Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2021
Abstract
The growing fascination with Zombies is beyond visible when regarding the frequent inclusion of the Zombie into current forms of media. Most contemporary accounts portray Zombies as monsters that lack feelings, consciousness, or morality, and have only one desire: to eat, and therefore kill, humans. Consequently, the correct response to this threat is presented to be killing them too. Nonetheless, comparing different fates of the Zombie reveals that these monsters might not always die, and that their destiny reflects the fears and desires of the society and time period in which they were born. In Haiti, where Zombies originated, they were mainly required to perform physical labour instead of harming other humans, to help certain individuals gain wealth and power. Due to fluid conceptualisations of life, death, and the self, none of the ways to deal with a Zombie in Haitian mythology entails a finite death as it is understood to be in Anglo-American society. However, when looking closer, many contemporary Zombie films raise similar questions about the validity of dichotomous categories such as life and death, and who controls these categories. By regarding Haitian mythology, analysing multiple Zombie films such as White Zombie (Halperin, 1932), 28 Days Later (Boyle et al., 2003) or Warm Bodies (Levine, 2013), and drawing upon theories such as the Freudian death drive and Agamben’s homo sacer, this essay argues that the ‘Western’ Zombie has to die because it dismantles dichotomous categories and represents societal fears that must disappear. However, the Zombie never actually dies because its existence is tied to that of its master, society itself.