Article
Culture
Film & TV
Monsters
Weirdness
Zombies
5 min read

Zombies: a philosopher's guide to the purpose-driven undead

Don’t dismiss zombiecore as lowbrow.

Ryan is the author of A Guidebook to Monsters: Philosophy, Religion, and the Paranormal.

A regency woman dabs her mouth with a bloody hankerchief.
Lilly James in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
Lionsgate.

Writing from his new book, A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan Stark delves into humanity’s fascination for all things monsterous. In the second of a two-part series, he asks what and where zombies remind us of, and why they caught the eyes of C.S. Lewis and Salvador Dali 

 

On how Frankenstein’s monster came to life nobody knows for sure, but he is more urbane than zombies tend to be. Nor do Jewish golems and Frosty the Snowman count as zombiecore. The latter sings too much, and both are wrongly formulated. Frosty comes from snow, obviously, and the golems—from mere loam, not what the Renaissance playwrights call “gilded loam,” that is, already pre-assembled bodies, which is a zombie requirement. Tolkien’s orcs function likewise as golem-esque monsters, cast from miry clay and then enlivened by the grim magic of Mordor. We do not, for instance, discover scenes with orc children. 

And neither is Pinocchio a zombie, nor Pris from Blade Runner, but dolls, automatons, and C3POs border upon the land of zombies insofar as they all carry a non-human tint. Zombies, however, carry something else as well, a history of personhood, and so in their present form appear as macabre parodies of the human condition writ large. They are gruesome undead doppelgangers, reminding us of who we are not and perhaps—too—of where we are not. Hell is a place prepared for the Devil and his angels, Christ tells us in the book of Matthew. And maybe, subsequently, for zombies. 

Kolchak, in an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker aptly titled “The Zombie,” correctly discerns the grim scenario at hand: “He, sir, is from Hell itself!”  

C.S. Lewis pursues a similar line of thinking in The Problem of Pain: “You will remember that in the parable, the saved go to a place prepared for them, while the damned go to a place never made for men at all. To enter Heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter Hell is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into Hell is not a man: it is ‘remains.’” Lewis makes an intriguing point, which has as its crescendo the now-famous line about the doors of Hell: “I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of Hell are locked on the inside by zombies.” I added that last part about zombies. 

I make this point—in part—to correct those in the cognoscenti who dismiss zombies as a subject too lowbrow for serious consideration.

Not everyone believes in Hell, of course, yet most concede that some people behave worse than others, which also helps our cause. Indeed, part of zombiecore’s wisdom is to show that bad people often produce more horror than the zombies themselves. Such is the character of Legendre Murder, a case in point from the film White Zombie. Not fortunate in name, Mr. Murder runs a dark satanic mill populated by hordes of zombie workers, which is the film’s heavy-handed critique of sociopathic industrialization. The truth to be gleaned, here, is that zombies did not invent the multinational corporation; rather, they fell prey to it. 

We might think, too, of Herman Melville’s dehumanized characters from Bartleby the Scrivener: Nippers, Turkey, Ginger Nut, and the other functionaries whose nicknames themselves indicate the functions. From an economic standpoint, their value becomes a matter of utility, not essence, which is Melville’s reproach of the despairingly corporate drive to objectify personhood—of which zombies are an example beyond the pale. They might as well be fleshy mannequins, in fact, and as such provide the perfect foil for the human being properly conceived. 

Here, then, is why we do not blame zombies for eating brains, nor do we hold them accountable for wearing white pants after Labor Day, as some inevitably do. They cannot help it—in ethics and in fashion. Perhaps especially in fashion. The best we can hope for in the realm of zombie couture is Solomon Grundy, the quasi-zombie supervillain who holds up his frayed pants with a frayed rope, a fashion victory to be sure, however small it might be, though “zombie fashion” is a misnomer in the final analysis. They wear clothes, but not for the same reasons we do. 

The point holds true for Salvador Dali’s zombies as well, most of whom find themselves in nice dresses. I make this point—in part—to correct those in the cognoscenti who dismiss zombies as a subject too lowbrow for serious consideration. Not so. Exhibit A: the avant-garde Dali, darling of the highbrow, or at least still of the middlebrow, now that his paintings appear on t-shirts and coffee mugs. Burning giraffe. Mirage. Woman with Head of Roses. All zombies, too ramshackle and emaciated to live, never mind the missing head on the last one, and yet there they are posed for the leering eye, not unlike those heroin-chic supermodels from Vogue magazine in the late 1990s. Necrophilia never looked so stylish. 

The zombie’s gloomy predicament bears a striking resemblance to that of the Danaids in the classical underworld, those sisters condemned to fill a sieve with water for all eternity...

But never let it be said that zombies are lazy. They are tired, to be sure. Their ragged countenances tell us this, but they are not indolent. Zombies live purpose-driven undead lives. They want to eat brains, or any human flesh, depending on the mythos, and their calendars are organized accordingly. No naps. No swimming lessons. Just brains.  

But we quickly discern that no amount of flesh will satisfy. There is always one more hapless minimart clerk to ambush, one more sorority girl in bunny slippers to chase down the corridor. In this way, the zombie’s gloomy predicament bears a striking resemblance to that of the Danaids in the classical underworld, those sisters condemned to fill a sieve with water for all eternity, an emblem of the perverse appetite unchecked, which has at its core the irony of insatiable hunger. And as the pleasure becomes less and less, the craving becomes more and more. The law of diminishing returns. So, it is with all vices. The love of money demands more money, and the love of brains, more brains. 

And so, in conclusion, a prayer. God bless the obsessive-compulsive internet shoppers, the warehouse workers on unnecessarily tight schedules, and the machine-like managers of the big data algorithms. God bless the students who sedate themselves in order to survive their own educations, taking standardized test after standardized test. And God bless the Emily Griersons of the world, who keep their petrified-boyfriend corpses near them in the bedroom, an emblem of what happens when one tries too mightily to hold on to the past. And God help us, too, when we see in our own reflections a zombie-like affectation, the abyss who stares back at us and falsely claims that we are not the righteousness of God, as Paul says we are in 2 Corinthians. And, finally, Godspeed to Gussie Fink-Nottle from the P.G. Wodehouse sagas: “Many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance, and started embalming on sight.”  

  

From A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan J. Stark.  Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.   

Review
Culture
Film & TV
Monsters
5 min read

Here’s what Death of a Unicorn gets very wrong

‘The unicorn was a Christ-allegory’ and other lies.

Iona is a PhD candidate at the University of Aberdeen, studying how we can understand truth. 

A tapestry depicts a unicorn resting within a fenced enclosure.
The Unicorn Rests in a Garden (from the Unicorn Tapestries).
Public domain, The Met Museum.

I don’t do horror or gore. And yet, I just saw the gory creature feature comedy horror Death of a Unicorn. I have not seen such a clichéd movie in a very long time (probably since Don’t Look Up…). Death of a Unicorn gives us a strained father-daughter relationship, the artsy young girl with silver rings on every finger and dyed hair, cartoonishly evil rich people, their creepy but stupid blonde son, the put-upon butler… and… the unicorn. However, the biggest cliché of them all is perhaps the desperate attempt to subvert expectations and tell a new story about a familiar trope… and failing.  

Given the title of the film, one would be forgiven for assuming that unicorns play a significant role in it. One would be mistaken. The conceit of killer-unicorn is a fun one. I wish the film had played with it more. Instead, the unicorns themselves barely feature and are not particularly interesting or subversive. The perception of the unicorn that is put forward by the characters likewise is trite and tired.  

The film features another classic scene: the ‘plucky young woman digs out her laptop and falls down a google rabbit hole to research paranormal/fantastical phenomenon’. In her research Ridley comes across a set of medieval tapestries depicting a unicorn hunt. These tapestries do exist in real life and are indeed now housed at The Met. The Met’s fictional website in the film informs Ridley that the fifth tapestry in the series ‘The Unicorn Surrenders to a Maiden’ only survives in fragments (true) and that scholars believe the missing part of the tapestry most likely showed the unicorn going on a murderous rampage (very much not true). From this, Ridley deduces that, since unicorns do indeed appear to be real, the warnings of old ought to be heeded. In the film, Ridley is proved right, the unicorns do turn out to be murderous monsters out for the blood of those who would abuse the remains of their dead foal.  

While the real Met website does indeed show us the torn tapestry, it features no such conjecture about the gory violence the unicorn might have inflicted prior to being subdued by the maiden.  

In one of her desperate attempts to reason with the megalomaniacal pharmaceutical tycoons, Ridley slips in a sentence about the unicorn serving as an allegory for Christ. This is a claim that is repeated all across the internet in various fora, fan sites, even some old scholarship. But that is exactly what this theory is: outdated scholarship… mixed with a healthy (unhealthy?) dose of paternalistic attitudes towards the past and half-misremembered folklore about Christian symbolism. It is true that medieval art is rich in symbolism. It is also true that medieval European cultures were deeply steeped in Christian religious traditions. However, as Barbara Drake Boehm writes in her recent book on the tapestries ‘the Cloisters Hunt for the Unicorn tapestries have … fallen victim to a tendency to perceive Christianity in every stitch’. The fact that one of the hunters has a scabbard that invokes the ‘Queen of Heaven’ (the Virgin Mary), or that another carries rosary beads, are most likely simply indicative of the fact these were common items ‘within the majority-Christian society in which the tapestries were created’. (A Blessing of Unicorns, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2020).

This contrived and at the same time lazy interpretation speaks of a deeply patronising and arrogant attitude to the past. 

One doesn’t need a degree in art history to figure out that such an allegorical relation would make no sense either. If the unicorn was representative of Christ and the hunt of his Passion, why does the unicorn fight back? If the untouched maiden in whose lap the unicorn reposes is the Virgin Mary, mother of Christ, why does she help the hunters trap and kill the unicorn? The tapestry that supposedly shows the unicorn resurrected and at peace in its captivity does not even appear to belong to the same narrative as the other tapestries. And why would a resurrected Christ-figure be shown in supposed captivity?  

This contrived and at the same time lazy interpretation speaks of a deeply patronising and arrogant attitude to the past. ‘Ah, well, back then they were all religious fanatics that believed in silly things like Jesus and unicorns.’ The implication being that in our modern, enlightened state we couldn’t possibly be accused of believing in silly simplistic mythical accounts of the world… Yeah. Not only is this of course false, it also distract from the very real things we could learn from the past.  

The film in the end wants to have it both ways. It wants to ridicule medieval people (based on lazy stereotypes) as well as perpetuating some of the most backward attitudes woven into the tapestries. So, what is the real true meaning of the tapestries and of unicorns? I don’t know. I can’t offer ‘real true’ interpretations (because they don’t exist). What I can offer is a careful and close engagement.  

What strikes me about the myth of the unicorn is what the unicorn does stand for. Over the centuries the unicorn has been used as a symbol for purity, innocence, humility, and sometimes fertility. In medieval poetry the (male) bard would often cast himself as the unicorn, beguiled by his beautiful lady, desiring nothing more than to rest his head in her lap. Little of this particular metaphor has survived into the modern pop-culture. What seems to have survived is the strong connection with young virgins. This particular trope features heavily in the film too though the film makers attempt to gloss over the sexual implications of ‘virgin’ by speaking only of ‘maidens’ (which still means the same thing but doesn’t have the same sexual baggage for modern ears).  

Now, that is indeed an interesting aspect worth unpacking. Why is it that unicorns are so attracted to young women who have not had sex? Why the obsession with virginity and the implied association that – for a woman! – having sex sullies something pure? What does it mean that both the hunters in the tapestries and the rich people in the film use a woman’s body and sexuality to trap the unicorn and commit their violence? Where’s the film that deals with those questions? Until they make that one maybe I’ll stick with My Little Pony, I’m told that has significantly less disembowelment.  

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

Since March 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free. This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.
If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?
Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.
Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief