Zombies

I remember as a kid a whole bunch of my friends would sit together and watch a terrifying horror movie and then afterwards boast about how completely unscared they were - ha ha ha. I love movies but for thrills I go to adventure sports. I relate to the appeal of a scary challenge, (like sky-diving, kloofing, surfing, down-hill skating) enjoying the thrill, conquering my fears and then wanting to do it all over again! Maybe the fact that I'm not into horror films helps me write on
the topic of zombies with a certain amount of objectivity, in the same way that you might see me standing on the edge of an unreasonably high cliff about to plunge into a pool below and point out (rather truthfully) that what may seem "normal" to me is anything but normal.

Something that I have noticed recently that strikes me as disturbingly abnormal is the fascination that has been generated in various kinds of media about zombies. I saw there is even a "zombie walk" now, something for the whole family. Really? The whole family is going to dress up like bloody, sort-of-living-sort-of-dead people with decaying flesh hanging off of them? I hate to be the one to point out here that the emporer has no clothes but this is definitely not normal! Let me try and explain what I have learned about where zombie culture comes from and why we have good reason to be wary of it.

The zombie idea was first introduced to film in the horror genre in order to scare the living daylights out of us. At the time of its introduction audiences were well familiar with horror films, but the introduction of the dead-but-not-quite came as a fresh new source of terror. What could be more scary than a "dead" person walking around, decaying and disgusting but refusing to stay buried safely underground? What's more, not only are they walking around outside their graves but they are also threatening to eat the innocent and healthy living inhabitants of the earth.

But that was back-in-the-day when zombies were still scary, now we use them for comic relief. We're desensitized to them now. The horror scripters will have to unearth some fresh new terror to get our blood racing again. This is the intrinsic danger with the horror movie genre I think. In trying to contrive new ways to scare an audience that are so familiar with all the cinematic tricks they have seen over the years, directors cannot help but delve into the truly terrifying realm of spiritual darkness. You dont need a crystal ball to predict that writers will eventually go to religious ideologies and borrow from a veritable treasure trove of truly terrifying beings both real and imagined.

The most conspicuous example of this kind of borrowing from the very real world of spiritual darkness is the "exorcism" kind which has almost become a sub-genre of its own now. If you have ever witnessed a real life exorcism it makes perfect sense that a horror fiction writer would go there for inspiration, it is a truly terrifying experience! But should they?

Something similar happened with the whole zombie idea. In one of the earliest films which popularised zombies as we know them in popular media today - Night of the Living Dead, the word 'zombie" was not actually used. The writer used the word "ghoul" to describe the non-dead characters of the story; the word "zombie" was only used later. The word "ghoul" is quite medieval and unfamiliar to us today but from Arabic folklore (whence the stories came) a ghoul was: "a desert-dwelling, shapeshifting, evil demon that can assume the guise of an animal, especially a hyena. It lures unwary people into the desert wastes or abandoned places to slay and devour them. The creature also preys on young children, drinks blood, steals coins, and eats the dead, then taking the form of the person most recently eaten."So why did the people watching the film label the creatures they saw zombies? Well, the idea of a zombie as they understood it was influenced by a documented and publicized use of witchcraft practiced on the island of Haiti called Voodoo. According to Haitian culture a witch could cast a spell on you and apply a certain potion which would turn you into a "zombie" who would be enslaved and used as manual labour.

Now I'm sure that the fear-crafters in Hollywood consider all this spiritual mysticism which they are dredging up to be a bunch of fantastical nonsense. All they know is that it gets the results that they are going for - terror. They wouldn't bother to distinguish between what is real and what is garbage. My question is this - as Christians, shouldn't we?

My worry is this - where does it end? Why not just film a real life exorcism and screen it as a documentary? Would it be ethical to do this? Here is why I take exception. These kinds of films create an apetite in their audiences for death, decay, blood, cannibalism and - ultimately - demons. Let's get real here, this is not a coincidence, it's how Satan works. He takes what is truly vile and evil and he dilutes it to a palatable consistency. Then when he gets us hooked on the palatable evil he ups the ante and before you know it you're loving the stuff that initially you would have found abhorrent. Here's a warning - "Woe to those who call evil good".

I have watched the increasing popularity of the zombie genre with a growing sense of concern. I'm going out on a limb here because it would be easy for people reading this to perceive me as an old finger-wagging scrooge, but I reckon somebody needs to call it, and it might just as well be me. Christians should beware of becoming desensitized to media which subtly promotes any kind of necrophilia, its just not what we're about at all. Jesus is not a champion of what is disgusting and morbid. Its because of him that we are champions of life and everything that is pure and lovely.


References:
- http://news.discovery.com/history/history-zombies-12-6-4.htm

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_(fictional)

- Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times chided theater owners and parents who allowed children access to the film. "I don't think the younger kids really knew what hit them," complained Ebert. "They were used to going to movies, sure, and they'd seen some horror movies before, sure, but this was something else." According to Ebert, the film affected the audience immediately:
"The kids in the audience were stunned. There was almost complete silence. The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying. There was a little girl across the aisle from me, maybe nine years old, who was sitting very still in her seat and crying."[16] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghouls