Ghosts vs. Zombies

If you're expecting this to be some kind of story about an epic battle, you've come to the wrong place.

If you've come here expecting to get some kind of statistics about how said epic battle would take place, you've still come to the wrong place.

I only gave that particular title to this Note because I thought it sounded a little bit better than "Why I Hate Zombie Fiction."

And to be fair, I don't hate every story that I've ever encountered which included at least one zombie. I mean, I actually kind of liked the MS-DOS game made by Apogee which was called Monster Bash, and that game featured quite a lot of zombies on certain levels. It was actually kind of funny; you played as a little boy named Johnny Dash who ran around in polka-dot, footed pajamas and a red baseball cap, gathering candy and using a slingshot and some rocks to fight monsters and free caged animals.

 If your rocks hit a zombie's body, his body would disappear and his head would start rolling around indefinitely without ever losing momentum. It was entirely possible to forget about such a rolling head and see it come back to you about fifteen minutes later, which made the game all the more hilarious.

But on the whole I've never liked zombies. And no, I don't only say that because ReDeads and gibdos from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (and the ones in Wind Waker) have given me nightmares for years. There is a lot more to it than that which has fueled this relationship of hating the undead creatures.

I'll go right to the root of the problem, because I know that most of you prefer it if my posts can be read in under 20 minutes. (That's just our culture, isn't it?)

One of the main reasons that I don't like zombies is because of what they represent. In fact, if anybody came across my Facebook Note from years ago called "Things I Fear (Or Not)," you'll remember that one of the things at that point in my life that terrified me the most were the ReDeads. If you don't know what one is, do a Google search - no, you know what? Instead of discriminating, I'm going to say, "Do a Yahoo! search." Get on there and look up the term "ReDead." It works best if you type the word as "ReDead," capital letters and all. Then you might see what I'm talking about.

I had to think about why I hated these creatures so much; a lot of people think that they're funny, actually.

                                                               

 So I considered the possibilities of what it was that scared me - was it the high-pitched banshee's scream that the ReDeads had? No, at least, that couldn't be the only thing; I wasn't scared whenever I saw and heard Nazgül. Was it because of the way that ReDeads hang out in tombs or dark caves? No, if that were the case, then I wouldn't feel so peaceful walking around in or even sitting down for a while in cemeteries, day or night. Was it because of how ReDeads looked? No, as astounded as we were at the time that 64 bits of video game graphics could produce a 3D game world, those undead creatures looked more like they were made of mud than the corpses that they were supposed to look like. (And according to the lore, they wore wooden masks to hide their true faces. So, that's apparently what the faces were meant to look like.) Was it just the fact that my imagination at that age was so vivid that I couldn't face the frightening creatures without scarring my mind? Maybe, but... that still doesn't explain what it was about them that terrified me.

I actually questioned that for years - as I've said, I had nightmares about the things for years, no matter how my life moved on. Maybe on the one hand that was because one of my first experiences with terror was with these imaginary enemies. Or maybe it was because the aspect of ReDeads that actually scared me was something that I was still afraid of.

                                                              

Eventually it made sense. I found two things that really disturbed me about them. One was, indeed, the scream. But it wasn't just the scream itself: it was what the scream did. They will only scream if they can see you (notwithstanding that they have no eyes), and as your fairy friend Navi would tell you, "Its gaze will paralyze you. If it bites you, tap any button to escape!" (Umm, thanks for breaking the fourth wall, Navi.) So, accompanying the scream would usually be this undead enemy walking slowly towards me while I was powerless to escape. Never mind that this was a video game, the idea scared me immensely when I was young. And in later years I understood the principle: these monsters undermined my agency. In that first Note where I talked about ReDeads, "Things I Fear," I said that I found that fear and love are opposites. What you fear is very often the opposite of the thing that you love. So, as I loved being free to choose for myself, to have moral control over my own life, to move as I will, and to do what is good and what is right because I want to, rather than being forced to do it, that meant that one of the things that I would fear would be losing that agency. Seeing this zombie incarnation steal my ability to do anything at all for a time, naturally that was something that I feared. How can you fight something that prevents your ability to fight?

Second, and more importantly, I feared them because of what they were, and what their very existence implied. I'll admit, there isn't an official statement about where ReDeads come from. One theory says that they are completely composed of dark magic, but more commonly the theory is that they are "animated corpses" - dead bodies brought back to life. Or, in the case of a personal theory about it... they were dead bodies that had always remained alive. This theory more or less lines up with one of the theories that I have heard thus far: if a criminal, or more specifically, a user of dark magic was condemned to die, that was not the end of their punishment. They would be cursed so that once dead, their spirits would not leave their bodies, even after the body was dead. They would be condemned to live on within a body that didn't live with them, and to use that body in order to try to exist as the living do. Magic would allow them to move and... well, eat... things.

Now why would that scare me? It wouldn't be solely the thought of the dead consuming the living - which is a metaphor that I'm sure a lot of book and script writers love - it's much worse than that. It's the thought that some kind of evil is able to subvert resurrection.

The idea of resurrection isn't a doctrine unique to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (yes, I have to keep typing out the name in full), but I do know that in today's world the idea is not only unpopular, it is mocked openly. And even among religions and individuals who believe in life after death, there are variations of many kinds - many of which seem to think that the idea of having a body is undesirable, and that we would be better off returning to the form of spirits only. Perhaps in that regard Latter-day Saints are unique (yes, now I don't have to write the name in full; once I've referred to the name in full once, afterwards I can abbreviate it); we teach that having a body is indeed an advantage over being disembodied, and that God is an actual incarnate person - it's just that His body is not the mortal, corruptible, fallible kind of body as ours. And a kind of glorified body is what we are to receive after dying - to be resurrected is to have the spirit and body brought back together again and made a complete and living soul better than ever before, and make it much more like God's. That, as we could explain to you, is a gift that is given to all people who were ever on this earth. All people, good, evil, or somewhere in between, will rise again and receive that resurrection. That is the truth.

So that is what disturbed me about ReDeads; in this fictional world, evil magic had proven that it could prevent some people from receiving that promise. Now I understand. And now that I understand that, whenever I encounter ReDeads either in dreams or in any of the new Legend of Zelda games (yes, I still play them whenever I can), they don't incite quite as much fear in me anymore. I said that love and fear are opposites, but it can also be said that faith and fear are opposites, that hope and fear are opposites, and that truth and understanding are likewise the opposite of fear.

Now, my thoughts about these ReDeads have set me thinking about a larger question as a whole:

What is it about our culture that has it so obsessed with zombies?                                         

I've heard one wise person named Hank Green give his opinion on that topic. He said, "In my opinion it's because the myth of the zombie allows us to do metaphorical battle with things that we are not able to battle in real life, such as disease, decay, and violence, and the inevitable evacuation of ourselves from our bodies." I think I see some value in that statement; zombies are a personification of things that humans hate and fear but are unable to combat - things like disease, mindless slavery, and death. That way, in the fantasy worlds where people fight zombies, it is possible for ordinary people simply to be resourceful, determined, and persevering, and by these virtues will be able to overcome these otherwise invincible enemies of ours.

I guess that sounds credible, but my personal theory is different from that.

I was reading a book that was essentially about beginner's philosophy, and in one of the chapters the book explained to me that the belief of "duality" has been all but completely discarded among philosophers everywhere. "Duality," as the book explained to me, is the belief that the spirit and the body are independent entities that form a soul. This idea has been rejected by nearly all of the philosophical community (well, according to the author's opinion). I understand that practically goes without saying when speaking of a field that encourages atheism; rejecting the one rejects the other. That is, if you reject the idea that there is a God or some kind of higher power that created and organized things into the way that they are, you reject the idea that life is anything more than an elaborate accident. Thus you say that the quality which we call "life," this idea of an organism being a living thing, is nothing more than a series of chemical reactions and reformations of matter. Therefore, you discard the idea that there is such a thing as a spirit.

Then to follow the process the other way: if you say there is no such thing as a spirit, then you most likely reject the idea that it is possible for life to exist in any state other than the mortal life that is present around us - as I said, you will be viewing the existence of "life" as a series of chemical reactions and transformations of matter taking place in a system. With that kind of outlook, you will say that it is not possible, or at least not reasonable to think that Deity can live in a way other than the same manner that we live, or to say that such a Deity could indeed be living in a way similar to us, but communicating via some means that spans the monstrous distance of outer space. Thus, you would infer that looking into the cosmos would eventually reveal explicit evidence which you have proposed should exist - perhaps that of a Deity doing exactly what we do, and at a distance and angle that would make it convenient for us to detect. And when you don't find any of the evidence that you have demanded, you will discard the idea that there is a kind of life that transcends this one, because you didn't find the specific type of evidence that you were looking for.

This is what the world thinks today, isn't it? The world would have you believe that there is no life after death, no such thing as spirits, no Creator, nothing beyond what we are able to tangibly sense or calculate with our current understanding, and some of the world would even have you believe that our own consciousness is an illusion that needs to be cast off and conquered with our own higher intellect.

Consider those things for a moment and see if you can tell me what I am about to tell you about why zombie fiction has become so popular.

If you would like me either to confirm what you just thought about or else guide you a little further on my understanding of this, let me explain.

The idea of the dead rising again isn't a new one. But the proposed method has changed drastically. Stories about monsters are as old as storytelling itself. Stories that teach about facing fear and overcoming it are... well, aren't those what almost all stories are? One of the common fears since ancient times is the thought of premature death, and death in general. So it would be easy to invent stories about the dead; why not make stories about the mysterious unknown? It gives you the chance for artistic license, anyways.

But the way these stories used to unfold was different from our present ones. Back in times past, many cultures acknowledged the idea of spirits in some form or another. In fact, my Aboriginal ancestors told legends that taught that not only living people had spirits, but so did the deceased, and so did the animals and the elements; these natural elements had intelligence and awareness too, and a part of them that existed beyond the mortal. All of the cultures who believed in the existence of spirits would tell stories about them. And for the longest of times, we used to call those ghost stories.

Have you noticed that in these most recent decades, storytelling and the popular media have mostly stopped telling ghost stories?

While we would see different kinds of "scary" movies for as long as movies have existed - just think of the original Frankenstein and Dracula - you can see that there has been a transition, and more and more people love this new idea of a zombie apocalypse. When I was young, there was a movie that I saw (well, except for a few parts, because as young as I was I found some parts too scary) actually called Ghost. It was about a man who had been murdered, and who as a ghost had the chance and... I think it was the duty to bring his murderers to justice. Not too long after that, another scary movie released was The Sixth Sense, a story about a boy who has the ability to see and communicate with spirits of the dead (against his own will). But this genre of movie soon passed. While I won't research in full right now what all of the scary movies over the years have been, I seem to remember that the idea of demonic possession and exorcism became really popular - think The Exorcist, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, and that kind of thing. And then we moved to vampires and werewolves - on the one hand you had your Van Helsing kind of movie, and on the other Twilight. And in this past decade especially, people are in love with the idea of zombies.

It's come so far that there is actually considered to be a "zombie genre." Now it's not enough to say that you have a "horror genre" or "monster genre," but you explain that a TV show or movie or book or video game or iWhatever app falls into the "zombie genre."

                           

As I said at the beginning, I don't like it.

I hope that I've made it clear, or at least strongly implied it already, but this is the reason why I don't like the idea of zombies themselves: while they are intended to embody concepts other than the one that I am about to say, to me they are the living (rather, the living dead) representation of faithlessness. I mean, even the idea of how zombies are created has been altered to fit that fact. It used to be that zombies came back to a form of life because of black magic; some ancient curse or a person trying to call on Satanic power would put some kind of evil life into dead bodies. Now the idea is that a virus takes over dead tissue - or even still-living tissue - and that turns a person into a zombie.

It seems to me that people are unwilling to believe in - let alone trust - in anything that they consider aethereal, arcane, unknowable, anything that is beyond the scope of understanding by conventional scientific means. There is no room for faith, in their opinions. And it seems to me that they want to - yes want to - believe that our lives are random, temporary, painful experiences that last for a few decades and then are extinguished forever. Thus, I think that the idea of zombies appeals to some people as a way to lash out temporarily at the cold and gaping abyss that is waiting for them; using fantasies about the undead is a fleeting chance for people to mock their invincible enemy until he finally comes for them.

Yeah, zombies don't appeal to me.

And you know what else doesn't appeal to me? Fiction about zombie apocalypses.

Ok, ok, so good writers and creators of fictional universes can make entertaining and informative literature regardless of what the setting is; you can teach lessons about choosing the right and rejecting evil just as easily in a galaxy far, far away as you can in a hole in the ground where lived a hobbit. You can bring into being a character that you love no matter what universe you place him or her (or it) in. So, I don't mean to say that a work is condemnable because of its genre - but I will tell you what I don't like about the idea of a zombie apocalypse.

This first idea is one that I borrow from John Green. (Yes, I know I do that a lot, but he's one of the authors that I've most often heard talking about literature and what goes into creating it, so he's one author that I pay close attention to.) He said, "It seems to me that the central difference between zombies and the rest of us is that zombies just walk around, doing whatever they have to do to continue walking around. What I'm suggesting is the terrifying thought that zombies may be people, and in our weaker moments, we may in fact be zombies."

...He's right, you know. If your only purpose of living is to perpetuate living, what is the point of that? In fact, don't we call people who are like that "zombies?" So, that is one of the things that I dislike about zombie fiction: it creates the idea that "zombification" - the process of becoming mindlessly consumed in a limbo-like state of living oblivion - is involuntary.

If you'd like me to say that in words that people actually use: I don't like zombie apocalypse stories because people worship the idea that having a meaningless, pointless existence is a circumstance that is out of our hands, rather than a choice we make. I don't like the stories of mass zombification because they teach people that you need not have any accountability over the kind of life that you live.

And that is also the point that I want to elaborate on in this next case. Think of your favourite zombie apocalypse, if you have one. How do we most often portray the world? It is degenerate, falling apart, cared for by no one. Well, on the human side of things, that's how it is. Nature seems to thrive and even succeed in reclaiming lands that had been built over by humans. The land is in chaos and people have become a law unto themselves. It's "live by the sword or die," except that the adage is usually, "live by the biggest gun you can find or die." It's also "eat or be eaten," is sometimes, "every man for himself," or in some cases the ideal of living is, "Me first, my tribe second. Nobody is third. Kill everything else."

And people love and adore that idea.

...What is it that appeals to people about that? Is it the thought of being given a powerful weapon and an excuse to unleash it on absolutely everything that you want? Is it the thought of no longer being held down by laws or someone else's ideals? Is it the idea that because you were spared while everyone else was doomed, and that now you are the one culling them, that you somehow believe that you are somehow special, or a superior sort of being? Is it the thought that you get to roam the world that was once made by others, and now that they are gone, you get to take all of the spoils? Is it the idea (false, by the way) that organization hinders progress, and that innovation thrives in chaos?

I could keep that list going with all kinds of questions. But as I ask them rhetorically right now, I only want for you to see what I am saying here: every ideal that I see represented and celebrated in a zombie apocalypse turns me cold, if not outrightly sick.

                                               

You see, when you tell a ghost's story, there is something uncanny about it, something eerie that kind of prickles in a way that you can't quite place. It may be scary in that respect, but it's scary in the sense of, "Wow, that's unexpected! I don't understand what is happening, and this is so weird that I can't cope with this yet," rather than in the zombie story sense of scary, where you... well, now that I think about it, people seem more despondent than they do scared in most zombie apocalypses I've ever seen. But when people do get scared, it's generally the fear of losing their lives or losing their loved ones to their enemies. Sure, that's relevant, and that's relatable. I don't know, maybe the thing that turns me off about that is that the way to overcome the fear of facing ghosts has mainly been the courage to confront the unknown - to have faith in that which is not yet seen or understood. To alleviate the fear of facing hordes of zombies, your best weapons are not metaphorical weapons that stand for principles, but literal weapons. I think that's probably it: I find that the way to fight fear in the case of zombie apocalypses is to "put 'em in the ground;" once your enemy is neutralized, then you can feel safe and free from fear. ...Maybe that bothers me because that's how a lot of people think of the real world as it is; rather than change people in heart and thus neutralize your enemy by finding out that you have no enemy, people seem to like the idea that you neutralize your enemy by... well, neutralizing your enemy.

What happened to "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," "love thy neighbour as thyself," or one of my personal favourite lines - but the most difficult for me to do - "love your enemies?" If our pop culture is an indication of our contemporary culture - and it is - then we apparently don't like that thought. Shoot 'em up and burn 'em down is the philosophy of today. In today's world we just can't afford - it isn't considered reasonable to have faith.

But our friends the ghosts would have told us otherwise. In believing a ghost story, or experiencing one, you have to suspend your disbelief and momentarily trust that there is more to this world than what we physically experience, more than the set of things to which we say with some degree of confidence, "we know." As I said, to me zombies represent faithlessness. In a peculiar way, then, ghosts represent faithfulness in the unseen. The existence of ghosts gives provision to the idea that life extends further than what we are able to see right now. Ghosts tell us that what we consider to be the cold void of death is in fact conquerable. And as you heard me say that denying the existence of spirits requires you to deny other things as well... believe in the existence of spirits, and by extrapolation... you get the idea.

                             

And you know what else I really liked about ghosts and their accompanying stories? Not all of them were bad. Just think of Casper, the Friendly Ghost. While his uncles were mischievous, sometimes cruel, and occasionally dangerous, you have a ghost like Casper who is the kindest boy you'd ever meet - he's just dead, that's all. The stories about ghosts happen on a true principle, one that you'd accept if you accept the continuation of life after death: death does not change our natures. By that I mean that the simple act of dying will not alter your personality. So, if the person you are in this life has some determination over what becomes of you in life after this life... then we start talking about accountability. Then we start talking about consequences. And in the end you might start to draw personal conclusions that something matters in what we do here in this life.

Conversely... when was the last time you met a zombie with a benign nature? When is the last time you met a zombie who had a personality at all, for that matter? Essentially by those zombies we teach that death is the universal equalizer. In their stories we press the idea that death is the only thing that unites rich and poor, slave and master, good and evil; all people who live become one and the same in death. Just look at the zombies, after all; they seem pretty well conformed, don't they? There is no distinction between people who had money, success, intelligence, passion, love, righteousness, and those who lacked those attributes. Therefore we must be saying that in the end it doesn't matter what you do, so long as you enjoy what you have while you're here in this life. Well, isn't that inspiring.

Ok?

...I think now I'm done.

You might be asking yourself why I thought that I should tell this to any of you. What does it matter that I don't like zombies or the decadent dystopias (no, don't worry; you don't need to know what that means), and that I like hearing about ghosts? What does it matter that [TAB III] takes so seriously the two genres and wants to convince me that they are hiding ideologies about nihilism, existentialism and stuff? It's not exactly the difference between worshipping life and worshipping death, is it?

(...Well, actually it kind of is...)

I'll hand the rest of those questions off to the great writer James Baldwin right now. He says, "You write in order to change the world knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter even by a millimeter the way people look at reality, then you can change it."

Yeah. I'm probably not about to cause some great cultural movement by writing this. I'm probably not even going to cause anybody to think that he doesn't enjoy killing zombies in video games anymore, or that she doesn't feel quite the same obsession with The Walking Dead. But I have told you what I have seen, felt, and thought. Having passed that knowledge to you, I give you free reign to do with it what you want. I hope that you use it well, in a way that will increase your happiness and that of people around you. But as I said, I leave that up to you. Unless someone has sincere questions for me or just wants to lace up the comments section of this post with all kinds of reasons why I'm wrong and such an uncultured hipster (I haven't been called that yet, but I'm sure that people must think it by now), barring those two possibilities, my part in this is now over.

I wrote this with some help from one of my best friends... and I thought he might like it, considering that part of one of his nicknames is "Ghost." More on him later.

And now I leave my ghosts with you. I hope that someday you love them as much as I do.

- TAB III