Zombies Outside the Horror Genre from the Caribbean Into

Sabine Schönfellner Appropriating the Undead: Zombies Outside the Horror Genre

This article analyses cultural products of the recent “zombie wave”: In all of these, zombies have been transferred into new contexts outside the horror genre – into a highly intertextual novel (Die Kinder der Toten), into a literary classic (Pride and Prejudice and Zom- bies), into a comedy (Shaun of the Dead), and into satires (Homecoming, Das dritte Lager). The central questions are whether these novels and films adapt features of the classical “zombie narrative” and how their presentation of zombies deviates from “classical” zombies.

Since the mid-1990s, a considerable “zombie wave” (as Russell calls it in his Book of the Dead) has swept these undead creatures into mainstream culture, not into only a great number of films (e.g. Dead Snow, Romeo and Juliet vs. The Living Dead, Silent Night, Zombie Night, Yesterday, Zombieland - opened in 2009 alone), but also into graphic novels (e.g. The Walking Dead) and video games (e.g. Resident Evil).1 Apart from these films, graphic novels and video games, which represent the horror genre, zombies also have made appearances in other contexts. This article analyses the similarities of the zombies in different contexts to “classical” zombies and whether these films and novels share characteristics with “classical” “zombie narratives”. To begin I look at the history of the zombie figure. This historical background leads to the expla- nation of the characteristics of zombie narratives, followed by an analysis of selected novels and films outside the horror genre.

From the Caribbean into Video Games

The term “zombi(e)” or “zumbi” originates in the African Bantu languages and means “enslaved ghost”,2 in Haitian voodoo cults zombies are revived and enslaved by practitioners of black magic.3 In the English speaking world, the term was first used in 1889 in an article in Harper’s Magazine about

1 Jamie Russell, Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema (Godalming, Surrey: FAB Press, 2006), 171. 2 Claudio Mattes, ‘Zombie’ in Metzler Lexikon Religion: Gegenwart – Alltag – Medien. Pa- ganismus, ed. by Auffahrt, Christoph and others (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000), pp. 725- 727 (p. 725);there are also other explanations for the etymological background of the term: „Linguists have claimed that the etymological root of ‘zombi’ might be derived from any (or all) of the following: the French ombres (shadows); the West Indian jumbie (ghost); the African Bonda zumbi and Kongo nzambi (dead spirit). It may also have derived from the word zemis, a term used by Haiti’s indigenous Arawak Indians to describe the soul of a dead person.“ (Russell, 11). 3 Mattes, 725. 136 Sabine Schönfellner

Haiti by the amateur anthropologist Lafcadio Hearn.4 The next account was William Seabrooks’ The Magic Island (1929), which recounted the author’s adventures in Haiti.5 The first fictional accounts that feature zombies were films; this fact dif- ferentiates zombies from other supernatural creatures: “[...] although creatures such as ghosts, werewolves, vampires, and reanimated corpses were also born in the depths of folk tradition, the zombie is the only supernatural foe to have almost entirely skipped an initial literary manifestation [...]”.6 The first of these films was White Zombie in 1932, followed by I Walked with a Zombie in 1943, which both still rely on the colonial background and the rac- ist implications of zombies:7 “[…] the true horror in these movies lies in the prospect of a Westerner becoming dominated, subjugated, symbolically raped, and effectively ‘colonized’ by pagan representatives.”8 In these films, zombies never constitute a convincingly mortal threat to the Westerners, they “remain little more than exotic set dressing, frightening in their lumber- ing movements and dull stares”,9 as Bishop explains in his enlightening in- troduction to the topic, American Zombie Gothic. A significant alteration of the zombie figure was first introduced in the 1960s by George A. Romero; especially his first two films influenced the further development of the “zombie film”-genre.10 In his first feature, Night of the Living Dead (1968), several people seek refuge in an abandoned farm- house because they are chased by zombies. All but one of them are killed during the night; the last survivor gets killed by security forces, who might be mistaking him for a zombie, in the morning. The film’s innovations are largely due to its assemblage of different sources: “Primarily, voodoo zombie movies set in the Caribbean; Gothic tales of reanimated golems, insatia- ble vampires, fractured personalities, and haunted houses; and science fic- tion stories of alien invasion and the resulting paranoia.“11 This assemblage of different sources also affects the characteristics of the zombies; they are a mortal threat to the human beings and no longer will-less slaves. These characteristics will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter.

4 Russell, 9. 5 Ibid., 9f. 6 Bishop, 12f. 7 Cf. Russell, 13f. 8 Bishop, 66. 9 Ibid., 92f. 10 In his other films, Day of the Dead (1985) and Land of the Dead (2005), Romero contin- ued his critique of society and the evolution of the zombies, but these films have not proven as influential for the genre as the first two (cf. Russell, 190). 11 Bishop, 94.