A still from Night of the Living Dead, 1968.
It’s Halloween season now, I guess, so I think I’ll speak my mind about zombies.
I don’t like them.
Not in the Bruce Campbell Evil Dead sense of, “I hate those bleeping zombies and I’m gonna blow them away.”
No, I dislike them because they’re boring. Of all the monsters invented by the mind of man, the zombie (as imagined in America ever since the movies altered a Haitian folk superstition into a semi-systematic popular mythology) is the least intriguing.
Zombies have no style, like Dracula. They (generally) have no pathos, or capacity for it, like Frankenstein’s monster. They have no tortured self-awareness, like the wolf man.
They just lurch around hungering for brains, compelled by mere appetite, without choice or agency.
They are a metaphor for modern humanity, as seen by itself.
And I hate that most of all.
Good insight.
This is like saying a hurricane is boring. Or a blizzard. Or the shipwreck that casts Robinson Crusoe onto the island.
Zombies are a force of nature, a sign of mortality, a metaphor for aging. Always coming for you. Never stopping.
A good zombie story is not about the zombies, but about the people dealing with them. If they’re not interesting, neither is the story.
The best monster stories are the ones where the creatures AND the people dealing with them are good characters.
Zombies have no excuse when “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley and “Dracula” by Bram Stoker exist and do both.
Sorry, I won’t settle for less.