The appeal of vampires is easier to guess at: they’re suave, sexy, sophisticated. They’re strong and swift, they stay up all night drinking, and their hair always looks good. Who wouldn’t want this kind of supercool, metrosexual afterlife (the problem of evil aside)? Zombies, on the other hand, are “all messed up,” as someone says in Night of the Living Dead. They leak disgusting fluids, parts of their bodies are often missing, and they have terrible table manners. They can’t talk or operate any machinery more complicated than a club. They don’t even seem to know what’s going on around them, beyond the fact that they’re hungry /pissed off/both. So what’s to identify with?
In a way, the question answers itself. Zombies are purely creatures of the id, dedicated to mindless self-gratification and nothing else. They don’t care that they look like crap. Being a zombie means never having to say you’re sorry—or anything else, for that matter. Of course, one could argue, many frat boys achieve this same condition without having to be dead first.
The deadness of zombies is obviously a key part of their appeal. They represent our deepest fear—our own mortality—rendered in the most horrifying way thinkable. They’re not just dead, but hyperdead: in them, all the processes of decay and putrefaction are exaggerated, animated, burlesqued. Further, they continually bring more bodies into the same state they’re in. When we see them crowded around the flimsy cabin or schoolbus we’re holed up in, we know it won’t be long before we’re them, they’re us. In imagining zombiehood, we imagine our own annihilation—but we also imagine, as a result of that annihilation, our entry into a condition of immense power, a condition in which we are the terrifying thing that shambles mercilessly across the landscape, devoid of mercy, kindness, or guilt. We become the destroyer. Hardcore. Wicked. Badass.
Whereas the vampire embodies a form of Nietzschean super-humanity, beyond good and evil, the zombie goes even further beyond. For the vampire, knowledge that one is doing evil still remains as a concept, and with this knowledge comes the erotic charge of unheeded guilt. For the zombie, this is all a non-issue. The zombie is sub-Nietschean, sub-animal, really: as K. Silem Mohammad suggests (Chapter 8) it is a Spinozan force of decomposition, a completely non-moral and completely liberated interaction of matter with other matter.
Zombies are the face in the mirror that doesn’t look back, memento mori without the moral. They are the perfect self-expression of an age in which the (personal, romantic, heroic) self has become an ever more difficult construct to sustain. From one perspective, our identification with zombies could be seen as cynical self-loathing; from another, as a creative negotiation of our transformation from human to posthuman.
As they get fiercer, faster, and more numerous, zombies more aptly continue to describe a grotesque allegory of our own living-dead existence. Like real-world terrors, they’re not going away, even as we convert our barricaded malls into temporary zones of luxury and consumer indulgence. In fact, the supreme irony is that zombies have become yet one more desired consumer object—fantastical distractions from the Real that they reflect. And therein, perhaps, lies their real appeal: what better to help us shut out the things we don’t want to think about than distorted, obviously unreal, and far less threatening versions of those same things?
PART I
It’s Alive (Sort Of)
1
The Badness of Undeath
RICHARD GREENE
It’s an interesting feature of horror films that most people either like them or dislike them for precisely the same reason: they are terrifying. Those who like them enjoy the “rush” of being terrified and those who don’t like them find being frightened distressful, unpleasant, or uncomfortable. Few, if any, enjoy horror films but fail to find them frightening to some degree. One reason that horror scares us is because we have an ability to empathize with characters as they are being chased, slaughtered, mauled, impaled, burned, eaten, or tortured. We can easily imagine what it would be like to be hung on a meat hook by Leatherface while still alive or to have one’s jugular vein sliced by one of Freddy Krueger’s razor-sharp “fingers,” and it scares us. Horror films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and A Nightmare on Elm Street frighten us, in part, by playing on our fear of death. After all death is regarded, at least by most folks, as a bad thing for the person who dies.
While people’s emotional responses toward death range from mild anxiety to all-out panic, there is a scenario that frightens us even more. Films about the Undead, such as Night of the Living Dead, Dracula, Nosferatu, and White Zombie to name a few, trade on this more terrifying prospect: they threaten us with the possibility of becoming Undead ourselves. There is no shortage of examples in zombie and vampire films of characters that either kill themselves or ask others to kill them so as to avoid becoming Undead. Being Undead is generally regarded as a worse state than being dead.1 Philosophers have long debated the question of why death is bad for the person who dies. I’d like to address the question of why Undeath—the state of being Undead—is bad for the person who becomes Undead. A successful account of the badness of Undeath must accomplish two things: it must identify the feature or features of Undeath that make it bad, and it must explain why Undeath is generally regarded as being worse than death.
Depending on how one defines it, there are a number of different ways of being Undead. K. Silem Mohammad and I define Undeath as that class of beings who at some point were living creatures, have died, and have come back such that they are not presently “at rest.” On this account, all vampires, mummies, and ghosts, most zombies, some skeletons (such as the Lost Skeleton of Cadavra), and miscellaneous other animated corpses, such as the manipulated dead from Donnie Darko, would count as being Undead. For simplicity’s sake and because when people are queried about the Undead, vampires and zombies come to mind much more frequently,2 I’ll restrict my discussion to the badness of being either a vampire or a zombie.
Some Haunted Housekeeping
As is usually the case when one raises a philosophical question, there is a natural temptation to respond to the question by rejecting it. Rejecting the question of why Undeath is a bad thing for the person who is Undead might take one of two forms: (1) one might cite counterexamples to the claim that Undeath is bad, perhaps by identifying Undead beings whose existence is, intuitively, not bad, or (2) one might take issue with the central arguments for the view that Undeath is bad. While the latter approach is promising and will receive much attention over the course of this chapter, I’d like to quickly dismiss the first strategy. Let’s briefly address the notion that for many, being Undead isn’t bad.
There are a number of Undead creatures in recent horror films and television shows who stand out from the crowd by avoiding many if not most of the trappings of being Undead. For example on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the vampires Angel and Spike both have souls by the end of the series. As a consequence they are able to have meaningful relationships, experience strong emotions, perform good deeds, and fight on the side of good. Intuitively, it’s not obviously bad to be Angel or Spike. Similarly, in Interview with the Vampire Louis is able, albeit with some difficulty, to resist his more basic vampiric urges, and hence, lives on the blood of chickens and rats. In Shaun of the Dead, Shaun’s best friend Ed experiences no qualitative change in his daily existence upon becoming a zombie—at film’s end his normal routine still mostly involves lounging on the sofa, playing video games, and hanging out with Shaun. Count Blah, the muppet-esque vampire on the television series Greg the Bunny, thoroughly enjoys all the pleasures that life has to offer (“She went down for The Count, blah”). And Casper the friendly ghost. . . . Well, you get the idea. One thing that all these characters have in common is that they are not in any important sense evil, though one probably wouldn’t want to spend more than a few hours in the presence of Count Blah. This raises the question: to what extent do these characters and others like them pose a problem for our more traditional conceptions of the Undead?
Once a ficti
onal concept such as vampirism or zombiedom, or a character such as Dracula or Nosferatu, is established, intuitively it seems inappropriate for subsequent writers to come along and alter that concept or character. It’s almost as if a work of art is being altered against the will of its creator, in much the same way that there is something creepy going on when black-and-white films get “colorized.” If, for example, a movie were to come out that portrayed Atticus Finch, from To Kill a Mockingbird, as a narrow-minded bigot, people would rightly feel that the original work had been harmed or denigrated in some fashion. This line of thought provides us with a reason for thinking that “good” vampires and zombies should not be considered when discussing features of vampires and zombies in general. That being said, the conception that most people have of vampires and zombies is one that has developed over time as various writers have contributed to the legend. For example, some of the more familiar aspects of the vampire story, such as an aversion to holy water and the ability to take other forms, were added later. So we also have good reason for treating subsequent modifications to basic concepts as legitimate. The question is where to draw the line.
My proposal is to treat those modifications to the vampire and zombie mythologies that enhance them without drastically altering our understanding of what it means to be a vampire or a zombie as legitimate modifications, and to treat those modifications that radically alter our concepts, such as the existence of “good” vampires or zombies with whom one can spend quality time playing video games, as interesting hypothetical experiments. It’s fun to think about what it would be like if there were vampires with souls or if there were horny muppet-vampires, but these thought-experiments shouldn’t then serve to change what we believe about vampires and zombies. For this reason, I’ll not consider Angel, Spike, Louis, Count Blah, Ed, and others of their kind to be “real” vampires and zombies. In this chapter all vampires and zombies will be considered to be unfriendly and dangerous. Moreover, all vampires will be considered to be cursed or damned and evil by nature, and all zombies, though not cursed or evil by nature, will be understood to behave in ways that we normally consider to be evil.
Deprivation and Desire-Frustration
Let’s begin our search for the badness of Undeath by looking at what philosophers have to say about the badness of death. Since death and Undeath have something in common—they can both be contrasted with being alive—it may turn out that the thing that is objectionable about death is the same thing that makes Undeath bad. At minimum, looking at the badness of death should serve to provide a useful point of departure for our inquiry into the badness of Undeath.
Since it is not obvious that death is a bad thing if there is an afterlife involving some sort of reward for a life lived well, philosophers working on the question of death’s badness typically consider death to be an experiential blank. That is, they consider that death doesn’t involve any conscious experiences for the person who is dead. On this view, death is not a state in which some part of us lives on after our physical bodies have died. Of course, if philosophers are wrong about this, then the badness of both death and Undeath is easily accounted for. Undeath is bad because one misses out on whatever rewards one has coming in the afterlife. Death, on the other hand, is simply not a bad thing (unless one has misbehaved to such a degree that the afterlife promises punishment instead of reward). Since there is little consensus about whether there is an afterlife, and if there is, about what it’s like, it is appropriate to address the question of death’s badness by assuming that death is an experiential blank.
If death is simply the cessation of life and nothing more, then it is not clear why death is thought to be a bad thing. As Epicurus points out, “Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.” 3 If death is considered to be an experiential blank, then the badness of death cannot be accounted for in terms of some sort of unpleasant experience; the badness of death must lie elsewhere. Many (perhaps most) theorists working on this issue today endorse either some version of Thomas Nagel’s deprivation view,4 which is the view that the badness of death lies in its depriving persons of the good things that life has to offer (the praemia vitae), or they endorse some version of Bernard Williams’s desire-frustration view,5 which is the view that death is bad insofar as it frustrates certain of our important desires.
While perhaps providing the best hope for accounting for the badness of death, the deprivation view isn’t able to account for the badness of Undeath, since the Undead are not deprived of the praemia vitae. Vampires, for example, in virtue of being immortal, have the opportunity to experience an infinite quantity of fine things. Of course, there are a number of desirable things that vampires cannot experience, such as the pleasure associated with a fine meal (a glass of warm blood notwithstanding) or the warmth of the sun’s rays on one’s skin. This, however, doesn’t help the deprivation view, as the sheer quantity of positive experiences that vampires will have (in virtue of being immortal) will far outweigh those experiences lost due to being a vampire.
Admittedly, the deprivation view fares a little better at accounting for the badness of being a zombie, since zombies seem able to have only a few experiences. Mostly they stagger, grunt, and eat human flesh and brains. If one were to become a zombie, presumably one wouldn’t derive a lot of pleasure from listening to the symphony, studying philosophy, or watching a good movie, nor would one have close personal relationships and the like. Still, the badness of being a zombie doesn’t seem to lie in the fact that we are being deprived of these things. If it did, then being dead wouldn’t be preferable to being a zombie. Being dead would be on par with being a zombie, in terms of badness. Moreover, although zombies do not enjoy many of the finer things in life, it’s not clear that they don’t experience as much pleasure as do living human beings, or even more. For all we know there is no more satisfying experience to be had than the experience of being a zombie and biting into a fresh living human brain. Until you’ve staggered a mile in someone’s shoes . . . Thus, we can reasonably conclude that the deprivation view does not account for the badness of Undeath.
Proponents of the desire-frustration view of death’s badness reason as follows:1. If I desire something, then I have a prima facie reason to prefer a state of affairs in which I get it to one in which I don’t get it.
2. Death precludes some desires being fulfilled.
3. Thus, I have a reason to avoid death.
4. If something is to be avoided, then that thing is bad.
5. Therefore, death is bad.
So life is preferable to death, because when one is alive, one’s desires can be satisfied, but when one is dead, one’s desires are necessarily thwarted. Of course, if one desires death, then this argument doesn’t work, but, in such cases, it’s not clear that death is a bad thing. Typically people don’t desire death, unless life is bad (or at minimum, life seems bad).
Will this line of reasoning also serve to capture the badness of Undeath? At first glance it is a promising strategy. If one becomes a vampire or a zombie at some point in the future, then most of one’s present desires will go unfulfilled. For example, my desire to win the first Nobel Prize in Philosophy certainly won’t be satisfied if I am a zombie. My desire to spend my retirement lounging in the sun on a beach in Santa Barbara will go unfulfilled if I am a vampire. My desire to be invited to the office holiday party will not be realized if I am either a vampire or a zombie (my colleagues are adventurous and fun-loving, but they have their limits).
Though promising, the desire-frustration account cannot account for the badness of Undeath. The problem is that mere desire frustration is not sufficient for a state of affairs being bad. For example, when I was around ten years old I had a desire to be a major league baseball player when I grew up. When I was in my twenties and thirties, this desire was going unfulfilled. It doesn’t follow that because my desire was not being fulfilled, my situation was bad. This is because desires change. When
I was in my twenties and thirties I had no desire to be a baseball player. In fact, since I wouldn’t have enjoyed being a baseball player, it is plausible to suppose that the situation in which my desire had been fulfilled would have been worse than the one in which it had not been fulfilled.
This does not pose a problem for the desire-frustration account of death’s badness. A proponent of the desire-frustration view can hold that as long as a previous desire has been cancelled or replaced by some later desire, then desire-frustration is not a bad thing. So my unfulfilled desire to be a major league baseball player didn’t lead to a bad state of affairs, because it was replaced by my desire to be a philosophy professor. Death is bad, on this view, because it is a state that involves unfulfilled desires that have not been cancelled or replaced. Undeath, on the other hand, is a state in which one’s desires have been replaced. A desire for scotch has been replaced with a desire for blood. A desire for pork roast has been replaced by a desire for raw human flesh. So Undeath does not lead to desire-frustration; rather, it leads to changed desire, which, as we’ve seen, is not necessarily a bad thing. So the desire-frustration account is not able to account for the badness of death.
Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy Page 2
