Nothing has incited such rapturous enthusiasm in my parents since Forster’s World War Z (2013). There is something about its choppy narrative, fast-paced, Brad Pitt face and crumbling society that has charmed them. After being persuaded to watch the film for the fifth time I sat there reflecting on how we got to this point, watching diseased bodies scramble over one another, with infatuation.
The first zombie depicted on film was in 1932 in White Zombie. This film was a horror, the zombie figure was inspired by Haitian voodoo and thus was under a compulsion that made the body susceptible to external control. The ‘flesh-eating zombie’ whom we have all grown to know emerged from the 1960s in Romero’s Night of The Living Dead. This additional animalistic feature served as a dual threat to the sanctity of the viewership’s being; body gore and the loss of autonomy. The Zombie figure became a truly pervasive figure in horror, solidifying itself within the iconography of the genre and joining the vampires and ghouls as prominent goosebump-inducing models of selfhood. What unified these ‘creatures’ was a likeness to ourselves as their origin’s stem from their former human vitality. What distinguished the Zombie from the others was its mindless persona, the complete loss of individuality. They lose the threads of their moral code while being propelled by the senseless need to consume. The horror of collectivism!
In more recent depictions of the ‘zombie’ the pseudo-medical infection has plagued the screens (pun!). This has enabled the bodily host to move with feverish intent as it is being projected into its compulsions, not by its undeadness, but by a living virus; we see this within The Last of Us, World War Z and the 28 Days Later franchise. The slow moving ‘undead’ urged the viewer to grapple with their own encroaching mortality. The fear was not in the singular but in the sheer volume ‘en masse’ as they edged closer without hesitation and without means to an end. The viewer, much like the human protagonist must not only confront their own eventual demise by natural or external means but also the deconstruction of culture, history and familiarity.
The new ‘infected’ zombie disrupts the slow burning dread by turning, attacking and spreading the infection, in seconds. This element is communicated within the first 30 minutes of World War Z in the ‘12 seconds to turn’ sequence in which the nature of the zombies rapid infection is established for the audience (I have more World War Z references if you want them).
The zombie figure has evolved with our culture, matching the pace of the progressing capitalist stimulation. The world is rife with advertisement, new faces, new media and it is pushed upon us from the moment we step outside in the morning to when we pull our phones out at night. The insurgence of stimuli alters our ability to consume slower paced media which is then reflected within the media being produced. The chicken and the egg. The zombie and the bite? While stylistically the newer adaptations may cater to a faster paced and actionable genre they remain horrifying in their depiction of lost humanity and the dissolution of order.
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash