Zombies are Always Hungry and Other Oversimplifications
As much as I suspect you love it when I latch on to a quasi-academic excuse to be prejudiced against the Differently Animated, I had to comment on this one from The Zombie Feed:
“But Where Did All You Zombies Come From?”
by Brandon Alspaugh
Zombies are always hungry.
I had begun a fairly dry, academic essay on the difference between movie zombies and print zombies, with observations on what one could do that the other couldn’t, and how each tickles a different part of the brain. I even had a rather elegant digression into Maori cannibalism, and how it was a very different thing to eat a brain than a heart than an eye than a liver. It was staid and respectable and the sort of essay you don’t mind taking home to mother, and that’s how you know it was a load of pretentious rubbish.
We don’t read zombie stories because of their Lacanian epitropes. We read them because we truly and passionately love monsters.
Hunger. All monsters hunger, in some sense. Vampires hunger for our blood, and werewolves our flesh, but zombies just… hunger. Whether shambling or sprinting, groaning or shrieking, the only thing separating them from a corpse with the good sense to stay down is their hunger. They may not even know what they are. All they know is what they want.
Is it even worth noting that this theory doesn’t hold water even when confined solely to the classic Anti-Zombie canon? Romero’s Zombies don’t just hunger for flesh, they are capable of learning, feeling, even complex emotions like grief. Russo/O’Bannon Zombies aren’t ‘hungry’ at all, they’re in terrible pain and trying to find an effective opiate; they don’t have an eating disorder, they’re drug-seeking. 28 Days Later Rage Zombies may be hungry, but they can’t eat, nor do they try to eat. And of course, your classic Hollywood Voodoo Zombie has no particular association with hunger.
Going broader, the Videogame Zombie may or may not show signs of insatiable hunger; in Resident Evil, yes, somewhat. In Silent Hill, no, although that might be stretching the umbrella of ‘Zombie’ a bit. In Dead Rising, no. Bites aren’t even infectious per se.
In the world of Anti-Zombie comics, again, the hunger issue is far from universal. Mainstream Anti-Zombie comic book ‘Zombies’ follow a simplified Romero ideal, and so typically attack and try to eat their victims, but there are many exceptions. ‘I, Zombie’ from the indie comics world, is a prominent contemporary example, certainly, but going back to the venerable Simon Garth comics from Marvel, it’s clear that not all Zombies in comics ‘hunger’ either.
As Garth’s origin in fiction suggests, pre-Comics Code Zombies didn’t universally live up to this hunger stereotype either.
Where does the ‘hunger’ notion come from? As demonstrated above, it’s clearly not history. We’ve talked about this before on the ZRC blog; there are Zombies, in fiction and otherwise, and then there’s what I call the ‘American Pop Culture Zombie’, which is a mishmash of tropes from numerous differing and mutually contradictory sources, distilled down into a sort of lowest common denominator prejudice.
Back to the blog post we’re discussing:
Zombies don’t keep living – they just keep existing. Zombies keep going, against all reason, against all advice, against all good sense.
Yes, there’s a type of advice you’re likely to take.
Imagine this conversation at the grocery store:
Zombie Citizen: ‘Hello? Can I help you?’
Anti-Zombie Advice-Giver: ‘You should stop existing because you’re not alive.’
Zombie Citizen: ‘That’s nice, but if you’ll excuse me, I’m next in line to checkout.’
Anti-Zombie: ‘Abomination!’
Finally, the conclusion, which brings it all home, in a ‘Dawn of the Dead is totally a metaphor for consumerism and it’s definitely worth mentioning that again’ sort of way:
They frighten us, while we stand behind them in the store or join them on the elevator or nod to them as we shuffle towards the cubicle. They frighten us because we see so clearly the slow seep of their humanity, their hopeless hunger, their familiar despair…
They frighten us when we worry how easily someone might mistake us for them.
That brings us to the real point Mr. Brandon Alspaugh is making, although I’m not sure he’s even aware of it: Zombies are basically the same as ‘regular’ people, but worse, because… of something. Something he picked up, somewhere or other. Therefore they should stop existing and making us Living people look bad because of our close mutual resemblance.
It’d make us, or rather, him, *feel* better, you see.
Update: I completely forgot to make a point about the rather arbitrary ‘always hungry’ standard for non-personhood. I mean, I get hungry regularly; am I not a person while I am hungry? What about a person who’s on a hunger strike, they’re hungry pretty consistently, yet we usually think of such people as either noble or highly motivated, both of which are generally considered virtues.
Yet, when a Zombie does it, it’s bad. I’m awaiting a consistent explanation of why that is the case.
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