Dillon Waugh
Hayes
English 100, 9:10
1/29/13
Essay
1 Final Draft – What I Know
One evening, my family watched the
film ParaNorman, of all things - and all were impressed. We switched off our
home 3D glasses. They expressed their great satisfaction with the quality of
the animation. The first sentence I spoke, meanwhile, was: “I liked the twist
that the town wasn’t cursed with a zombie plague – instead, just a few people
were cursed with being zombies.”
I didn’t receive a direct verbal
response. I did, however, feel the implied “That’s nice, Dillon. You have fun
with your zombies.”
Though I’m no connoisseur, exactly,
I’ve had a little of a special curiosity toward monster and horror media ever
since my mother would let me watch her play Resident Evil on the PlayStation. (As
a disclaimer, I would like to insist “I turned out all right.”) It’s gotten me
to read that “zombie” is Swahili in origin, to know that I have more of an
interest in zombies than in vampires, and to catch that certain types of
monsters appear in certain types of plots. You hardly see zombies treated as
characters rather than hazards on legs – in a film, a little girl convicted of
witchcraft would normally schedule a raising-of-the-dead to plague the village
that persecuted her, wouldn’t she? Of course to see her cursing the jury to
rise as zombies and find themselves hunted by the village as monsters is switch!
Mine is a household with multiple
computers, Netflix, and every current video game console. My parents, so it
seems, watch a new movie before bed at least twice a week, and follow at least
one “streamable” television series at a time. However, though of course they
happen by a new scary movie that they go on to recommend to me every now and
then, the sole bit of monster fare they seem to be “fans, exactly” of would be The Walking Dead show. Talk to them
about horror – which pieces are stupid, which are actually scary, and so on – but
people get used to having little to say about zombies. They’re the simplest of
simple monsters: wandering, mindless eaters – it’s seen so all the time.
It’s a shame for monsters to ever
be approached without imagination or deeper thought. Various types of living
dead may have grown from a simple origin – “ghost stories” and old wives’ tales
sparked by a basic deep discomfort regarding dead things – into a number of
different stories and types. However, those types are not the story formulas
they’ve come to be attached to – they’re their own concepts, each turning the
idea of a dead thing getting up and walking into a somewhat unique sort of
monster. Different types are naturally in-place than the others in the types of
stories that inspired the direction of their mythology’s growth. That’s not
because monsters, zombies included, are their pigeonholes but because of all
that there is to them inherently.
The basic idea of THE LIVING DEAD is, again, a simple one.
Fear of losing life has existed as long as animals’ consciousness, and
sometimes, when a person is afraid of something, they kiss up to it – revere it,
give it the utmost respect, pray to god they don’t make it angry. That and the
fact that what happens after death is one of those unanswerable questions –
nobody’s come back to tell us, after all! And who’s to say that’s because they
can’t? – have had people to the beginning of culture devising rule after
just-in-case rule governing disposal of corpses. If the Egyptian MUMMY is going to stay in his pyramid
as long as the embalming process keeps him intact, perhaps he’ll want a game of
solitaire to get him through the centuries; if the Norse DRAUGR takes offense to the fact that you left a bit out of his
last rites, it’s a good thing we carried him feet first through the doorway so
he can’t see the route we took from home and follow us back; if the Chinese JIANGSHI manages to find us anyway, for
goodness’s sake, he’s dead and stiff, and we have steps leading up to the
threshold. (The jiangshi is an interesting case – it’s commonly referred to as
the “Chinese vampire”, but in legend, it rises from the grave when the primal
half of the Yin Yang balance comprising a person’s soul stays in the body
longer than the conscious half, moves stiffly, and doesn’t feed on blood at all
but chi life essence – debate if you
like on whether blood or brains are more essential to life).
Those three are easily categorized
now according to the current concept of a “ZOMBIE”
- a slow-moving and normally mindless and empty-headed monster, taking after
the word’s mythological origin as a body made mobile to serve as a sorcerer’s
slave or “puppet.”
-
The MAGICAL
ZOMBIE – one of the dead raised by a curse or spell – is obviously the
traditional kind, if not so often seen in media any longer.
-
The INFECTED
ZOMBIE, created by a parasite or rabies-like virus that apparently keeps
the body running long after the brain shuts off, is the more recent, popular
kind. Their sci-fi origin, after all, lends itself to easily-sold,
universally-hitting visceral gore-horror: grotesque mutations and over-the-top
symptoms of illness. Not only that, but while magic now is typically thought passé
and silly, you’ll find people who think that the idea of infection-induced
zombification sounds unnervingly plausible – I encourage you to look up
parasites that attack the brains of ants and slugs. If there’s another draw to
use of “infected”, it’s that their plague-bearing lends to building hordes. For
shoot-‘em-up gamers looking less for a tense horror story and more for new
gratifying heads to pop, the excuse of a zombie plague will give them waves of
dozens after dozens of monsters, however humanlike, to go at without remorse.
In the movies, meanwhile, “In a World
Where” humans risk being outnumbered by the dead, the seed exists for a
distinct plot.
ZOMBIE PLOTS, like zombies, come most
clear-cut in two distinct flavors. Both play on the idea that zombies become
exponentially scarier with numbers – how can you defend yourself against a whole
troop of things capable of thinking about literally nothing but trying to eat you alive?
-
ZOMBIE
CURSES catalyze old-fashioned dead-rising-from-the-grave stories. They’re
not so uncommon in PG-and-down “scary” media likely because nobody’s life needs
to be rushed to an end, implicitly or explicitly, for zombies to appear. In Tim
Burton’s (albeit not “horror”) Corpse
Bride, most of the people in the Land of the Dead were old – and their
grandkids, widows, and so forth weren’t too displeased to see them once they
realized they only came back to the living world to attend a wedding.
-
However, apocalypse media has become prevalent
enough to be its own subgenre the past decade, and, like the rest, the ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE sub-subgenre is often
used by its writers to – often not gently – display their idea of humanity
without organized society. Curiously enough, the zombies themselves tend to be
used to critique that society – filmmaker George Romero is known for using his zombies
as a metaphor for consumerism. There are a few more positive spins in
lighthearted zombie media, which does in fact exist: the silly film Zombieland and video game Left 4 Dead each focus on a small team of
living who stay living by bonding in
crisis. The Walking Dead, across a graphic
novel series, TV show, and video game seems to mix it up – its characters survive
their best in hard times by cooperating and aiding each other; it doesn’t mean
they’ll do it.
