ZOMBIES VS VAMPIRES
S Peter Davis

I’ve had this theory, for a while now, about the Big Problem. With the world, I mean. With everything. With society. With people. If you had to pick one thing, boil the issue down to a single ridiculously uncomplicated generalisation, what would that look like?

I think I've figured it out. It's probably not what you expected, but that's the beauty of it. The problem with the world is zombies vs vampires.

You heard me.

Nothing provides more telling insight into the collective psychology than the phenomenon of horror. Let's be honest with each other right here, right now, because ordinarily we never are. We tend to manufacture these identities of ours, keep each other sedated with little lies and secrets. Horror, in movies and books, is where the truth leaks out. That's why it's so popular. If you take every horror story in the world, lay them out on one huge graph and crunch the data, you'd have a very valuable insight. You'd have a clear picture of what humanity is afraid of.

I've always been attracted to horror. As a child I was an avid fan of R.L. Stine and Roald Dahl. The first adult novel I ever read was Stephen King's It when I was around fourteen, and although I've moved on to literature more acceptable to the artistic elite, I'm still drawn back frequently to my impressive collection of horror movies, and to my bookshelves to sift through Lovecraft, Barker, Herbert, King, Campbell and Strieber. I write the stuff, too, but don't tell my professors.

It's a much maligned genre. All genre fiction is maligned. Horror, romance and comedy compose the trifecta of literary scorn. That's because they appeal to the stupid emotions, the ones that serious academics, philosophers and artists wish they didn't have, or pretend they don't. There's absolutely nothing important to be gleaned from a horror movie, or so goes the critical argument.

I disagree – there's something philosophically and socially important we can learn from the horror genre, and the secret lies encapsulated within the way horror works.

Google image search result for "horror"

How does it work? It sounds like a strange question to ask because so much of horror operates on a literal level. You're scared of what you're seeing. The most primal embrace of the literal probably comes with what Roger Ebert labels the Dead Teenager Movies. Popularised by Halloween and its many imitators, the fear finds its grounding in crude, uncensored reality. This kind of movie found its niche in the late 20^th Century riding upon the wake of the Son of Sam and Ted Bundy. These are real human monsters, just as incomprehensible in reality as anything we fear on the screen.

We run into a problem, though, when we start looking into the much broader category of the supernatural. There is an aspect of the literal in this, too – many people believe in ghosts, for example, or aliens. But more people are frightened of ghosts and aliens in fiction than actually believe such things exist in any comparable sense. Why would we obtain such a lasting anxiety about things that we know, on a conscious level, are not lurking in the shadows beyond the cinema or the pages of a book?

The answer, simple as it is, presents itself when we look beyond the literal. Most of us are not as afraid of ghosts as we are of what the ghost represents to us. There's a certain extent to which a movie like Paranormal Activity is preying upon our much more ingrained and universal dread of a bunch of crap happening that we don't understand. Let's face it, that's a pretty standard fear. We like our rationality, our ability to make all the pieces fit together and make predictions about the universe. It's a comfortable state to be in. But lurking back there, hiding in the shadows behind our sane understanding, is the fear that the world is not sane, and whatever form Reality truly takes in its unmasked glory, its incomprehensibility utterly dwarves the tiny portion of it we perceive as rationally ordered, physical, and logical.

We can ignore this fear that rises like bile in our throats when scientists talk about electrons being in two places, states or velocities at the same time without contradiction. We're comforted by our inability or unwillingness to comprehend, safe in the assumption that people smarter than ourselves have the mystery covered and the answer is as mundane as the orbit of the Earth. Harder to ignore is when we hear a bump in the night and fear, if only for a moment, that everything we think we know about reality is horseshit.

Stanley Kubrick thought that tales of the supernatural were, at a very basic level, universally optimistic. I would have to disagree with him on that. The very idea of the supernatural presents a demand for a reality far larger and more inaccessible to us than the rational universe we inhabit, and for our fragile scientific ego, that is the most pessimistic idea imaginable.

I thought you were going to explain the zombies versus vampires thing.

Take a walk into your local Borders, find the horror section and take a look at what's on the shelves. Stephenie Meyer and Charlaine Harris compete for space with Max Brooks and Seth Grahame-Smith, and even the old guard of horror literature find it difficult to wedge themselves into the market dominated by the twin juggernauts of the genre, zombies and vampires.

The weird thing about these two horror monsters above any other is that there's almost nothing about them that can be taken as literal. Nobody believes there are real vampires or zombies out there. The tropes are so constructed, so mainstream, so specific, that nothing about them can be chalked up to a glimpse of something that really exists. And yet, they're probably the most common recurring themes in horror.

We're not really afraid of vampires or zombies, not in any literal way, so what is it about them that endures so successfully? What are we really afraid of? Well, quite simply, they are us. Or, more specifically, they are how we see others, and how others see us. They're not how we see ourselves, but what we fear we might become. Everybody is either a zombie or a vampire in the eyes of others, and the fear is as much associated with how we think they see us as it is with how we know we see them. As Sartre famously said, hell is other people.

It sure is.

What in the Christ are you talking about?

Well, the most important trait that both vampires and zombies share is their capacity to make us one of them. Get bitten by a vampire, you become a vampire. Get bitten by a zombie, you become a zombie. It's a rule that also applies to werewolves, but I'm not going to muddy the analogy by trying to wedge them into it so let's just suggest that werewolves are kind of just hairy vampires and leave it there.

Zombies and vampires oppose each other on a very basic, very direct level. That's not to say that anybody wants to be either – though we all are. Maybe that seems confusing, but it's an analogue to the way we think of a lot of ethically muddy issues like abortion: Everyone is either pro-choice or pro-life, but nobody wants to be either anti-choice or anti-life, although by definition, we're one or the other. We don't want the derogatory baggage that comes with negating somebody else's equally obscene ideology.

To illustrate further, I'll have to dig in here and analyse vampires and zombies on their own. Hold tight.

Zombies

Part and parcel with the concept of the zombie is the concept of the zombie apocalypse. The zombie in its current form owes its origins to George Romero, the filmmaker who made Night of the Living Dead and its sequels. Even then, he didn't call them zombies. They were the Living Dead, corpses reanimated without soul or mind, driven only to shamble about and attack and consume the living, creating more dead and continuing the cycle.

The term zombie doesn't literally apply to every story that follows this formula. Purists will and do argue that the creatures in 28 Days Later and I Am Legend are not zombies, but live human beings driven mad by disease or mutation. For the sake of simplicity, I'll include all of these under the zombie umbrella, because the technicality of the monster in one case isn't as important as the device they constitute.

In the Romero movies, and most of the stories that follow in their inspiration, the zombies quickly multiply in such numbers that they consume the world. Everybody becomes a zombie but for the handful of resisters who manage to retain their humanity. Zombie stories are characterised by sprawling, dystopian visions of civilisation in silence, the decline of humanity into a mindless, shambling, animal mass. Despite the best efforts of the governments and militaries of the world to contain the threat and keep the order, the zombies, mindless as they are, always take over.

Think about the zombie for a minute. It's not an individual beast. We can only think of it as The Masses. Zombies look like regular people, and when the whole world is theirs, regular is precisely what they are. It's you who are different. Zombies are unintelligent, directionless, unreasonable, and utterly, utterly conformist. And they hate you.

The fact that so many zombie movies take place in shopping malls and other common urban settings is no accident. At least, it wasn't an accident for the guy who started the mythology. Romero knew what his zombies actually were – consumers.

When you're watching a movie about zombies eating up the world, what you really fear, deep down, is your parents sitting in their recliners watching Idol. You're afraid of McDonald's and Boost Juice and 7-11. You're afraid of Cosmo, Facebook and Justin Bieber.

Zombies never attack each other. It doesn't matter whether they're undead corpses or virus-infected humans, one of the most important aspects of their character is that they don't represent chaos. The world that lies on the other side of a zombie apocalypse is always more peaceful than the one we inhabit. The zombies have no argument with each other, their strength is in solidarity, and in conformity. At the same time, they have no independence, no unique pursuits, no culture, and possess only the single unceasing drive to murder or convert anybody who isn't one of them. Zombies, you see, are white people.

Our obsession with the zombie is that it feeds into our persecution complex. Humans are funny things – we always want to be part of a group, we need desperately the reinforcement of our peers to assure us that we're not crazy or solipsistic. But the only thing we hate more than being alone is not being alone enough. When our group grows too large, we stop seeing it as a good thing, and start seeing it as a zombie apocalypse. That's why empires always collapse.

People begin to see almost any ideology, product, behaviour, artwork or opinion that is appreciated by The Masses to be wrong, misguided or even evil – not just paradoxically, but by definition. There is a certain point at which our desire to be seen as unique and individual conflicts with our need to be a part of something. Even the most avid reality TV junkie feels that ache. If you've ever felt annoyed that you loved Johnny Depp before anyone else had heard of him, and then he starred in that pirate movie and now he's everyone's favourite actor. If you've ever been frustrated that another woman at the party is wearing the same dress, carrying the same handbag, walking in the same shoes. If you've ever uttered the phrase "sold out" in reference to anything at all. We want to be special, most importantly we desperately want to reaffirm that we have free will, we have these beliefs and these mannerisms and these styles and they are ours, we came to them on our own and with purpose. They were not dictated to us by commercialism or conformity. We are not part of a cult. We are not zombies.

The necessary counterpart to that is that everyone outside of our comfortable subculture is a zombie. And our fear is that they will consume us. The films we love will be smothered by big budget Michael Bay remakes. The music we love will be killed by the behemoth of industry-manufactured pop. The zombies want to annihilate us for our fashion, our sexual identity, our culture, our ideals, even the colour of our skin. All we can do is fight the hoards, and the worst thing that can happen to us isn't that we die – we retain our humanity even in death. The worst thing is to become a zombie ourselves. To become a part of something that's too popular is to lose that spark of individuality we cherish above everything else.

Vampires

The creature we recognize as a modern vampire is stitched together from all kinds of legends around the world of demons who feed on the blood of the living, but it's one particular incarnation that stuck with us, the trope remaining relatively untouchable for the past hundred years or so. Contrary to popular assumption, the modern vampire wasn't dreamed up by Bram Stoker – it was an Italian guy named John Polidori who came up with this neat idea about a blood-sucking aristocrat and titled it The Vampyre.

Vampires have the same power to convert humans, but unlike zombies they rarely constitute the visible majority. Vampires exist in secret. They swoop out of the night and pick you off one by one, and you'll never know who's been turned until the fangs sink in. The zombies will swarm you, they don't give a shit about subtlety, but vampires are sneakier than that. They're infiltrators, they will sneak in and quietly assimilate everyone before you know there was even a threat.

Something else that persists about the vampire legend is that they are incredibly seductive. You don't ever see an ugly vampire.

Well, that's not true.

They are sexy, sexy monsters, not just in fiction but in actuality, which is why, since Ann Rice, we're seeing vampires undergo a perplexing genre shift out of horror and into romance. There is something innately attractive about vampirism. But they can't break out completely from the genre that spawned them – we're still afraid of them, in part because we're so attracted, and that's the heart of what the vampire really represents for us.

The vampire is the social inversion of the zombie. They are intelligent, often moreso than us, and they're often foreign. Vampire movies trigger in us the same quiet ominous discomfort that we feel when any alien culture rises in our neighbourhood. When you visit the shopping centre and notice a growing population of foreigners, slowly replacing the familiar businesses with Chinese specialty stores, Italian food vendors and turban supply outlets. It isn't necessarily closet racism, either – whenever we see the emergence of a new religion, fashion, technology or ideology, we're struck with the pang of unease that we're quietly being assimilated by some unrecognizable culture.

Vampires, you see, are the counterculture. We take a great comfort in familiarity, and we don't like being removed from our element. We see something nefarious about change, and importantly, whether the distrust is racially, culturally, or ideologically motivated, we absolutely hate funding it. Most people believe that they are contributing to something decent, that even if we don't agree with the way society conducts itself, we are personally working to build a better world. Any paradigm shift that doesn't agree with our personal lifestyle is built of the sweat from our backs – and the blood from our veins.

The vampire concept is our defense mechanism against being accused of zombism. It is our fear of the awry, of the subculture defeating its place and rising among us, and our fear of somehow wanting it to. It's the hipster you meet on campus who likes all these obscure bands, devours philosophy textbooks, and aggressively challenges everything you believe. All of your friends think he's just so cool. The girl you're crushing on reveals a deep attraction to him because he's so insightful and exotic. You think that your world is being swallowed around you, that one day you're going to wake up and find that all of your friends are vampires and you're the final defender of the life you've worked so hard to achieve. We want to stake all the vampires before they wreck the establishment.

Vampires don't have the sense of community that zombies have. While the status quo have their strength in numbers, the vampire usually exists in solitude, seeking to convert others to their cause, living immorally and maliciously among us while we feed them with our bodies. There's an element of sexual deviance involved – you don't want your daughter to go out with that tattooed, long-haired, motorbike-riding miscreant. Why does she keep turning away that handsome, smart, well-dressed law student? Most of us are attracted to things we intuitively believe, in our zombie solidarity, are bad for us. When we continue to desire it, we learn to resent it, and to fear it.

Why is this a problem?

You'll try to deny it, and that's understandable, but we are all zombies, and we are all vampires. These are of course derogatory concepts, and it is anathema to us to turn them back on ourselves. We can only think of them in terms of the Other. While we see ourselves as delicate little snowflakes in a world of zombies and vampires, we can relax in the comfort of knowing that the problems of the world are the problems of monsters. The biggest difficulty we've always faced is to own up to the idea that zombies and vampires don't actually exist – we're just people, and when we see monsters, we need to understand that the monsters are thinking the same about us.

We also need to understand that mummies do exist, and while we're fighting each other, we're leaving ourselves wide open for the coming mummypocalypse.