So, what are the ideological coordinates within which the zombie, as a cultural signifier, operates? What are the core assumptions that make the zombie a good boogeyman?

Unlike other horror film themes which induce the audience to fear for the ‘innocents’ being killed through wanton violence by, say, a serial killer, the zombie genre, along with the vampire and werewolf genres, are more complex. When attacked by a zombie, a vampire or a werewolf, the victim is not only a victim but, after a period of gestation, also becomes a victimizer. In this sense, each of these monsters are all excellent metaphors to explain the plight of people who believe they live in a fundamentally, irreversibly corrupt or, to use a Judeo-Christian term, “Fallen” world – especially during the nihilistic epoch of Neoliberal global capitalism.

The assumption being made, of course, is that the poor are made poor by a system of exploitation – by being deprived the full value of their labor. This was the thesis put forward in the article “Plutocracy Now” by Kevin Drum featured in the April, 2011 edition of Mother Jones Magazine which led with the headline “Vampire Economy” featuring an illustration of Bela Lugosi sucking the life out of a woman dressed like Uncle Sam. In essence, the victims of the “vampire economy” are exploited to the point of poverty. The victims then become an unwitting but critical component in their own victimization by being forced to work harder and harder just to survive, which in turn only creates more and more profits and power for their exploiters. All of this then reinforces the vampire economy – the system of exploitation.

Additionally, because of the victims’ poverty, the working-poor have no choice but to buy cheaper and cheaper products, which then doubles their victimization by forcing their exploiters to intensify the process of exploitation through cuts to wages and tax-funded social programs in order to maintain profits and remain “competitive.”

How does one escape the vampire economy’s cycle of exploitation and poverty, according to Neoliberals? In essence, they say ‘Become a vampire and you too can enjoy the profits of exploitation.’ In this way the Neoliberals are saying the way to escape the terror experienced by the living who are threatened by the exploitation of the Undead is to become Undead yourself. In fact, when George A. Romero, director of “Night of the Living Dead”, was asked what he would do if he found himself in the zombie apocalypse, without hesitation, he said the first thing he would do is “go right out and get bitten: That way I could live forever.” The logic here is clear: the way to stop being a victim is to consciously and deliberately embrace becoming a victimizer. Of course the problem is also almost immediately apparent: If we all become Undead exploiters of living labor, there will eventually be no living-labor left to exploit and the Undead will eventually become fully dead.

A critical distinction between the zombie and vampire genres, however, can be found in the story-teller’s conception of the original source of the infection – that is, the zombie story generally depicts ‘infection’ as a human product whereas, in the Stoker tradition, the vampire is a product of something altogether evil and completely inhuman. The vampire’s victims are generally intelligent people who succumb to the seduction of an evil plotter in a sort of Faustian bargain. The vampire is conscious of the evil it does and goes to extraordinary measures to conceal its dark secret; zombies, on the other hand, are – in the Žižekian sense – pure ideology, unaware of what they are doing or why they are doing it. Likewise, the zombies’ victims are generally ‘stupid’ people who make some sort of natural human mistake in a moment of fear or hysteria, and end up infected or devoured completely.

Of course the zombie creatures themselves are an easy target for ideology critique. A far more interesting and elusive subject for analysis that requires deeper investigation is not the zombie creature itself, or even the zombie’s victims, but the vague references made to those who create the infections in the first place. (Again, by comparing the vampire to the zombie, we can get a clearer picture of just how deep the ideological infection goes.)

The vampire is generally a supernatural creature and, thus, the culprit is often Satan – in the sense that Satan is conceived as the adversary of God – an evil abnormality in a world which is normally good. The zombie, however, is generally depicted as a product of either human arrogance or stupidity – not supernatural influence. In this sense, the zombie plague is not the product of good or evil but simply the result of a ‘natural’ (in the Original Sin / Manichaean sense) downward dialectic of humanity’s own arrogance and malign stupidity. What’s more, in the vampire genre, to defeat the vampire it is not only necessary to destroy the creature itself, but to seek out the creature’s hive and exercise the evil – to extirpate the evil anomaly from the world. What is significant to note here is that, in the vampire story, mankind is generally regarded as “good” by Nature but deceived by a consciously evil extra-human power. In the zombie genre, the opposite is true: mankind is itself depicted as being stupid, arrogant and/or corrupt by Nature and, therefore, unconsciously driven to sow the seeds of his own destruction.

In Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), for instance, a government agency is to blame for reanimating the dead. In Quarantine (2008) the experiments of a fanatic create the infection and, rather than rushing to the aid of the victims, the government prefers to allow the victims to die or kills them deliberately without ever attempting a rescue or cure. In Night of the Living Dead, the living find themselves trapped in an abandoned house and, while foolishly fighting amongst themselves over a variety of petty issues, many perish. The same is true in Quarantine and many other films in the genre today – over forty years after Romero’s zombies made their debut. The message of the zombie film, then, is clear: mankind is not to be trusted – especially when functioning in groups.

What is depicted in the vampire genre as an evil that originates from something external to man (usually emerging from an otherworldly spiritual evil manifest through the class of feudal aristocrats) is reversed in the zombie genre and conceived as something that originates from within mankind (emerging either from ‘the gov’ment’, the working-class or some far-away place inhabited by amorphous brown people). Understood in this way, the zombie infection is a product of man’s own dark nature unleashed by man’s own stupidity and hubris. In this sense, one might say that the vampire, as it was conceived by Stoker, was emblematic of the late nineteenth century ideological belief that many ordinary people during the period were being oppressed by a “vampire economy” controlled by ancient tyrannies (monarchs, nobles, aristocrats, etc.) still clinging to life in newly constituted democratic societies – a sort of “undead” holdover from the feudal period. To put an end to this external evil, then, all they required was the discipline to resist temptation and maintain unity. The zombie, however, which really came into its own during the 1960s, was emblematic of how deeply the Freudian concept of individual “repression” had come to supplant the Stoker’s more Marxian concept of class “oppression” in popular ideology – especially in the horror genre where the true adversary to mankind was steadily being recast as mankind itself. The source of the zombie infection, at its core, emerged from within mankind.

Robin Wood’s article, “Return of the Repressed” takes the Freudian view and contends that the horror film is comparable to a dream in that, “Dreams [are] the embodiment of repressed desires, tensions, fears that our conscious mind rejects [and] become possible when the “censor” that guards our subconscious relaxes in sleep…”[1] Wood’s analysis is clearly Freudian insofar as it views “desires, tensions and fears” as something repressed, implying that they are drives which originate from within the individual and, for whatever reason, are tenuously held at bay by our conscious mind. But if we continue along this path of logic while understanding ideology as a sort of infection, we can trace the zombie infection back to its origins in the inner-Self. Therefore, according to Freudian logic, we must conclude that the zombie is not in fact an aberration or perversion of man’s “repressed” unconscious Self; rather, the zombie is the awakened, unbridled Id run amok – the logical conclusion of man’s own corrupt essence or “nature” freed from the chains of consciousness. In other words, the zombie’s condition is presented (through subtle ideological signifiers within the basic plot) as mankind’s natural condition without the pretense of liberal consciousness.

From a Marxist perspective, however, the ideological infection that possesses man and induces one group to devour another group through exploitation is conceived as something subtly (or unconsciously) implanted into us – something which can only be overcome through enhancing our consciousness. As Marx argued:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.[2]

Taking Marx’s analysis of ideas and the machinations and means by which they become diffuse in popular culture, we get another take on the anti-social/anti-government conventions of the zombie genre.

Sticking with the interpretation of the “infection” as ideology, the Marxist views the source – not as something internal, natural and universal to the human condition – but rather something unnatural in the sense that it is foisted upon the people and cultivated within them so that it takes on the appearance of emerging from within the natural “Self”. In this sense, Marx is applying the pre-Frankish (Augustinian) Judeo-Christian viewpoint also applied by Stoker to his vampire. The monsters are the enemy of the common man, the oppressed and the poor. What mankind requires in order to defeat the monsters of the vampire economy, according to pre-Augustinian Christianity, Marx and Bram Stoker, is personal fortitude, education, enlightenment and unity. The monster in the zombie story, however, is mankind itself which can only be overcome in the end by surrender and/or annihilation.

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[1] Robin Wood, “Return of the Repressed”, Film Comment; Jul/Aug 1978; 14, 4; ProQuest, p. 25.

[2] See Karl Marx, The German Ideology. Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968)