Clowns, spiders, ghosts, vampires (the non-sparkly kind), things under the bed, heights, giving speeches . . . we humans sure have a lot of fears. Did you know people fear public speaking more than they fear death? That's just silly. But why do we fear clowns? Personally, I blame Stephen King. Despite the fact that zombies seem trendy, our fear of them is not. In fact, the first reference to the living undead predates the bible.
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| "28 Weeks Later," Fast Zombies |
In "The Epic of Gilgamesh" from around 2500 BCE, the Goddess Isthar threatens to inflict a plague of the living dead on mankind:
- I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld,
- I will smash the doorposts, and leave the doors flat down,
- and will let the dead go up to eat the living!
- And the dead will outnumber the living!
Goddesses are so temperamental. Mankind fears the idea of the dead rising? But why?
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| "Shaun of the Dead" zombies |
Zombies are certainly symbols of social unrest, but they also evoke our deeper human fears. What does being dead mean? What happens when we die? When we become a corpse, what happens to our immortal soul? If I can be a zombie, does that mean I still have a soul? Am I an animal or a human or somewhere in-between? The idea of the dead walking amongst the living makes us think about our mortality. If the dead can rise, what does that mean for our spiritual existance after death?
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| "The Walking Dead's" Zombie Girl |
Zombie writers have a lot of different "takes" on this question. "The Walking Dead" shows walkers ambling around with brain-stem activity, but not much else going on. Season 3's Milton question whether or not walkers retain any of their humanity. I guess, considering Milton tried to eat Andrea, he'd probably call that in as a "no" now. In "I am Legend," the undead transformed into something new . . . a thinking race. But most of the time, zombies amble around in a decayed form, forcing us to confront our own mortality.
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| "I am Legend" kinda zombie |
Coming face-to-face with a zombie require us to think about our own death and to question the after-life. Zombies are scary because our mortality is so scary. Our fear of the unknown is what lurks behind those decaying eyes. If my body rises after I die, does that mean I don't get an afterlife? Am I stuck in purgatory? Death scares many, that is why the fear of coming face to face with the undead is a theme and concern that has been with us since our earliest written works of literature.
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