The Zombie & Literature

[thetownsman]

In my introduction I spoke as follow:

“I have come to learn of the zombie - does it belong to the working classes -as the vampire belongs to the aristocracy? That is my question and I seek guidance..."

I am a writer and I want to write about Zombies and I come to pick at you brains.

I received this reply from Thingy

“Very good analogy!

And to answer your question, Yes.

Well, that is if you subscribe to the philosophy of the inventor of the "Modern Zombie," Mr. George Romero. As already mentioned above, it has been his point of view that the Zombie is a working class ‘blue-collar monster’ and a sympathetic creature representing the potential for revolution and ‘change.’

But if I may, (and anyone is welcome to dispute this point. I am relatively new at analyzing Horror and am probably wrong on some points)

It has always been my understanding that in the primary mythology of the vampire (Wampyr), they were typically of the peasant class (originally). The design of the "dark prince" type vampire has its genesis in the novels of the gothic age.

The design was then further developed, by the immortal Bella Lugosi and his predecessors, into it the “seductive” supernatural creature many people venerate today (the Goth chick in my Physical Anthropology class ).

If I am not mistaken, the vampires in the “Dusk Till Dawn” film are much more similar to the original.”

I would like to take this topic further and would appreciate any kind of feedback.

"Art, for me, is universal and inclusive - not elitist and exclusive..." A D Dawson (conducter of Dodsley Pages www.dodsleypages.com)

[Emperor]

It all comes down to definitions and what era you are looking at.

Romero is really contrasting his films with the vampire movies and the modern vampre is "cool" and people want to hang around in clubs pretending to be vampires while the zombie is cool but few people would actually want to be one.

As you mention (you might want to use the QUOTE BBcode to clarify what you are saying and what someone else said) the origin of the movie vampire is much less glamorous. Basically the modern vampire oroginated in Slavic folk legends based around a misunderstanding of decompositional process and they are essentially sub-sepcies of the (now extinct) European zombie - the Revenant. The main difference is that the bloody purge (basically red decompositional juices forced out of the mouth by the pressure of decompsitional gases) led people to assume that the body had been coming alive and drinking blood. The Revenant became extinct during the Enlightenment (and had been in trouble throughout the Reformation) but the vampire made the leap into fiction and will its mythological part went the same way as the Revenant (with belief clinigng on into the 20th Centruy in some areas) it evolved into an aristocratic figure and in its fictional incarnation went on to fame and fortune ;)

We had to wait until the US occupation of Haiti for the Haitian zombie to catch on (in much the same way as the Slavic one did 200 years earlier) and jump into a fictional role in Western culture where it also evolved into the Romero zombie - the incarnation that really tapped into what people were looking for.

Is it a "blue collar monster"? It depends - it is more the Everyman. It could be any one of us.

For more background you should read the best vampire book:

Vampires, Burial and Death: Folklore and Reality
Paul Barber (1990)

www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0300048599/
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0300048599/

I have tonnes more stuff on this.

Emps