The Appeal Of The Undead

I like zombies.

This is a difficult thing to say, clearly, in three words. Obviously there’s a lot not to like about disgusting, rotting, mutilated corpses that shamble around eating people, and like most quick Twitter-friendly statements, brevity doesn’t do the idea any favours. Zombies are a gross visual phenomena that typically end the world in a horrific and messy display of violence – who wants to be seen as a fan of that?

The post-apocalypse and survival aspects of the genre have a more obvious appeal. Society is too complicated, and paring the requirements for success down to “staying alive, fed, and healthy” is satisfying in its achievable simplicity. Then, interspersing that basic idea of survival with moments of terror makes a story exciting. Having to fight or evade the undead makes it something more than a lonesome Stardew Valley. It’s what makes the zombies terrifying that I find more fascinating, though.

The gore and rotting visuals are my least favorite part of sensationalized zombie media. Don’t get me wrong, I can see how they add layers of horror and adrenaline to a properly constructed zombie story, but for me personally they don’t appeal. Gross shambling corpse by itself as an aesthetic or an archetype isn’t the idea in zombie fiction that I find so appealing – it’s something practically human but fundamentally not.

There’s an oft-discussed theory about nearly-human objects that make us uncomfortable. People call it *the uncanny valley* – the space in between human-ish things that we find appealing (cartoons, videogames, figurines) and actual humans. It’s the exact zone where something goes from being human-like to actually being human – in part or in the whole. It’s where the details are so realistic that a passing glance might dismiss an object one way or another, but any close observation will find something *wrong*. The issue could be very obvious, like a baby doll with eyes that are creepily realistic, or more subtle, like an artificial robot head whose muscles twitch slightly or don’t quite move the way they should. In either case we can attribute features that we reserve for humans to something that isn’t quite right… And it unnerves, or outright scares us.

The fear or discomfort around these off-brand human-ish things is pretty universal. Like most universal fears, it’s suspected that it’s a part of our DNA – something our ancestors left to us because it helped them stay alive and avoid some existential threat. Its been variably proposed that this threat could have been aliens impersonating people, cryptid creatures like skin walkers, or – more likely, I think – an inherent revulsion to sickness. Humanity’s ability and desire to protect the old, ill and injured among us is admirable and socially advantageous, but in a world without medicine, with scarce resources and cultural violence, the perceived *other* was a threat to the safety and wellbeing of the group. The fact that this revulsion extends to human-ish objects speaks to the human imagination.

My thought is that zombies sit in the uncanny valley in a very peculiar way… They do look fairly human – usually they come from some virus or curse that transforms regular people – but it’s their *behaviour* that is uncanny. They don’t think the way we do, or make what we’d think of as sane or healthy decisions, but in some mysterious way they do think, and they do make decisions. There are a few pieces of social commentary that can be applied to this idea: the insatiable, unnecessary greed of people in a terminally capitalist society, the pursuit of unknowable desires at any cost to others, but I think it’s a more literal and ancestral behaviour that gets to us. It’s the unrelenting stamina of the undead that is so terrifying.

There is an idea of human beings as *endurance hunters*. Instead of being fast like wolves and lions, powerful like gators, or poisonous like so many lizards and snakes, humans are persistent. A well trained human can literally walk many types of prey to death, because the energy used by the darting deer or flighty buffalo is intense but short-lived. Animals can run quickly before needing to stop and recover. A healthy human can walk for hours with very little rest. It’s a much more violent take on the tortoise and the hare.

Zombies are to humans what humans are to wild animals. They are unrelenting. Their motivations are impossible to understand. They will traverse and attack in ways that we intuitively don’t believe should be possible, except for their unimaginable superpower. The power of humans comes from tools and ingenuity that animals will never grasp – the power of zombies comes from the source of their undeath and complete lack of fear, but the effect is very similar.

Zombies present humans with an uncanny view of the way humans dominated the natural world. Gore, spooky moans and the spectre of decay are unsettling things – but I think a dark mirror is a much more terrifying thing to contemplate at night.