Rereading my post, I guess I was, though that wasn’t my intention. I intended to focus on the way zombies are a constant reminder of mortality, and that the zombies I was talking about actually display, for all the world to see, all the horrors of the death they had. As though Death were a curtain beyond which we know nothing. The scary thing, I intended to imply, is when the Zombies (or anything - generally speaking, this is out fear of the unknown) come back from the other side of the curtain with the consequences of their death (tempering the unknown with just enough “known” to make it scary). I mean, it’s not that they’re grotesque per se, and it’s not that they’re just the unknown danger… it’s all of those things combined with them having been one of us, and having suffered a dreadful fate whose consequences are still all too visible.
Not to trivialize your post, which does genuinely sound horrifying, but I first read this (in the context of, you know, George Romero) as “I endured many years of low-grade horror [novels and movies] due to a gluten intolerance.” Because, you know, all really good literature is made of wheat.
Regarding voodoo zombies: I think I saw a PBS show about it where they said the drug/poison was made from the pufferfish. The show did a comparison between Haitian and Japanese uses of the pufferfish (“fugu” in Japanese.) In both cases, it’s very hard to control the dosage of toxin that you receive, making both the gourmet and the occult applications risky and unpredictable.
It’s all about food, baby.
That’s strangely appropriate.
You know what I thought of when I read your post? Ghost Whisperer. All the ghosts on that show start out looking like they just died, and then they “evolve” into healthy people by the end. I have to confess that I liked that show for taking things that are scary and turning them into warm fuzzies. It’s almost an original concept.
I think you understand, but maybe you underestimate the effect it has on others.
flickr.com/photos/55635034@N … 953202940/
These photos that I posted caused several of my friends to recoil in horror and some of them even said it made them want to become vegan. Out of consideration to my friends, I omitted the photo of myself ripping the tongue out of the skull with my teeth because of my unreasonably gleeful expression. I regret that I can’t share it with you now for purposes of discussion. :mrgreen:
My theory is that the amount of horror that food can cause in a person is related to the amount of alienation from Nature that they experience. For me, it’s the alienation itself that is most horrifying, not the killing and eating. But to truly confront death every time you sit down at the table (or check on your livestock) can be a challenge to the spirit.
That calls to mind The Andromeda Strain - a story where the last-resort destruction of the area would actually have resulted in a greater disaster, the spreading of the contagion. I can see how that might resonate very strongly with a current audience - consider the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, for example. It might be an opportunity to cast the zombies as the “lesser evil” if you wanted to tell that kind of story.
Interesting pictures; after all we can’t have a proper zombie thread without some actual portrayal of gore. I’d say that head mainly looks unappetizing because it doesn’t look like it has much meat on it (unless you were aiming to eat the brains, which one isn’t really supposed to eat as brains can be a source of weird prion diseases–yet another possible angle on brain-eating zombies). Presumably I’m immune to the effect you mentioned the photos have on others, because as a child a favorite pastime was to go fishing with my grandfather. After we had caught our limit for the day, we would clean (cut, eviscerate) the fish so we could later eat them for dinner. I suppose the sight of blood, guts, and brains just doesn’t bother me since I was innoculated from this “taboo” (as you called it) at a young age.
This is a sound idea. For those (including myself) living in the comfy fantasy-land of the US, Canada, and Western Europe it is relatively easy to experience a lifestyle (truly unprecedented in human history) of complete estrangement from nature and natural sensibilities, allowing all manner of odd ideas to blossom (the oddest of which is the naive belief that such a lifestyle is not odd in any way). As implied by your observations, one can now live an entire lifetime subsisting on neatly-packaged food purchased at a supermarket; hence the unusual “revulsion” experienced by some folks when forced to ponder the ultimate source of their neatly-packaged food. I’m saying then that this feeling of revulsion is unnatural, not its trigger.
This sort of thinking holds relevance for the zombie metaphor as well. Western societies are, compared to most human societies elsewhere and throughout history, almost unimaginably peaceful utopias. The average member of these societies rarely (sometimes never) squarely faces brutal violence or death. Death consists of people “going away” (to a hospital, to an old-age home, to a gas chamber); one day we are informed by messenger that we won’t be enjoying a person’s company again, but their death isn’t something we experience in an immediate sense. Even more commonly, the personalized prospect of violent unexpected death at the hands of another is usually quite far removed from the life-experience of the average westerner. The zombie is a means to facilitate pondering both of these possibilities which are, for many, remote in daily life.
@ all
So far we’ve been able to suggest that the zombie metaphor is indeed a fertile field for inducing horror, for in sketching its outline we’ve seen that the zombie metaphor contains a number of distinct aspects that offer a sort of “buffet of terror” to a variety of potential audiences:
–for some, the grotesque presentation of the zombie is a source of revulsion (don’t those oozing sores hurt?);
–for some, the brutal behavior of the zombie is a source of anxiety (violence–particularly random violence–and apparent cannibalism);
–for some, the very existence of the zombie is a source of spiritual disquiet or the collapse of scientific certainty (The Dead walk the Earth? How can this happen?)
–for some, the metaphysical implications of the zombie may be a potential source of dread or hopelessness (the view I’ve been espousing)
–for some, the de-personalized lifestyle of the zombie is a source of anguish (mindless constituent of an indistinguishable zombie horde)
–for some, the abolition of will is a source of consternation (voodoo zombies)
–for some, the zombie is terrifying because it behaves in an unnatural way (you can’t go around engaging in rapine and murder all the time);
–for some, the zombie is terrifying because it behaves in a perfectly natural way, similar to an animal who has lost its human sensibilities (how uncivilized; can’t we talk this over?);
–for some, the zombie is threatening because it represents a source of infection against which no precaution may be adequate (therefore we are powerless to resist);
–for some, the zombie is feared because it has lost its sanity; this is worse than being an animal, because at least animals are often predictable and seem to have comprehensible reasons for behaving a certain way (how can we defeat a foe we can’t understand?);
–for some, the zombie is an in-your-face reminder of one’s own mortality, which we’d rather try to forget about until the last possible moment (so much so that in a sense we’ve organized our civilization around hiding the personal prospect of death);
Does that summary leave anything out, or can some of the principles be further generalized? Do some of these ideas merit closer examination than we’ve thus far given them?
Another idea we’ve been hinting at is that the zombie may be less worthy as an object of horror than as a means to examine our own potentially horrifying nature or behavior. Eleas and capmikee mentioned this, and the conception of a game I proposed certainly seems to offer this idea as well (even if the player survives the zombie hordes, he then still has to survive the even more destructive activity of his own elected government officials). As we’re striving here to enhance the terror credentials of the zombie qua zombie, perhaps we should acknowledge this possibility but leave it for another time unless we think that it is indeed the most compelling facet of the zombie metaphor.
Regardless of the nature of the zombie, we’ve also explored a few principles for presenting the zombie to the audience (mostly thanks to the observations of bcressey):
–an air of enigma will help sustain feelings of tension regarding the creatures; perhaps the zombies engage in familiar activities to an unfamiliar end, or perhaps they engage in strange rituals of their own design, or perhaps there is an indication that zombification affects individuals in slightly different ways due to some mysterious process that we should investigate further.
–some means of further personalizing the horrific nature of the zombie (whatever that may be) will enhance the impact of the zombie device on the audience; a friend of the protagonist or the protagonist himself should directly face the possibility of zombification
–unless we can find a truly compelling vision of the genesis of the zombie that can comprehensibly be presented (or least partially revealed) to the audience, we may be better off relying on a wink from the audience that they are now switching suspension of disbelief mode to “on.”
Can we determine other devices which will help us successfully (i.e. in a manner conducive to horrifying the audience) portray the zombie?
We’ve also mentioned some principles for constructing an effective horror game in general:
–Atmosphere is vital; if the player can be made to feel generally uneasy amidst the background upon which the drama plays out, the player will be much more susceptible to our specific efforts to be shocking or disturbing at or in regard to certain points. To further stress this important principle, we might consider Lovecraft’s expansive comment:
–Some effort should be made to accomodate variations in audience ability.
I would expand and modify this last principle as saying that the overall objective of a well-designed game is to satisfy its audience. Perhaps others believe that the overall objective of a well-designed game should be to clearly communicate the artistic vision of the designer to the audience. Even if that is the case, however, the practical means of communicating that vision must still be to provide a game that satisfies the audience. If the audience rejects the game, quits playing half-way through, finishes but feels strongly dissatisfied enough to never again think of the experience and dissuade others from playing, etc, then the artist has failed to fully express any artistic vision using the chosen medium–in other words, the artist has failed as an artist as well as a game-designer.
Some general techniques for satisfying the game audience may be:
–Providing a rich environment for the player to explore something (an idea, a theme, a technique, a characterization, an intellectual challenge, etc) which uniquely satisfies that particular player;
–Avoiding contrivance that jars the player from immersion in the fantasy-escapism of which the gaming experience largely consists;
–Providing an opportunity for the player to feel satisfaction in being an active participant in resolving the game in a way that is satisfactory to the player;
–Avoiding obscurity (whether in conception, in presentation, or in the mechanics of gameplay) that may estrange the player from the experience potentially offered by the game.
“Satisfaction” here is a carefully chosen term that can signify a broad range of experiences. In a horror game, I believe satisfaction in the audience will above all else consist of their experience of genuine feelings of terror. This design goal is justified by the likely fact that the audience has chosen to play our horror game at all rather than play Tetris, and we may safely presume therefore that they’d like to be horrified.
While we continue to move toward a better understanding of the zombie itself, we should also continue thinking about how we will express the zombie metaphor using our chosen medium of a game. We’ve already seen a number of innovative ideas in this regard. What are some other general considerations of game design we should keep in mind, with a view to effectively applying them to the horrific tale of the zombie?
For example, in the conception of a game I proposed the main objective of the player is survival of various threats of which zombies are only one category. Bcressey rigthly noted that the player may then have no compelling reason to even explore the depths of zombification I will take great effort to provide. While my “hook” in this case to draw the player into involvement with the zombies is to present another character with whom the protagonist has an emotional attachment, one who will attempt to pull the player-character into the zombie mystique, in my case I’m not too worried that other than in some scenes of direct confrontation the player-character may minimize any involvement with the zombie phenomenon. It’s there if the player wants to explore it, but on the other hand if that doesn’t strike the player’s fancy there’s no compulsion to do so in the basic structure of the game narrative. What are some other methods one might use to attract the player to a suggested but not mandatory direction for the story?
@Jim Aikin
Presumably you were experimenting in your short story with the frenetic “run-on sentence” style found therein. If this was indeed intentional, what overall effect were you hoping to achieve with that device?
The question of whether it’s more terrifying to be a zombie than to be attacked by a zombie is indeed one of the central questions I’m hoping to explore here. I’m saying the answer isn’t certain, and perhaps that the answer can’t be known with any certainty.
You made a good observation about the nature of Lovecraft’s written medium. I too think film or visual imagery is a potentially superior medium for the expression of horror art (so much so that I honestly don’t usually take much of an interest in written horror tales compared to my interest in horror films). Perhaps by examining Lovecraft’s less-than-successful efforts to consistently convey through writing something he obviously (in my view) understood very well, we can learn some important lessons. For example Lovecraft had tremendous respect for the works of Arthur Machen; presumably he closely studied these works in an effort to discern how to supercede or at least duplicate their success (in terms of being horrifying). Yet in my view Lovecraft never wrote anything that approaches the creepiness of Machen’s better works. There may then be something to looking more closely into the differences and similiarities between the work of the two authors.
Sorry for the delay; I got caught up in IRL stuff.
I think I’m trying to expand on what seemed to be your earlier desire - i.e., to take the Zombie archetype new places, to reinvent it so that it becomes a fresh source of terror. My central argument is that all the classical horror archetypes were devised during past decades, and that all of them attack something that makes us feel psychologically safe, in one way or another. The shocking thing about the Victorian-era vampire, for instance, was its ability to subvert the social order, to bridge the gap between men and beast, to induce Unspeakable Lusts into once-virginal women, and to contaminate the very blood of socity… all those qualities mirrored very real thoughts and fears. To speak them out loud and to give them form, as Le Fanu and later Stoker did, made for an intensely frightening creature that, so to speak, invaded the foundations of the reader himself. As I see it, it’s a fictionalized meditation on the issues of a given age. When those issues settle or abate, so does the power of the monster itself to induce terror.
Zombies, too, subvert the natural order. They transgress boundaries of their own - they eat flesh (a taboo), they are dead when they should be alive (an impossibility), they make more of their kind (a perversion of reproduction), and they are eternally and unreasoning in their hunger (a perversion of appetite). And so, they invoke the spectre of overpopulation, famine, disease, and savagery. Those are fears that are no longer as fresh as they once were.
As a consequence, I feel that yeah, you can take past tropes and conventions and devise something bloody frightening from it. But in order to make something truly terrifying to the reader, it’s almost always necessary to look not to what frightened people in the past - those issues that we are now able to look at with a measured stare, with our equanimity intact - but the issues that we have ourselves. Such as, for instance, one that we still haven’t done away with in the context of horror, or at least not enough to make it comfortable.
Monsters are questions. They are questions that we don’t really wish to answer. Once you introduce an issue that still bleeds and screams, you’ll have immediacy and terror.
And so, I thought scapegoating would be as good a sacred cow as any. Because we do, instinctively, scapegoat, and we do naturally and in order to feel safe.
We admire magnificent bad guys, but we don’t support them; Darth Vader, Rakoth Maugrim, Ozymandias, the Joker, Mr Morden, Scorpius, Lijah Cuu, they are all brilliant, are all edgy, and are all on the wrong side because they dare to be unreservedly bad. And because we know they are bad, because they are perfect antipodes to the shining light, we can love our heroes and invest more in the beautiful hopelessness of their task. The heroic struggle gains depth.
Sympathetic villains have been done before, and that’s not where I’m going with it. Instead, I’m proposing taking it a step further, that the whole structure of the heroes (average joes!) versus the villains (flesh-eating zombies!) should be done away with at the root level. The object is not to “shake things up” for “added variety”, but to remove the ability of the player to instinctively label the zombies “other”… while still retaining the classically voracious and lethal behaviour that zombies are known for. This is not making the zombies sympathetic. It is about making them flawed, dirty, and real.
The Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark are villains. They’re scenery. The Nazis in Defiance, in contrast, are entirely believable… and all the more horrible because of it.
The little meat that was on the jowls was incredibly tasty and well worth it. The tongue was also very, very good. I did indeed eat the brains (not my favorite part) and the eyeballs too. And I used the skull to make a broth, which formed the base of a delicious curried stew.
Now I’m afraid I’m really derailing this thread: It’s my opinion that the “prion diseases” threat is a phantom, fueled by the very fears we’ve been discussing here. There are other explanations for BSE and vCJD but they don’t get much press. I consider brains a health food - they are one of the world’s best sources of DHA, the body’s most critical omega-3 fatty acid, as well as Vitamin B12 and Vitamin K2.
I would never eat pork brains in milk gravy, however. I don’t eat dairy. Nice to see that they’re gluten-free, though. 
In my mind, this is the reason that Western societies crave horror. Industrialization has left holes in our experience that we fill with some pretty ghastly stuff. I’m not an expert on this, but it seems to me that what passes for horror in pre-industrial societies takes the form of particularly gory fairy tales. They’re filled with violence and sometimes cruelty, but they’re not really scary.
There’s a parallel here - the most frightening monster is the one we never clearly see - and at the same time the most frightening things in our lives have been removed from our experience so that we can’t easily confront them.
I don’t want to discount this, because I think it’s important. But I’m reminded of a statement I’ve heard from many people interested in science: They feared that learning about a mysterious phenomenon would ruin the sense of wonder they experience at it, but after they have learned all they can, their sense of wonder only increases at the further mysteries their learning reveals. So perhaps the goal is not to avoid explanations altogether, but to provide true-to-life explanations that present more questions than they answer.
That’s great stuff, guys. I think now we’re starting to get to the heart (brain?) of the matter, namely how best to recast the somewhat tired zombie cliche so that it may continue to be a compelling source of terror in the future (which is indeed my general interest and the reason I started this discussion).
At the risk of disrupting our discussion by making it even more obscure (which I hope won’t happen–zombies for the people!), based on the many thoughtful comments everyone has offered so far I’d like to restate my initial argument in a different way that I hope will inspire even more novel thinking about the zombie. In the end, though, hopefully everyone realizes that to some extent we have tongue-in-cheek here and aren’t really trying to argue about anything other than the best way to do something entertaining–namely, make a cool zombie game.
Eleas did a fine job of analyzing the Gothic vampire, in a way that clearly allows us to transfer his method of analysis to the zombie.
Based simply on the volume of treatment that artists continue to crank out in all forms of media which is then eagerly consumed by audiences who find it compelling, apparently one of the major concerns of denizens of modern western civilization is the idea that Science, that shiny stainless-steel practical application of Reason on which we have quite literally constructed every aspect of our current society, has already or will very soon run utterly amok. For some time there has been an awareness among the thoughtful sort of folk, which has been slowly filtering out to the rest of us, that the very foundation of our society almost certainly also contains the seeds of our destruction and will be the source of our undoing.
The urge to construct every aspect of life and society according to orderly rational principles threatens to utterly destroy all notions of freedom and joy (both of which are utterly irrational and inefficient phenomena) to make way for safety and predictability. We are often now faced with demands that even the simple sensation of pleasure itself must give way to order and scientifically-determined convention. Each time we open a news magazine or listen to a news broadcast, we are literally overwhelmed by a flood of junk science created by the paycheck-seekers of the modern science industry. As scientific sub-disciplines multiply and the volume of our knowledge becomes far too great for any individual to even consume let alone comprehend, the primary practical effect of this deluge of pseudoscience is that the masses, unable to genuinely distinguish fact from fiction even if they make a sincere attempt, are shamelessly manipulated by the powerful (who naturally sign the paychecks of those working in their science mills). Finally in the fields where honest scientific progress does occur, the products of this progress clearly offer us increasingly quasi-arcane and horrible powers that we just as clearly lack the wisdom to use in a beneficent manner even if we wished to do so (unlikely given human nature).
Or so say the artists. I would never be so bold as to proclaim such as novel thoughts on my part.
Whether we agree with these conceptions or not, I don’t think anyone will deny that many find them compelling. In terms of the zombie, then, I believe we need look no further for any justification of the appeal of the modern “disease” model of zombification, with its theme of science run amok (and in which the fantastic traditional notion of undeath is increasingly excluded altogether). That this notion of the zombie has become increasingly intermingled with the amenable yet relatively distinct idea of the “zombie apocalypse” which destroys our civilization makes the bases of both metaphors even more clear. They both speak directly to the fears that an increasingly large number of people often experience but rarely speak of except through the parable of fiction or the incoherent ramblings of solipsistic modern philosophers, as the power establishment in our society allows little serious critique of the fundamental scientific nature of our civilization to go unpunished (lest its allegedly scientific right to rule be potentially undermined). This observation is hardly novel either, though, as bcressey has (leaving aside the political notions) been making this point all along.
If we take what may be called the “antimodern” critique of society outlined above seriously, however, the question of how we shall live quickly devolves into uncertainty, as the final outcome of the civilization of science is yet to be determined. Although we may generally be suspicious of any optimism regarding the future, a broad range of equally plausible futures may prevail–the future of The Matrix, the future of Blade Runner, the future of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, or any number of other future scenarios whose main commonality is their gloom and certainty of misery.
Regardless of which side we may personally find most compelling in the debate between law (currently clothed in the garb of science) and freedom (the newest incarnation of which in our society has no definite form yet, although I think clearly something is brewing), the fact is that this debate is an ancient one, an overarching struggle which has perhaps more than any other factor formed the general plot of human history. The pendulum between these opposite urges has been swinging for ages, and will continue to sway for ages more. More recently in western civilization, the Romantic movement of the 18th and 19th centuries was a reaction to the early stirrings of a rational reorganization of all aspects of human life proposed by Enlightenment which preceded it, just as the latter was itself a reaction to the unconstrained irrationality and barbarism of the Reformation era.
Of more particular interest to our discussion here is that aspect of the Romantic movement generally referred to as Gothic literature, which provided many of the most compelling icons of horror (Frankenstein, Dracula, a fascination with exotic yet isolated locales containing dusty labyrinths and crypts holding eldritch horrors, etc) that still see heavy service today. As the pendulum of civilization swung away again from the Romantics in the late 19th century and into the early 20th century, there was an increasing interest in the development of optimistic (indeed, almost evangelical) science fiction which promised a future wherein unfettered reason would allow mankind to construct a scientifically-ordered utopia (this movement continues today in forms such as Star Trek and similar popular fiction). As bcressey noted earlier, H. P. Lovecraft was part of a vanguard seeking to move away from such optimism; he took the language of science fiction and infused it with Gothic notions of irrationality and terror. However, we have seen in quoted excerpts that Lovecraft was essentially a Romantic even more than a horror writer, as he ultimately saw the primary objective of his writings as the production of an emotional response in the audience (which only coincidentally happened to be the emotion of terror according to his particular interests).
We ourselves are too close to Lovecraft’s time to know where precisely our society at this minute is on its ever-swaying path between the polar opposites of order and chaos, of law and freedom, of Enlightenment and Romanticism. Nonetheless based on the notion of history I outlined above, I am arguing that as we are currently in a period where Reason predominates, our society certainly shall at some point shift into a clear counter-movement consisting of a massive rejection of rationalism. What does this mean for the hero of our current discussion, the zombie?
As our current understanding of all things (including ourselves) begins to change during this movement away from science, so likely shall many of our fears and our manner of expressing those fears change. I believe there will be a movement away from the “disease” model of the zombie back to the traditional “undead” model of the zombie, with all the concomitant unreason that the very notion of undeath implies resuming its former importance. In fact I, as thoroughly modern a citizen of our scientific world as any, already find the disease model of the zombie unsatisfying for reasons variously noted in our discussion. Others have noted, however, that the current zombie model still holds a great deal of effectiveness for them. Neither impression is right or wrong, as each is a description of an individual state of mind. I am in the end only saying that when the next inevitable facet of civilization ferments, perhaps we can already have a cutting-edge zombie ready to unleash upon it. As this coming return of Romanticism will likely generally favor emotion over rationality, I believe Lovecraft’s model of horror as working to inspire irrational dread in the audience will provide a useful template, at least initially.
In those terms, then, what form might an imagined zombie of the future take? We’ve done a fine job in sketching a fairly thorough portrait of the zombie as he is generally portrayed today. How can we build upon the best the zombie currently has to offer (which will likely remain at least somewhat compelling for some time) while also constructing novel (or resurrecting ancient) aspects of the zombie metaphor?
Of course I’m only seeking to provide fuel for a growing discussion rather than narrow and limit our scope. Everyone should also feel free to continue discussing the considerable pile of zombie meat we’ve already stacked upon our plate in this thread.
A few other possibly fertile ideas I threw out earlier that no one else has yet mentioned:
–We sometimes think of the zombie as a creature driven insane either by its resurrection into a decaying corpse or perhaps by some other experiences it had after death. I argued, however, that perhaps the zombie just doesn’t share our values (based on knowledge he has but we don’t) and is otherwise behaving in a way that seems sensible to himself. At the core of my contention was the broader question: is there any meaningful distinction between insanity and utter indifference to generally accepted beliefs?
–I mentioned a range of possibilities for the creation of zombies–victims become zombies when a zombie bites them, victims become zombies when a zombie kills them, or everyone who dies after the initial rising of the zombies will become a zombie if they leave any physical remains. This aspect of the zombie metaphor explores the question of whether a horrible inevitable fate (all will become zombies) is more or less terrifying than facing a horrible fate as a result of our own failure (we failed to defend ourselves, and the zombies tore into us). Which of these possibilities is more terrifying to you?
For those not that interested in rarefied theories, basic discussion of favorite zombie movies, games, or stories (along with an explanation of why these are favorites) is always welcome.
The true horror of modern society is that we cannot turn back the clock. Science and progress have come too far to unwind. Though science has damned us, it is the only god left to worship, even as permanent resource depletion, abrupt climate change, carcinogens in the water and neurotoxins in the air lead to population collapse and extinction.
Science may save us for a time, but at what greater cost? Make no mistake: we are addicts and science is the drug. Withdrawal and rehab would kill us, so all that’s left is the next clever fix.
And when our ingenuity fails us at last, when we have followed the sinking star down into the grave, the zombies will be waiting. As they are waiting now, for the medicine to run out and the crops to fail. The only difference between us is that the zombies no longer believe the two great lies. That we know what we are doing, that we have time to figure it out.
Maybe I’m wrong to suggest an involved explanation for zombies. Maybe it’s as simple as a retirement home or an elementary school not getting the requisite shipment of drugs for a few weeks. Maybe the horror is close enough to the surface that all we have to do is peel back a layer of skin.
I would argue that the viral zombie already functions as a rejection of rationalism, and its enduring popular appeal derives from the audience’s eagerness to dispense with the overwhelming complexity of modern society. Or why else are so many zombie scenarios post-apocalyptic ones? We want to see humanity, or at least a few humans, prevail against the zombies and survive the prolonged collapse of the machine-state.
But this is not terror; this is wish fulfillment.
Undead zombies, by contrast, are supernatural creatures of the darkness that science thought to banish. Their existence does not represent the failure of science; to the contrary, it reaffirms the importance of science, for in our quest to know everything we will ultimately negate the unknowable.
Again, this is not terror, merely bad luck to be born in the time before science conquers all.
I do not think undead zombies will come back into favor before the balance tilts the other way for a time, long enough for the perils of science to fade from popular memory and for faith in its promises to be restored. And as outlined above, I doubt we could survive such a transition, even supposing we had the collective will to try.
@ bcressey
Thanks for the thoughtful response, which raises some interesting ideas. On one level, a Romantic might respond to the notions you raised by simply adding “So says the scientist.”
On the other hand it seems likely that, as has always been the case previously, whatever follows will build upon and adapt to its own ends what came before. I think it’s difficult to utterly reject the rationalistic “progress” notion of history in the basic sense that in fact the classical Romans didn’t live like cavemen, and we don’t live like the classical Romans; however each later snapshot of civilization contains some aspects familiar from the previous snapshot. Even in a case of profound apocalyptic doom, the urges of reason and unreason are basic aspects of human nature, both present at all times even though one or the other seems to cyclically predominate. Therefore if any survive an apocalypse at all, while they may recoil from Reason for a time Reason will also continue to prevail upon them in some degree. In the standard “Mad Max” post-nuclear apocalyptic scenario, for example, while survivors find new ways to live that are unfamiliar to us they also rely heavily upon relics of technology from our time. Their new societies are in a way based upon a struggle to salvage such technologies which over time become increasingly rare, and can’t be recreated as no one knows how to make them anymore. Presumably at some point science will take hold again (an excellent exploration of this theme is the fine novel A Canticle for Leibowitz).
If one were making a post-apocalyptic zombie story (a double dose of misery, so to speak), perhaps a take-off point could be a subtext of the struggle between the old and new civilizations. Imagine very broadly a scenario like the 70s film Planet Earth where a small remnant of high-science civilization survives hidden away amidst a larger society of survivors reduced to barbarism. Normally, as in that film and in scenarios such The Omega Man, it is the barbarians (mutants) who are the antagonists. However the tables could easily be turned, with the high-science group portrayed as the zombies due to some manner of technology which allows them to transfer their consciousness and prolong their existence by taking residence in a corpse (procured from the outsiders) when their current body deteriorates to the point of uselessness. In addition to the larger clash of values between law and freedom separating the societies, perhaps this mind-transfer excites increasing blood-lust and subtle madness in its users. That would give us a battle between “humans” and “zombies” with a great deal of complexity.
There seems to be a considerable problem for us in utilizing the “undead” aspect of the zombie in a compelling way. Although it doesn’t fit into the game I was envisioning, for general consideration would a Silent Hill approach be a good way around the difficulties associated with the notion of undeath? I was replaying a classic AGS game called Trilby’s Notes which uses a similar “two worlds” approach and began thinking that this might be in fact the only way to facilitate an exploration of living vs dead. The player is transported at times between his own reality and a “land of the dead” whose inhabitants have a very different perspective on things. Is there still any novelty left in this approach, or has it been explored to the point of exhaustion by the Silent Hill games and film?
Perhaps we can shed further light on the terror of the zombie if we compare it to another fearsome icon of the modern horror genre, the “serial killer.” Unlike the zombie with its source in the ancient metaphor of the ghoul, I think the serial killer is largely a modern phenomenon (commonly supposed to have gained prominent notoriety in the popular imagination with the “Jack the Ripper” murders in England in the later 19th century). Setting aside the obscure view that ancient myths (like the ghoul and the zombie) may have some actual basis in reality, the serial killer mythos fundamentally differs from the zombie mythos in that the former is an embellishment of undeniably real behavior by undeniably real actors.
While I am mainly examining the imagined serial killer of fiction in what follows, in real life I suppose most actual serial killers are simply career criminals who have tallied a large number of victims as they go about their criminal enterprise of obtaining wealth and power. As such these individuals have always been with us (well before they were given a moniker and a special place in the modern popular imagination), but they’re not whom we’re referring to when we refer to the notion of the “serial killer.” We’ll also not be considering the ilk of serial murderer who, despite having an often incomprehensibly-large number of victims, is shrouded in the sovereign power of the State at the height of his bloodlust. Whether such murderers are ultimately commended or reviled is largely a result of whether they retain power long enough to choose authors for writing histories of their reigns; such controversy has little to do with our examination of zombies.
The violence of the zombie is never incidental to the pursuit of any other goal; it simply devours because it must. Likewise the serial killer of popular imagination kills out of an inherent interest in murder, and doesn’t use murder as a means to obtain some end other than his own satisfaction. Occasionally the modern serial killer may be imagined as a very complex character. Dr. Hannibal Lecter seemed to kill for a variety of reasons including at times revenge and complex subterfuge, but on the other hand perhaps such complexity is why his character is one of the more famed fictional villains of our day. For the most part, these sorts of characters usually seem overwhelmed by an obsession to kill, and while their individual “delusion” may provide them with a unique angle on the whole they’re largely stock antagonists (like the zombie).
As conventionally imagined, the serial killer is a loner who rejects our social norms. While the zombie often appears as part of an overwhelming ravenous horde (each member of which rejects our social norms), I earlier raised the question of whether this is essential to the zombie’s nature. The zombie seems to be simultaneously a member of a horde and an alienated individual–unable to relate, communicate, or otherwise interact with its own monstrous kin.
The zombie devours our body (resulting in our death), while the serial killer mutilates our body (resulting in our death) but may also torture our mind or spirit before he dispatches us. Both the zombie and the serial killer have an insatiable bloodlust, which we see as being rooted in insanity. Is the zombie just a mindless animal rather than an intellect fallen into insanity? An important difference between the portrayed threats might seem to be that the zombie is an unnatural creature while the serial killer is clearly one of us, although as we’ve noted the unnatural nature of the zombie is increasingly de-emphasized in recent conceptions of the creature.
The threat of the zombies is contagious, and the power of the zombies grows with each new victim until their menace is too great to be overcome. The threat of the serial killer lingers as he eludes capture, and while he may inspire increasingly fearsome legends with each new crime he remains a discrete, identifiable threat. Each time the serial killer commits a crime, we have a fresh opportunity to catch and stop him; thus in a sense he grows weaker by risking satisfaction of his terrible appetites. Related to these notions, the zombie is immortal–its threat will grow over time as it spawns more zombies; the serial killer is mortal–even if we never catch him, eventually he will grow old and too weak to continue his crime spree. Likewise we can envision a final end to our struggle with the serial killer–once we find him we will capture or kill him, ending his threat. Even if we stop the zombie menace today, depending on its genesis we may need to maintain a state of eternal vigilance against a re-emergence of the creatures. The serial killer may stop killing for his own mysterious reasons (or is that unlikely?); although we may continue to fear him, it’s possible such fear may have no object if he has indeed retired from a life of crime. The zombie will never stop for any reason short of having already destroyed everything within its grasp.
The zombie is easily identified, even from afar, due to its grotesque appearance and blatantly odd behavior. The serial killer (outwardly appearing as one of us) is able to lurk among us. He may be eyeing us right now, pondering our suitability as a victim, without our being aware that he is pondering our doom. I think that may be a clear horrific advantage for the serial killer–perhaps someone disagrees with me on that count?
The zombie definitely “chooses” its victims randomly in the sense that it indiscriminately attacks all who happen across its path. Some serial killers may choose victims randomly, while others may be drawn to victims matching a certain profile that seems sensible to the killer. Overall, as we mentioned earlier, it seems likely that the serial killer is compelled to kill in the same way the zombie is compelled to devour (and coincidentally kill). Nonetheless a profound difference here seems to be that for the serial killer the act of murder seems to hold some symbolic significance, while presumably the zombie is not directly aware its actions are murderous (as it merely wants to consume flesh until no flesh remains to be consumed, at which time it will move on to search for its next meal).
The zombie seems to be a mindless beast. The serial killer is usually (in fiction at least) profoundly clever and devious. The zombie does not use tactics, other than its natural technique of overwhelming us by sheer numbers. Our struggle against the zombie is purely a physical struggle. Our struggle against the serial killer may have moments of physical confrontation, but largely consists of the intellectual challenge of determining a pattern in his behavior and motivations so that we may either escape him or close our dragnet in upon him before he kills again.
The zombie is a monster. The serial killer is monstrous. The zombie has a grotesque appearance; the serial killer has a grotesque soul. The zombie horde is like a pack of hyenas; the serial killer is like a spider, a lone hunter meticulously hiding in the shadows waiting for a chance to pounce on its prey.
Is the threat of the serial killer less personalized than that of the zombie? We rely on The Authorities to apprehend the serial killer, and our own response may be simply to stay in for the evening rather than visiting dark alleys in unfamiliar parts of town. On the other hand we must defend ourselves against the zombies. The Authorities won’t believe our initial report in the early days of the zombie plague, and by the time they do ponder a heavy-handed response it may be too late as institutions and even society itself will be on the verge of destruction at the hands of rampaging zombie hordes. For this reason protagonists in serial-killer fiction are often detectives or civil servants, while the protagonist of the zombie tale can more broadly be anyone.
What are some other differences between the metaphor of the zombie and the metaphor of the serial killer? Is the serial killer more, or less, terrifying than the zombie–or are two simply sources of different kinds of terror? What does a comparison with the serial killer tell us about the zombie and its power to horrify?
This sounds similar to the scheme that Alan Wake employs, cutting between narrative-heavy scenes during the day and scare-oriented ones at night. There is only one “world” but its essential character changes drastically between the two states. I haven’t played any of the Silent Hill games, mostly because I heard about the better ones only after the heyday of the console on which they appeared. An IF take on that structure sounds reasonable; it may be done but it hasn’t been done to death.
The caveat there is that the big reveal at the end, if any, should not vitiate the play experiences from either realm. The dark and scary place can’t be just a dream. I spent the first half of AW on mental eggshells, prepared to hurl the game across the room if it so much as hinted at that kind of payoff. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say the game doesn’t cheat; I found the ending quite satisfying, even sublime.
Serial killers are a source of terror and zombies are a symptom.
Spoilers for All Alone follow. It’s a quick game, so it’s worth playing if you haven’t seen it and want an IF take on serial killers. Highly recommended.
[spoiler]The terror for me in the game came when, having been hunted and harrowed through my apartment, I resolved to stop hiding and to embrace death by running headlong into the room where I believed the serial killer to be waiting. Even a poor outcome like *** YOU HAVE DIED *** would have been a relief, because it would have meant I was back in control of the game, able to choose an ending on my terms. And then to undo, telling myself that I’d seen the worst and could only go up from there.
Except my plan didn’t work. The living room was empty. The apartment was empty. I was trapped there, all alone, until I had played the role of victim to its preordained end.[/spoiler]
For me, zombies present a binary choice: resist or die. Serial killers offer no real choice. You can resist, but resistance only gives them what they want. You can die, but only when they let you.
This is a very fertile imagining of the fundamental conflict. I can see a few different variations on it:
I’m reminded of “Cryptonomicon,” where the conflict is described as a war between Mars and Athena. In other words, it’s not between law and freedom, but between arbitrary authority and structured reason. Both sides have aspects of both law and freedom - Mars is hierarchical, and yet decisions are made at the whims of a leader. Athena is more democratic in the sense that any individual has the opportunity to succeed, but all are bound by the constraints of reason and technology.
I’ve heard of an interesting book on this subject, called “Revolution in Time” which describes how the invention of accurate timekeeping devices took power away from monarchs (the Emperor will see you when the Emperor is ready) and subjected all to the ultimate authority of the clock (The King’s audience begins at noon).
I’m not sure this is relevant to what you’re trying to achieve, but I feel obliged to mention another idea presented by philosopher Ken Wilber: the “pre-trans fallacy.” We speak easily of the pendulum between Romantic and Enlightenment ideas, but Wilber suggests that there is a third way. Both advocates of reason and mysticism assume that there are only two states of mind, which Wilber refers to as “rational” and “pre-rational.” The pre-rational state is viewed as childlike or even baby-like, which is either a good or a bad thing depending on which side you’re on. But Wilber sees a third state called “trans-rational” where one is capable of using reason as a tool, but is also capable of leaps of faith or intuition - a tool we must have if we are able to solve problems that computers can’t solve, such as the Halting Problem.
I think brilliant scientists and great theologians have a lot in common with each other, whereas mediocre scientists and theologians have very little in common. I’ve heard that atheism is quite common among scientists, but the very greatest scientists are deeply religious, for the most part. It fits well in my mind with this “pre/trans” distinction. You could certainly base a story around the hero being able to use such a quality to resolve a conflict between rational and mystical forces. But perhaps the conspicuous absence or even the total failure of such a third way would make for a more terrifying story.
I thought we’d touched on this at least tangentially. I think it’s central to what you’re trying to achieve, but I’m not sure what more to say about it. It’s more a question that must remain at the back of our minds than a point that needs to be clarified before we go on.
I think inevitable is scarier. The latter is just tragedy.
I think you’re right in the sense that we can’t voluntarily go back. But after the Singularity, we may have no other choice.
Civilizations have been set back before - consider the Babylonians and the Anasazi. And there have certainly been localized manifestations of high and low tech.
The thing that always bugged me about the Matrix - not as an allegory but as a story - was that if the crops fail (because the sun has been blotted out), then all life is useless as an energy source. Life depends on the sun for energy. Even fossil fuels got their energy from the sun at one point. Every civilization has hard-and-fast limits like that, which no technology can overcome. And that’s where the point of collapse comes. Coming back to the Anasazi: analyzing the wood used in their dwellings shows that they used local trees for a long time, and then started building with wood from farther away. Soon afterwards, they disappeared. They were destroyed by deforestation.
Do you mean this simply in the metaphysical sense that zombies are ideas/imagined metaphors while murderous people exist in our world, or are you saying something more with this analogy?
Serial-killer fiction often presents the view that these fiends crave attention, are lonely but too socially inept to relate to others except through killing, or are otherwise somehow seeking to impress us with their behavior or some symbolic design motivating their behavior (e.g. the film se7en). Thus the killer forms some sort of odd “relationship” with the detective pursuing him consisting of a perilous game of cat-and-mouse in which the adversaries switch positions over time. In essence, the detective is somehow satisfying the killer by paying attention to the villain and taking the threat of the villain seriously during the detective’s investigation. I think this is mainly a device to add some complexity to the antagonist’s character, but I’m not sure it’s a truly essential characteristic of the serial killer qua serial killer.
Books like these have become increasingly common in recent years as historians have found the general idea of looking at how innovation creates a context for changed perceptions of reality is a great way to sell books. I’m not trying to disparage the idea, as a number of these works are indeed quite fascinating even if in the end it seems unwise to assent to the truly expansive notions these authors sometimes present. I haven’t read the book you mentioned, but if the general concept interests you some others I have read, thought were interesting, and may have a direct relevance to the nature of zombies are:
Plagues and Peoples (1976) by the very distinguished William H McNeill; a general treatment of the history of plagues and how the introduction of novel diseases affects societies;
Rats, Lice, and History (1935) by Hans Zinsser; a more detailed look at a plague which thankfully is rare today but was dreadfully common in the past, typhus;
Poisons of the Past: Molds, Epidemics, and History (1989) by Mary Matossian; I don’t mean to trivialize this fine book, but its essential argument (supported by scholarly evidence) is that in the past unsanitary food storage conditions frequently sent an awfully large number of people on bad acid trips, leading to a number of unusual developments in society and profoundly effecting a number of historical events;
I’m very wary of junk science, but the aforementioned books are all serious works written by historians generally recognized as serious scholars.
The notion of history I proposed isn’t all that novel as a number of serious historians have examined the idea over the years, perhaps most comprehensively as the metaphor of Apollo and Dionysus. The idea you raised of rationalism and mysticism is a bit more complex than the one I initially raised of order and freedom, as the former is a metaphysical debate while the latter are conflicting reactions to metaphysics by living beings.
As it possibly bears upon the nature of the zombie, I think the central question of the idea you proposed would be whether a leap of intuition is mainly a novel connection between obscured but otherwise rational aspects of a generally rational multiverse (perhaps a form of revelation) or a different sort of revelation clearly identifying an undeniable irrational element of existence. If there is at least one element of reality that is truly irrational, then reality is irrational and reason can never hope to fully comprehend reality. If that’s the case, then human beings are incapable of fully comprehending reality (except possibly through mysticism). This isn’t to say that the mystic rejects reason as a tool, or that the rationalist doesn’t value serendipity; the general problem is more foundational than that. I’m not familiar with the author you mentioned, but I think ultimately he would have to choose a side as the notions of rationalism and mysticism are fundamentally incompatible in a way that has serious consequences for human beings (zombies too) and how we should live.
I haven’t decided yet whether my own conception of zombie will require return to the first principles I mentioned, but it may. Therefore the ideas you raised are very relevant and welcome. Our analysis of the zombie metaphor has so far been strictly limited to a rationalistic-materialistic perspective, which may be stifling in that the mystic perspective casts the zombie in a quite different light. The problem in discussing mysticism, however, is that if the particular gnostic insights of the conversants aren’t a shared viewpoint or don’t quickly command unanimous assent, it may be difficult to sketch a universally compelling portrait of the horror of the zombie. You mentioned the Anasazi, so let’s construct an analogy on that basis. If our general question is “what lessons may we learn from the collapse of Anasazi civilization?” but some of us are arguing that their civilization declined due to natural resource depletion while others argue it collapsed due to infertility and disease, we may get somewhere. On the other hand if some are arguing the notions mentioned while others are arguing that the Anasazi civilization collapsed because many were taken by strange beings (perhaps from another world), our argument must (if we take its ends seriously) quickly change from a discussion of what happened to the Anasazi to an exclusive discussion of the nature of these abductors.
You mentioned that you find the inevitability of zombification the more compelling of the alternatives to zombie genesis. The major emphasis of that aspect of the zombie metaphor would be universal dread and hopelessness; if all who die become zombies, then since all humans are mortal when each human dies he will become a zombie. One of the difficulties in this view (again we’re seeking to understand rather than argue in this discussion) is that there isn’t much room for exploring any sort of conflict that is meaningful (because stakes are involved) in our implementation of the zombie metaphor. There’s no reason for our protagonist to struggle against the zombie in an affirmation of life or his own particular life, apart from delusion. Likewise, there seems to be no fundamental motivation for the zombies to pursue the protagonist as he will join them eventually even if they remain in their graves and do nothing. I mentioned an example of this approach, the film Shatterdead, and mentioned that it was ultimately unsatisfying to me. Once we’ve committed ourselves to nihilism, I think anything less than the fullest committment is profoundly dishonest and therefore will lead the audience to devalue our assertions.
What would be some compelling ways to address these issues? I’ve noted that I’m more interested in the Romantic notion of inducing an emotional response in the audience. Do you think the “all will become zombies” notion is more, or less, conducive to that goal?
No, I meant that, while they create horror of themselves, the terror that zombies induce derives from their origin. Something has caused them to appear, be it supernatural influence or science run amok. That thing is the source of terror; the existence of zombies is symptomatic of a broader suspension in the natural order.
I am working from the sense that horror is situational and terror is omnipresent. In other words, it is horrible when a zombie jumps out of a closet, and terrible that you will never again inhabit a world in which zombies do not jump out of closets.
Serial killers are terrible because they are enough like us that they can understand, predict and even control our behavior, but they are alien enough that we cannot do likewise. Serial killers are commonly thought to be wired differently from normal people: not simply someone who decides one day to begin killing strangers, but someone who has been an unnatural outsider since birth. A normal human birth, rather than a blasphemous rebirth.
Moreover, unlike zombies, serial killers are not readily identifiable through external markers. Defeating a zombie requires only perception, reflexes, and a shotgun. Surviving a serial killer forces you to unmask and ultimately to understand them, which may not be desirable or even possible.
I agree that it is a common device but not an essential one. Generally the point seems to be to justify the serial killer’s interest in engaging an adversary that could defeat him, either because he craves an audience or seeks to prove his intellectual superiority. These motives suffice for mainstream audiences precisely because they are readily understood, but at the same time, it reduces the potential terror to a series of shocking, horrible demands for attention or recognition.
This is the serial killer as artist rather than alien. We know what he is after, even if we do not know quite why he picked that way to go about it, and we wish he could have taken up something less grisly, like watercolors.
You can hedge the commitment somewhat; Lovecraft’s vision of the universal is only nihilistic insofar as humanity is concerned, not least because we are bound by laws of time and space that other entities can conveniently ignore.
With the above in mind, you could demonstrate that zombies have a way to win out over nihilism: either because their lofty ambitions have been channeled into mere consumption, at which we excel; or because freedom from death and environmental hazard empowers them to overcome checks on progress that mankind cannot.
That sounds like my kind of book. I’ve heard a couple things about ergotism that sound like they would fall in this area, and I even heard allegations that the Beowulf story is about an ergot cult (Beowulf apparently means barley-wolf). It seems like fungus is Nature’s chemistry lab - nowhere else will you find such a wide variety of chemicals produced by a living thing for no apparent purpose at all. Michael Pollan has a few choice musings on mushrooms, and of course where would we be without yeast?
A friend of mine has been working on a card-based game in which the players take on the role of diseases and compete to infect or kill the most humans. He got the idea for the game from “Plagues and Peoples” and “Guns, Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond. They’ve both been on my reading list for a while.
That certainly casts the question in a different light. But does it really kill the story if there is truly no avoiding our destiny? Maybe that puts us back in the realm of tragedy again, but we still have an inner story to tell - whether we cling to hope even when there’s no reason for it.
I think I’m out of my depth now. What scares me is often random images that didn’t seem like they were supposed to be scary. I think someone mentioned Raiders of the Lost Ark. Nothing before or since has ever scared me as much as the angry angels and the melting faces. I was 9 years old, though.
Thanks for the responses. I was off-line all week due to IRL business but haven’t forgotten about this highly stimulating discussion, which due to the very thoughtful input of a number of people is quickly turning into one of the most interesting and wide-ranging examinations of zombies I’ve ever seen in any medium.
To recap where we are in this discussion (mostly for my own benefit as I organize my thoughts), I’ve been arguing that the disease-crazed-monster aspect of the zombie metaphor (which has in recent times been so thoroughly over-emphasized by most horror artists that it has now become a point of satire) significantly undervalues the horrific credentials of the zombie. Nonetheless we’ve discovered that these aspects of the zombie metaphor still hold considerable terrible potential and truly are a source of fright for many, so perhaps I initially overstated my case. In the course of a fairly thorough analysis we’ve explored many core aspects of zombie nature and I’ve argued that a fertile field for reinvigorating the zombie may be an exploration of its undead-ness. We’ve also seen, however, that the reason many horror artists have recently moved away from this aspect of the zombie phenomenon is the difficulty of inspiring terror with the notion of undeath–particularly in our increasingly secularized western society where the very idea of undeath itself no longer holds the disturbing religious implications many folks found compelling in times past.
I think that latest idea is an important conclusion, something I haven’t seen discussed anywhere else as I researched the zombie metaphor. That the notion of undeath is difficult to implement in a coherent way for the jaded modern horror audience explains much about how the idea of the zombie evolved to its current state, and where the zombie may be headed in the immediate future. We’ve decided that unless we can find a satisfactory way (that avoids appeal to religious conviction) to make the notion of undeath compelling, comprehensible, and scary we may be better off to set the notion aside.
I think I’ve found (due to inspiration from a number of comments in this thread) a satisfactory resolution to that problem which also allows us to continue making full use of all the other terrible aspects of the zombie; for the discerning reader my thinking on the matter is currently heading in this general direction:
Nonetheless I think there are still a number of questions to be explored regarding the nature of the zombie and the nature of the zombie horror tale. Until we thoroughly understand the threat of these grotesque malefactors, any proposal for significantly advancing their cause would be premature and almost certainly too inadequate to be very satisfying.
A question that naturally flows from our previous discussion concerns the nature and use of tragedy in horror fiction and particularly in zombie fiction. In real life, the enormity of dread and despair engendered in most of us if we are forced to ponder an inevitable and utter doom can be quite overwhelming. Yet I’ve argued that in a work of horror fiction this device may be unsatisfactory in that it likely reduces our tale to a mere description of the particular doom faced by the protagonist, perhaps along with a description of the actual moment of doom. To the degree that the audience empathizes with the protagonist and we succeed in outlining the menace in a plausible way, a temporary sense of unrest may thus be inspired in their minds; however I think this effect is unlikely to be long-lasting once the audience leaves the constraints of the imagined universe of the tale.
The alternative device would seem to be a horrible fate faced by the protagonist to which he may or may not succumb. Yet unless we take care to clearly elaborate under what circumstances the protagonist may meet his doom, we risk turning our tale of horror into a didactic play of manners and morals–which would be unfortunate if our goal is to inspire profound terror in the audience.
Are there other alternatives I haven’t mentioned? Which device is likely to give us a maximum payload of horror in the medium of a game–particularly a game consisting solely of text?
More generally, is the tale of zombie horror more effective with a “downer” ending? Assuming we’re not bland mass-media entertainment executives who believe the primary theme of all entertainment must pander to the Disney crowd by dictating that every story must have an optimistic ending where “They all lived happily ever after,” can a theme of true terror be successfully explored in a story where the protagonists are victorious and proceed to return to a mundane existence with no lingering effects (apart perhaps from a few physical and mental scars) of their encounter with the monstrous? What are the clear hazards to be avoided in such an approach? Is the audience more, or less, likely to be satisfied with such an ending? In pondering this concept, I should state again that I’m presuming in a horror tale satisfaction of the audience means we succeed in horrifying them.
A related area we haven’t explored yet is the question of zombie character. Are zombies evil, or are they just adversaries and opponents whose objectives conflict with our own goals? The idea of “evil” is beset by many of the difficulties that plague the notion of undeath–namely, I think the term “evil” is heavily loaded with religious connotations. In real life evil ensues from people pursuing goals that cause direct and significant harm to others, and from these actors selfishly continuing their pursuits once that harm becomes evident. In other words, I think evil is a process. On the other hand there is a long and robust tradition in literature–particularly in horror literature–of portraying the antagonist as “evil” in some absolute sense, as if evil were a fundamental trait of character or state of being.
If we were to say “zombies are evil,” what exactly would we be saying? Is it anything worth saying? Is saying such likely to assist our endeavor of terrifying the audience? Is a characterization of the zombie as evil more or less disturbing than portraying the creatures as “mere” enemies? Is the idea of an evil enemy more or less profound than the idea of an enemy with sincerely held beliefs which are simply offensive to us–or is that all we’re really saying anyway when we use the word “evil”? Perhaps finally, is it not at all the beliefs of the zombie that disturb us, but more simply the actions the zombie takes as it implements its beliefs and carries out its agenda?
I already have a number of other zombie topics I’d like to present for everyone’s examination and discussion, but I don’t think we can proceed much further until we look into the issues I’ve raised in this current post. Once we’ve worked out these theorhetical issues at the heart of the zombie metaphor, I think we’ll reap a handsome dividend when we return to our examination of more mundane topics such as rotting zombie flesh and whether zombies find our guts or our brains tastier. As always, for those not interested in discussing such epic issues more general observations or thoughts on zombie games and movies are also welcome.
Very well said.
Is this more, or less, terrifying than the idea of a killer who rationally pondered all the options and decided that becoming a killer would be the most satisfying way to live?
I have always refused to eat mushrooms of any kind; most fungi are our enemies. 
Perhaps Lovecraft was on to something there. In fact, many fungi exhibit behavior that is also commonly seen (on a much larger scale and in a more aggressive manner) in zombies.
I myself often find that even images with a clearly innocuous theme can instantly inspire mildly disturbing feelings if they demonstrate a particular color scheme that I can only (unhelpfully, sorry) describe as “unnatural.” I know it when I see it, but I’ve never been able to work out the details of how these color combinations work or how to design them, and I think the whole effect is accidental in all cases where it is displayed. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting subject because it’s rarely even articulated (let alone discussed). Several examples of this phenomenon can be found amongst the production design of several scenes in the horror film Lair of the White Worm, although even in that case I don’t think the effect was intentional (or even comprehended) on the part of the director and production designer.
Perhaps an important element of a “happy” horror ending is that we feel the scars that the protagonists bear at the end - as bcressey described it, “never again living in a world where zombies do not jump out of closets.” Sometimes the twist on this is that in defeating an evil, we have incorporated some of the evil into our souls.
Presuming that what you are producing is a work of interactive fiction, your question raises the possibility of multiple endings. It might be a worthwhile experiment to use the players choices in the game to determine what sort of ending would scare them most. In other words, while most multiple-endings games base the type of ending on a cause-and-effect chain from the player’s actions (showing compassion towards an NPC results in the NPC coming to your aid later), you could instead base the ending on some measure of the player’s internal experience (showing compassion towards an NPC results in an ending that would more greatly disturb a compassionate person). Kind of cruel, really, in that the logic presented in the story will most likely appear to be based on random chance or a perversion of normal cause-and-effect.
I’m not sure if we mentioned before, but in the “downer” ending, it’s important to hold out a sense of false hope. In the crudest sense, it could be a bit like the ending of Infidel, where you succeed in the task that has been set before you, but the result is unexpected disaster.
I think there’s some overlap in your definitions of evil, in a state you might call “psychosis” - the serial killer takes pleasure from the suffering of others, so the goals they are pursuing are not coincidentally related to the harm caused by their means. I can picture some very devious villains who do this at a high level - manipulating people into causing harm to themselves or loved ones in the belief that they are doing good. I get the impression that the Saw movies do this in a contrived way by offering difficult and painful choices to the protagonists. Maybe not very zombie-like, unless you have a more intelligent “zombie master.”
That leads to the possibility of zombies who mindlessly follow an evil master. Building on the discussion of endings, this could involve a scenario where the protagonist gains control of the zombies to destroy the enemy, and subsequently the zombies turn to the protagonist asking “what next, Master?”
It’s hard for me to imagine zombies as being themselves evil. Perhaps that’s a sign that if you could pull it off, it would be frightening because of its novelty. If zombies take pleasure not just in the eating of their victims, but in the fear and agony that they cause, perhaps that has potential. I think I’ve seen a few stories in which the monster “feeds on” fear and pain (even Monsters, Inc!). I’m not quite sure this convincingly represents evil in every case, but it’s a possibility. Maybe the reason it doesn’t always work is that using suffering as pure sustenance still falls under the category of purely physical animal needs. It might be better for the monsters to need only killing for “life”, but to enjoy causing suffering as pure recreation.
In the case where zombies are not evil, they can either be deeply incomprehensible in a Lovecraftian way, or they can be sympathetic to our own “darker” sides, indulging needs we don’t want to admit we have.
Interesting! I suppose fungus represents a level of the food chain that is above the highest predators, where we prefer to picture ourselves. Every animal that dies is food for the great kingdom of fungus, organisms that seem like plants superficially but thrive in the dark and are closer to states of decay than of fruition.
My friend who created a game based on “Plagues and Peoples” gave players a choice of whether to be viral or bacterial. We discussed whether to provide a fungal option for a long time, but too many fungi are either not lethal or not communicable, so it didn’t fit well with the victory goals of infecting or killing the most people.