Having accidentally become a horror writer I have been viewing horror movies with a literary element in my down time. The tropes wear thin. This week I viewed two recent low budget, but quality, zombie apocalypse/feral vampire [like Thirty Days of Night as opposed to the dapper blood drinkers of Interview with a Vampire] movies. As I noted how surprisingly well the stories were written—trope laden though they were—and that the subtext was a manifestly liberal secular one my friend Arne, who brought the movies over, said, “Back in the day people thought I was strange for watching this stuff—like the classic Romero movies—now everybody is watching The Walking Dead.”
This got me thinking, and I was in a biblical frame of mind after my most recent purchase at Barnes & Noble where I picked up a copy of Dante’s Inferno. Another book buyer had lent me his card, and after the nerd at the register factored the discount he grinned devilishly and said, “Congratulation, the discounted price comes to six dollars and sixty-six cents sir!”
I have saved the receipt and would be lying if I said I did not just experience a superstitious chill handling it once again.
The roots of horror fiction are sunk into the primal experience of early man and have been preserved in various mythological traditions around the globe. Horror is universal, but apocalyptic horror is not. It interests the metaphysically minded viewer of postmodern apocalyptic horror typified by zombie films that the secular liberal filmmakers generally set up religious figures from voodoo cultists to catholic hierarchs and fundamentalist protestant Christians as the heavies, with the swing decidedly away from the voodoo cultists and toward the Christian villains in recent years.
How much this amounts to playing to the audience I do not know. A brief survey of 11 fans of this material that I personally know finds mostly atheists with a few agnostics. None of these people have read any religious texts as far as I know. It is interesting then that their preferred horror setting can easily be traced to the apocrypha attached to the New Testament; John of Patmos’ Book of Revelations.
Where most mythology is cyclical, some religions have a concept of a final battle or a death of the gods. However, Middle Eastern faiths stand out as tending toward strict anthropomorphic monotheism, with a lineal cosmology, headed remorselessly toward a supernatural punishment that shall extinguish most of humanity—definitely all heretics, heathens and infidels.
The modern secular news viewer is familiar with the apocalyptic world view of radical Christian separatists at home and Islamists abroad. These two faiths count over half of the world’s people as believers between them. Historically this was due to state patronage and the resulting secular/religious power sharing. Middle Eastern faiths developed—all four of them—in a harsh landscape that encouraged militant state-based religiosity. Recent ideological experiments—from communism to fascism to political correctness—are attempts to rejoin faith and passionate belief to the secular obedience of the individual to the state. It is no accident that the most prominent religions on earth and the faith that spawned them have ancient texts that advocate submission or extermination of unbelievers.
John of Patmos is seen as an evil crackpot monastic by many atheists, agnostics and Gnostics, and served as the model for the fictional traitor/scientist of The Nation of Islam’s cosmology, Big-headed Yakub, who invented the Whiteman to the everlasting woe of the world. However, the author of Revelations, when looked upon as a writer, does not seem so far off from the modern writer of post apocalyptic horror. He lived at odds with the corrupt evil ruling power of his world [Rome] and penned a militant tract about its downfall by supernatural agency at great human cost. If his work—like the work of many early Christian writers—had not made it into the Bible and was discovered in an archeological dig today many of us would classify him as an End Time horror writer—perhaps the first.
When writing Fruit of The Deceiver, about an actual cannibal apocalypse in 13th Century Egypt, the easiest portion of my work consisted of opening the Koran and the Old Testament at random, and, more often than not, finding a passage in one of these ancient holy books that supported the horrific historical events to such a degree, that I was able to offer holy quotes as narrative markers in every chapter.
It is no accident that the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula lived and killed on the Balkan fault line between Islam and Christianity. It is no accident that the zombie tale originated in Haiti where Christianity and African animism engaged in a centuries long struggle over the bodies and minds of men and women.
The supernatural tropes of most zombie and vampire fiction are not only telling, but tellingly unrealistic. But the fact that the text is about as believable as a Grimm’s fairy tale does not render it meaningless, and in actuality, aids the exposition of the subtext.
Zombie and vampire fiction is about alienation and slavery to grim social circumstance. The vampire represents the demanding social order and the zombie the army of strangers that we postmodern humans confront daily, but whom our primal ancestors, whose lives ‘wired’ our psychological coping mechanisms, never, or rarely ever, encountered.
Imagine a world without strangers?
That is the world we were evolved to occupy. A stranger, when they appeared, was a traumatic life-defining phenomenon. Most of us are in daily contact with far more strangers than friends or relatives. The emotional shock of the human being confronted with a counterpart that does not care about him, that does not know him, that sees him only as an obstacle, is severe, though we are numbed to it, largely through self-medication and diversions such as movies.
If we could bring a primitive human out of the past and put him at the bus stop I used today he would go into shock. The primal nature of our brain is to appreciate a mass society as a never ending threat. Now that society has advanced to such an intense level of artifice and objectification the angst is seeping into the arts as horror, not of the haunting ghost story of old, but of a soul extinguishing zombie virus that erases our humanity en masse or the soul binding vampirism that threatens to render all humanity servants to an empty predatory impulse. The modern vampire is best understood as a metaphor for an investment banker, the soulless predator that Robert E. Howard depicted as sorcerers in his early 1930s horrific fantasy.
The next time you view a zombie apocalypse film and the religious crazies come out of the woodwork as secondary enemies you are witnessing the passing of the torch of angst from one mythological construct to another, as illustrated by the slavish devotion of filmmakers and fans to the fairy tale tropes of the genre.
The horror that the zombie film protagonist experiences upon his first encounter with a human body whose brain has been stripped of its humanity, is no different than the horror experienced by the astronaut played by Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes, when he sees that his copilot has been lobotomized. The difference is that the horror of the social antipathy portrayed by the apes in the classic sci-fi film is combined with the horror of lost humanity into one predatory being, the zombie.
Horror fiction seems to be at a tipping point with this now entrenched genre. Will it stagnate or continue to evolve?
While we wait for the answer, our appreciation of the subtext of such films can be enhanced by reading metaphysical literature from the past.
