Trash Mob: Zombie Walks and the Positivity of Monsters in Western Popular Culture

Simone do Vale

AbstractEmploying flash mob tactics and performed worldwide by youngsters dressed as the undead since 2003, zombie walks keep spreading all over like a ‘plague’, in a metaphor that ilustrates contemporary fears of disintegration, nuclear catastrophes and infection, due to HIV and other highly spetacularized epidemies, whilst revealing an affectionate identification with this amazingly resilient monstrous cultural icon that mixes life and death, human and non-human in one single lurching carcass. These parades were inspired by the ever growing zombie culture, due to the constant appropriation of George Romero's famous apocalyptic trilogy through remakes and original movies like The Return of the Living Dead (1985), 28 Days Later (2002) or Shaun of the Dead (2004), as well as the popular video game Resident Evil and it's versions on celluloid. Therefore, by focusing on the recent global phenomenon of zombie walks, this paper aims to discuss the positivity of monsters in contemporary Western popular culture by exploring the new role assigned to the zombie myth.

Key Words: Zombie Walk, horror films, subcultures.

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1. Introduction

La vida pública no es solo política, sino, a la par y aun antes, intelectual, moral, económica, religiosa; comprende los usos todos colectivos e incluye el modo de vestir y el modo de gozar1.

Ortega y Gasset (The Revolt of the Masses)

Back in 2003, just one week after Halloween, six Toronto horror movie fans decided to go out dressed as zombies, apparently for no special reason whatsoever besides having fun. On the following years, however, the group teamed up by Thea Munster, who used to throw zombie parties, launched its own website at http://www.torontozombiewalk.ca - and began summoning the public to take part in the enactment.

That's how Zombie Walk, a movement that in less than three years has managed to spread like a real plague along several Canadian and North American cities and, almost as instantantly, infected countries like Brazil, England, Poland, and Australia, exclusively through the internet. Therefore, dolled up as the living dead, the participants follow a previously planned route whose goal is crossing each town's busiest spots like malls, parks, and main boulevards. However, it is not a simultaneously orchestrated happening, held on a specific date. Although many groups obviously prefer dragging their carcasses on Halloween (when traditions holds that the dead are allowed to walk among the living) or, like in the Brazilian case, in the Dia de Finados (Day of the Dead), the marches may happen worldwide at random dates, therefore totally independent from one another.

According to the definition provided by the Porto Alegre Zombie Walk organizers website, Zombie Walk is a 'flash mob, a free event without any apparent purpose, in spite of the intention of gathering horror movies and music fans'.2 Yet, differently from flash mobs, instant gatherings whose intent is intervening in the urban space that, at least superficially, seems pointless and dissolves into the air, Zombie Walk does not fade away all of a sudden: the zombie mob mingles with the crowds as a line up of bizarre celebrators.

The reticence regarding explanations, theories and manifestos, such as publicity strategies employed so to disclose the marches and the ‘surrealistic’ enactment of the zombies raid, are very similar between flash mobbers and zombie walkers. Nevertheless, the adjetive ‘flash’ - that expresses an intense although brief experience - in the Zombie Walk case, does not make any sense. Zombie Walk, thus, could be understood rather as an unfoldment, an appropriation of flash mobs tactics by a kind of collective performance that is entirely distinct.

Zombie Walk main goal is simulating an invasion of zombies who feed themselves on human flesh, like in George A. Romero's most popular movies, that originated a very special living-dead cult. Romero's famous trilogy - Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985) - never ceased to reverberate, either through remakes or appropriations like Return of the Living Dead (Dan O'Bannon, 1985), whose zombies are particularly drawn to human brains and, hence, do constantly appear in the movie grumbling the punch-line ‘brains, brains’, echoed untill exhaustion by Zombie Walk participants worldwide.

Besides the remake of Dawn of the Dead (Zach Snyder, 2004), several recent movies recaptured the zombie theme, specially Romero's apocaliptical perspective like 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002) and the parody Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004), as well as the notorious

videogame Resident Evil (1996), that gave rise to its own blockbuster trilogy, not to mention the wide variety of short movies and independent productions.

In Brazil, as in other countries, it seems that what initially bounds participants together is this very particular thematic universe ruled by the taste for horror movies. It also includes their own particular vintage clothing style, tatoos, piercings, and a preference for rock bands that incorporate horror and science-fiction movies components, which constitute an important part of the 1950's and 1960's trash culture, as an ultimate aesthetic concept.

Albeit sometimes very different in musical style, we could say this aesthetics already have been appropriated by bands which share the zombie icon as an emblem, like British group Zombina & the Skeletons, authors of the symptomatic Nobody likes you when you're dead, Youtube's parody act Zombeatles, and Brazilian trio Catalépticos (cataleptics), whose front man Vlad holds a festival named Psycho Carnival, a refuge for the quite ‘oppressed’ rockers throughout the most popular Brazilian celebration, just to name a few. Beware: a whole new culture of the undead seems to be rising... from the tomb.

Therefore, in order to deepen our understanding on the peculiar cultural phenomenon of the Zombie Walk, as well as on the positive role it assigns to monstruosity, it is necessary to approach trash culture without prejudice, hence examining its aesthetical project, as well as the potential for resistance it may provide in opposition to either contemporary mass-mediated culture or hegemonic values. Although the discussion on the concept of resistance still may remain controversial, since, in a somewhat fatefull manner, subcultures, often spectacular in their own strategies, inevitably end up being absorved by the cultural industry as commodities, such as punks and the like, it is undeniable that these contemporary subcultural manifestations should at least be seen, according to João Freire Filho, as ‘seismometers... for the shifts in cultural production and consumption, behaviour and social interactions’.3 Freire Filho translates exactly what this article aims to explore: instead of adressing a debate on taste, this is an attempt at mapping the

1 'For public life is not only political, but is equally, and even more so, economic, moral, intellectual, and religious. It includes all our collective habits, even our fashions in dress and modes of amusement'. See J Ortega Y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, edited by Kenneth Moore, translated by Anthony Kerrigan Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985, p.3.

2 Zombie Walk Porto Alegre, viewed on 1 August 2007, <http://www.zombiewalk.com.br>.

symbolic relationship suggested by this identification with this apparently not the least alluring figure, inasmuch as its resignification through the new social practise of zombie walking and its potential for providing an ironic kind of resistance against mainstream culture and values.

2. Horror, Fear and Entertainment

Along the latest decades, the expression ‘trash’, as traditionaly associated with the mostly undervalued segment of the horror film industry, distinguished itself from its pejorative meaning and so began connoting a whole new genre of low budget productions that, regardless the imposition of Hollywoodian dogmas for success, and featuring unending supposedly not intentional gags due to lack of time and financial resources, is highly appreciated by its afficionados.

Concerning the interaction between the audience and the action onscreen, horror movies are specially fruitful for studies on spectatorship, as Jeffrey Sconce observes, due to its own kind of cinematic narrative, for they provide a more explicit scope than any other cinema genres for the analysis of the roles played by vision and power, whereas, the identification with characters are much more complex and so harder to problematize. Unlike other genres, the identification process in horror movies is not as unambiguous - otherwisely, one might alternatively identify oneself with the victim and also with the monster/murder/slasher role.4

In order to address the issue of identification in horror movies, let´s take a somewhat brief look at its early historical background. Le Manoir du Diable (George Méliés, 1896) is said to be the first horror movie, and it is also important to note that the first great horror movie production was Frankenstein (1910), filmed by Thomas Alva Edison for the kynetoscope. Among the groundbreakers of horror we can assemble the obscure Danish version for Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hide (August Blom, 1910); German classics The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and Nosferatu (1922), and Universal Studios The Phanton of the Opera (1925), Dracula (1931), and Frankenstein (1931), which launched its own icons to stardom - namely, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff. Concurrently, monsters, however

3 J F Filho, Reinvenções da Resistência Juvenil: Os Estudos Culturais e as Micropolíticas do Cotidiano, Mauad, Rio de Janeiro, 2007, p. 22.4 J Sconce, ‘Spetacles of Death: Identification, Reflexivity and Contemporary Horror’, in Film Theory Goes to the Movies, J Collins, H Radner & A P Collins (eds), Routledge, New York, 1993, pp.110-111.

now in their immaterial glamourous version, once again became a focus of empathy for the viewer, differently from the clearly defined good/evil loci of identification in early productions, despite the strong appeal of creatures of the night such as the vampire.

Generally, many theorists claim that the proliferation of horror movies often coincides with times of overall insecurity, like the Great Depression or the German defeat in WWI. However, it is reasonable to argue that this is far from being the only potential explanation for the popularity of scary cinematic narratives. An intense curiosity and awe for the different, morbid, and monstrous components - omnipresent in child tales throughout history - have always permeated Western Culture. As an example, we can mention the Greek myth of the Gorgon to ilustrate our ancient fascination for monstrosity. Rather than a mere interpretative model for what we fear in given times, horror movies are also a means to problematize identity, social, political, and cultural issues.

According to David Skal, historically, the macabre has played a significant role in circuses, since Seargent-Major Philip Astley (1742-1814), founder of the modern circus ring, already held bizarre sideshows presenting numerous kind of freaks, both animal and human.5

However, it was Phineas Taylor Barnum (1810-1891) who became the most notorious predecessor of the horror show later aproppriated by modern cinema. Barnum's circus sideshows consisted of a kind of cabinet des curiosités that travelled around the so called civilized world exhibiting Otherness in its most dramatic and, consequently, reassuring form, because the boundaries between normal and deviant were then clearly stated. But soon the psychiatric studies on scopic pulsion and the perversion of vision, along with other important cultural factors, resulted in the banishment of monsters from the public sight, confining the freaks to the now exclusive authority of the medical gaze.

So, despite the prestige achieved by the likes of Jojo, the dog-faced boy, monstrous celebrities were gradually interdicted to the lay gaze of the mass. A set of restrictions was prescribed against the public exhibition of the so called ‘living phenomena and human prodigies’, based upon the condemnation of the populace's vulgarity and lack of compassion towards human anomalies.

This censorship gained momentum specially in England and France around 1860. Coincidentally, as notes Jean-Jacques Courtine, the early manifestations against the freak shows took place in the 1880's, invariably

5 D Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, W. W. Norton, New York, 1993, p. 29.

uniting their voices to the psychiatric discourse. These entertainments from then on became questioned under the emblem of the psychopathology of sight, that included voyeurism and exhibitionism in the set of perversions. Therefore, as Courtine argues:

Resorting to medical intervention for juridical and administrative dispositions in the name of the control of visual culture from then on will stretch the field of anomalies from objects to subjects, from deformities exposed to the eyes set on them, from the curious pulsion to the psychological qualification of the person who surrenders to it. The curiosity for human monsters, whenever pursued outside the sphere of medicine, will be vicious, morbid, perverse. In other words, an infraction reprehensible to the eyes of the law and a psychological deviation in contrast with the norm at the same time.6

Closely following the eugenic ideals propagation in the 1930's, and on the verge of the WWII outburst, the good families withdrew from the grotesque spectacles which once amused their well-born children. Now, only physicians hold the moral and juridical privilege of contemplating monstrosity vis-à-vis.

One good example of this sheer intediction of vision, now imbued with compassion, is the case of British physician Frederick Treves, who, in 1884, rescued John Merrick - the notorious Elephant Man eternized onscreen by David Lynch - from a rented room in White Chapel Road, where he was exhibited, in order to hospitalize and reveal Merrick to the world now as the object of a meticulous scientific study.7

Ironically, in 1932, Freaks, directed by Todd Browning, whose cast enrolled authentic freak show celebrities, however, was not as well received as its contemporaneous horror movies. The film tells the story of a sideshow midget, Hans (Harry Earles), who falls in love with Cleo (Olga Baclanova), a beautiful blond trapezist who not only intends to marry him so to drain his pocket out of money, but also plans to poison him to inherit his estate after

6 J J Courtine, ‘O Corpo Anormal: História e Antropologias Culturais da Deformidade’, in História do Corpo: As Mutações do Olhar - O século XX - Vol. III, J J Courtine (ed), Vozes, Rio de Janeiro, 2008, p. 303.7 S B Clark, ‘Frankenflicks: Medical Monsters in Classic Horror Film’, in Cultural Sutures: Medicine and Media, L D Friedman (ed.), Duke University Press, Durhan, 2004, p. 132.

his death. The other human prodigies of the circus discover the plan and go medieval on her, taking revenge by mutilating and transforming the ruthless beauty into another sideshow attraction, a squawking and repulsive ‘duck woman’.

Due to this unexpected ending, Freaks remained censored for approximately 30 years, and thus can be seen as a bravata against the tirany of normality, that, currently, seems to be the predominant model according to which we might shape ourselves, changing the very way we regard our own bodies. One good example of this shift are the surgical reality shows like Extreme Makeover or The Swann - people chosen to be totally corrected by plastic surgeons and dentists aren´t what we could call aberrations, but these shows goal is to make them the most perfect possible according to the current beauty canons. The emphasis, then, is not set on a supposed monstrosity of the subject, but rather on the ideal of an utter normality. Because of their rarity, monsters were an affirmation of order itself, a warrant for the humanity of the human itself. Normality, on the other hand, is not as generous as monstrosity.

Wether dystopian or conventional, in the sense that the monster must always be defeated at the end, horror movies indeed often provide allegories that might represent our fears. For Douglas Kellner, they 'reproduce the resurgence of the occult in contemporary society, an indication that people realize that they do not control their own everyday lives'. Thus, Kellner argues that in those times when dealing with social and economical reality becomes harder, the occult helps out making sense of unpleasant circunstances or unintelligible events, like catastrophes, for instance.8

I agree that, specially concerning catastrophic films, this is a valid argument, however, it is necessary to say that it can not account for every horror movie, in particular the ones like Romero's zombies, Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th series, among so many others, where ghoulish creatures and terrifying slashers command stroboscopic butchery scenes and hence become the primary focus of attention and even fondness. Fear alone is not able to explain the attraction for such films, as Nöel Carrol argues, because it is a fact that people also enjoy horror movies for simply watching - yes - repulsive scenes . In Carrol's definition:

Horror stories, in a significant number of cases, are dramas of proving the existence of the monster and disclosing (most often gradually) the origin, identity, purposes and powers of the monster. Monsters, as well, are obviously a

8 D Kellner, A Cultura da Mídia, Edusp, São Paulo, 2001, p. 165.

perfect vehicle for engendering this kind of curiosity and for supporting the drama of proof, because monsters are (physically, though generally not logically) impossible beings. They arouse interest and attention through being putatively inexplicable or highly unusual vis-à-vis our standing cultural categories, thereby instilling a desire to learn and to know about them. And since they are also outside of (justifiably) prevailing definitions of what is, they understandably prompt a need for proof (or the fiction of a proof) in the face of skepticism. Monsters are, then, natural subjects for curiosity, and they straightforwardly warrant the ratiocinative energies the plot lavishes upon them.9

Once again, I shall argue that curiosity and the sheer pleasure of watching lots of gore spilling everywhere onscreen, however, do not also account for why people identify so closely with monsters with so much devotion as to need 'real' vampire nightclubs to hang around with their friends. Some monsters in particular also have another important attribute: they result from some obscure process that takes place within the body itself, thereby posing several issues of identity, like zombies, for instance.

3. Zombies ‘R’ Us

According to Slavoj Zizek, paranoia's most elementary form is exactly the belief in a Other of the Other: an Other that, under the socially explicited Other, conjures up random effects in social life, hence warranting its consistency.10 Differently from dystopias like 1984, evil has no fixed focus in Romero's movies. Although figures of authority are fiercely satirized, evil is represented in ambiguous forms. Romero does not totally explain the origin of the mysterious radiation that causes the dead to rise from their graves and feed on people, whilst the first zombie movies - White Zombie (1932) and Plague of the Zombies (1966) - refer to zombies as people enslaved by voodoo sorcerers. Therefore, before Romero, the zombie condition was a reversible one.

9 N Carrol, ‘Why Horror?’ in Horror: The Film Reader, M Jancovich (ed), Routledge, London, 2002, p. 35.10 S Žižek, ‘The Matrix: Or, the Two Sides of Perversion’, in The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real, W Irwin (ed.), Open Court Publishing Company, Peru, 2002, p. 245.

Anticipating the niilism of horror movies from the 1970's, in which authority is shown as absolutely helpless before evil, Night of the Living Dead, as his other movies, uses the monster as an allegory of a dehumanization thread, the fear of nuclear holocaust, but also for the fear of mass alienation, lost of identity, and the fear of homogenization and disregard for singularity.

By its turn, Dawn of the Dead criticises mass-mediated and consumption society. The opening sequence shows a tv station that is broadcasting the news on the emergence of a sudden attack of cannibal zombies. Running for their lives, the main characters seek refuge in a shopping mall, where staggering zombies struggle to repeat the same acts they used to perform when alive. Obviously, here the compulsion for humam meat, whose lack makes the poor creatures from hell moan like there´s no tomorrow, is a critic to consumerism.

When her friends decide to hide in the living-dead infested mall, Francine, the only woman in the group, argues that they 'must be hipnotized, this is a prison'. To what her boyfriend retorts: 1Here we have everything we need'. OK, the metaphor couldn't be clearer. After they erradicate all the zombies in the mall, Francine and the others start behaving in a curious Decameron fashion.

In Bantu, zombie means a ghost that looms at night. Through a powerful potion, Haitian tradition holds that the sorcerer or ‘boko’ is able to stirr and make the dead perpetrate crimes for him. The zombie, thereby, could be defined as a body deprived of will, controled by an invisible force, a borderline creature between human and monstrous, life and death.

Therefore, only after Romero's approach to the zombie allegory we may find it directly associated with an idea of the contagious outbreak posed by the putrid body mass. In interviews, Romero himself usually states that the zombie, in his films, must be understood as a metaphor for the passiveness frequently associated with consumption society. Consequently, the affection Zombie Walk participants express for the unappealing living-dead that lurch miserably in trash movies, and not for glamourous monsters, like the vampire, for instance, is quite striking. In part, I can argue that the outsider logic could help explaining what originates this fondness for such a wreck of a monster. Like his fans, Romero himself can be called an outsider – and as a matter of fact, a very sucessful outsider role model.

In the contemporary context, in spite of all the spetacularization of catastrophes and genocide, death itself became one aseptic abstraction, secluded to the hospital environment. For Julia Kristeva, 'the corpse seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life'.11 And whilst its imagerie may give rise for uncaniness and

revulsion, death became a constant fear. As Philippe Ariès puts out, ‘The dead became beautiful in social vulgate when they started to be a real source of fear, a fear so deep that it can only be expressed through interdicts, that is, silences’.12

As any other monster that inhabits an at least apparently human form, the zombie represents the supposedly untamable animality that resists to the perishing concept of human, a return of the repressed. But surely it is also a representation of the fear of disintegration, of contagion, and hence the trespassing of boundaries, the plague, and, consequently, isolation. Commom fears in a society that faces dramatic shifts in social interaction, particularly due to the constant media messages featuring ubiquous towering menaces like terrorists, ecological and economical disasters, HIV, bird flu, swine influenza, and young Marilyn Manson fans going postal apparently everywhere around the globe.

Through the zombie metaphor, Romero movies present an idea of a predating, alienated, despicable crowd. On the other hand, however, Toronto Zombie Walk website explains the zombie allurement as follows: ‘which other monsters accomplish such a unity as a mass in death?’.13

Unlike flash mobs, a clear desire for closeness and distinction moves Zombie Walk participants, what, however, does not prevent it from becoming a commodity someday. A series of paid events have already been created for the zombie walkers, like after-hour film festivals, for instance. But there are also beneficent Zombie Walks, and the astounding civilian organization Zombie Squad,14 based in Saint Louis, Missouri, whose mission is offering communitary assistance regarding survival tactics in the occurrence of earthquakes, floods, terrorists acts and...zombie invasions.

Finally, Zombie Walk could be understood as a carnivalization of fear, besides being a reason for people who share a cultural universe in common to get together and display their power as a mass. And, in this sense, Zombie Walk could be seen as a political manifestation, however deprived of modern idealism of the term, as an ironic resistance act against the very dictatorship of fear in contemporary mass-mediated culture.

11 J Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Columbia University Press, New York, 1982, p. 4.12 P Ariés, História da Morte no Ocidente, Ediouro, Rio de Janeiro, 2003, p. 158.13 Toronto Zombie Walk, viewed on 1 August 2009, <http://www.torontozombiewalk.ca>.14 Zombie Squad, viewed on 1 August 2008, <http://www.zombiehunters.org>.

In its grotesque representation of death, Zombie Walk holds a principle of bodily materiality. Inspired on Bakhtin's essay on Rabelais,15 I believe the corporal images provided by zombie movies, and then reproduced by Zombie Walk participants in the most varied fashions, are exactly as exagerated as are the excesses contemporary risk society condens.

Notes

15 M Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1984, pp. 18-19.

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Simone do Vale is a doctorate candidate at the Department of

Graduate Studies in Communication & Culture, Escola de Comunicação, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her dissertation focus explores the relationship of the representations of the body in contemporary medicine, mass-mediated culture, and subjectivity.