An early premiss in Hamlet’s famous soliloquy (from where the title of this piece is borrowed) is that death is preferrable to the theatrical “mortal coil” of life, because death is nothing more than a longed-for dreamful sleep. Hamlet is here supposing that some vestige of presence, of being, remains in the state of death. However, as he soon realises, the nature of death’s sleep and what dreams it may bring, are wholly unpredictable. Given this, he rightly considers the possibility that the realm of death could contain life-like horrors. What is to be done then? Where is the escape from the dreaded mortal coil? How does one cope with the mystery of what lies beyond life?

Most religious reflections on the subject, maintain that some kind of crossover takes place, and that there is some form of existence after death. Such forms of existence may remain ethereal, or they might manifest. They may inhabit bodies and minds, they may move things or cause them to be moved, they may simply and unnervingly, present themselves as distressed or distressing. In fact, in all events, they are unnerving. Expectedly then, in the popular cinematic imagination of life beyond death, the questionable nature of this form of existence, has had its most robust and sustained articulation in the genre of the horror film. Here, we have possessions, visitations from other worlds, resurrections, the revivified dead, the undead, and of course, the zombie.

The zombie, which is the focus of this piece, has its origins in a specific voodoo practice which involves the actual production of the Haitian zonbi (popularly known as the zombi or zombie). Elizabeth McAlister (2012) informs us that the ‘life’ of a Haitian zonbi, emanates from ritually treated shavings of human bone (often the human skull) that are bottled along with unguents, additives, perfumes, ashes and so on. Typically, this capture is executed by the witch doctor immediately after the dead have been buried, and at the site of their graves within which lingers that small portion of the spirit which has not immediately gone to god. So, the bottle contains that fragment of the now-captured spirit that can be put to work to aid or trouble the living. The zonbi bottle thus “refuses the Western ontological distinction between people and things, and between life and death, as it is a hybrid of human and spirit, living and dead…” (McAlister 2012: 464). When zonbis become zombies, i.e., when they reach popular western cinematic imagination, they do so as incarnations, as bodies that vacillate between the two worlds, “mortified schizos” to use Deleuze and Guattari’s phrase, neither living nor dead. Hence, the zombie is one version of the corporeal undead.

The figure of the modern zombie is a quintessentially twentieth century one, though there were folktales from other parts of the world, like Africa, that spoke of zombie-like figures called, variously, nzambi, nzumbi, nvumbi, mvumbi. The English word ‘zombi’ is recorded first in a history of Brazil written by the poet Robert Southey, in 1819. Perhaps it is no serendipitous coincidence that Mary Shelley’s zombie-like creation in her novel Frankenstein came out in 1818. But it is not till more than a century passes that we see the figure entering the popular imagination through cinema.

The cinematic zombie is born with Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932 ). In that film, a young white woman is turned into a zombie by a Haitian witchdoctor’s voodoo, and becomes, like the original Haitian zonbi, a slave, the fragments of whose soul have been seized and rendered obedient to the witchdoctor. Sarah Lauro (2017: ix) reminds us that the “zombie’s lineage can be traced to African soul capture myths that were carried to the New World aboard slave ships bound for the colonial Caribbean”. The link between the zombie and slavery, Haitian and other plantation contexts, and the dependence of these economies on free labour, notate the complex relations between freedom and slavery, capitalism and labour, life and death. It is not surprising then that a zombie breakout signals the apocalyptic end of society as we know it.

After all, the zombie is now rarely thought of as the original captured and bottled, fragment spirit turned worker of ethnography, but as the twentieth century revenant soulless body turned infectious monster. Deprived of soul, judgement reason and will, this twentieth century monster possesses only the basest of all human faculties: a voracious, blind and cannibalistic appetite. And with that come the proliferate contemporary blood and gore zombie film that include George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, the Resident Evil and Zombieland series, the Train to Busan series and a host of others, in which zombies quickly identify, pursue, pounce on, and rapidly infect human beings. If they labour at all now, it is to satiate their own appetites and increase their numbers.

One crucial and noteworthy change in the zombie film that is set in the US, is that the zombies are (for the most part) racially white. McAlister (2012) remarks on the possible commentary this presents about whiteness and “the nightmarish aspects of modernity. In particular, this monster refers and responds to the nexus of capitalism, race, and religion.” (p461)

Halperin’s film came out at a time when the European world – and by extension, the American world – was beginning to engage with anti-imperialist, anti-colonial movements around the world (in the USA, of course, this took the form of the incipient civil liberties movement). Already coloured as it were, by the terrifying imagination of the inscrutable ‘third world other’, in the work of writers like Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham and EM Forster, these nationalist movements bespoke an agency that the Other was not supposed to have – a volition that slavery and colonial conquest were supposed to have substantially depleted if not killed off. So, even if the witch doctor in White Zombie is himself white, his zombies and the power through which he enslaves them are ‘black’. It is not difficult to see in this an attempt to present slavery as justifiable in the terms of the history and culture of the slaves themselves; Michael Taussig refers to this as history as sorcery, but, in this particular instance, it is probably more accurate to describe it as sorcery as history. Lauro (2017) remarks that writings on Haiti in the USA between 1915 and 1934 displayed a fascination with the myth of the zombie. This was more often than not rendered as the barbarism of the Haitians, thereby tacitly justifying US military intervention in Haiti as a civilising mission. This modern monster then, represents a complex and polyvalent Other.

There has been a whole library of zombie films produced since Halperin’s, but if one looks at the way the figure of the zombie has evolved, it is of particular interest that the horror in the zombie film shifts to hordes of zombies, rather than focussing on a single zombie. ‘From the 1940s to the 1960s, Hollywood produced a slew of “trash films” featuring a variety of mutated, radioactive, or hybrid monsters that were termed zombies.’ (McAlister, 2012). Now, however, the aetiology of the zombie is no longer sorcery and magic, but the uncontrolled excesses of science – a perspective that has remained the dominant causative factor in zombie mythology since then. More recent aetiologies present the zombie as caused by viruses that are created in laboratories (very similar to the rumours surrounding our own COVID-19 virus, which now is touted as capable of leaving severe neurological damage in its survivors). The hordes of monstrous cinematic zombies are increasingly represented, not only as voraciously hungry for human flesh, but infectious and contagious to boot. Their bite transforms the bitten into zombies themselves. This was first seen in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1969). It is significant that this particular version of the zombie emerges in the western imagination during the American misadventure in Vietnam – a point that has not often been remarked on – when upward to 500,000 US military personnel were stationed in Vietnam (Lauro, 2008).

Conventional left-oriented critiques of the zombie film have tended to see it mainly as a metaphor for rampant (American) consumerism, or rather, of ‘hyper-consumerism’, and the attendant culture of ‘dumbing down’ that is perceived to have – or argued as having – affected the USA as a whole. The deep theme of cannibalism is also seen as the dehumanising tendency of this culture, i.e., of its ability to commodify to the extent that the human itself becomes a consumable. This is of course, possible only if the zombie is ultimately represented as itself an aberration of humanity, even sub-human – i.e., bearing the outward appearance of being human, but incapable of anything more than a voracious appetite, especially for human flesh. In this, the zombie may be read as that which seeks obsessively (if also mindlessly) to rediscover its humanity by consuming the human (body).

While these are unexceptionable arguments, I believe it is possible to also see the figure of the zombie – more accurately, the hordes of zombies – as representing the starving millions of the ‘developing’ world. Obviously, it would be very politically incorrect to actually show the zombies as masses of mindless, coloured or otherwise racially and/or ethnically ‘othered’ bodies, located in ‘other’, ‘third world’ countries (especially given that a large part of Hollywood’s market is precisely in those countries). Interestingly though, one of the most successful zombie films of all time, World War Z (Marc Forster, 2013), identifies the source of a zombie plague that rapidly spreads around the world, as located in India. Nevertheless, a repeatedly singular characteristic of zombies in almost all zombie films (apart from their voracious appetite for human flesh) is their predilection to invade and transgress into spaces designed to keep them out – not unlike the tight border regulations of most ‘advanced’, ‘developed’, ‘first world’ countries, designed to keep out what are perceived to be floods of immigrants and refugees from the ‘third world’, seeking to take over and consume what ‘rightfully’ belongs to the citizens of the ‘first world’, and taint or contaminate the exceptional white subject.

This understanding of the zombie film, or at least, of certain predilections in it, suggests the possibility of a cultural vulnerability, or more specifically, of multiple senses of vulnerability underlying the popularity of the genre, and permitting the classification of it as ‘horror’. In the previous paragraph, I noted the sense of vulnerability arising from apprehensions about the economic, social, cultural and political impacts of ‘third world immigration’. Apart from these, one can also identify vulnerability to (a) physical contact with others, especially as a means of transmission of disease and death; (b) the essential unknowability of others (anyone can become a zombie), and hence their essential untrustworthiness; (c) the idea that the values, affects, relations that are often considered the essence of our humanity, can be stripped away, revealing a more fundamental, primeval aspect of being human; and (d) the unanticipated consequences of scientific and technological adventurism.

In this sense, the zombie film is not just a metaphor, but the articulation of a sensibility of vulnerability, and hence also an (inadvertent) warning. The warning is in the fact that these films repeatedly and continuously locate the immediate cause (as different from the geographical source) in the excesses of science, on the one hand, and on the failure of science to correct its own excesses, on the other. In this sense, in the representation of the excesses of technological modernity in these films, we can read an awareness of the price that must be paid for it – the price that Hollywood appears to be aware is being paid for it, by the massive exploitation of the ‘developing’ world by the ‘developed’ world – and the just-below-the-surface fear of the consequences of that exploitation. Thus, from the history-as-sorcery, and sorcery-as-history, aetiology of the zombie, to the present trends in the zombie film, we see a creeping, zombie-like awareness of the ways in which exploitative conditions have themselves changed, even as the exploiters and exploited remain more or less the same, in terms of their geographical location, and in terms of the terms of the exploitation themselves.

What then does the zombie film tell us of what it means to be human, in the light of the above? Most obviously perhaps, that the human is a historically determined concept – shaped by its location in social hierarchies, as much as in history and geography. Most tellingly, however, perhaps it tells us that what it means to be human is ultimately a question of striving continuously not to lose one’s humanity. Karl Marx, writing about ‘alienation’ more than a century ago, said,

labour, life activity, productive life, now appear to man only as means for the satisfaction of a need, the need to maintain physical existence. … In the type of life activity resides the whole character of a species, its species-character; and free, conscious activity is the species-character of human beings. … A direct consequence of the alienation of man from the product of his labour, from his life activity and from his species-life, is that man is alienated from other men. … man is alienated from his species-life means that each man is alienated from others, and that each of the others is likewise alienated from human life. (Marx, 1844)

There is an uncanny similarity to the condition of the zombie, in Marx’s words. Perhaps it is time to tell the ‘first world’ that they have been the zombies all this time, consuming the flesh of the ‘developing world’, believing in their own humanity at the expense of that very humanity. And it is time to be and to stop replicating that model of actual zombie-ness that passes for ‘humanity’, in our own societies in the global South.                                                     

References

• Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari (1983) Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (335)
• Lauro, Sarah Juliet. (2017). Zombie Theory A Reader, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
• (2008). A Zombie Manifesto : The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism. Boundary 2., 35(1), 85–108. DOI 10.1215/01903659-2007-027
• Marx, Karl (1844 [1959]) Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Moscow: Progress Publishers (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm)
• McAlister Elizabeth. (2012). ‘Slaves, Cannibals, and Infected Hyper-Whites: The Race and Religion of Zombies’ Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 2 (Spring 2012), pp. 457-486