A major literary influence on the Gothic scene in the 1980s and ’90s was Anne Rice‘s reimagining of the idea of the vampire. Beginning with Interview with the Vampire (1976) and continuing for ten more novels, Rice’s characters, most famously Lestat, were depicted as struggling with a kind of existential isolation; this along with their ambivalent or tragic sexuality was instrumental in casting the vampire image as a popular cultural representation of human isolation.
Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight saga, begun in 2005, is a series of novels and films very popular with teenage readers. The series features a struggle between werewolves and vampires and treats both kinds of characters as misunderstood romantic heroes.
Along the way, we’ve had responsible vampires who feed without killing, blood banks for vampires, righteous versus unrighteous vampires, and vampire rights movements; moreover, issues like HIV and drug addiction have found analogies in vampirism. The latest TV vampire hit, True Blood (based on a series of novels by Charlaine Harris), is southern gothic with a wide-ranging cast of mythic subtypes, including werewolves, maenads, fairies, shapeshifters, and, of course, star-crossed lovers. The central axis of the plot is the effort of the vampire community to “come out of the coffin” and go mainstream—an effort made possible by the invention of a synthetic blood available in bars and convenience stores. Mainstreaming is opposed by some vampires and many humans, prominent among them an intolerant religious organization (analogies to the gay rights movement are not subtle).
There are those who think the vampire needs to be rescued from this existential earnestness and restored to its rightful and villainous place in the dark, free to run wild and dangerous. And it’s not all fiction.
The Highgate Vampire is the resident vampire in Highgate Cemetery, in northern London, one of seven private cemeteries established in the Victorian period when the churchyards in the city were too full to accept more bodies. Beginning in the late 1960s, there have been “sightings,” which, despite their original very disparate descriptions, quickly settled on the presence of vampires. (This is not surprising. Anyone who has ever walked Highgate’s atmospheric overgrown paths and mused on its ornate Victorian graves in various states of decay and collapse readily senses that this is a site waiting for an urban ghoul.) The manic vampire hunting that followed coincided with the decade’s increasing flirtation with the Gothic and the occult. Hammer Studios was quick to use the cemetery as the backdrop for Dracula A.D. 1972—a film devoid of merit except for its setting. Of course the place has an older association. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Lucy Westenra, who succumbs to Dracula and becomes a vampire herself, is buried there (though the cemetery is renamed Kingstead by Stoker). So it is to be expected that a vampire would show up in Highgate, inspiring late-night chases, grave desecrations, a possible staking or two, and a vampire-hunting frenzy that is still sorting itself out in the writings of two rival vampire slayers named Manchester and Farrant. The process of enacting the rituals from stories seems to be urban legend in the making; what is the point of the lushly gloomy Victorian cemetery without a specter? Moreover, with so many graves to sleep in during the daylight hours, a vampire could hardly do better than Highgate.
As legend has always warned, vampires plan to be around for a long time.
By comparison with vampires, zombies would seem to be a hard sell. Less literary in origin than the other species of revenant, who generally return as specific individuals with names and stories to tell, the zombie does have an ancestor of a sort. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster is not technically a zombie but is considered a forerunner. Shelley’s creature is a revivified collection of dead body parts, but it possesses superior intelligence, considerable eloquence, and arguably greater moral awareness than its creator, who abandons it in disgust at the very moment of its creation. The creature craves human companionship and is murderous only in proportion to its being deprived of that desired object. In James Whale’s 1931 film, Boris Karloff’s creature physically resembles the modern zombie with its stiff gait, grunting speech, and hooded eyes. Yet like its literary ancestor it is more sinned against than sinning.
Your more typical zombie is not looking for love, only for flesh to feed upon. Modern zombies are thought to have arisen in response to three types of stimuli: sorcery (black magic), scientific experiment, and, more recently, atomic or biological accident.
William Seabrook’s The Magic Island, a 1929 self-described travelogue set in American-occupied Haiti, was one of the earliest representations of the zombie. In it, former slaves are regenerated by supernatural means, specifically voodoo ritual. Though only one chapter dealt with zombies, the book appeared during the monster craze and had wide-ranging influence. Seabrook attempted a precise definition of the Haitian zombie as he understood it:It seemed that while the zombie came from the grave, it was neither a ghost, nor yet a person who had been raised like Lazarus from the dead. The zombie, they say, is a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life—it is a dead body which is made to walk and act and move as if it were alive. People who have the power to do this go to a fresh grave, dig up the body before it has had time to rot, galvanize it into movement, and then make of it a servant or slave, occasionally for the commission of some crime, more often simply as a drudge around the habitation or the farm, setting it dull heavy tasks, and beating it like a dumb beast if it slackens.2
Resurrected from the dead to work in the sugar cane plantations, these zombies represent colonial exploitation of a racial underclass. Their role as horror creatures is very much underplayed. Here the zombie’s distinguishing characteristic—its mindlessness—is an aspect of its helplessness and its vulnerability to manipulation by self-serving forces. A film version of the book played a major role in shaping the physical image of the zombie.
White Zombie (1932) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943) confirmed this identification with voodoo practices; both films feature the transformation of a white woman into a zombie by black magic. Both films also continue the implicitly racist use of the zombie figure, associating it with historical slavery in the Caribbean. Decades later, even after mainstream zombie film and literature had taken a different direction, an ethnobotanist named Wade Davis wrote The Serpent and the Rainbow (1987), in which he claimed to have found a “scientific” connection between Haitian zombies and the administration of a toxic drug called tetrodotoxin. While his science was quickly discredited, the association of zombies with scientific experiment has persisted, thanks, in part, to the book’s rapid repackaging as a horror film.
However, it has been the films of George Romero that have made the deepest mark on the rehabilitation of this seemingly unsympathetic figure. Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985), Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007), and Survival of the Dead (2010), along with their various remakes, portray a progressively darkening picture of human civilization and perhaps even a gradual shift in sympathy toward zombie “culture.” The films are also the source of the familiar images of shambling hordes of nameless, flesheating undead assailing the farmhouses and shopping malls and bunkers—where civilized humans make a last stand.
Today zombies seem to be getting faster, smarter, and more organized. The work of Max Brooks, such as Zombie Survival Guide (2003) and World War Z (2006), has explored the apocalyptic connotations as well as the spread of zombieism by infection rather than as the result of voodoo or other forms of sorcery. Using a documentary style, Brooks takes aim at the widespread fearfulness on the planet, the bumbling and corruption involved in government attempts to counter disasters, and the global nature of the human predicament.
Milestones in the zombie craze must include Michael Jackson’s music video “Thriller”(1983), which features the morphing of shy “boyfriend” Michael into a hugely appealing zombie version of himself. He is joined by a group of the undead from the local graveyard, who twirl, stagger, and slide
with a finesse any self-respecting zombie might long to emulate.
Another notable literary take is 2009’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, a comic attempt to explore the violence seething below the surface of a tightly reined-in society (Regency England) and the concomitant violence, verbal and otherwise, used to combat it. Elizabeth Bennet becomes a particularly accomplished zombie destroyer. Not surprisingly this talent is the chief component in Mr. Darcy’s attraction to her, and their side-by-side battles are a wry form of foreplay. Other invasions of the literary canon by zombies are anticipated.
What is the perennial fascination with this rather blank monster, who hangs around in groups and says almost nothing? For starters, the zombie is an avenging corpse, and thus a trope for our fear of and curiosity about death. In addition, zombie flesh is available to take the form of all downtrodden, marginalized, exploited subjects, who may at any time enact a faceless march against their oppressors (and maybe even their supporters—remember, they’re mindless), threatening the civilized order within which we desperately if futilely take refuge.
Clive Barker, filmmaker and scriptwriter, sums up the warring emotions of sympathy and fear:Zombies are the liberal nightmare. Here you have the masses, whom you would love to love, appearing at your front door with their faces falling off; and you’re trying to be as humane as you possibly can, but they are, after all, eating the cat. And the fear of mass activity, of mindlessness on a national scale, underlies my fear of zombies.3
The term werewolf literally means “wolf-man.” Except in certain rare versions of the myth (the 1943 film Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man is one), werewolves are not the “undead.” Instead, they seem a response to other kinds of anxiety—about the instability of what we call human nature and the animism of the natural world.
References to werewolves in Western culture go back at least as far as Patronius and Ovid. The wolf makes regular, villainous appearances in the tales of Aesop, Grimm, and Perrault. Anxiety about wolves is encoded in the earliest stories we tell our children: “The Three Little Pigs,” “Peter and the Wolf,” “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “The Wolf and the Seven Kids.” Wolf anxiety understandably derived from a well-deserved fear of forests and other wild places, especially in the northern hemisphere, on the part of those who lived adjacent to such places or whose business took them into the woods. Wolves, usually the dominant predator in their habitats, show up most often in the myths and folk beliefs of human cultures who share habitats with them. Warriors who covered themselves in animal hides (typically bear hides, though wolf pelts were also used) were called berserkers, and their ferocious, seemingly uncontrolled fighting led to the English word “berserk.” Wolves appear as the consorts of witches and as potent figures in animal rituals. Britain, which exterminated wolves in the early modern period, has fewer tales to tell, and these are more likely to be stories of hellhounds.
Werewolves are also called lycanthropes, and “lycanthropy” means the transformation of human into wolf, but it is also a clinical term for a mental illness in which the patient believes he has been turned into an animal of some kind. Undoubtedly the fact that there are documented cases of lycanthropy has served to weaken the boundary between science and superstition for some. But it is probably historical events such as the eighteenth-century “beast of Gevaudan” attacks in southwestern France that helped to solidify the myth of the preternatural werewolf. In a short time, almost one hundred people were killed, mostly women and children, and the elusive beast attained mythic size and ferocity, until a smaller animal or perhaps a number of ordinary animals were killed and wolf attacks resumed their normal rate of frequency.
Early legend attributed lycanthropy to a variety of causes: a pact with the devil, an accident of birth, a curse put upon the victim. Only recently has the most recognizable method of contagion, the bite of a werewolf, become dominant. Other elements like the full moon and the silver bullet are also recent additions to the myth.
Though there were werewolf films that preceded it, The Wolf Man (1941) with Lon Chaney Jr. gave this creature a Hollywood face, the equivalent of Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein monster and Bela Lugosi’s Dracula. Perhaps because it had no single literary source, the film was able to carve the fable somewhat definitively into the imagination of popular culture. It enshrined the sympathetic, victimized wolfman, who hates and fears his own condition and who, in the end, seeks death to escape the danger of harming the woman he loves. The film also showcased the transformation process—roughly six hours were required to apply Chaney’s makeup—so that the fearsome look of the human as his lycanthropy comes over him became the dominant motif of werewolf films.
The werewolf speaks to our fear of “the animal inside us,” that uncivilized remnant that we try to suppress, so memorably metaphorized in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In many cases that inner animal is specifically identified with unbridled sexuality; in The Company of Wolves (1979), Angela Carter, revisiting the fairy-tale connection, has the heroine Little Red conquering the male beast by meeting him more than halfway and dominating him sexually.
Ultimately, the werewolf evokes mixed emotions about the repressed self, capable when released of uninhibited aggression.
According to the vampire novelist Anne Rice:
. . . the werewolf in many instances embodies a potent blending of masochistic and sadistic elements. On the one hand man is degraded as he is forced to submit to the bestial metamorphosis; on the other hand he emerges as a powerful sadistic predator who can, without regret, destroy other men. The werewolf as both victim and victimizer, wrapped in magic, may arouse emotions in us that are hard to define.4
It is that hard-to-define emotion, call it wildness or elation, running alongside horror and fear, that is so very intriguing.
Ghosts are certainly the most amorphous and ubiquitous class of the undead; one can be sure of finding ghost stories in every culture. Earlier ghosts were most often represented as possessed of a corporeal body, attired in the clothes they wore in life, and capable of physical interactions with the living. More recent emanations tend toward the spectral and ethereal.
The existence of ghosts is associated with ancestor worship, the need to honor and appease (really reverse sides of the same impulse) the dead of one’s clan and the expectation that the dead could and did interfere in the affairs of the living. Of course the hope was always to turn that interference into an advantage for one’s self and a problem for one’s enemies. Though ancestor worship was more commonly practiced in Asia and Africa, Western vestiges are found in such festivals as the Day of the Dead and All Souls’ Day in early November.
Ghosts appear to have played a fairly limited role in Greek and Roman religion, where rationality among the Greeks and religious formalism among the Romans did not lend themselves to excessive anxiety about the supernatural. There are references to ghosts in both The Iliad and The Odyssey, but these appearances are important only as they convey information to the living. The returning dead are not objects of fear or even surprise. They are an accepted part of the natural world.
Today ghosts are most readily associated with “unfinished business,” remorse, or warnings, or vengeance, unpaid debts and purloined property, or seeking release from some betrayal on their part or by another, before they can achieve a final resting place. Improper burial also lends itself to unrest. While zombies may roam, werewolves run wild, and vampires fly, ghosts are typically associated with a particular space, whether castle, house, or hollow, where they might be seen peering from windows and parapets, or glimpsed in solitary walks, accosting the living who venture near. The locale seems to afford some residual energy that animates the ghost—this is where something important happened in the individual’s earthly life. But though they may look hungrily on, no flesh or blood or fur or fangs are involved. They are not biters. While they can be angry and destructive, it is relatively rare for a ghost to
physically assault the living. Why then is their power so frightening?
Although the ancients may have regarded them with little alarm, ghostly appearances in later times are more likely to be experienced as transgressive and, even in their milder emanations, disturbing. The softening of the boundaries between the solidity of life and the unknowability of death can only create unease. Not that the presence is always undesirable; in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff begs the dying Cathy to haunt him—but the rest of the community is not so pleased when she does.
Ghost, like all other supernatural phenomena, are captured earliest in folktales, myths, and religious traditions. In medieval religious practice, it was accepted that ghosts could be condemned to unrest as part of their punishment, but conjuring ghosts was considered a sinful practice akin to devil worship.
The most recognizable versions of the modern ghost story flourished in the Victorian and Edwardian periods and through the end of World War I (1840–1920). The genre was probably energized by the fashion of lavish funerals, ornate cemeteries, and elaborate mourning rituals, all of which favored the dramatization of the emotions surrounding death over sublimation. In conjunction with this expansion of the rituals of death, the vogue for spiritualism, necromancy, and mesmerism in the midnineteenth century created a rich medium in which the castles, monasteries, and subterranean crypts, the habitats of the Gothic ghost, gave way to the chambers and laboratories where paranormal activity could flourish.
Vampires, Zombies, Werewolves and Ghosts Page 2
