits of kinship and attachment where these are placed under severe pressure, as in systems of slavery or conditions of extreme economic dispossession and migration. The zombie is the loved one who has somehow catastrophically turned , in the same body yet a stranger to themselves and their kin. They can be (in Haiti) a pathetic figure of a long-dead relative who wonders forlornly into their home village years later, or (in Africa) a bewitched migrant whose labour destroys a fragile economic and social balance, or (in American and European horror films) the ravening wife, husband or child who has forgotten all emotional and social ties and is intent only on devouring their own kin(d).

The real question is why it is that this particular figure of the undead has become so all-pervasive. There are still large numbers of doomed aristocratic vamps around, of course, despite Buffys repeated dustings, or operatic announcements of the exhaustion of genre, like Jim Jarmuschs enervated film Only Lovers Left Alive (2013). A good deal of North American real estate nowadays seems to be the subject of vengeful spectral returns (and not only from the enraged ghosts of long-dead mortgage providers). An occasional mummy, bad-tempered pagan elemental or even Old Nick himself still stirs his stumps once in a while. The unique twist the zombie offers, though, is massification: the undead as a multitude. Thus it is very common by now to interpret zombies as a distinctly modern contribution to the Gothic tradition, not archaic survivals from a ghastly past we thought we had superseded, but products of our industrial modernity, mirrors and images of modern mechanical processes. modern worlds sheer number of people, the population explosion, bodies crammed into super-cities and suburban sprawls, demanding satiation beyond any plan for sustainable living. Survival horror is the crisis of the last representatives of rugged Western individualism trying to wrest themselves from the unregarded life of the anonymized mass.