A Monster of Our Times: How the Zombie Apocalypse Has Evolved to Mirror Societal Fears
From dark magic to office culture, the undead offer a biting commentary on what ails our society.
BY: TANISHA AGARWAL
The scene opens on a beautiful suburban house. A small, mismatched group of people walk through the darkened hallway. A woman—or something resembling one—appears from the master bedroom. She wears a bright dress and an apron, both of which are covered in various dark stains of unknown origin. Growling, she moves towards the group in a jerking run. Her face comes into full, gory view: rageful eyes, grey skin, and blood smeared around the mouth. Someone in the group cries, “Mom?” Their more hardened companion cocks a gun. “That ain’t your Mom anymore.” Two bangs and the woman-creature hits the floor, the newly-bored hole in her forehead leaking dark fluid.
Zombie kill of the week? // Photo via Pinterest
If you’re wondering which summer monster movie that was from, then we’re on the same page. Since the 1930s, zombies have been (un)alive and kicking on our screens, somehow charming us with their lack of personal hygiene and insatiable appetite for human flesh. Like any film star worth their money, the zombie has persisted through the many changes of the decades—not just in animation and makeup techniques, but also in the socio-political landscape of our world. In the era of COVID-19, we are all-too-familiar with the dangers of infection, as the early days of the pandemic really did resemble something from a zombie film. But dig deep enough and it becomes clear that ever since the zombie first appeared on our screens, it has been a manifestation of what our society fears most.
However, the zombie wasn’t always a cinematic villain. In Haitian folklore, a zombi was the lingering spirit of someone who had died of an ‘unnatural’ cause, such as murder or suicide. As the zombi waits for the gods’ approval to join the other deceased, its corpse may be enslaved by a bokor or sorcerer. Even this early in its history, the character of the zombi appears to be a reflection of the fear and misery of those who believed in it. Starting in the 17th century, the French enslaved and transported nearly 800,000 West African people to sugar, coffee, and cotton plantations in Haiti. Death was the only way out of this brutal regime, and enslaved Haitians believed dying would allow them to return to lan guinée, literally meaning Guinea, or Africa as a whole. However, slaves who committed suicide would be bound to the plantations forever, labouring away as zombi workers. The figure of the zombi, therefore, represented the Haitians’ fear of eternal oppression.
Zombi (1965) by Wilson Bigaud via Haitian Art Society
The Haitian undead remained unknown in the West until the United States’ occupation of the island in 1915, when an American named William Seabrook came across the concept while researching voodoo. In his 1929 book The Magic Island, Seabrook wrote about zombies that he had supposedly seen for himself, working on a sugar plantation “like brutes, like automatons” with “the eyes of a dead man.” Seabrook may have simply seen overworked slaves kept in inhumane conditions, but to the Western audience that read his book, there was a brand new monster on the block.
At first, the zombie was seen as a ‘savage’ creation, born out of the Voodoo tradition that was perceived as a threat to Western religion. Many of America’s early zombie films feature White protagonists who travel to Haiti and find themselves caught up in the nefarious schemes of sorcerers and witch doctors. The first of these films was White Zombie (1932), starring horror icon Bela Lugosi as the subtly-named voodoo master Murder Legendre. In the film, a plantation owner falls in love with a White woman visiting Haiti and asks the voodoo master to turn her into a zombie so she will stay with him. Her fiancé enlists the help of a local missionary (also White) to free her from the voodoo master’s control. It’s a simple story: marriage, decency, and Western religion come under threat in an exotic locale, but our White heroes ultimately prevail over the dark forces of the savages. Racist? Definitely, but this was the general blueprint for the zombie films of the decade.
Poster for White Zombie (1932), the first zombie film // Photo via IMDb
The effects of World War 2 and the Atomic Age led to the first major change in the zombie genre, with Germans and Soviets replacing Haitian sorcerers as the main villains. In 1943, Revenge of the Zombies brought us the inevitable Nazi-zombie collaboration, in which a German doctor secretly plots to create an undead army to serve Hitler. Later, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as the Soviet atomic bomb test put nuclear war front and centre in both America’s worst nightmares and its zombie films. Atomic radiation reanimates corpses in Creature with the Atom Brain (1955), while radio signals transmitted by an evil alien force are to blame in The Earth Dies Screaming (1964). The fear of unchecked scientific ambition, along with the atmosphere of mistrust during the Cold War, is captured in the plentiful zombie media created during this period—until one film changed the game again.
Duane Jones plays Ben in Night of the Living Dead (1968) // Photo via IMDb
George Romero joked that the cost of making Night of the Living Dead (1968) was less than actor Dennis Hopper’s cigar budget during filming. Despite its humble origins, the film was a box-office success and is now a cult classic. It follows a small group of people that hole up in a farmhouse as they come under attack from a horde of zombies, or “ghouls”, as they are called in the film. Released into the turmoil of the civil rights movement, the film’s ending feels undeniably political: the only survivor of the zombie attack, a Black man named Ben, is shot and killed by a White police officer. The credits appear over stills of Ben’s body being mutilated by a White mob, a choice which seems to question whether zombie violence is any worse than what humans do to each other. Meanwhile, the ‘mass attack’ in the film—a first for any zombie film, which usually limited themselves to a few scattered undead—is also reminiscent of the news broadcasts about growing casualties in the Vietnam War. Thus, Romero encapsulated the political tensions and strife of the 60s in the little zombie movie that could.
After a largely unimpressive slew of content in the 70s and 80s, the zombie genre appeared to have fallen from grace. That is until the various pandemics of the late 20th century introduced a new fear of disease in the public psyche. AIDS, SARS, and the avian flu may have been major public health crises, but they brought zombies back from the dead and gave rise to one of the most iconic zombie franchises of all time. In the Resident Evil video games, a pharmaceutical corporation carries out some sketchy research in their underground lab to create a zombie virus that leaks to the surface, resulting in an outbreak of apocalyptic proportions. The games were soon adapted into films, one of which was filmed at several U of T locations, including Robarts Library, the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, and UTSC’s very own Meeting Place. Drawing on the paranoia around contagion that characterized the period, the franchise marked a revival of the zombie in pop culture. Similarly, 28 Days Later (2002) seized upon the terrifying potential of (as we all know now) zoonotic diseases, which jump from animal hosts to humans. In a society still reeling from 9/11 and the anthrax attacks, the film spoke to American audiences’ fears of bioterrorism and invasion. The total societal collapse depicted in the film mirrored people’s anxieties at this time and became a mainstay of the genre.
A viral outbreak turns England into a zombie wasteland in 28 Days Later (2002), starring a then-unknown Cillian Murphy // Photo via IMDb
Societal collapse is also the first thing we see in Zombieland (2009), which opens on a scene of zombie-infested chaos as the US Capitol Building burns in the background. Coming on the heels of the swine flu pandemic—which director Ruben Fleischer acknowledges had a direct influence on the story—the film follows an awkward university student as he teams up with a trigger-happy cowboy-type and two con-artist sisters, after an outbreak of a mutated mad cow virus turns most of the country into cannibal zombies. The action-comedy film may seem like an odd release during a global recession, but according to cult cinema expert Xavier Mendik, zombies are the perfect monster for times of economic woe.
Anyone can become a zombie. The process of zombification leads to the loss of all brain functions higher than finding and consuming food, rendering things like wealth, status, and education irrelevant. There are only two categories that matter: zombies and meals. And at a time when people woke to find themselves several rungs lower on the socio-economic ladder than when they had slept, perhaps there is something comforting about an apocalypse where everyone is a flesh-eating monster.
The breakdown of the many social distinctions we impose on ourselves appears to be a general result of the world-ending zombie outbreak. In perhaps the most popular series in the genre today, an unlikely group of survivors establish a new settlement outside of zombie-ravaged Atlanta. The scariest part of The Walking Dead isn’t the undead monsters, but the sudden regression into a society where college-educated women bear the burden of domestic chores while tolerating verbal and physical abuse from the men.
Ed threatens Andrea in season 1, episode 3 of The Walking Dead / Photo via Insider
But perhaps the interpretation that remains most true to the roots of the zombie myth is the one that sees the undead as the result of labouring under capitalism. As it’s currently set up, our culture pushes workers to work longer and harder to make profits, sucking away their creativity and humanity to transform them into the living dead. This can be traced back to the Haitian concept of the zombie as an eternal, mindless worker. In the modern day, this view of the undead is taken by Ling Ma in her 2018 novel Severance, in which the infected aren’t insatiable cannibals, but simply become stuck in an endless loop of their everyday routine until they die of exhaustion. Indeed, if there ever were a zombie for our grind-loving culture, it would be the overworked, dead-eyed office employee.
So where do our zombies go from here? With another economic recession already underway and remote work taking us to new heights of burnout, it’s safe to say we have plenty of inspiration for the social problems we want our undead to represent. Or, maybe we just want to forget our troubles at a good zombie-comedy, like 2019’s Zombieland sequel or the 2021 heist film Army of the Dead.
Just like a vast horde of the undead, the possibilities are seemingly endless. But whether our zombies are terrifying, comical, or heck, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, one thing’s for certain: they are very much alive.
