Zombies a sign of the times

Lousy, good-for-nothing terrorists. As if it isn’t enough that al Qaida – or groups… Lousy, good-for-nothing terrorists. As if it isn’t enough that al Qaida – or groups strikingly similar to al Qaida in their obsessive jihadi-ness – do annoying stuff like blow up train stations and fly airplanes into buildings, they’ve now decided to hit us where it hurts: in our horror movies.

This was a hypothesis I read in The New York Times Sunday Styles section – their motto being “Look at these rich, rich, socially connected people who are getting married. Envy them! Envy!” – the argument being that horror movies are a sort of a Rorschach test for the national unconscious and this test is coming up positive for terrorist influences.

Seriously, let’s look at the evidence we have before us. Horror movies, as everyone is aware of, are a cyclical thing. Certain themes tend to dominate at particular times. What this theory is suggesting is that the monster that dominates the box office is the monster that represents the national fear.

The vampire, always my favorite, enjoyed a brief blood-soaked reign in the late ’80s/early ’90s. “The Lost Boys,” “Interview With the Vampire” and “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” were all moderately successful movies at the time that featured the blood-sucking undead. Perhaps there were other horror films at the time – probably dreary sequels with terrible one-liners and half naked teenagers that didn’t feature vampires – but the undead were enjoying a moment in the pop culture spotlight. And why was that?

Look at what Americans were afraid of and obsessed by – occasionally at the same time – in the late ’80s/early ’90s. AIDS, a blood borne and incurable virus that was striking the young and turning sex into death, was raging uncontrolled in this time period, still stigmatized as a gay disease and still viewed as a death sentence capable of turning a young and healthy body into a crippled and diseased one. Androgyny was falling off Calvin Klein billboards to appear in malls, transforming the hearts and minds of the American youth. And finally the combined 12 years of two Republican regimes had produced an angry alternative generation that demanded a different sort of lifestyle than that of the noxious money- and cocaine-addled yuppies of the ’80s.

The vampire boom had to happen because the vampire image – bloodsucking, overtly sexual, frequently homoerotic and decadent in a decidedly non-bourgeois manner – dovetailed perfectly with that period in time. It’s just like the big werewolf movie boom of the eighties. Everyone then was obsessed with money – greed was legendarily good – and yet everyone felt bad about being greedy. “Voila,” “An American Werewolf in London,” the underrated “Teen Wolf” franchise and the deservedly ignored “Howling” series were all movies that said it was OK to be a bad guy, that becoming a manimal wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to someone. The ’80s were a time when no one felt comfortable with what they were doing, so a monster that lived in a constant state of duality was born, one part good human, one part raging id that did whatever it needed to, no matter what the circumstances. Even barbarians at the gate want to feel understood.

Terrorism is what we worry about nowadays, though, the exterior threat instead of the interior. No one cares about AIDS – Bill Gates will come up with a vaccine, right? – and no one even thinks he should feel bad about being greedy, so what do we worry about? We worry about terrorists. And that’s why we have zombie movies.

Zombies, as the article pointed out, are the ultimate stand-in for terrorism because they do not signal that the system is under attack, they symbolize that the system has been destroyed. If you call the police, there is no response. The police can become the zombies. The ability to survive the zombie lies mostly in how many boards one can use to reinforce the doors of the house in which one is making a last, desperate stand. Zombies are fear and, as such, are a lovely stand-in for the forces that menace our society.

What is one to make, however, of the new reoccurring theme in horror films? I’m speaking of the terrifying image of the ghost child, an adversary frequently spooking audiences in American remakes of J-horror films. Is the scary kid just an imported image and, as such, unworthy of debate? Or is it that American audiences have keyed into the dead child as a different sort of metaphor?

In Symbolism 101, ghosts are frequently found to be a symbol of history and, especially in the case of a child ghost, a history that has never been addressed. These ghost children, with their wide eyes and ominous silences, seem to speak directly to an America that has been having problems with history lately. As wars go poorly and foreign policy fails, the flickering image of the ghost child suggests that things never stay as deeply buried as one might wish and the past is always waiting to recommence.

If you are between the ages of 37 and 41, excluding 39, and would like to participate in an investigational study of a generic medication, please e-mail kjs34@pitt.edu.