Overview: What is Fear?

Etymology is often a particularly good place to start any inquiry, so here is the origin of the word fear:

Middle English fere, from Old English fær “calamity, sudden danger, peril, sudden attack,” from Proto-Germanic *feraz “danger” (source also of Old Saxon far “ambush,” Old Norse far “harm, distress, deception,” Dutch gevaar, German Gefahr “danger”), from PIE *pēr-, a lengthened form of the verbal root *per- … “to try, risk.”

The sense of “state of being afraid, uneasiness caused by possible danger” developed by the late 12c. Some Old English words for “fear” as we now use it were fyrhto. . . . Meaning “feeling of dread and reverence for God is from c.1400. To put the fear of God (into someone) “intimidate, cause to cower” is by 1888, from the common religious phrase.¹

Meanwhile, this is the best answer I have found to this important question: What is fear? From Irena Milosevic and Randi McCabe:

Fear is a fundamental and universal emotion that has been adaptive in ensuring our survival as a species – it serves as an alarm system that enables us to perceive and react to danger in an instant, without conscious thought. . . . However, when the fear alarm system goes awry – by misfiring in response to nonthreatening stimuli, for example – the consequences may be significant. Maladaptive fear can lead to severe psychological distress and interference in one’s ability to engage in daily activities and function normally. With this presentation, fear becomes what we call a phobia – an excessive and persistent fear that is disproportionate to the degree of danger in a situation.²

Thus, fear is pervasive and “normal,” as echoed in the work of Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen:

In fear we are met by something outside ourselves, and what we meet is a negation of what we want. We fear the important things in life being destroyed or taken away from us, such as our freedom, dignity, health, and – taken to its extreme – our lives. We fear not only for ourselves but also for others, especially those dear to us. When any of this is threatened, fear is a normal reaction.³

How paradoxical it is that we desire fear when fear itself is a threat to the acquisition of the very things that we desire.

This chapter takes a careful look at fear and its manifestations and functions, focusing on three key phenomena and concepts, relevant to our analysis of the zombie apocalypse: sociophobics, othering, and contagion. Obviously fear has everything to do with the zombie craze, but the idea of the zombie and our infatuation with the zombie and with fear itself are decidedly complex, as is human nature. So they require serious philosophical consideration in order to be analyzed and grasped on a deeper level. Such consideration is the chief orientation that will guide and perplex us over the following pages.

Fear, Fascination, and the Births of Religion, the Apocalypse, and the Zombie

Most people probably experience fear every day of their lives, whether triggered by paranoia, distorted thoughts, or rationally demonstrable threats to their well-being or that of beloved others. Take the great American artist Georgia O’Keefe: “I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life.” I return to her words time and again in contemplating and living with my own fears, ultimately finding hope in the latter phrase of O’Keefe’s arresting statement: “I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.”⁴ To be terrified, to fear, is often unpleasant, if not horrible, but sometimes this emotion causes us to do salubrious things, like getting a COVID booster shot; cutting down on cigarettes, booze, salt, and fried foods; exercising more often; fixing the brakes on the vehicle; and so on.

Fear is also something that we desire, a tantalizing emotion, an experience to which we return again and again, out of a deep-seated evolutionary necessity, and its triggers are often overwhelmingly fascinating and revolting at the same time: Mysterium tremendum (terrifying Mystery) and Mysterium fascinans (fascinating Mystery). The Mystery, this numinous “entirely Other,” that terrifies and attracts, inspires a dual emotion that the great German scholar Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) identified as “the starting point for the entire religious development in history…. the basic factor and the basic impulse underlying the entire process of religious evolution.”⁵ Otto calls this other “the Holy,” but “minus its moral factor” and “minus its rational factor altogether.”⁶ Defined as such, the holy could be God, a demon, a zombie, an impersonal energy, or the apocalypse. When we encounter it, we are launched into a sense of awe and dread, which takes multiple forms across the history of religion:

The feeling of it may at times come sweeping as a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul. . . thrillingly vibrant and resonant . . . . It may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy. It has its wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering.⁷

In the hazily intense, transcendent experience of the sacred, Mysterium tremendum is usually accompanied by Mysterium fascinans, for the Holy has “at the same time another aspect, in which it shows itself as something uniquely attractive and fascinating.”⁸ One may think here of Moses and the burning bush in Genesis or of Arjuna’s vision of Lord Visnhu in Bhagavad Gita, the great Hindu scripture:

There an angel of the Lord appeared to him in fire flaming out of a bush. As he looked on, he was surprised to see that the bush, though on fire, was not consumed.  So Moses decided, “I must go over to look at this remarkable sight, and see why the bush is not burned.”

When the Lord saw him coming over to look at it more closely, God called out to him from the bush, “Moses! Moses!” He answered, “Here I am.”  God said, “Come no nearer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground. I am the God of your father,” he continued, “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.” Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God (Genesis 3: 2-3).

Krishna, the great lord of discipline, revealed to Arjuna the true majesty of his form.  It was a multiform, wondrous vision, with countless mouths and eyes and celestial ornaments, brandishing many divine weapons. . . .  Arjuna saw all the universe in its many ways and parts, standing as one in the body of the god of the gods. Then, filled with amazement, his hair bristling on his flesh, Arjuna bowed his head to the god, joined his hands in homage and spoke: “Seeing the many mouths and eyes of your great form, its many arms, thighs, feet, bellies, and fangs, the worlds tremble and so do I. . . .  my inner self quakes and I find no resolve or tranquility. Seeing the fangs protruding from your mouths like the fires of time, I lose my bearing and I find no refuge; be gracious, Lord of Gods, shelter the Universe … Tell me – who are you in the terrible form?  Homage to you, Best of Gods!  Be gracious! I want to know you as you are in your beginning.  I do not comprehend the course of your ways” (Bhagavad Gita 10:8–31).

Other great thinkers besides Otto have seen fear as the root of religion, though theirs are entirely materialist analyses, whereas Otto’s was theological insofar as he believed that the Holy is objectively real, or sui generis. For the pioneering anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), “when there is uncertainty and unpredictability and danger, people engage in religious rituals to try to ensure a particular outcome,” as Karl Thompson explains. Here religion functions “to reduce anxiety by providing confidence and a feeling of control over the situation.”⁹ Great Western philosophers have come to similar conclusions about fear’s nurturing religion, like David Hume (1711–1776) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970). In his 1757 Natural History of Religion, Hume argues that “agitated by hopes and fears . . . men scrutinize, with trembling curiosity, the course of future causes, and examine the various and contrary events of human life. And in this disordered scene, with eyes still more disordered and astonished, they see the first obscure traces of divinity.”¹⁰ Nearly two centuries later, Russell published the provocative book Why I Am Not A Christian, where he argues in like vein: “Undoubtedly the most important source of religion is fear; this can be seen in the present day, since anything that causes alarm is apt to turn people’s thoughts to God. Battle, pestilence and shipwreck all tend to make people religious.”¹¹ Put more colloquially, there are no atheists in foxholes.

Whether or not we agree with Hume and Russell as to religion’s being an epiphenomenon that results ultimately from human doubt and despair, it is undeniable that fear influences religion on a profound level. It probably does so by way of some combination of Otto’s vision and Hume’s. Many of us grew up being taught to fear God, after all, and fearing things in life that are more demonstrably real. But just how does fear influence human consumption and mimicking, gawking over, playing with or against, and killing zombies?

I would argue that Otto’s Mysterium tremendum – Mysterium fascinans diptych can go far in answering this question, by peeling off more of the veil covering the collective psychological taproot of human fascination with and fear of the undead. That and evolutionary biology, capitalism, and the chili pepper, about which I’ll say more in a moment. We fear zombies and evidently we like to do so—at least the Hollywood or video game version. At times they do ambush, however sluggishly or lightning fast. Yet we are so infatuated with them in the imaginary because they can harm us, kill us, or infect us to become one of them, and we get to kill them in video games or walk out of the theater without harm, our hearts sometimes racing. Thus, gripping but safe fear is at the heart of it all when it comes to zombies, coupled with an equally gripping fascination. This also underlies the apocalypse, in terms of human psychology. It is extremely risky to venture about when zombies are around, or to be unprepared spiritually for the apocalypse. We fear the end, the apocalypse, and “zombies have served as an archetype of the fear of the return of the dead,” as Philippe Charlier offers, “an outlet for the harshest of anxieties and fantasies, and sometimes also the most harebrained.”¹² Phillip Cole adds, fear of zombies transcends the fear of death itself “because they bring the threat of our destruction with them from beyond the grave.”¹³

I once met a former zombie in Haiti. The man had been liberated from his zombic state by a Pentecostal preacher. He explained to me that while he was a zombie he feared absolutely nothing, but that later, once liberated, he so feared being re-zombified that he changed his religion, abandoning Vodou and becoming a Pentecostal, believing that to be the surest form of protection against re-zombification.¹⁴ As Donald Cosentino rightly puts it, “Rather than fearing zombies, what Haitians would fear is either becoming a zombie or else great sadness at looking at someone whose life and death plans have been interrupted . . . by a bad magician.”¹⁵ In the same documentary in which Cosentino makes that comment, J. Lorand Matory opines that “the zombie seems to represent a set of fears and dilemmas deep in the hearts of most US Americans that we have not processed consciously. Consequently they emerge in the form of nightmares. Repeated, obsessional nightmares.”¹⁶

Based on research into why people eat and enjoy chili peppers despite the pain, perspiration, indigestion, and watery eyes that they can cause, Matt Kaplan offers that “there is pleasure in the mind in watching the body react negatively while knowing perfectly well that nothing bad is actually going to happen.” This is referred to as “mental mastery”: “in this realization there is a sense of mastery of mind over body that is, in itself, pleasurable.”¹⁷ So chili peppers might well be another key to understanding why people are so infatuated with zombies. Fear and mental mastery can also lead people to fetishize zombies, a form of “maladaptive fear,” because zombies, at least the kinds seen in comic books, novels, movies, and video games, rarely and barely exist, even if at times they do exist quite explosively, and spawn and sprawl virally, in the captivating but ultimately fictive imaginary realm. So we can fear them without really fearing them and enjoy the mental mastery that they enable. Chili peppers would not, however, explain human captivation with the apocalypse, because the end of the world is very real and inevitable, whether or not it involves the Antichrist, four horsemen, dragons, a split moon, locusts, earthquakes, pestilence, or divine judgment. Heat is the common denominator between chili peppers and the apocalypse—blazing heat. But in the latter, some of that heat is eternal, while in the former we can just put down the plate when our mouth is temporarily burning, just as we can put down the joystick when we need a break from evading or slaughtering zombies, walk out of the theater, or turn off the TV unscathed.

We have traveled far in this book, beginning some three thousand years ago, from Persia to Haiti, covering much ground and crossing seas, meeting the dead and the undead, and contemplating the afterlife, the apocalypse, and our fate. En route, we have seen apocalyptic and zombic splendor, angst, disaster, and fascination. This chapter concludes Section Three of Zombie Apocalypse, while in the conclusion the End Time and Judgment Day will be recentered. But presently we are getting philosophical and theoretical and raising the question of how, when, and why people in places like the United States, Korea, Japan, Australia, Argentina, Mexico, South Africa, and France have become so captivated by zombies. Why do they watch them, fear them, dress up like them, walk like them, axe murder them, and spend tons of money on them? Before launching into a few of the most compelling philosophical forays into these and related questions, recall that the zombie in most films, novels, comic books, video games, and zombie walks shares very little with the zombie in Haiti. The Haitian zombie, per Kaiama Glover, “is not at all the crazed, bloodthirsty monster raised from the grave by some compulsion to hunt down humans and feast on their brains. Such a conception of the zombie – drooling, stiff legged, arms outstretched – is strictly a Hollywood invention. . . . the zombie in Haiti is a victim, and not a predator; deserving of pity more than fear.”¹⁸

Recall, too, from Chapter Ten, where we explored several influential zombie novels and films, that many analysts seem to agree that their popularity is largely about fear—not so much the fear of zombies per se but the fear of everything that they might represent. To wit, following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America witnessed both a rise of Islamophobia and a recharged obsession with zombie cinema, especially in its apocalyptic form. As Eric Hamako rightly observes, “Rising fears about Muslims are one factor driving the current surge in zombies’ popularity. Demonized Muslims and zombies are both Orientalist projections of the negative repressed qualities that Western Whiteness anxiously denies about itself.”¹⁹ Although the first four chapters focused on the apocalypse, in Chapter Ten we looked only at zombic apocalyptic cinema and not more “purely” apocalyptic films. That was chiefly a function of the book’s tripartite structure, but let us be reminded here that the apocalypse has gripped humanity for much, much longer than the zombie: for millennia. But humans have for just as long dreaded earlier forms, imaginings, and possibilities of the undead, of protozombies, if you will.

As already noted, Stephen Prince argues that prezombic or unzombic apocalyptic movies, at their very best, “fashion beguiling visions from daunting conditions that have seemed inescapable to the human psyche throughout its centuries of existence.”²⁰ To be daunted is to fear, especially when the source of the daunting appears to be “inescapable to the human psyche.” Over the first two years of teaching the class for which this book is primarily written, the one purely apocalyptic feature-length film that I have shown is the 1972/73 evangelical thriller A Thief in the Night. The movie, the most influential of its genre ever, depicts the rapture, which is not explicitly found in the Bible, but based on biblical interpretations that have relatively recently thrust the notion to the center of Protestant Christian apocalypticism.

As Timothy Beal explains:

Building from these [biblical] fragments an image of the saved, dead and alive, being raptured up from the earth to heaven, this rapture theory is then inserted back into Revelation as an event that, although not explicitly described in the text, will take place before the reign of Satan and his beasts. During that time of terror, those “left behind” will be forced to worship the beast and take its mark, or be persecuted and killed.²¹

In other words, the “tribulation saints”—those not quite evil enough to worship the beast but not quite “ready” enough to be assumed into heaven during the rapture—are forced to stay on earth for seven years and are urgently challenged to fend off Satan’s bastions and to resist becoming one of them, infected with evil, totally succumbing to and annihilated by their sin. In Beal’s reading, it seems that the tribulation saints are endeavoring to survive what is like the zombie apocalypse in five ways: “First, both story worlds emerge . . . in the theological vacuum of a perceived withdrawal of God from the world.” Each is also “built on a dynamic of us-versus-them,” as in the living versus the living dead, or the tribulation saints versus the beasts of Satan. “Third, both story worlds are constructed to scare the hell out of us. . . .  Fourth, both story worlds are especially popular in times of war, terrorism, and mass death”—like today, surely, a time of COVID, Al Qaeda, and environmental destruction. “Fifth and finally, not only do both story worlds resonate with the war-tornness of Revelation, but both draw literally from elements of it.” So just as in Revelation people are brought back to life but not yet saved, thus is the zombie.²²

It was neocolonialism that brought the Haitian zombie to life (pun fully intended) in Hollywood and in the pages of American novels and comic books, a monster that has been abducted, stolen, appropriated, and transformed in ways that are highly profitable in the United States and globally. But the Haitian zombie has been thanklessly left in the dust, abandoned, an entity whose stolen other has been remade for massive profits that never trickle down to the Caribbean. Zombies in Haiti are not contagious, nor are they really feared, nor do they run or eat brains. “Cultural theft”—racially inflected, neo-imperialist thievery—is, for Sarah Juliet Lauro, central to the zombie’s success in Western economies.²³

A pitiful victim of sorcery, yes, but more expansively the zombie is and always has been a pitiful victim of capitalism. “Whether in Haitian religious practices, art, and cultural mythology, or in US films,” as Elizabeth McAlister explains, “the zombie serves to index the excessive extremes of capitalism, the over-lap of capitalism and cannibalism, and the interplay between capitalism and race in the history of the Americas.”²⁴ To be othered in such a way that one serves an unjust social system is thus to be cannibalized, zombified by that very system. To labor incessantly to service debt, for instance, zombifies those who are straddled with debt, as many, if not most, people in the United States are.

Largely because of the exploitation that is the essence of global capitalism, the next thing you know, a bunch of mostly white, Latin American, or Asian folks are dressed up as zombies and shuffling about city streets, around the world, chanting “brains.” Meanwhile, on Amazon and eBay you can shop for hundreds of thousands of zombie things, including a Plants vs. Zombies PVC action figure toy set, LEGO zombies, and an anti–Joe Biden American Horror zombie T-shirt, to say nothing of all of the games, movies, books, and other merchandise. Why? How and why did all of this happen? We seek to answer these questions here, in our final chapter, but first I would opine that, though enabled by imperialism and fueled by capitalism, on a deeper level it is really about human need and human fear and the human need to fear. A need to know that we have nothing to fear, or at least a need to fear something unreal in order to escape contemplation of real things that should absolutely terrify us. An outlet. A pressure valve. For Daniel Drezner: “The spread of the living dead into every nook and cranny of American popular culture mirrors societal fears about the amorphous, asymmetric threats in the world today – the ‘unknown unknowns,’ as former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it.” Furthermore, the CDC and “other actors … have exploited the zombie apocalypse to spread a millenarian message of imminent societal collapse.” Even “gun rights advocates and their political allies” have gotten into the fear game and used zombies to promote their cause.²⁵

For reasons such as these, Camille Fojas finds the zombie to be “a loaded cultural figure that symbolizes a number of social fears about disaster, ruin, and dehumanization. The zombie marks the return of something long dead, something unresolved, put to rest, but never really mourned or purged.”²⁶ Thus, if in America we have never reconciled the debt crisis or the civil rights struggle, or truly embraced that Black Lives Matter, or come to terms with the related vastness of wealth inequality and racial injustice in our country, the zombie will keep returning as a constant reminder of that, and of how it could all come tumbling down any day. Meanwhile, being pitched into a life of indebtedness is itself a form of zombification. Think of those zombies in White Zombie working in the mill, mindlessly pushing the wheel in circles toward nothing more than staying unfree and perpetuating Monsieur Murder Legrande’s wealth and white privilege. It’s not a stretch to say that the zombies are the debtors, Legrande is the bank, and the mill is the structure of society. Meanwhile, the potion that zombified the millworkers is a form of socialization that dupes us into believing that our “otherness” is natural. “Debt demands the reanimated corpse of the indebted, resulting in the living debt of indentured servitude.”²⁷

In a similar theoretical analysis to mine, Kyle William Bishop, a leading scholar of the zombie in popular culture, draws upon celebrated literary critic Gayatri Spivak’s idea of the sub-subaltern toward understanding the symbolic and metaphoric registries of White Zombie and the subsequent pioneering zombie movie I Walked with a Zombie:

Spivak’s critique of the colonial class system can be related to the social system of the zombie narrative as well. When it is applied to movies such as White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie, the essentially subordinated mindless creatures are subordinated for two reasons. . . . (1) the master has no responsibilities towards a group of automatons that require little food, no pay, and no time off, and (2) the zombies have no voice, no opinions, no consciousness, and (most importantly) no ability to organize.

But, adds Bishop, the zombie as “the sub-subaltern differs from Spivak’s conception in kind and not just degree. They are truly ‘other’ both because of their fundamental lack of ‘humanity’ and because their physical appearance, their ‘stain’ of the human, makes them decidedly uncanny.”²⁸

Underlying the zombie’s uncanny sub-subalternity are three forces: sociophobics, othering, and contagion, which, when it comes to the undead, are almost inevitably overlapping and interconnected, as we’ll see. They all have to do with fear. Some of these ideas have been briefly touched upon earlier in the book, as well as René Girard’s relevant mimetic theory, but here the aim is to understand and interrogate them on a deeper level. Toward that end, we should turn to philosophy and social theory, with a bit of psychology tossed into the mix along the way.²⁹ Let us begin with the intriguing concept of sociophobics.

Sociophobics

American anthropologist David Scruton coined the term sociophobics in the early 1980s for “the study of human fears as they occur and as they are experienced in the context of the sociocultural conditions that humans have created.”³⁰ How does one employ this concept for cultural, psychological, philosophical, or social analysis? One relevant example is found in the study of horror films, where the understanding that “the wide variety of fears present in society when the film is created is made manifest in the movie” is carefully considered, as Kevin Wetmore explains.³¹

The notion of sociophobics should not be confused with sociopathy, which is a diagnosable psychological condition of someone “who is devoid of conscience, but who may or may not be prone to violence,” a person who exhibits symptoms of an “‘antisocial personality disorder’.”³² Sociophobics is, rather, the study of the fears that are reflected and evoked in a sociocultural object of human production—especially when they gain popularity, like, for instance, horror films, Ouija boards, the Magic 8 Ball, pet rocks, boy bands, Steven King novels, etc. One fears loneliness, but one can buy a rock for a companion or immerse oneself in a crowd of thousands to watch cute young men sing sophomoric love songs; one fears the unknown, so one can consult a piece of plastic to gain insight into the future. One needs a thrill in a safe way, so one reads horror novels and watches horror films. And, of course, one fears fear itself but desires control in the face of it, and zombies are a very convenient form of such control, and they are morally bankrupt and devoid of human value, so we are free to imitate them and kill them with impunity.

The concept of sociophobia is, I believe, especially relevant for understanding current zombie mania in terms of racism, as reflected by César Rundueles: “The most crude and racist aspect of sociophobia is the fear of a barbarian invasion, of a magma of social holism erupting over our exquisitely and meticulously individualist lives.”³³ Many people deeply fear, for instance, change to the social order or threats to their “way of life,” which is perhaps why interest in zombies spiked during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. And when things are happening in our world that are widely perceived as capable of changing the social order, it elicits fear that has a real social impact on what we do, say, buy, watch, and hoard, and on how we vote and even on whom we love and whom we hate. Hoard, like toilet paper, bottled water, and hand sanitizer when the COVID pandemic broke out.

Horror films are analyzed by scholars in this light, in light of their underlying and propelling sociophobics. And now so are zombies and their immense popularity. Douglas Cowan has applied the notion of sociophobics to the attractiveness of horror cinema, for instance, particularly horror that is somehow rooted in or reflective of religion. As we have seen, the zombie certainly fits that bill, being derived from Haitian Vodou and Vodouist notions of the soul. He writes, “Religiously oriented cinema horror remains a significant disclosure of deeply embedded cultural fears of the supernatural and an equally entrenched ambivalence about the place and power of religion in society as the principal means of negotiating those fears.” In terms of sociophobics, one source of people’s captivation with horror—and, I would add, with zombies —is precisely “the fear of change in the sacred order.”³⁴

It thus stands to reason that Americans so feared the threat of Muslims after 9/11, and that they have so feared an influx of Mexican immigrants, that they elected a president in 2016 who campaigned on promises of “a Muslim ban” and of building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, one that he would make Mexico pay for. Donald Trump is running for reelection as I write this and recently commented on the arrival of thousands of Haitians to the Texas border with Mexico, stating that “many of those people will probably have AIDS” and that this was “like a death wish for our country.”³⁵ The association of Islam with terrorism and of Haitians with AIDS, however deeply paranoic, ignorant, and irrational it may be, are leitmotifs in this narrative about the sacred order in America. Consider the words of seasoned U.S. diplomat Richard Haass in a 2001 speech before the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations: “The challenge of terrorism is . . . akin to fighting a virus.”³⁶ Given the long-standing application of the “epidemiology metaphor” in U.S. immigration policy, it is quite in keeping with the xenophobia gripping Haass’s hallowed homeland that Islam became understood in America to be a disease.³⁷ Just as Haitians allegedly bring diseases like AIDS—and zombies.

Many Americans seem to fear that the sacred order of white privilege is threatened not just by Muslims, but by hordes of Brown or Black people—most Muslims around the world, in fact, are “people of color”—who speak other languages and practice “dangerous” religions, invading the so-called land of the free, which was brutally stolen from “people of color” in the first place. Sadly, but relevantly, I write this as U.S. border agents in Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border, storm about on horseback with whips to keep Haitian refugees away. In the United States, the sacred order is, and one could argue always has been, about white privilege. Contrary to what kids are taught in schools in the United States, the American Revolution was, per Gerald Horne, “a revolt driven in no small part by opposition to abolition.”³⁸ To abolish slavery would have rocked the sacred order of colonial America, after all, just as refugees and Muslims are accused of threatening to do today, thereby allegedly “poisoning the blood of our country,” in the Hitleresque words of Trump at an Iowa campaign speech in December of 2023.

So, one must wonder, do such fears of others and their threatening disruption drive people to kill zombies in video games and root for the human heroes in zombie films, novels, comic books, and TV shows? Who roots for the zombie anyway? In certain ways, the zombie is the perfect other from whom we need to save the sacred order, a somewhat human being who is a dreadful and victimized creature that we ourselves might become. Expendable, fearsome, and pathetic. Since its debut in our world, as Lauro reminds us, the undead have always been other, after all: “The original zombie ‘other’ was a helpless slave of a Vodou master and, thereby, was implicitly connected to the transatlantic slave trade, furnishing commentary on the legacy of oppression and abuse of persons of African descent under colonial and postcolonial rule.”³⁹ Similarly, Jean and John Comaroff opine that “the mounting preoccupation with zombies” is ultimately rooted “in an unprecedented mix of hope and hopelessness, promise and impossibility, the new and the continuing.” And in the present sociocultural configuration in the global north, zombies are refugees and immigrants, “pariah citizens of the global order.” Furthermore, “because industrial capital chases cheap, tractable labor all over the earth,” it compels a “stream of immigrants in pursuit of employment – and to the likelihood that they will be despised, demonized, and even done to death.”⁴⁰

Refugees, immigrants, and zombies must be stopped, therefore, before they disrupt the normative order, just like in World War Z. Though clearly not fans of the film, Penny Crofts and Anthea Vogl consider “zombie and monster theory” to read the movie in terms of the dehumanization and fear of refugees. Theirs is a fascinating interpretation and an illumination of the sociophobics at play in the popularization of zombie apocalypse films and zombie culture. They argue that the movie’s tremendous success in the United States is largely about xenophobia, in this case about the fear of refugees flooding upon American shores or crossing borders and disrupting “our” way of life:

The portrayal of the zombies – as a heaving undifferentiated mass of dangerous border crossers – with the potential to take over a city if they gain access – mirrors and directly calls up metaphors and images used to describe and depict refugee arrivals. The scenes of an infected mass breaching the new border wall directly references (and willfully exaggerates) the usually placeless images of masses of refugees or migrants in transit, at sea or climbing over the top of border fences.⁴¹

This “zombie as refugee trope” is centrally about othering, about the fear of the other, and, in the American context, about white fear of the spread of Blackness, Brownness, “strange” languages, “dangerous” religions or ideologies, and their threat to white privilege. Think white flight during the Civil Rights Movement as Black people in the United States marched, protested, and even rioted against dehumanization. Think, also, the Vietnam War and the Cold War in which it was situated and the Communist witch hunts under Senator Joseph McCarthy.

When sociophobics of this kind swirl people into their collective effervescence, zombies fester, the apocalypse seems nigh, and people spend five billion dollars a year to service their twisted addiction to the zombie apocalypse. In his study of music in the popular zombie game Plants vs. Zombies, K. J. Donnelly offers a specific example, in the gaming realm, of the zombie as refugee or immigrant, or of zombies as the underclass masses creepingly grappling to take away the privileges of the privileged:

The game’s scenario adumbrates a clear metaphor: the zombies appear to be the social underclass invading the lawns of respectable suburbia. Here, garden plants – which are a seemingly useless sign of the cultivated middle class – prove effective against the great unwashed. Thus, cultivation destroys barbarism. . . . While it is not explicit, it is tempting to impute the use of a tango/habanera [the game’s background music], as the basis for the first assault on the house, as in some small way ascribing a Latin or Hispanic character to this underclass invasion of civilized suburbia.⁴²

What to do? Get a handsome white man like Brad Pitt to save the world, build higher fences, prohibit foreigners with misunderstood, unfamiliar religions, or who are otherwise infected, from entering your sacred, orderly world, put Brown children in cages, and send white cowboys on horses to whip and corral marginalized Black human beings and fly them back to the “shithole countries” from whence they came. That is our world. It’s downright dreadful, even more so than the zombie itself, a helpless monster that “cannot help but both represent and critique fears that refugee populations will both contaminate systems of national order, as well as unsettling present-day responses – of containment and securitization – to the so-called refugee crisis.”⁴³

Interesting and timely words: “containment and securitization.” Trump: build a wall. Muslim ban. Only want migrants from places like Norway and not “shithole countries” like Haiti or African nations that he could never name. Biden: white cowboys on horseback brandishing whips and corralling Black migrants in the Rio Grande before they have a whiff of “freedom” or of the American dream. Fly kids back to Haiti who weren’t even born there. Could anything be more racist and inhumane than such “policies”? Is anything in the United States more embodying of the sociophobics rooted in white privilege? Speaking of the United States, did you know that some 14 percent of all Americans have plans to prepare for the zombie apocalypse?⁴⁴ Do you have one? If the other is always a threat—the Mexican, the Muslim, the Haitian refugee—and if that threat swells to the point where we might be infected and become part of the threat, then we should prepare for the resurgence of the menacing other, right?

The great French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984) writes “that in each epoch . . . there have been privileged forms of monsters.”⁴⁵ Today it is clearly the zombie who is precisely this, our epoch’s ultimate metaphor of the menacing other. Two other great French philosophers have, in fact, said as much: Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and Félix Guattari (1930–1992), who argue that “the only modern myth is the myth of the zombies – mortified schizos, good for work, brought back to reason.” Furthermore, “the myth of the zombie is a work myth, not a war myth.”⁴⁶  Let us now consider yet another great twentieth-century French philosopher in our exploration of the concept of othering, Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986).

Othering and the Other

Also French, and one of the most widely cited scholars of our age, Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), a philosopher-cum-sociologist, has this to say about the social world and hence about the human condition: “Every established order tends to produce . . . the naturalization of its own arbitrariness.”⁴⁷ To grow up and be socialized in the United States during the Cold War, as I was, for instance, was to accept as natural that democracy is good while Communism is evil, even though democracy is as arbitrary, or as random or without ultimate reason, as anything and everything else, including Communism, a la Bourdieu. Honor, religion, patriarchy, and love are all arbitrary, not essential, and we are socialized to accept them to be natural, to be objectively real. The disruption of that sense of moral realism can be gloomy,⁴⁸ but there is something quite liberating in arriving at an agreement with the legendary French sociologist on this notion. Take gender, for instance. For Vivienne Jabri, Bourdieu’s notion of the naturalization of the arbitrary “is nowhere more pertinent than in the naturalisation of the gendered order of things in every aspect of cognitive and social being.”⁴⁹ In other words, “a woman’s place is in the kitchen,” and many of us grew up during the Cold War believing that and believing that Communism is evil and democracy is central to the sacred order of things. In Simone de Beauvoir’s words: “One is not born, but one becomes a woman.”⁵⁰ Bourdieu would call such a process socialization, while de Beauvoir calls it “mediation,” but they are essentially talking about the same thing.

Though she is unfairly dismissed by Bourdieu in his work on gender, perhaps no philosopher has been of greater influence on feminist theory than de Beauvoir.⁵¹ de Beauvoir was a close reader of Hegel, as were all of the first generation of existentialist philosophers. G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) is one of the most influential thinkers ever, having inspired the world’s two most important recent schools of thought, Marxism and existentialism. Hegel developed a system to understand all of universal history, called dialectical idealism. It is a deeply religious approach to understanding everything, with Spirit or Mind (Geist, basically God) progressively coming to a total self-realization through humanity’s own self-realization. It all unfolds as a triad: Thesis – Antithesis – Synthesis. To offer a crude example of how this works: Thesis – All swans are white; Antithesis – I just saw a black swan; Synthesis – Most swans are white, but not all of them. One thereby, through this dialectic, arrives at a higher level of truth and awareness. This has much to do with our very identity, insofar as we know who we really are only when we encounter and are close to others, whom we need to be themselves so we can be ourselves and be self-aware. Hegel famously maps this out, in terms of human interaction and identity, especially in his 1807 magnum opus The Phenomenology of Spirit.⁵² Usually referred to as the “master-slave dialectic,” here Hegel alludes to the radical otherness of the slave and its infusion of freedom on the master.⁵³ As Susan Buck-Morss has demonstrated,⁵⁴ Hegel was paying much attention to Haiti (whose slave revolution was won in 1804) while developing his famous metaphorical dialectic, which would be the foundation of the notion of othering. So the most compelling philosophical way of understanding zombies is rooted in Haiti, like the zombie itself.

In her classic 1949 feminist philosophical treatise The Second Sex, Beauvoir (1908–1986) argues that one’s very own self-identity requires the construction of “the other.” She writes:

The reason why otherness in this case seems to be an absolute is in part that it lacks the contingent or incidental nature of historical facts. A condition brought about at a certain time can be abolished at some other time, as the Blacks of Haiti and others have proved: but it might seem that natural condition is beyond the possibility of change.⁵⁵

de Beauvoir had Hegel’s (in)famous “master-slave dialectic” in mind in recrafting the notion to develop her groundbreaking feminist philosophy. It is not clear, however—despite her mention of Haiti here—whether she was aware that Hegel had developed his thesis while reading enthusiastically about the French plantation colony of Saint-Domingue (colonial Haiti) and the Haitian Revolution. Though de Beauvoir employs Hegel’s concept of the other primarily to philosophize about identity and gender, she clearly believes that the notion is central to human consciousness writ large, as reflected here:

The category of the Other is as fundamental as consciousness itself. In the most primitive societies, in the most antique mythologies, one finds a duality, that of the Self and the Other; this division was not originally placed under the sign of the division of the sexes. . . . In the couples Varuna-Mitra, Uranus-Zeus, Sun-Moon, Day-Night no female element is originally implied; not more than in the opposition of Good and Bad, fortune and misfortune, right and left, God and Lucifer; otherness is a fundamental category of human thought. No group ever defines itself without simultaneously positing the Other facing itself.⁵⁶

Subsequently, the term and its gerund othering have gained wide currency in a number of academic fields beyond feminist theory. Here is the best definition that I have found, from Lajos Brons:

Othering is the simultaneous construction of the self or in-group and the other or out-group in mutual and unequal opposition through identification of some desirable characteristic that the self/in-group has and the other/out-group lacks and/or some undesirable characteristic that the other/out-group has and the self/in-group lacks. Othering thus sets up a superior self/in-group in contrast to an inferior other/out-group, but this superiority/inferiority is nearly always left implicit.⁵⁷

So how does it work? For Lawrence Cahoone, as for de Beauvoir before him, identity itself requires difference and opposition. How can you be one thing unless you are not another, hence the importance of the other? That is to say, identity is only defined “if other units are represented as foreign or ‘other’ through a hierarchical dualism in which the first is privileged or favored while the other is deprivileged or devalued in some way.” This hearkens back to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, clearly. But the “process must itself be hidden or covered up, so that the hierarchy can be assumed inherent in the nature of the phenomena, rather than a motivated construction.”⁵⁸ So the black swan as antithesis is still a swan, just not a white one, so the white ones can knowingly get on in life as white swans—as if swans care about difference! Humans certainly do, though. They need it to understand themselves, and often they fear it deeply.

Thus, just as Foucault states that every era has its privileged monster, and just as Beauvoir so powerfully writes about othering, we now have the zombie, who fits both profiles and roles perfectly. As Kevin Boon tells it: “The proliferation of zombie mythology into mainstream culture over the past three decades has made the zombie the predominant manifestation of the monstrous other.”⁵⁹ This is manifest in zombie movies, in which “the other is foregrounded,” per Jeff May. “Zombies themselves are often faced with extreme othering. . . . Zombie otherness is so extreme in many cases that even the most humanist characters will kill a zombie if it threatens the sanctity of his or her own body.”⁶⁰ “Zombie otherness.” A reflection of human otherness and the fear of contagion.

Although in interpreting Hegel and developing her notion of the other, de Beauvoir never mentions zombies,⁶¹ one of today’s most important philosophers and leading interpreters of Hegel does, rooted also in considerations of Hegel’s reflections on Blackness. Slavoj Žižek (b. 1949) reads Hegel’s master-slave dialectic quite differently than de Beauvoir, insofar as Africans, Black people, “stand there for the human spirit in its ‘state of nature’ … a kind of perverted monstrous child.”⁶² For Žižek, Hegel’s thinking here is evolutionary and racist: that the human spirit needs, in the ultimate scheme of things, to move beyond its “state of nature,” to transcend its Blackness, an idea that is embedded in the notion of the zombie:

This is why a zombie par excellence is always someone whom we knew before, when he was still normally alive – the shock for a character in a zombie-movie is to recognize the former best neighbor in the creeping figure tracking him persistently. . . . What this all means is that at the most elementary level of our human identity. . . . The shock of encountering a zombie is not the shock of encountering a foreign entity, but the shock of being confronted by the disavowed foundation of our own humanness.⁶³

Put otherwise by William Larkin, zombies “unearth intuitions that bear significantly on the philosophical problem of human identity,” for they “provide a distinctive blend of terror and tragedy that helps reanimate the view that persons are most fundamentally corporeal objects.”⁶⁴

Outbreak and Contagion

And in many places in Siena great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead. And they died by the hundreds, both day and night, and all were thrown in those ditches. And as soon as those ditches were filled, more were dug. And I, Agnolo di Tura, called the Fat, buried my five children with my own hands. And there were also those who were so sparsely covered with earth that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured many bodies throughout the city. There was no one who wept for any death, for all awaited death. And so many died that all believed it was the end of the world. ~ Agnolo di Tura, Cronaca Senese (1348).⁶⁵

Plagues are horrific realities that drive us either to our knees or to graveyards. Or to cry as refrigerated trucks in New York City pull up to hospitals to bring out the dead for mass burial, during the COVID pandemic, in 2020.

In writing about the Black Death, the plague that killed di Turi’s five children and at least one-third of Europe’s human population in the late Middle Ages, John Aberth invites us to consider the following: “Imagine that, tomorrow or the next day, every other person you see around you could be dead and you may grasp something of the terror that this disease could inspire.”⁶⁶ Inspire? Aberth further informs us that the very word plague derives from the notion that God might actually “blow” pandemics into our midst: plaga.

When I first moved to the northern Congo in 1986, a doctor there warned me about two things: Ebola and AIDS. I will never forget his words: “If you behave and always carry clean syringes with you, you can protect yourself from the latter. But, if you are in a remote village and people all around you start dropping dead, bleeding from every orifice, get on your motorcycle and flee immediately, as fast as you can.” At the time, those diseases were both 100 percent fatal, and their transmission routes were still not well understood. I had good reason to fear contagion. Then one day I was wandering down a path, exploring the forested, remote African world in which I newly found myself, when a Zairean nurse stopped me to ask, “Where are you going?” My reply: “I don’t know… just exploring.” She grabbed me by the shoulders, spun me around, and said, “Never go that way; there is a colony of lepers there. Believe me! You do not want to become one of them!”

Contagion is indeed something to fear, especially during pandemics, like the 2020–2023 COVID pandemic, an illness that still poses a threat. My experience in Africa hopefully lends some encouraging perspective: COVID is far less fatal than AIDS and Ebola were in the 1980s and 1990s or the Bubonic Plague in the Middle Ages. Furthermore, pandemics have always rocked humanity, at least once or twice a century, in fact. In recent times, the following are the most notable, the dates here being just the identifiable starting point:

• 1800–2000: Tuberculosis

• 1918: Spanish Flu

• 1950: Polio

• 1982: HIV/AIDS

• 2003: SARS.⁶⁷

To this list we should add the N1N1 influenza virus, against which millions were inoculated around 2008, and then there was MRSA—anyone remember that? And COVID-19.

Priscilla Ward refers to the contagion narrative as the “outbreak narrative,” which since HIV/AIDS and advances in medical sciences, as well as advances in communications technologies, has in recent decades taken on new meanings and forms:

Following the introduction of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in the mid-1980s, accounts of newly surfacing diseases began to appear with increasing frequency in scientific publications and the mainstream media worldwide. These accounts put the vocabulary of disease outbreaks into circulation and introduced the concept of “emerging infections.”⁶⁸

She affirms, however, that although the outbreak or contagion narrative was amplified in the twentieth century, it is as old as anything else in human history and is, like fear itself, elemental to the emergence of religion. Prophets have long foretold that plagues are signs that the end is near, that the apocalypse and Judgment Day are at hand. Consider this passage from the Hebrew Bible: “Their flesh shall consume away while they stand on their feet, and their eyes shall consume away in their holds, and their tongue shall consume away in their mouth” (Zachariah 14:12). The book of Revelation features a “swarming imagery of trumpets, thrones, seals, vials of wrath, lamps of fire, angels, plagues, lightning, thunderings, earthquakes, falling stars, fire, blood, black sun and bloody moon, a menagerie of fantastic beasts.”⁶⁹ And, in the Quran, “plague is described as punishment from the Lord.”⁷⁰ These plagues at the End of Time seem as unavoidable as they are inevitable, and they are present in our world today. In the meantime we try to survive them and, though they might seem to be apocalyptic, life continues. Survival largely entails the avoidance of contagion. Zombies grafted themselves onto all this quite swimmingly.

Just as people love zombie films and games, they also seem to love plague movies, and there are actually video games in which one creates plagues and seeks to wipe out humanity, like Plague Inc. One of the most successful plague movies of the nonzombic variety, Stephen Soderbergh’s 2011 Contagion, opens with a black screen and the sound of human coughing. “We shortly learn who is coughing,” writes Annu Dahiya: “Gwyneth Paltrow, sitting at a bar in a Chicago airport, enjoying a beer and grazing from a bowl of communal peanuts. She already looks unwell, her skin pale and clammy, her nose slightly red.” She pays for her beer, and just as the bartender swipes her card, the movie goes frenetically global. Then the viewer is graphically whisked across the perilous and immeasurable interconnectivity of our world and how globalization has enabled contagion like never before in human history, readily and rapidly touching and torching bodies throughout the world. Launching forth from the airport bar, “the camera makes it a point to linger on what these sick bodies touch: public transportation surfaces, elevator buttons, office work documents, taxis and cars, bus and airplane bathroom handles, and drinking glasses.” It also lingers on “who they are physically near and touch: their loved ones, neighbors in a cramped elevator, fellow public transit passengers, and coworkers.”⁷¹ Sound familiar?

To any student who has ever taken a class with me, it will come as no surprise that I was delighted to see Dahiya’s article on contagion open with etymology! Taken here from the 2020 Oxford English Dictionary:

Contagion (n)

Contāgiōn-em: A touching, contact, contagion.

Con- together + tangĕre to touch.⁷²

To turn once more to etymonline.com:

late 14c., “a communicable disease; a harmful or corrupting influence,” from Old French contagion and directly from Latin contagionem (nominative contagio) “a touching, contact,” often in a bad sense, “a contact with something physically or morally unclean, contagion,” from contingere “to touch,” from assimilated form of com “with, together” (see con-) + tangere “to touch,” from PIE root *tag- “to touch, handle.” Meaning “infectious contact or communication” is from the 1620s.⁷³

It thus all makes sense. Quarantine if you are sick, and steer clear of anyone who is coughing, like Paltrow or the guy who is hoarding the eggs and toilet paper from your local supermarket. And when the zombies come, do everything possible to keep them from getting close to you or, God forbid, touching you, from biting you, and from eating your brains. Build a wall. Ban Muslims. Preserve the sacred order. And return to your own body, gaining a new awareness of it. According to Dahiyaany, “threat of contagion returns us to our body, but it does so from a fear-stricken sense,” a sense in which “our corporeality becomes forcibly evident to us through fear and prohibition: do not touch your mouth, nose, or eyes; distance yourself from others; be mindful of and be sure to disinfect the surfaces that you touch; sanitize and thoroughly wash your hands for at least 20 seconds.”⁷⁴

Much like viruses and plagues, zombies are contagious; at least they are now, though they never were in Haiti. They are mindlessly and deeply invested in outbreaks in most zombie films, a threat to all of us, a quintessential example of Dahlia Schweitzer’s take on the “outbreak narrative”:

The “outbreak narrative” generally begins with the discovery of an emerging infection and follows it as it spreads, documenting the journey to contain or neutralize it. Some versions incorporate terrorism, while others use zombies . . . . Security – and how to maintain it – is a pervasive theme in all outbreak narratives. . . . Othering is the second key thematic trope of the outbreak narrative, both as a way to reflect on how a disease would (and could) spread and as a way of placing blame and indulging implicit racism and stigma.⁷⁵

Fear, outbreak, contagion, othering. And the zombie. It has all come full circle, and the zombie apocalypse has all of this in spades.

Conclusion

Fear has enabled our species to survive, something deeply natural to which we are quite indebted for existing today. When our ancestors in the primeval era heard sounds in the bushes, they picked up their babies and ran for safety. And, at least for Hume, Malinowski, and Russell, they invented religion out of fear, and religion invented other deep fears. For Otto the fear underlying and motivating religion is rooted in something real, our encounter with the Holy. Eventually, also out of fear, our ancestors taught themselves to turn stones into weapons for defense. Once they smelted iron, humans had an epic advantage over the rest of God’s creatures, in the seas, savannas, deserts, and forests. And our religion advanced, too, as that enabled our tilling of the earth and our establishment of civilization, as we conceived of gods of iron and mother goddess of fertility to ensure the advancement of “civilization.”

But once again, the innate fear deeply embedded in our very nature, our DNA, our evolution, could not be squelched and thus had to go somewhere else and find other things to do, like religion. Innate dread is restless and cannot tolerate boredom. In America, it went to the movies and to voting booths. When the other, whether a threatening animalistic beast or a human immigrant, has wrought fear about our sacred order, we have consumed zombie stuff and enacted legislation to keep the other away, or we have clustered them in Home Depot parking lots (or ghettos or prisons). From there, they can come temporarily into our hallowed midst to paint our houses, mow our lawns, clean our toilets, prepare and serve our food, care for our toddlers and dying elders, and then just leave us alone, uninfected. You see, zombies are useful, after all; please just don’t let them turn our kids into Muslims. For the privileged, fight or flight, our primordial survival instinct, has morphed into fights of otherness and entrenchment, and of flights to suburbia. That is why we like zombies. They scare us into liking ourselves and protecting our own.

Notes