The South Wing

Vampires are the supernatural world’s old money, and zombies its slave labor. So how was it that drooling, moaning shells of humanity suddenly usurped vampires’ it-ghoul status? What Red revolution put zombies at the top of the pop culture food chain?

Not long ago, American culture was glutted with vampire-aristocrats. Robert Rodriguez’s 1996 pulp gore-fest From Dusk Till Dawn and the 1997 debut of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer signaled the start of their reign over the mainstream. More recently, the vampire/high school romance, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, along with its three sequels, spent a combined 143 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List. Elizabeth Kostova’s 2005 Dracula-hunter chronicle, The Historian, garnered the first-time author a two million dollar advance. Vampires were worth big bucks, and even publishers were willing to pay up for a taste of the next cold, old bloodsucker sex symbol.

Books weren’t always enough—we also wanted to see the fiends practicing their cosmopolitan hand gestures and stalking beautiful people bright with blood and joie de vive. In fall of 2008, Alan Ball’s True Blood—the story of a Louisiana town where humans and vampires live side-by-side– became the HBO network’s most buzz-worthy show. Twilight

’s same-name November 2008 movie adaptation debuted as number one at the box office.

But once retailers started moaning about their low holiday season sales, vampires turned more musty than musky. A month after its release, Twilight ceded its box office spot to the animated talking animal flop, Bolt, and Fox pushed the newest show from Buffy creator, Joss Whedon, into the Friday night pit of doom.

Vampires were glamorous during the second Gilded Age when corporate America was sucking the national economy dry. But now that we’re in the Good (as opposed to the Great) Depression, the rich are irrelevant. Americans aren’t aspiring to be sophisticated and spoiled; they’re hoping to endure. And what can endure want, humiliation, and hopelessness the way a zombie can?

Since 2009 began, #zombie has become a top tweet-thread on Twitter. A zombie hunting novel, Jonathan Maberry’s Patient Zero, has risen on the best-seller list. Juno’s academy award winning screenwriter, Diablo Cody, is talking up her film adaptation of the addiction memoir cum zombie rom-com novel, Breathers. Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment finally optioned Max Brook’s World War Z and Zombie Survival Guide, Borges-esque faux histories of a zombie outbreak, for 2010 movie release—but only after a bidding war against Leonardo Dicaprio’s film production company. Even the Resident Evil video game franchise is back in action this year, largely heated by rumors they’re going back to the zombie apocalypse archetype. As of this month, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is outselling Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Sorry vamps; the sun has risen and stumbling, smelly slobs are the wave of the future.

Zombies are only the latest human-monster hybrid to capture the national imagination; we’ve often sought a supernatural symbol for our national or spiritual condition. In the forties and fifties, for instance, superheroes rose from comic books to Saturday movie serial prominence. It was the “good war” era, so much of our popular entertainment was a variation of the propaganda film: supernaturally good, strong guy takes on supernaturally evil, somehow foreign guy. Supernaturally good guy always wins, and everyone tastes a bit of the glory. Invincible as they seemed,  superheroes did have to pay a price for their power. Though near-gods, they felt a responsibility to protect the humanity they could never truly be a part of.

Soon, however, we realized the good guys didn’t win all the wars. In 1960, Hitchcock released Psycho and ushered in the anti-hero, a protagonist done in by his overwhelming, albeit superficially repressed, sexual desires. From the sixties through the eighties, America struggled to come to terms with civil rights, the sexual revolution, and women’s lib– and our heroic archetype became a tormented beast.

There was the psychotic, repressive momma’s boy for adults, and the wild, hormonal werewolf for kids. Norman Bates and Teen Wolf. The wolves and psychos had enormous physical strength and could be wildly expressive, but they paid a price for their power just as the former super-heroes had. The new deviants were unattractive as hell. They didn’t have the social responsibilities that Superman did, but they paid for it with society’s distaste.

By the nineties, however, jeans turned baggy, models turned skinny, and eyeliner got smudged; it was time for the angsty, sexy, urban playboy of the night. Grunge didn’t lend itself to silly sex play the way werewolves did. Beauty wasn’t a raunchy All-American girl any longer; it was a dissipated, strung out, and world-weary rich kid.

We were killing the planet in our quest for a car in every garage and a steak on every table, but at least we could all die pretty. Vampires were anti-heroes that, like werewolves and crazies, had no sense of responsibility toward humans; they even hunted us down as food. But unlike the beasts that had come before, vampires stayed sexy while licking their chops. The price vampires paid for their power was internal; though attractive and nearly immortal, they were isolated and brooding. Vampires had no moral checks but also no hope or enthusiasm.

Now, the closest thing to a self-loathing but fabulous vampire on network T.V. is Chuck Bass on Gossip Girl. But more than Chuck or Dracula, today it’s zombies that captivate us.

Zombies seem to have little entertainment value, seeing as they blow off the finer things and yearn only for brains in their bellies. They are soulless shells incapable of thought, and whether they move fast (a la Twenty Eight Days Later) or slow (Shuan of the Dead

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), they aren’t witty conversationalists or wily action heroes. Yet in our current Depression, zombies fascinate because of their one strength; though they are brainless, busted, and doomed, they never give up, they always go on.

The price that zombies pay for their power is higher than the lonely heroes, the pariah anti-heroes, or the damned vampires. They are barely recognizable as human at all, unable to speak or use tools or learn; zombies have lost everything but their human body and their need. But now that they intrigue us more than ever before, have we become downright compassionate toward the bone-crunching ghouls?

In 1968, George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead filched zombies from Haitian voodoo ceremonies and myths, and introduced them to mainstream American culture. In Romero’s work, the zombies represented the socially oppressed masses fighting for liberation and civil rights. The movies took the perspective of the heroes as they tried to escape the zombie hordes, as the heroes tried to stay their good, middle-class selves despite the sudden crush of monsters competing with them for all the resources.

During the seventies and beyond, zombies populated the occasional horror movie hit or remake, especially in eras of budding multiculturalism and liberation. But they didn’t catch the popular imagination—or the box office, best-seller list, or television screen—the way anti-heroes, werewolves, and vampires did.

However, during those dark, zombie-less years, the filmmaker and audience perspective didn’t stagnate at ‘WASP good guys defeat dead baddies.’ In 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, a healthy human, Shaun, laces his interactions with zombies with empathy. In the epilogue, Shaun even cares for his now-zombified best friend, and plays video games with him—his best (zombie) friend is now nearly family.

Since Shaun of the Dead’s release, our fellow feeling for zombies has only grown. In the novel and soon to be produced movie, Breathers, the zombie is the protagonist who tries to make peace and find love in a breathers’ world. America’s gone multicultural, and gotten scared. We’ve become the zombie instead of the set-upon human.

In Haiti, people take in “zombies” found wondering towns, at the side of roads. These men and women are usually brain-damaged from poisons such as pufferfish venom, or by birth defects. They are alive, and can sometimes be saved; these so-called zombies must be cared for. Haiti is rife with stories of whole plantations cared for by zombies. Those legends stem from a real history of slaves poisoned by their masters into complacence. The zombie is hearty but slow. He is a good worker, albeit only good for work.

Now that we’re all packed onto this crowded earth, fighting for our (inaccessible) health care, our (fattening and chemical-laden) food, our (foreclosed) homes, or our (stressed and dissolving) families, we’re no longer heroic, raunchy, or blasé. Instead, we’re just fighting through the incomprehensible system for as long as we can, tamping down our souls and keeping our preferences out of the picture. We’re trying to be zombies, even though it’s tough. Because zombies have the one thing we need– the strength to keep going despite their wounds.