Death in Life
Roger Luckhurst, Zombies: A Cultural History
Reaktion, 224pp, £16.00, ISBN 9781780235288
reviewed by Imogen Woodberry
Among the classic monsters of popular legend the zombie is often seen as a somewhat subordinate figure. While the vampire conjures gothic associations – of Hungarian castles and elegantly cadaverous counts, Frankenstein, the mysteries of alchemy and the occult – the unthinking, unfeeling, speechless and stumbling zombie is a figure bracketed with the crass horror films and violent videogames of contemporary culture. Yet despite its comparative lack of high-cultural literary purchase, it has overtaken its forebears in the popular consciousness. The films, television, games and comics in which the zombie has now come to proliferate are global, multi-million dollar industries. In recent years it has been the subject of increased academic attention, not just within science fiction criticism, but also in the broader field of cultural studies. Straddling the gap between popular and scholarly writing, Roger Luckhurst’s masterly study sets out a rich and fascinating chronological account of the zombie’s history.
Zombies: A Cultural History begins by charting the origins of the ‘zombi’ within the margins of colonial encounters; a figure of folk voodoo law that became assimilated into American culture largely through its occupation of Haiti in the early 20th century. Brought first into the English language in William Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929), the ‘zombie’ swiftly developed into a mass cultural trope through the comic and B-movie industries in which it was a staple figure – by the mid-1930s the zombie had become a cocktail, served to visitors of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. While the zombie’s ‘massification’ intensified following World War Two via the expanding comic book industry, the catalyst for its rise to global prominence came with George A. Romero’s film visions of a zombie apocalypse, beginning with Night of the Living Dead (1968). Luckhurst concludes the study by examining its global reach through the horror film and television industries and video game franchises such as Resident Evil.
Given its varied and sprawling history the zombie is understandably hard to pin down. Maintaining its protean identity, in the introduction Luckhurst chuckles over attempts to hold on to fixed characteristics (Simon Pegg’s wail against E4’s Dead Set: ‘Zombies Don’t Run!’) instead proposing a profusion of jumbled manifestations:
One of the most interesting aspects of this study is the analysis of the zombie as an adaptable and pliable cultural trope. From early pulps of the 1930s the zombie became associated with Nazism, particularly through the figure of the mad Nazi scientist who attempts to control or create an army of zombie hordes. Conversely, Luckhurst connects its post-war resonance with its symbolisation of the traumatised victims of atomic war (expatiated in an influential book by Robert Jay Lifton as a state of ‘Death in Life’) and the holocaust, in particular the ‘Musulmann,’ camp figures who had given up all hope of life but were not yet dead.
Within the matrix of Cold War anxieties a similarly ambiguous dynamic surrounded the figure of the undead dead. Allegorical of the brainwashing effects of the spread of communism, a fear given very literal form in the ‘re-education programmes’ to which American prisoners of the Korean war were subjected, the zombie also acted as an expression of fears of American consumer culture; the effects of advertising and ‘hyper-capitalism.’ In, for example, the 1954 tale ‘CORPSES… COAST TO COAST’ – about a zombie takeover of America – the zombie victors, with connotations of the methods of both Nazism and Communism, place resistors into rehabilitation camps in which they are zombified. By the same token the American rhetoric of free world values is also parodied: the zombies establish the ‘United World Zombies’ which celebrates ‘making the world safe for zombieocracy.’
Luckhurst views portrayals as least effective when most conspicuously allegorical, criticising Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) on this score. The film’s symbolism of the corrosive effects of capitalism on the human consciousness, represented by the shambolic vision of the mindless zombies stumbling through the shopping mall, is, Luckhurst argues, too heavy handed a satire to have much sting. The problem is that the ease of its identification enables the viewer to see themselves as standing apart from the subject of critique, with the complacent sense that through ‘the appropriate exercise of cynical reason’ one can ‘see behind and … stay humanly alive.’ While Luckhurst stresses the current impact of the zombie as a symbol of globalisation, it is the zombie as a liminal, threshold creature, whose metaphoric import constantly shifts and destabilises, that has continued bite.
Zombies: A Cultural History begins by charting the origins of the ‘zombi’ within the margins of colonial encounters; a figure of folk voodoo law that became assimilated into American culture largely through its occupation of Haiti in the early 20th century. Brought first into the English language in William Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929), the ‘zombie’ swiftly developed into a mass cultural trope through the comic and B-movie industries in which it was a staple figure – by the mid-1930s the zombie had become a cocktail, served to visitors of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. While the zombie’s ‘massification’ intensified following World War Two via the expanding comic book industry, the catalyst for its rise to global prominence came with George A. Romero’s film visions of a zombie apocalypse, beginning with Night of the Living Dead (1968). Luckhurst concludes the study by examining its global reach through the horror film and television industries and video game franchises such as Resident Evil.
Given its varied and sprawling history the zombie is understandably hard to pin down. Maintaining its protean identity, in the introduction Luckhurst chuckles over attempts to hold on to fixed characteristics (Simon Pegg’s wail against E4’s Dead Set: ‘Zombies Don’t Run!’) instead proposing a profusion of jumbled manifestations:
What is a zombie? … a noisy child; a three legged horse; a homeless person; a wretched dog … a male spirit… a potent rum cocktail … a female spirit with a broken neck; a Guede God … the soul of a person caught in a bottle … a person with catatonic schizophrenia … the outcast of social justice … the bewitched slave…
One of the most interesting aspects of this study is the analysis of the zombie as an adaptable and pliable cultural trope. From early pulps of the 1930s the zombie became associated with Nazism, particularly through the figure of the mad Nazi scientist who attempts to control or create an army of zombie hordes. Conversely, Luckhurst connects its post-war resonance with its symbolisation of the traumatised victims of atomic war (expatiated in an influential book by Robert Jay Lifton as a state of ‘Death in Life’) and the holocaust, in particular the ‘Musulmann,’ camp figures who had given up all hope of life but were not yet dead.
Within the matrix of Cold War anxieties a similarly ambiguous dynamic surrounded the figure of the undead dead. Allegorical of the brainwashing effects of the spread of communism, a fear given very literal form in the ‘re-education programmes’ to which American prisoners of the Korean war were subjected, the zombie also acted as an expression of fears of American consumer culture; the effects of advertising and ‘hyper-capitalism.’ In, for example, the 1954 tale ‘CORPSES… COAST TO COAST’ – about a zombie takeover of America – the zombie victors, with connotations of the methods of both Nazism and Communism, place resistors into rehabilitation camps in which they are zombified. By the same token the American rhetoric of free world values is also parodied: the zombies establish the ‘United World Zombies’ which celebrates ‘making the world safe for zombieocracy.’
Luckhurst views portrayals as least effective when most conspicuously allegorical, criticising Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) on this score. The film’s symbolism of the corrosive effects of capitalism on the human consciousness, represented by the shambolic vision of the mindless zombies stumbling through the shopping mall, is, Luckhurst argues, too heavy handed a satire to have much sting. The problem is that the ease of its identification enables the viewer to see themselves as standing apart from the subject of critique, with the complacent sense that through ‘the appropriate exercise of cynical reason’ one can ‘see behind and … stay humanly alive.’ While Luckhurst stresses the current impact of the zombie as a symbol of globalisation, it is the zombie as a liminal, threshold creature, whose metaphoric import constantly shifts and destabilises, that has continued bite.