The zombie’s physical appearance varies, depending on the human’s physical condition at their time of having turned. Its flesh may be at varying stages of decomposition. It may bear open, bleeding head wounds, and flesh wounds often the result of recently severed limbs. Indeed, the zombie’s physical state may be in any condition – to the extent the head itself can be severed yet still animate – so long as the brain is relatively undamaged. Its skin hue can be anywhere between grey, pallid, blue or green – any unnatural tone suggestive of departure or ill health – and is usually in varying degrees of decay and veined due to ceased circulation. Its body is in a form of suspended rigormortis, and so its motion is generally slow, stiff and stunted.
The zombie is traditionally seen as something evil. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead makes use of the biblical phrase, “When there’s no more room in Hell, the dead shall walk the Earth.” And indeed, where there is one zombie present there is bound to follow more. As their numbers increase, they begin to move in inadvertent packs, hunting individually though in one large mob. In this sense the genre has made use of the zombie’s diseased appearance, likening the spread to a plague or virus, the origins of which are often either undefined, extraterrestrial or the result of government experimentation.
The zombie is a thing of perfect abjection, for in the definition of the abject we find all those qualities inherent in any and all representations of the zombie.
Creed (1993) states that the ‘ultimate abjection is the corpse’, and continues, ‘within a biblical context, the corpse is… utterly abject. It signifies one of the most basic forms of pollution – the body without a soul’. In this regard we have in the zombie the perfect form of abjection in that the body has surpassed its lifespan yet continues to function, though at a base level. The zombie is, in essence, a human stripped and devoid of those qualities that define it as such: reduced to animalistic qualities. It is a form of de-evolution, if you like: the being reverts to a stimulus/response capacity where hunger, for flesh in particular, and survival are its only necessities. It has no need for air, water or food, aside of culling its craving for flesh.
The zombie knows no boundaries. It is not confined by age, race, sex or creed. The zombie finds form in the old and young, the healthy and ailing, male and female, the rich and poor and in all ethnicities. Similarly, within the zombie text, there is no assurance that the righteous shall be rewarded and the wicked punished, necessarily. Whilst it is the trend that those of a manipulative or vindictive nature will, at some point through the text, feel the teeth of one such zombie, we are given no promise that the protagonist of said text will not meet the same fate.
It is the trend in the majority of zombie texts that the threat comes to the protagonist in the form of a stranger. It is generally not the lead’s friend who is the first to attack, nor a member of their family or community. The zombie begins anonymously, with no prior relationship or familiarity to the protagonist. That being said, however, the zombie is still recognised as human: an unrecognised member of the community, though a member all the same. The zombie comes in disguise, usually mistaken for someone in need of assistance, due to the stunned-like nature of their movements or actions. Once the zombie has revealed itself as a threat, however, the threat of the zombie then spreads into the realm of the familiar: the protagonist’s friends or family is turned, and we have a situation where the abject inhabits the form of something we once held dear. Something we cannot immediately remove ourselves from.
It is for this precise reason that the semiotics of the zombie are so objectionable. We have an entity that presents itself as something familiar, and is yet so repulsive to behold: someone we were familiar with, whom we may recently have said farewell to, yet is now returned in physicality though bearing little or no characteristics that defined them as the individual we knew them as. In a manner, the denotation is there though the connotation holds no resemblance.
I stated in my introduction that the zombie as a thing of abjection is always present, though alluded to there being varying degrees of abjection. I make this claim in relation to the changing form of the zombie over time, and the guise these forms are intended to portray.
The representation of the zombie has passed through many manifestations; from a slavish thing aroused through ancient voodoo rituals, to a spreader of disease and contagion leading to a pandemic of zombified beings or the ‘living dead’; from a thing of repulsive threat to something of jest; from a threat slow, lethargic and dull-witted to something stronger and capable of intelligent adaptation.
In exploring the changing form of the zombie over time, an interesting text to look at is Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space, in which an alien race resurrects the dead as instruments of invasion. This use of the zombie is analogous to the zombie’s very origins in ancient Haitian voodoo rituals, yet it is more prudent to consider each individual form of text within the social context of its creation.
Just as alien invasion has been used analogously to invasions of communism and the Cold War, so too have Romero’s films been used as analogy for slavery, greed and overt commercialism, social deterioration, class division, civil unrest, and government corruption. It is interesting therefore to consider this representation in terms of how the zombie’s physical form has changed over time. Once slow and cumbersome, the zombie has since become fast and savage, suggesting perhaps that our perception of outward threats has changed: that we no longer see the enemy as something to be underestimated.
Further to this is the realisation that the threat is not always in the form of an ‘other’: in his latest film, Land of the Dead, the zombies are largely empathised with and arm themselves against Romero’s representation of the Bush Government.
Schirato and Yell (2003) touch briefly on commoditisation and how it may change the context of a text. Such has occurred with the zombie as a text, and it is here that my introductory claim of the varying degrees of abjection of the zombie comes to the fore.
The zombie has become mainstream, with cult followings, websites, songs (Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Jonathan Coulton’s Re: Your Brains), movies and games all dedicated to it, inclusive of Zombie Walks that have people in their hundreds dressed as zombies and walking city streets in the US, UK, Europe, Canada and Australia.
In line with this is the zombie’s newly assigned semiotics in that the zombie has become the object of fond ridicule, though more generally in the form of self-referential satire. In recent texts we have seen zombie outbreaks dealt with by protagonists well versed in the zombie genre (Shaun of the Dead – a great indicator of commoditisation) and have been introduced to the tale of a lonely boy and his befriending of his parents’ domesticated zombie servant (Fido – himself a zombie and a protagonist). Both of these examples have the protagonists, at some point, coming to peace with the zombie and inviting them into their hearts and homes.
The zombie as text has made a successful transition from something of complete abjection through to something of a somewhat less objectionable matter. It has transformed itself from something nightmarish to a text more commonplace. It has made the transition from a creature of the night to something you could find, en masse, walking the streets of the CBD during peak hour.
References
Readings:
- Creed, Barbara The Monstrous Feminine, Routledge, London, 1993, pp.9-10.
- Schirato, Tony and Yell, Susan Communication and Cultural Literacy: An Introduction, 2nd Edition, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2003, pp.109.
Music Videos:
- Michael Jackson’s Thriller, 1983, directed by John Landis, Music Video, USA
- Jonathan Coulton’s Re: Your Brains, 2006, Spiffworld.com, released via Youtube.com, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjMiDZIY1bM
Videos:
- Night of the Living Dead: 30th Anniversary Edition 1999, (original release 1968), directed by George A. Romero, DVD, Market Square Productions Inc and Westwood Artists International Inc, USA, 18 August 2007
- Dawn of the Dead 1979, directed by George A. Romero, Anchor Bay Entertainment, USA , 18 August 2007
- Day of the Dead 1985, directed by George A. Romero, Anchor Bay Entertainment, USA , 18 August 2007
- Land of the Dead 2005, directed by George A. Romero, Anchor Bay Entertainment, USA , 18 August 2007
- Plan 9 From Outer Space 1956, directed by Ed Wood, DVD, RBC Entertainment, USA, 25 August 2007
- Shaun of the Dead 2004, directed by Edgar Wright, Working Title Films, UK, 25 August 2007
- Fido 2006, directed by Andrew Currie, Anagram Pictures Inc, Canada, 11 August 2007
