Traditional zombie-apocalypse narratives rarely consider the feelings of their zombie characters as they are relentlessly dismembered and decapitated by the human protagonists. Nor are their thoughts on the outbreak voiced, since the zombie is usually a blank entity with no back-story; a dead (or un-dead) being which is now a shell of their previous existence, driven by instinct and an insatiable hunger for human flesh. But what if the zombie could experience emotion in the same way they could when they were alive? What if the zombie who saw his fellow zombie’s brain bashed in with a baseball bat could feel fear and sadness? More than that, what if they were exactly the same person they were before they died, sans the living part? This is the plight of the ‘conscious zombie’, an evolution of the modern zombie character, who is essentially a living mind trapped inside a deceased body.
Two types of zombie are typically discussed by scholars in the history of the character: the voodoo zombie of west-African culture and the ‘modern’ zombie born from George Romero’s seminal horror film Night of the Living Dead (1968). The voodoo zombie can be defined as ‘a soulless corpse said to have been revived by witchcraft’,and is specific to the West African and Haitian cultures. This zombie appears in early horror cinema in films like White Zombie (1932) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and features zombies that are ‘magically brought back from the dead to do the bidding of their masters, usually as menial labor.’ The Oxford English Dictionary fails to provide a sufficient definition of the modern zombie, born from Romero’s Night, which has infiltrated recent popular culture. This leaves zombie scholars to create their own definition: ‘the modern zombie is a relentlessly aggressive, reanimated human corpse driven by a biological infection.’ It is this zombie that has inspired countless video games, comic books, television programmes and inspires people to take to the streets on annual zombie walks, dousing themselves in full gore and walking both to raise money for charity and express love for the sub-genre.
Poster for White Zombie starring Bela Lugosi
The modern zombie has evolved since the ghouls of Night of the Living Dead, with Romero taking a pivotal role in moving the zombie to new levels of consciousness. Dawn of the Dead (1978) was the first to present sympathetic zombie characters through its portrayal of monstrous human figures but it was 2005’s Land of the Dead, the fourth film in Romero’s Dead series, which changed audience’s expectations of zombie characters. Land of the Dead features an ‘agent’ zombie which Derksen and Hick describe as a zombie who is able to act using agency. Land’s lead zombie ‘Big Daddy’ is their main example of an agent zombie since he is able to use his advanced intelligence to lay traps for the human characters, becoming more of a threat than the mindless ghouls audiences are used to. Big Daddy also grieves for his fellow zombies when he sees them strung up and used for target practice by the human community. Though Big Daddy is more intelligent than the Night of the Living Dead ghoul, he is still far from ‘human,’ exhibiting an insatiable drive for human flesh which ultimately defines his character.
Big Daddy played by Eugene Clark
More recently there is another type of zombie which is beginning to emerge within the sub-genre across a range of mediums: the conscious zombie. The conscious zombie is the protagonist of its own story and is aware of its own actions and speech, returning from the dead with most memories and knowledge of previous experiences intact, often even with the memory of their own death. This zombie is articulate and sympathetic, rendering them more human than the modern, Romero models (ghoul or agent) they are based on and as such inspiring a much more sympathetic response from its audience. Though the conscious zombie is not based directly on the voodoo zombie, conscious zombie narratives draw on similar themes of oppression but focus more on sympathising with the zombie rather than ignoring it entirely.
Examples of the conscious zombie have risen in recent spates of zom-rom-com (zombie romantic comedy) fictions such as Isaac Marion's Warm Bodies and S.G. Browne's Breathers. A conscious zombie also made an appearance in the BBC's 'kitchen sink drama with zombies', In the Flesh in the form of Kieran, a young boy who must deal with growing up in a small town whilst also facing discrimination for being a flesh eating member of the living dead. Conscious zombies are often integrated back into the communities they once belonged to as living beings, but are oppressed, sidelined and treated as an 'other'.
Kieran played by Luke Newberry
The conscious zombie is a unique step in the evolution of the zombie sub-genre and allows horror to mix with comedy and romance as a more effective vehicle for portraying the tough underlining social issues it wishes to address. The traditional modern zombie in film, literature and television is capable of acting as a vehicle to demonstrate opinions on societies' issues, but it is a conscious, emotive zombie that gives a voice to these problems.
Note: The above is taken from the introduction to my paper 'Communities and Consciousness in Modern Zombie Fictions', focusing particularly on the conscious zombie. For that reason I have not mentioned the Italian splatter gore zombie movies of the 80s.
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