We heart zombies

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This is the full text of a short paper given as part of Cambridge University's Festival of Ideas, on Thursday 25 Oct 2012

LIVING THE DREAM: LOVING THE NIGHTMARE

While I teach Film Theory and related matters here at Anglia Ruskin, I'm largely here tonight in my capacity as an author [here I wave the Viking Dead book]

First, a confession. I have never read a zombie novel. That's bad, I know, considering I've written one. My points of reference, in terms of writing, are from elsewhere – and my inspirations zombiewise are almost all cinematic. I think that's important to note: the zombie – by which I mean the modern, Romero-style zombie with which we are all familiar, as distinct from its voodoo ancestor – is primarily a cinematic phenomenon.

The strong similarities between cinema and world of the dream – the literal, nocturnal dream – have long been noted. We are in a dark place. We see images whose significance we do not at first properly understand – there are characters, situations, interactions, scares, thrills, tensions. A dream is like reality, but it is a heightened version of reality. In both dreams and film we witness things we cannot in life. Real reality is bound by the weight of matter, in our cinematic dreamworlds, worlds of pure image, we experience a kind of boundless potential. Anything is possible. When dreaming, of course, we believe it to be real. In the cinema, too, we allow ourselves to believe in its reality – until finally awakened by the roll of the credits.

Being shown possibilities, and believing they could be real, is really what speculative fiction of any kind is about. Given this, it is not hard to see the value of dreams – or, at the very least, their ability to be wierdly entertaining.

But what about nightmares?

Film theorist Robin Wood refers to horror movies as "our collective nightmares". A devotee of psychoanalysis, he means this quite literally – that they provide us with a means of safely exorcising our primal demons. This doesn't mean they're not also genuinely terrifying, of course, just as literal nightmares are. So the question is, why do we want them at all? Even if we believe that nightmares serve some important psychological purpose, few of us ever actually want to have them. So why do we return to cinematic nightmares over and over again?

Well, let's take a tough case – the ultimate nightmare: the zombie apocalypse...

The western world loves zombies. But what, exactly, is there to love? It's such an obvious question that we hardly ever stop to ask it. But we should. Most of us would probably regard someone who yearns for apocalypse as completely crazy. Then we sit down to enjoy a good zombie film. An individual who expressed a sincere desire to be a zombie we would consider strange indeed. But then we take part in zombie walks and eagerly prepare our zombie costumes for Halloween. Subliminally, as in a dream, we seem to desire it, too. Dreams are about desires as well as fears.

Dreams also operate symbolically, by having something represent something else. So, let's take a moment to consider what zombies may represent.

Zombies are dead, and the dead belong in the earth. So, the zombie evokes a primal fear – fear of death, the looming presence that relentlessly stalks us, and from which we can run, but cannot hide.

Taking another cue from Robin Wood, we might think of them in terms of "the return of the repressed", in which the earth represents our unconscious and the dead the repressed material that won't stay put, rising up to threaten rationality and social order. The threat to social order, in this case, is total. The zombie has role, no ambition, no gender. It has no family and no nationality. It recognises no boundaries.

With apologies to Dr Seuss, the zombie isn't here or there, the zombie's with us everywhere.

The zombie represents the end. 'Z'. Omega. The end of us and the end of days. It brings not merely breakdown or war, but apocalypse.

The zombie is anonymous. There are no individuals, no zombie celebrities – no Dracula, no Frankenstein's monster, no Wolf Man and no Mr Hyde. They are legion. A faceless mass.

The zombie represents the destruction of identity. The eradication of humanity – in all senses of that phrase. The zombie is without thought or care. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear.

These zombies are not the servants of any voodoo master, nor the result of any occult curse. They are a contagion. Something that can infect us if we do not take precautions.

The zombie eats. That is its one purpose. We might say it is the ultimate consumer. It confronts us with a dual fear, that of becoming both the consumer and of being consumed. Of becoming walking meat. There is an insistent emphasis on the physical in these films – on gore, and flesh.

So much for the nightmare.

David Mamet says "Every fear hides a wish". But what is there in this comprehensive catalogue of disasters that any of us could possibly desire?

To get at this, I think we need to consider the landscapes of modern zombie mythology.

In the recent wave of zombie films, from 28 Days Later to Zombieland and beyond, one message is clear: get out of the city. It becomes a repeated motif. By the time The Walking Dead hits the screens, it is a given that the city is the heart of the corruption, and that only by starting again out in the country do survivors stand a chance.

Max Brook's ingenious distillation of American zombie mythology – The Zombie Survival Guide – states the case succinctly: Rule 12: 'Avoid urban areas'.

The city belongs to the living dead.

In the real world, the city pampers us, makes us comfortable, gives us a limitless choice of things to consume. In a sense, it connects us. But it disconnects us too – from the land, from nature, from the basic survival skills of our ancestors. The heroes of zombie films are those who can recover those skills. As Romero's Dawn of the Dead shows us, they also have to draw a line under capitalist, consumerist society, to let go the now useless consumer goods of the shopping mall. If they fail, they will themselves be consumed.

The city also disconnects us from our own nature. It alienates us from others, makes us too busy to bother with our neighbours. It makes us less human. The globalised city goes further still. Like a zombie horde it recognises no boundaries, it wanders without restriction and reproduces itself wherever people gather – wherever the meat is. It even threatens the category of 'city' itself. The city now comes to us – through our screens, our clothes, our purchases – and makes us citizens not of a locale, but of a concept – replacing physical places with what anthropologist Marc Augé calls "non-places".

Even my own novel, which took zombies as far from the cities of the modern world as I thought it was possible to go, the theme that repeatedly, insistently emerged was that of connection to, or disconnection from, the land.

The deep fear evoked by the American zombie mythology, then, is not the outlandish possibility of being pursued or killed, but the far more disturbing anxiety of a breakdown of all categories – of the collapse not just of society, but of the distinction between one and the other, us and them. A breakdown of all context, and therefore of meaning. A terror, in fact, of globalisation and modernity, which renders even geography irrelevant, disconnecting landscape from the specifics of the land, making it generic – a place that is no place. It is a fear of becoming nothing. Signifying nothing. It is fear that the globalised city has already fatally infected us, already rendered us meaningless – flesh, and no more, belonging nowhere. That we are already the walking dead.

When George Romero was asked what zombies represented, he had a one word answer: "Us."

And yet... Within this fear is hidden a wish – a wish to see the city fall. To sweep away all that confines and makes demands upon us. To be unfettered by modernity, to no longer be oppressed by the stuff of capitalism or culture. To be simple – a creature of instinct like the babe in the crib, without thought, without care, without responsibilities. To be a zombie. This is why the end of the world as we know it gives us a curious thrill – why the base existence of the undead holds a certain allure. It may be impossible, irrational, destructive, but we can still dream it. We can still forget ourselves from time to time. We should. That, it seems to me, is one of the great possibilities offered by cinema. And if in doing so, we can also acknowledge our inner zombie, and even love it, well, maybe there's hope for humanity after all.