The Modern Zombie: Critiquing Genre, Audience, and Violent Apathy
By Aaron Tuong
From the fantastical wizardry in the Harry Potter franchise to the space-opera adventures in Star Wars, fiction provides its audience unique and diverse settings to escape to. Fiction also provides a bleaker world for readers to examine. The problem with these settings is that readers tend to imagine themselves in the scenarios the authors have written about and glorified. These stories do not focus on the mundanity of the average person and how they would realistically react. In the zombie genre, the protagonists are usually zombie-killing savants. Colson Whitehead—author of Zone One—and George A. Romero—director and writer of Day of the Dead—both partake and criticize the zombie genre’s glorification of violence because that emphasis on violence misleads the audience by downplaying the mental trauma and apathy that people would experience in that kind of situation.
One staple of the zombie genre is body horror, the ways people and zombies disfigure each other. In most zombie stories, the only way to kill a reanimated corpse is by destroying the brain. Because zombies only have one weakness, a zombie’s other body parts are seen as disposable and allow for the writer to create grotesque imagery. This rhetorical strategy disturbs the audience and characters within the story. For example, in Zone One, Whitehead describes how an old man was overwhelmed by zombies “like ants who received a chemical telegram about a lollipop on the sidewalk… A cord of blood zipped up out of their huddle, hanging—that’s how he always recalled it, that’s what [Mark, the protagonist,] saw as he ducked down behind the cinder blocks and watched” (25). In Day of the Dead, Sarah, the protagonist, witnesses a researcher vivisect a zombie to determine how its body functions. The researcher removes most of the creature’s vital organs, but it can still move and rotates its body, causing the remaining digestive organs to fall out of its opened torso. Both instances of body horror cause the respective protagonist to etch that memory into their minds because of the brutality displayed on a human and a zombie. For Mark, his memory was scarring because it was his first time seeing a person helplessly ripped apart. Sarah remembers that scene because of the horrific image and because another living person performed the act. Zombies are usually depicted as feral creatures, so seeing a human perform cruel acts on a zombie is especially jarring and ironic.
Zombies are an objective antagonist in this horror subgenre. Humanity can agree that eliminating all zombies would improve people’s quality of life. So, killing zombies seems like a reasonable outlet for people to relieve their frustrations. The problem is that this outlet normalizes and enforces physical violence as an appropriate pastime. What will people do once all zombies have been eradicated? Violence has ingrained itself into the survivors’ culture. By proxy, audiences also accept violence as a norm of the genre and are redirected from examining the cultural impact violence has on people.
The reason violence in the zombie genre needs to be examined is that writers and directors need to identify the purpose of the violence. Is it supposed to be a McGuffin—a plot device—to motivate characters in a story? A common example of violence as a character motivator is trauma, both physical and psychological. Trauma can then be used as an excuse for characters to act irrationally and add more drama to a story. That irrationality can, depending on the character’s portrayal, make the audience feel contempt for that character if depicted poorly. Thus, a stigma against people in the real world with mental disorders can arise.
In Day of the Dead, a character’s trauma is vital to the plot. The film takes place within a military bunker occupied by civilians and military personnel. To protect the supposed remnants of humanity, the soldiers force the civilians to stay within the bunker. The military lacks manpower, so the soldiers are not allowed to leave active duty. Miguel—a soldier—partakes in the military’s constant carnage pushing him to his breaking point. He lashes violently at both humans and zombies alike. At the film’s climax, Miguel leads a zombie horde to the bunker, and they overrun him and the facility. Miguel’s actions can be seen as a heroic sacrifice or as a final act of vengeance. He did free Sarah and her group from the military’s control, but he also made the supplies (including guns, food, and water) inaccessible to potential survivors. Romero’s portrayal of trauma does reinforce the idea that trauma causes people to act irrationally. However, Miguel’s irrationality does save the protagonists.
Unlike Day of the Dead, where only one character showed signs of trauma, in Zone One, all survivors are diagnosed with Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder—a fictional rebranding of PTSD—or they were “under the sway of preexisting mental conditions that were ... exacerbated by the great calamity” (Whitehead 59). Everyone would have some sort of trauma from seeing formerly-human creatures devouring other humans, but that trauma manifests differently in each person and in seemingly contradictory ways including “insomnia or excessive sleeping; changes in appetite leading to weight loss, or increased cravings for food and weight gain” (Whitehead 59). Unlike Romero, Whitehead portrays trauma as a normal occurrence amongst survivors; given how radically different the post-zombie world is compared to the pre-zombie world, some type of psychological distress would manifest. Whitehead does not glorify or vilify mental illness. Instead, he proposes that everyone has a form of it and learns to cope with it to survive.
In addition to trauma, the one common factor all zombie stories share is the zombie. In zombie apocalypses, the undead are the primary antagonists. Each story, at its core, is about killing former humans ad nauseam. Writers tend to dehumanize zombies so that audiences do not feel remorse or sympathy for the reanimated corpses. Romero and Whitehead both blur the distinction between the living and the undead in their works. Romero has a domesticated, peaceful zombie who slowly remembers and reenacts his life as a former human. Whitehead uses the concept of “stragglers,” passive and inactive zombies who “haunted what they knew” (58). The first straggler described to the reader is the reanimated corpse of an office worker, trying to make copies of a document on a broken printer (85). Both writers humanize the zombies, making them more sympathetic. Both zombies ignore and do not try to eat humans at arms' length. This choice makes viewers consider who the real zombie is: the formerly human creature or the person who mindlessly kills them without a thought?
Another important aspect of the blurred living and undead distinction is questioning what it means to be human. If killing zombies becomes a pastime for many survivors, then how would society change since it would then encourage killing zombies? Apathy would set in to both the characters within the story and the audience. For the characters, they would mindlessly kill zombie after zombie. For audiences, they would read and watch works in the zombie genre and eventually grow apathetic to the genre expectations.
Given the vastness of the zombie genre, critiques of the genre’s glorification of violence would eventually arise. As more writers contribute to the genre, it will become saturated in violence and genre conventions. Zombie fiction forces regular people to become killing machines to survive, so writers need to be cautious of the effects that prolonged violence would have on readers and characters. If writers are not critical of their work, they may turn their audience into real-life zombies, emotionless and apathetic to violence.
Works Cited
Day of the Dead. Directed by George A. Romero. United Film Distribution Company, 1980.
Whitehead, Colson. Zone One. Doubleday, 2011.
From the fantastical wizardry in the Harry Potter franchise to the space-opera adventures in Star Wars, fiction provides its audience unique and diverse settings to escape to. Fiction also provides a bleaker world for readers to examine. The problem with these settings is that readers tend to imagine themselves in the scenarios the authors have written about and glorified. These stories do not focus on the mundanity of the average person and how they would realistically react. In the zombie genre, the protagonists are usually zombie-killing savants. Colson Whitehead—author of Zone One—and George A. Romero—director and writer of Day of the Dead—both partake and criticize the zombie genre’s glorification of violence because that emphasis on violence misleads the audience by downplaying the mental trauma and apathy that people would experience in that kind of situation.
One staple of the zombie genre is body horror, the ways people and zombies disfigure each other. In most zombie stories, the only way to kill a reanimated corpse is by destroying the brain. Because zombies only have one weakness, a zombie’s other body parts are seen as disposable and allow for the writer to create grotesque imagery. This rhetorical strategy disturbs the audience and characters within the story. For example, in Zone One, Whitehead describes how an old man was overwhelmed by zombies “like ants who received a chemical telegram about a lollipop on the sidewalk… A cord of blood zipped up out of their huddle, hanging—that’s how he always recalled it, that’s what [Mark, the protagonist,] saw as he ducked down behind the cinder blocks and watched” (25). In Day of the Dead, Sarah, the protagonist, witnesses a researcher vivisect a zombie to determine how its body functions. The researcher removes most of the creature’s vital organs, but it can still move and rotates its body, causing the remaining digestive organs to fall out of its opened torso. Both instances of body horror cause the respective protagonist to etch that memory into their minds because of the brutality displayed on a human and a zombie. For Mark, his memory was scarring because it was his first time seeing a person helplessly ripped apart. Sarah remembers that scene because of the horrific image and because another living person performed the act. Zombies are usually depicted as feral creatures, so seeing a human perform cruel acts on a zombie is especially jarring and ironic.
Zombies are an objective antagonist in this horror subgenre. Humanity can agree that eliminating all zombies would improve people’s quality of life. So, killing zombies seems like a reasonable outlet for people to relieve their frustrations. The problem is that this outlet normalizes and enforces physical violence as an appropriate pastime. What will people do once all zombies have been eradicated? Violence has ingrained itself into the survivors’ culture. By proxy, audiences also accept violence as a norm of the genre and are redirected from examining the cultural impact violence has on people.
The reason violence in the zombie genre needs to be examined is that writers and directors need to identify the purpose of the violence. Is it supposed to be a McGuffin—a plot device—to motivate characters in a story? A common example of violence as a character motivator is trauma, both physical and psychological. Trauma can then be used as an excuse for characters to act irrationally and add more drama to a story. That irrationality can, depending on the character’s portrayal, make the audience feel contempt for that character if depicted poorly. Thus, a stigma against people in the real world with mental disorders can arise.
In Day of the Dead, a character’s trauma is vital to the plot. The film takes place within a military bunker occupied by civilians and military personnel. To protect the supposed remnants of humanity, the soldiers force the civilians to stay within the bunker. The military lacks manpower, so the soldiers are not allowed to leave active duty. Miguel—a soldier—partakes in the military’s constant carnage pushing him to his breaking point. He lashes violently at both humans and zombies alike. At the film’s climax, Miguel leads a zombie horde to the bunker, and they overrun him and the facility. Miguel’s actions can be seen as a heroic sacrifice or as a final act of vengeance. He did free Sarah and her group from the military’s control, but he also made the supplies (including guns, food, and water) inaccessible to potential survivors. Romero’s portrayal of trauma does reinforce the idea that trauma causes people to act irrationally. However, Miguel’s irrationality does save the protagonists.
Unlike Day of the Dead, where only one character showed signs of trauma, in Zone One, all survivors are diagnosed with Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder—a fictional rebranding of PTSD—or they were “under the sway of preexisting mental conditions that were ... exacerbated by the great calamity” (Whitehead 59). Everyone would have some sort of trauma from seeing formerly-human creatures devouring other humans, but that trauma manifests differently in each person and in seemingly contradictory ways including “insomnia or excessive sleeping; changes in appetite leading to weight loss, or increased cravings for food and weight gain” (Whitehead 59). Unlike Romero, Whitehead portrays trauma as a normal occurrence amongst survivors; given how radically different the post-zombie world is compared to the pre-zombie world, some type of psychological distress would manifest. Whitehead does not glorify or vilify mental illness. Instead, he proposes that everyone has a form of it and learns to cope with it to survive.
In addition to trauma, the one common factor all zombie stories share is the zombie. In zombie apocalypses, the undead are the primary antagonists. Each story, at its core, is about killing former humans ad nauseam. Writers tend to dehumanize zombies so that audiences do not feel remorse or sympathy for the reanimated corpses. Romero and Whitehead both blur the distinction between the living and the undead in their works. Romero has a domesticated, peaceful zombie who slowly remembers and reenacts his life as a former human. Whitehead uses the concept of “stragglers,” passive and inactive zombies who “haunted what they knew” (58). The first straggler described to the reader is the reanimated corpse of an office worker, trying to make copies of a document on a broken printer (85). Both writers humanize the zombies, making them more sympathetic. Both zombies ignore and do not try to eat humans at arms' length. This choice makes viewers consider who the real zombie is: the formerly human creature or the person who mindlessly kills them without a thought?
Another important aspect of the blurred living and undead distinction is questioning what it means to be human. If killing zombies becomes a pastime for many survivors, then how would society change since it would then encourage killing zombies? Apathy would set in to both the characters within the story and the audience. For the characters, they would mindlessly kill zombie after zombie. For audiences, they would read and watch works in the zombie genre and eventually grow apathetic to the genre expectations.
Given the vastness of the zombie genre, critiques of the genre’s glorification of violence would eventually arise. As more writers contribute to the genre, it will become saturated in violence and genre conventions. Zombie fiction forces regular people to become killing machines to survive, so writers need to be cautious of the effects that prolonged violence would have on readers and characters. If writers are not critical of their work, they may turn their audience into real-life zombies, emotionless and apathetic to violence.
Works Cited
Day of the Dead. Directed by George A. Romero. United Film Distribution Company, 1980.
Whitehead, Colson. Zone One. Doubleday, 2011.