Thoughts about Zombies in Relation to Cultural Views of Death

For me, one of the most interesting aspects of the Zombie is the emotional pain it engenders in those it encounters.  Two examples that stuck me were both from The Walking Dead. These would be the wife and mother encountered in the first episode, as well as the little girl met at the abandoned gas station.  The special sort of fear that zombies instill in the living is also interesting, as it differs in a fundamental way from the emotions usually caused by other, more traditional monsters. Zombies are different from vampires, another classic un-dead monster, in that they are mindless whereas the vampire has full use of its mind.  Part of what we fear so much about Zombies is not so much the physical aspect so much as it is the mental death and loss of agency.

On page 17 of the essay Your Zombie and You, the authors have a quote that says “Monsters are unnatural relative to a cultures conceptual scheme of nature”.  In American culture, death is often treated as a taboo subject.  The vast majority of people feel that death and the dead should be accorded a great amount of respect.  Behaviors that violate this, such as grave-digging and necrophilia instantly designate the perpetrator as a pariah.  Zombies also violate the sanctity of death.  Whether is from disease and infection or the supernatural, one of the most fundamental concepts of our society as been drastically altered.  Death is no longer final, no longer inviolable.

The example of the wife serves to highlight many of the issues that zombies bring to light.  The case of personal identity is given extreme importance.  The husband of the Zombie knows that she cannot communicate with him, that she would kill their son without a thought if given the chance, and cannot be cured. And he cannot bring himself to put a bullet through her skull.    From his vantage point on the second floor of the house, she poses no immediate physical threat. Rather, something about the situation seems inherently wrong to him.  People just shouldn’t be up and walking around once they are dead.  His inability to cope with this is implied to lead to his, and therefore his son’s, demise.

The little girl serves to illustrate that this phenomenon exists even without prior personal connection.  The look that crosses Rick’s face when the girl turns around and exposes her necrotic flesh shows a different sort of disgust, almost anguish, than one might expect.  The white and pink clothes of the girl, the long blonde hair, the teddy bear, these are all things that we might associate with childhood innocence.  That even this is violated is a poignant statement about the totality of the change that has taken place in Rick’s world.

There is, of course, the question of whether or not these zombies remember in any meaningful way their former lives.  If they do not, it is much easier emotionally to kill them, as well as being less problematic in a moral sense. But if they, as the two previously mentioned zombies do, exhibit behavior that hints that they remember their past lives, it becomes much more complicated. And not only for the fact that it is much harder to kill someone you love than it is to kill a stranger.  It gives added legitimacy to the fear of becoming a zombie yourself.  If zombies are mindless shells, it lessens the pain of knowing that when you die, you will do your best to kill everyone around you because you at least won’t be aware of it.  But if, for example, you know you will be trapped inside, cognizant but unable to act on the thoughts, it makes the thought of turning into a zombie that much worse.

All this is to say that people are uncomfortable with death. Being in a leadership position within the community, understanding this is vital.  Knowing that a person’s fear of zombies goes beyond the fear of bodily harm or infection is necessary for effectively dealing with the zombie threat.