proposed amendments to the seven degrees of zombification

In his essay Ontological Anxiety Made Flesh: The Zombie in Literature, Film and Culture, Kevin Alexander Boon purports that the zombie's monstrous construction is effective as an embodiment of mans greatest fear - that of death. The zombie's construction blurs the boundaries between the self and the other. It is life in death brought forth from beyond or below (ground) and bringing with it the reminders of our own mortality. Zombies are commonly defined as a physical body with no will of its own, but instincts to follow. It suffers a complete loss of humanity and those individuating processes that we hold so dearly in life. This is the fearful splitting of the human into otherness. The zombie carries with it the threat of becoming, it does not want to undo you but wants to make you. 

Boon's thesis is supported by a categorization of zombie archetypes popularized through cultural media and through which their particularities play and taunt at our ontological anxieties while they tug at our intestines and gnaw at our throats. His first type is the 'zombie ghost', the body that has returned from death with its volition in tact or at least so automation, as found in Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) in the form of Captain Barbossa and his skeleton crew. This type is perhaps is a more generic form of the 'undead'. There is the rather unpopular 'zombie ruse' in which the power of suggestion performs a diversion suggesting the presence of a revenant that proves to be false. The 'zombie drone' bears the strongest resemblance to the original Haitian myths of the dead being risen to the possession of a person to perform their biding. Perhaps the most familiar form of zombie is the 'zombie ghoul' as popularized by the films of George A Romero.  This zombie is dangerous and has developed a taste for the flesh of the living, and produced allegories for infection in a fearful climate with films like 28 Days Later (2002). The infrequently used 'zombie channel' is related to the ghoul variety in that they are still cannibals but through the process of consuming they reacquire some of their humanity, absorbing knowledge and personality through the blood. The 'tech zombie' shares many traits with the drone, its distinction being its control via technological device or medium, the most famous example of this being The Stepford Wives (1975). Boon's final type is the 'cultural zombie' who is determined by a lack of freewill and personal identity but are not in fact dead. Such characters would be Patrick Bateman in Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho, who is loosing himself in yuppie culture and slaved to his American Express card. 

I would like to propose an addition to this analysis, that combines many of the properties set out by Boon but problematizes the spectators presumed attitude towards the zombie character. Instead of emotions of fear, this type invoke sympathy - the 'sympathetic zombie'. The gap in this study was highlighted during a renewed enthusiasm for gothic literature and of my students projects. i became aware  that the existence of this type of monster inverts all our ideas about the monster that dares occupy the divide between humanity and monstrosity. The 'sympathetic zombie' reminds us not of our finitude but of the atrocities of humanity of the violence that freewill can yield. 

Marcel Sarmiento's critical success Deadgirl (2008), depicts a 'zombie drone' of sorts. A girl is discovered by 2 youths in an abandoned mental institution strapped to a table. She is enslaved by one of the boys and passed around his friends for sex. While the themes of possession and the objectification of the body in zombie narratives is not new, the slant takes the zombie film out of the survival horror genre. Instead concentrating on the debasement of the monster forcing an uncomfortable sympathy toward it. Sympathetic monsters briefly came to popularity in the Victorian gothic revival, with the poster-boy of Frankensteins monster. Like the zombie Frankensteins monster is a fusion of man and beast, the recognizably human characteristics endear him, his cognition and his modest quest for a wife as well as his acknowledgement of his own difference, while the other-side revolts. Yet in Deadgirl the humanness of the brutality done and the sufferance endured by the zombie seems to have an overriding effect on the otherness aspect and sympathy is evoked. The character of Bub in Day of the Dead also warants this sympathy. After being bitten we watch his struggle through the becoming. His desire to remain human engenders sympathy in a way that is alien to the genre as a whole. It seems to be about retaining an evident sense of humanity that by Boon's definition is lost in the zombie. This presence of volition radically shakes up a tired genre.  We need the monster, we etch our culturally dominant fears into them but we sometimes need reflect, through a saturated genre, the monster of man. 

xoxo Final Girl