Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy: New Life for the Undead
Author: Richard Greene; Silem Mohammad
Date: 2006-08-29 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Philosophy; Horror; Vampires
Description: Since 1968's Night of the Living Dead, zombie culture has steadily limped and clawed its way into the center of popular culture. Today, zombies and vampires have taken over TV shows, comic books, cartoons, video games, and movies. Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy drags the theories of famous philosophers like Socrates and Descartes into the territory of the undead, exploring questions like: Why do vampires and vegetarians share a similar worldview? Why is understanding zombies the key to health care reform? And what does "healthy in mind and body" mean for vampires and zombies? Answers to the
Publisher: Open Court
Rights: Copyright ©2006, 2010 by Carus Publishing Company

Table of Contents

Popular Culture and Philosophy Series Editor: George A. Reisch

Title Page

A New Lease of Life for the Undead

PART I - It’s Alive (Sort Of)
Chapter 1 - The Badness of Undeath
Some Haunted Housekeeping
Deprivation and Desire-Frustration

Human Beings, Vampires, Zombies, Pigs, and Fools

Evil, All Too Evil

Not to Put Too Fine a Point on It

Chapter 2 - Res Corporealis: Persons, Bodies, and Zombies

Persons
Bodies
Zombies: The Terror
Zombies: The Tragedy
“They’re Just Dead Flesh”
“This Was an Important Place in Their Lives”
Dead People

Chapter 3 - “She’s Not Your Mother Anymore, She’s a Zombie!”: Zombies, Value, ...

The Value of a Zombie
The Philosophical Challenge of Zombies
Dead or Alive?
Self as Fiction
“Not Your Mother!”
Zombies and Us

Chapter 4 - Dead Serious: Evil and the Ontology of the Undead

Some Puzzles about Undeath
Conceptual Truths about the Undead
Kinds of Undead
A Touch of Evil
Evil and the Undead
Resting in Peace

Chapter 5 - Zombies, Blade Runner, and the Mind-Body Problem

Zombies and Replicants
And Bears! Oh No: Zombies Invade Philosophy
Zombies Ate My Brain!

Plan B from Inner Space: Revenge of the Zombies

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Zomb

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

PART II - Undead White Males

Chapter 6 - Heidegger the Vampire Slayer: The Undead and Fundamental Ontology

Sympathy for the Vampire
The Philosophy of Death
Dracula as Inauthentic Being

Heil Heidegger? Dracula’s Willing Executioners

Chapter 7 - When There’s No More Room in Hell, the Dead Will Shop the Earth: ...

“Let’s Go Shopping First!”: We Are the Zombies

“I Don’t Want to Be Walking Around Like That!”: Living versus Living Well

“Attention All Shoppers: If You Have a Sweet Tooth, We Have a Treat for You!”: ...

“Hey, Let’s Get the Stuff We Need!”: Putting the Mall in Its Place

Chapter 8 - Zombies, Rest, and Motion: Spinoza and the Speed of Undeath

Slow Zombies
(De)composing Bodies
Fast Zombies

PART III - Dirty Rotting Scoundrels
Chapter 9 - Zombie Gladiators
On the Prowl
Philosophical Zombies
Automata Among Us
A Plea for Zombie Gladiators

Amorality of Zombies and Moral Obligations of the Conscious

Postmodern Postmortem

Chapter 10 - Should Vampires Be Held Accountable for Their Bloodthirsty Behavior?

Vampires versus Zombies
Dracula: Amoral or Immoral?
Noble Louis and Villainous Lestat
Some Implications: Equal Rights for Vampires

Universal Rights: Vampires, Space Aliens, Robots, and Humans

Chapter 11 - The Bloody Connection Between Vampires and Vegetarians

Reasoning with Vampires
Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t
It’s a Matter of Taste
Cold Clammy Consistency

Chapter 12 - Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t: Vampires and the Hedonistic Paradox

The Vampire’s Plight
I Am Neither Living nor Dead—I Am Undead
Either Way, I’m Damned if I Do
Good Guy Vampires?

Chapter 13 - Deserving to Be a Vampire: The Ethical and Existential Elements of Vampirism

Got Blood?

Does It Hurt?

Undeath Sure Beats the Alternative

Undeath: Ultimately Uninteresting?

Deserving to Be a Vampire

PART IV - Digging Up the Body Politic

Chapter 14 - The Political Economy of Non-Coercive Vampire Lifestyles

Libertarianism and Welfarism Defined

Vampire Personhood

Ethical and Political Implications of Vampire Personhood

From Politics Back to Personhood

Possibilities for Human-Vampire Co-operation

Chapter 15 - Rousseau and the Vampires: Toward a Political Philosophy of the Undead

“No Evidence Is Lacking”: A Plague of Vampires

Hunting Satan’s Brood: The Enemy Within
Beyond Hunger
Itchy and Scratchy: Cartoon Cannibalism
Revulsion: Our Dead Bodies, Our Selves
Oceans of Time: The Romantic Vampire
Alien Invasions: The Vampiric Immigrant
The Evil Enemy
In the Borderlands of Buffy World
A Political Philosophy of Vampires

Chapter 16 - The Undead Martyr: Sex, Death, and Revolution in George Romero’s ...

Repressive Civilization

The Destructive Union of Eros and Thanatos

The Possibility of a Non-Repressive Civilization

Chapter 17 - When They Aren’t Eating Us, They Bring Us Together: Zombies and ...

Civic-Mindedness versus Fear
Communitarian Impulse
Importance of Community Connection
No Way Out

PART V - Leaving a Good-Looking Corpse

Chapter 18 - The Fear of Fear Itself: The Philosophy of Halloween

Halloween: The Festival of the Wandering Undead

The Paradox of Halloween
A Psychoanalytic Solution
The Meta-Fear of Fear

Chapter 19 - “Powerful, Beautiful, and Without Regret”: Femininity, ...

Beauty 101
“I’m Too Sexy for My Mirror”
The Female Vampire as Femme Fatale
The Male Vampire as Metrosexual . . . Sort Of
Chapter 20 - True and Untrue Blood
Blood Is the Life
The Fount of Immortality
Let It Bleed
False Blood
Oh Yes, There Will Be Blood
Chapter 21 - The Twilight of Infinite Desire
A Meditation on the Word - By Étienne Lavec

Philosophers by Day . . .
Hemolytic Index
Copyright Page

Popular Culture and Philosophy ® Series Editor: George A. Reisch

VOLUME 1

Seinfeld and Philosophy: A Book about Everything and Nothing (2000)

VOLUME 2 The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’oh! of Homer (2001)

VOLUME 3

The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002)

VOLUME 4

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale (2003)

VOLUME 6

Baseball and Philosophy: Thinking Outside the Batter’s Box (2004)

VOLUME 9

Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts (2004)

VOLUME 12

Star Wars and Philosophy: More Powerful than You Can Possibly Imagine (2005)

VOLUME 13

Superheroes and Philosophy: Truth, Justice, and the Socratic Way (2005)

VOLUME 17

Bob Dylan and Philosophy: It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Thinking) (2006)

VOLUME 18

Harley-Davidson and Philosophy: Full-Throttle Aristotle (2006)

VOLUME 19 Monty Python and Philosophy: Nudge Nudge, Think Think! (2006)

VOLUME 23

James Bond and Philosophy: Questions Are Forever (2006)

VOLUME 24

Bullshit and Philosophy: Guaranteed to Get Perfect Results Every Time (2006)

VOLUME 25

The Beatles and Philosophy: Nothing You Can Think that Can’t Be Thunk (2006)

VOLUME 26

South Park and Philosophy: Bigger, Longer, and More Penetrating (2007) Edited by Richard Hanley

VOLUME 28

The Grateful Dead and Philosophy: Getting High Minded about Love and Haight (2007) Edited by Steven Gimbel

VOLUME 29

Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy: How to Philosophize with a Pair of Pliers and a Blowtorch (2007) Edited by Richard Greene and K. Silem Mohammad

VOLUME 30

Pink Floyd and Philosophy: Careful with that Axiom, Eugene! (2007) Edited by George A. Reisch

VOLUME 31

Johnny Cash and Philosophy: The Burning Ring of Truth (2008) Edited by John Huss and David Werther

VOLUME 32

Bruce Springsteen and Philosophy: Darkness on the Edge of Truth (2008) Edited by Randall E. Auxier and Doug Anderson

VOLUME 33

Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy: Mission Accomplished or Mission Frakked Up? (2008) Edited by Josef Steiff and Tristan D. Tamplin

VOLUME 34
iPod and Philosophy: iCon of an ePoch (2008) Edited by D.E. Wittkower

VOLUME 35

Star Trek and Philosophy: The Wrath of Kant (2008) Edited by Jason T. Eberl and Kevin S. Decker

VOLUME 36

The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy: I Link Therefore I Am (2008) Edited by Luke Cuddy

VOLUME 37

The Wizard of Oz and Philosophy: Wicked Wisdom of the West (2008) Edited by Randall E. Auxier and Phillip S. Seng

VOLUME 38

Radiohead and Philosophy: Fitter Happier More Deductive (2009) Edited by Brandon W. Forbes and George A. Reisch

VOLUME 39

Jimmy Buffett and Philosophy: The Porpoise Driven Life (2009) Edited by Erin McKenna and Scott L. Pratt

VOLUME 40

Transformers and Philosophy (2009) Edited by John R. Shook and Liz Stillwaggon Swan

VOLUME 41

Stephen Colbert and Philosophy: I Am Philosophy (And So Can You!) (2009) Edited by Aaron Allen Schiller

VOLUME 42

Supervillains and Philosophy: Sometimes, Evil Is Its Own Reward (2009) Edited by Ben Dyer

VOLUME 43

The Golden Compass and Philosophy: God Bites the Dust (2009) Edited by Richard Greene and Rachel Robison

VOLUME 44

Led Zeppelin and Philosophy: All Will Be Revealed (2009) Edited by Scott Calef

VOLUME 45

World of Warcraft and Philosophy: Wrath of the Philosopher King (2009) Edited by Luke Cuddy and John Nordlinger

Volume 46

Mr. Monk and Philosophy: The Curious Case of the Defective Detective (2010) Edited by D.E. Wittkower

Volume 47

Anime and Philosophy: Wide Eyed Wonder (2010) Edited by Josef
Steiff and Tristan Tamplin

VOLUME 48

The Red Sox and Philosophy: Green Monster Meditations (2010) Edited by Michael Macomber

VOLUME 49

Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy: New Life for the Undead (2010) Edited by Richard Greene and K. Silem Mohammad

VOLUME 50

Facebook and Philosophy: What’s on Your Mind? (2010) Edited by D.E. Wittkower

VOLUME 51

Soccer and Philosophy (2010) Edited by Ted Richards

IN PREPARATION:

Manga and Philosophy (2010) Edited by Josef Steiff and Adam Barkman

The Onion and Philosophy (2010) Edited by Sharon M. Kaye

Martial Arts and Philosophy: Beating and Nothingness (2010) Edited by Graham Priest and Damon Young

Doctor Who and Philosophy (2010) Edited by Paula J. Smithka and Court Lewis

Dune and Philosophy (2011) Edited by Jeffrey Nicholas

Dexter and Philosophy (2011) Edited by Richard Greene, George A. Reisch, and Rachel Robison

Breaking Bad and Philosophy (2011) Edited by David R. Koepsell

For full details of all Popular Culture and Philosophy® books, visit www.opencourtbooks.com.

A New Lease of Life for the Undead

The Undead have held a firm, icy grip on the public imagination since Bram Stoker first used the word in his novel Dracula over a hundred years ago. Stoker’s introduction of this term applied a catchy label to an idea that has always fascinated humans. But Stoker could hardly have conceived of the intensity of popular interest, both in his own vampires and in the very different zombies, which would be attained in the twenty-first century.

Vampires and zombies are just everywhere. Don’t turn around—there’s probably one behind you right now. Only someone stuck in his coffin for quite a while could have missed the recent outpouring of vampire stories: the Twilight books and movies, Let the Right One In, HBO’s True Blood, and Thirty Days of Night, to mention just a few.

Rachel Robison (Chapter 20) gives some pointers to the deathless appeal of vampires, and Joan Grassbaugh Forry (Chapter 19) disinters the vampire aesthetic. While popular culture has been preoccupied with vampires, the vampires themselves have been thinking about popular culture, and the ways they are depicted within it. And so, this volume climaxes with truly amazing revelations from the private correspondence of two vampires, as documented by Randall Auxier and Eileen Townsend (Chapter 21).

At the same time, we’re in the midst of a full-fledged zombie invasion. Just as with vampires, so with zombies: zombie movies, books, comic books, and videogames are everywhere.

Like all living things, vampires and zombies continually evolve. Today’s vampires are as different to the Buffyverse’s Spike or Angel as those remarkable characters were to Count Dracula. In the case of zombies, traditional horror narratives survive and proliferate. There’s still a big market for movies in the mold of Night of the Living Dead, in which a group of people fight for their lives against a zombie attack.

As for zombie comedy, there are straight parodies like Return of the Living Dead, with the same structure as the movies they lampoon, but played for laughs. However, comedies such as Zombieland and Fido are not restricted to poking fun at horror films; instead, they incorporate elements of the zombie mythos as a backdrop to different kinds of stories entirely. Zombieland is at base a comedic road movie about friendship, family structures, and trust. The zombies are every bit as grisly and lethal as the ones in films like Dawn of the Dead or 28 Days Later, but they take up surprisingly little screen time, and their presence is a kind of “given”: they’re a plot mechanism to launch us into the character-driven central story. Fido is a satiric suburban pastoral in which the zombie character takes on the status of a beloved household pet. (And don’t forget the ending of Shaun of the Dead.)

We’ve gone from I Walked with a Zombie to “Honey, could you take the zombie for a walk?” Movies such as these trade on our love for zombies, but the zombies in the stories are not essential to the plot qua zombies. Seemingly, it’s the mere fact that these films have zombies in them that makes them appealing. Zombieland would not have been nearly as successful had it been Bearland or even Dinosaurland.

The same goes for zombie books. Case in point: the remarkable success and impact of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. You take an early-nineteenth-century novel, infuse it with a zombie narrative and back story, and suddenly everybody wants to read it: both those who were already Austen fans, and those who wouldn’t ordinarily touch classic literature with a ten-foot pole.

There’s also been a slew of zombie-based faux-academic, technical, and spiritual books. Zombie parodies of academic books are coming out of the woodwork, undoubtedly influenced by Max Brooks’s The Zombie Survival Guide and its cottage industry of zombie survival products. There are zombie self-help books (The Zen of Zombie: Better Living Through the Undead), zombie history books (History Is Dead), books on zombie forensics (Zombie CSU), even books of zombie poetry (Zombie Haiku). The list goes on and on.

Then there are non-media-based zombie phenomena, such as the game Humans Versus Zombies and the social practice of zombie walks. Humans Versus Zombies is essentially an elaborate game of tag, lasting a week or two, that is played each year on college campuses around the United States. Some players are humans, and some are zombies. The game is over when all the humans have been converted to zombies or all the zombies have starved to death. It’s a testament to our love of zombies that college students are willing to devote that much energy to playing tag. (Again, if it were called “Humans Versus Bears,” the game likely would not have caught on.)

Zombie walks are organized activities in which persons dress up like zombies and walk—or lumber—around town. These walks often involve several thousand people. What’s the point, you ask? Basically, it’s just fun to walk around looking like a zombie. Our obsession with zombies drives us so far as to spend time acting like them just for the hell of it.

Why are we so obsessed? This is a question that some of our authors attempt to answer in regard to traditional horror films and stories. Noel Carroll (in Chapter 18) argues that taking an up-close look at that which we fear (including the Undead) offers us a satisfying sense of control or mastery over our fears. Richard Greene (in Chapter 2) points out that horror films provide a kind of rush, an adrenaline-producing experience in an otherwise safe environment. These explanations, however, don’t tell us why the public loves fake zombie textbooks, or why Zombieland is so much more successful than Bearland would be, or why Pride and Prejudice and Zombies goes over better than Pride and Prejudice. There’s something about zombies per se that uniquely excites the contemporary imagination. It seems that these Undead creatures answer to some deeply-felt collective cultural fantasy on a visceral level (no pun intended).

The appeal of vampires is easier to guess at: they’re suave, sexy, sophisticated. They’re strong and swift, they stay up all night drinking, and their hair always looks good. Who wouldn’t want this kind of supercool, metrosexual afterlife (the problem of evil aside)? Zombies, on the other hand, are “all messed up,” as someone says in Night of the Living Dead. They leak disgusting fluids, parts of their bodies are often missing, and they have terrible table manners. They can’t talk or operate any machinery more complicated than a club. They don’t even seem to know what’s going on around them, beyond the fact that they’re hungry /pissed off/both. So what’s to identify with?

In a way, the question answers itself. Zombies are purely creatures of the id, dedicated to mindless self-gratification and nothing else. They don’t care that they look like crap. Being a zombie means never having to say you’re sorry—or anything else, for that matter. Of course, one could argue, many frat boys achieve this same condition without having to be dead first.

The deadness of zombies is obviously a key part of their appeal. They represent our deepest fear—our own mortality—rendered in the most horrifying way thinkable. They’re not just dead, but hyperdead: in them, all the processes of decay and putrefaction are exaggerated, animated, burlesqued. Further, they continually bring more bodies into the same state they’re in. When we see them crowded around the flimsy cabin or schoolbus we’re holed up in, we know it won’t be long before we’re them, they’re us. In imagining zombiehood, we imagine our own annihilation—but we also imagine, as a result of that annihilation, our entry into a condition of immense power, a condition in which we are the terrifying thing that shambles mercilessly across the landscape, devoid of mercy, kindness, or guilt. We become the destroyer. Hardcore. Wicked. Badass.

Whereas the vampire embodies a form of Nietzschean super-humanity, beyond good and evil, the zombie goes even further beyond. For the vampire, knowledge that one is doing evil still remains as a concept, and with this knowledge comes the erotic charge of unheeded guilt. For the zombie, this is all a non-issue. The zombie is sub-Nietschean, sub-animal, really: as K. Silem Mohammad suggests (Chapter 8) it is a Spinozan force of decomposition, a completely non-moral and completely liberated interaction of matter with other matter.

Zombies are the face in the mirror that doesn’t look back, memento mori without the moral. They are the perfect self-expression of an age in which the (personal, romantic, heroic) self has become an ever more difficult construct to sustain. From one perspective, our identification with zombies could be seen as cynical self-loathing; from another, as a creative negotiation of our transformation from human to posthuman.

As they get fiercer, faster, and more numerous, zombies more aptly continue to describe a grotesque allegory of our own living-dead existence. Like real-world terrors, they’re not going away, even as we convert our barricaded malls into temporary zones of luxury and consumer indulgence. In fact, the supreme irony is that zombies have become yet one more desired consumer object—fantastical distractions from the Real that they reflect. And therein, perhaps, lies their real appeal: what better to help us shut out the things we don’t want to think about than distorted, obviously unreal, and far less threatening versions of those same things?

PART I

It’s Alive (Sort Of)

1
The Badness of Undeath
RICHARD GREENE

It’s an interesting feature of horror films that most people either like them or dislike them for precisely the same reason: they are terrifying. Those who like them enjoy the “rush” of being terrified and those who don’t like them find being frightened distressful, unpleasant, or uncomfortable. Few, if any, enjoy horror films but fail to find them frightening to some degree. One reason that horror scares us is because we have an ability to empathize with characters as they are being chased, slaughtered, mauled, impaled, burned, eaten, or tortured. We can easily imagine what it would be like to be hung on a meat hook by Leatherface while still alive or to have one’s jugular vein sliced by one of Freddy Krueger’s razor-sharp “fingers,” and it scares us. Horror films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and A Nightmare on Elm Street frighten us, in part, by playing on our fear of death. After all death is regarded, at least by most folks, as a bad thing for the person who dies.

While people’s emotional responses toward death range from mild anxiety to all-out panic, there is a scenario that frightens us even more. Films about the Undead, such as Night of the Living Dead, Dracula, Nosferatu, and White Zombie to name a few, trade on this more terrifying prospect: they threaten us with the possibility of becoming Undead ourselves. There is no shortage of examples in zombie and vampire films of characters that either kill themselves or ask others to kill them so as to avoid becoming Undead. Being Undead is generally regarded as a worse state than being dead.[1] Philosophers have long debated the question of why death is bad for the person who dies. I’d like to address the question of why Undeath—the state of being Undead—is bad for the person who becomes Undead. A successful account of the badness of Undeath must accomplish two things: it must identify the feature or features of Undeath that make it bad, and it must explain why Undeath is generally regarded as being worse than death.

Depending on how one defines it, there are a number of different ways of being Undead. K. Silem Mohammad and I define Undeath as that class of beings who at some point were living creatures, have died, and have come back such that they are not presently “at rest.” On this account, all vampires, mummies, and ghosts, most zombies, some skeletons (such as the Lost Skeleton of Cadavra), and miscellaneous other animated corpses, such as the manipulated dead from Donnie Darko, would count as being Undead. For simplicity’s sake and because when people are queried about the Undead, vampires and zombies come to mind much more frequently,[2] I’ll restrict my discussion to the badness of being either a vampire or a zombie.

Some Haunted Housekeeping

As is usually the case when one raises a philosophical question, there is a natural temptation to respond to the question by rejecting it. Rejecting the question of why Undeath is a bad thing for the person who is Undead might take one of two forms: (1) one might cite counterexamples to the claim that Undeath is bad, perhaps by identifying Undead beings whose existence is, intuitively, not bad, or (2) one might take issue with the central arguments for the view that Undeath is bad. While the latter approach is promising and will receive much attention over the course of this chapter, I’d like to quickly dismiss the first strategy. Let’s briefly address the notion that for many, being Undead isn’t bad.

There are a number of Undead creatures in recent horror films and television shows who stand out from the crowd by avoiding many if not most of the trappings of being Undead. For example on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the vampires Angel and Spike both have souls by the end of the series. As a consequence they are able to have meaningful relationships, experience strong emotions, perform good deeds, and fight on the side of good. Intuitively, it’s not obviously bad to be Angel or Spike. Similarly, in Interview with the Vampire Louis is able, albeit with some difficulty, to resist his more basic vampiric urges, and hence, lives on the blood of chickens and rats. In Shaun of the Dead, Shaun’s best friend Ed experiences no qualitative change in his daily existence upon becoming a zombie—at film’s end his normal routine still mostly involves lounging on the sofa, playing video games, and hanging out with Shaun. Count Blah, the muppet-esque vampire on the television series Greg the Bunny, thoroughly enjoys all the pleasures that life has to offer (“She went down for The Count, blah”). And Casper the friendly ghost. . . . Well, you get the idea. One thing that all these characters have in common is that they are not in any important sense evil, though one probably wouldn’t want to spend more than a few hours in the presence of Count Blah. This raises the question: to what extent do these characters and others like them pose a problem for our more traditional conceptions of the Undead?

Once a fictional concept such as vampirism or zombiedom, or a character such as Dracula or Nosferatu, is established, intuitively it seems inappropriate for subsequent writers to come along and alter that concept or character. It’s almost as if a work of art is being altered against the will of its creator, in much the same way that there is something creepy going on when black-and-white films get “colorized.” If, for example, a movie were to come out that portrayed Atticus Finch, from To Kill a Mockingbird, as a narrow-minded bigot, people would rightly feel that the original work had been harmed or denigrated in some fashion. This line of thought provides us with a reason for thinking that “good” vampires and zombies should not be considered when discussing features of vampires and zombies in general. That being said, the conception that most people have of vampires and zombies is one that has developed over time as various writers have contributed to the legend. For example, some of the more familiar aspects of the vampire story, such as an aversion to holy water and the ability to take other forms, were added later. So we also have good reason for treating subsequent modifications to basic concepts as legitimate. The question is where to draw the line.

My proposal is to treat those modifications to the vampire and zombie mythologies that enhance them without drastically altering our understanding of what it means to be a vampire or a zombie as legitimate modifications, and to treat those modifications that radically alter our concepts, such as the existence of “good” vampires or zombies with whom one can spend quality time playing video games, as interesting hypothetical experiments. It’s fun to think about what it would be like if there were vampires with souls or if there were horny muppet-vampires, but these thought-experiments shouldn’t then serve to change what we believe about vampires and zombies. For this reason, I’ll not consider Angel, Spike, Louis, Count Blah, Ed, and others of their kind to be “real” vampires and zombies. In this chapter all vampires and zombies will be considered to be unfriendly and dangerous. Moreover, all vampires will be considered to be cursed or damned and evil by nature, and all zombies, though not cursed or evil by nature, will be understood to behave in ways that we normally consider to be evil.

Deprivation and Desire-Frustration

Let’s begin our search for the badness of Undeath by looking at what philosophers have to say about the badness of death. Since death and Undeath have something in common—they can both be contrasted with being alive—it may turn out that the thing that is objectionable about death is the same thing that makes Undeath bad. At minimum, looking at the badness of death should serve to provide a useful point of departure for our inquiry into the badness of Undeath.

Since it is not obvious that death is a bad thing if there is an afterlife involving some sort of reward for a life lived well, philosophers working on the question of death’s badness typically consider death to be an experiential blank. That is, they consider that death doesn’t involve any conscious experiences for the person who is dead. On this view, death is not a state in which some part of us lives on after our physical bodies have died. Of course, if philosophers are wrong about this, then the badness of both death and Undeath is easily accounted for. Undeath is bad because one misses out on whatever rewards one has coming in the afterlife. Death, on the other hand, is simply not a bad thing (unless one has misbehaved to such a degree that the afterlife promises punishment instead of reward). Since there is little consensus about whether there is an afterlife, and if there is, about what it’s like, it is appropriate to address the question of death’s badness by assuming that death is an experiential blank.

If death is simply the cessation of life and nothing more, then it is not clear why death is thought to be a bad thing. As Epicurus points out, “Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.” [3] If death is considered to be an experiential blank, then the badness of death cannot be accounted for in terms of some sort of unpleasant experience; the badness of death must lie elsewhere. Many (perhaps most) theorists working on this issue today endorse either some version of Thomas Nagel’s deprivation view,[4] which is the view that the badness of death lies in its depriving persons of the good things that life has to offer (the praemia vitae), or they endorse some version of Bernard Williams’s desire-frustration view,[5] which is the view that death is bad insofar as it frustrates certain of our important desires.

While perhaps providing the best hope for accounting for the badness of death, the deprivation view isn’t able to account for the badness of Undeath, since the Undead are not deprived of the praemia vitae. Vampires, for example, in virtue of being immortal, have the opportunity to experience an infinite quantity of fine things. Of course, there are a number of desirable things that vampires cannot experience, such as the pleasure associated with a fine meal (a glass of warm blood notwithstanding) or the warmth of the sun’s rays on one’s skin. This, however, doesn’t help the deprivation view, as the sheer quantity of positive experiences that vampires will have (in virtue of being immortal) will far outweigh those experiences lost due to being a vampire.

Admittedly, the deprivation view fares a little better at accounting for the badness of being a zombie, since zombies seem able to have only a few experiences. Mostly they stagger, grunt, and eat human flesh and brains. If one were to become a zombie, presumably one wouldn’t derive a lot of pleasure from listening to the symphony, studying philosophy, or watching a good movie, nor would one have close personal relationships and the like. Still, the badness of being a zombie doesn’t seem to lie in the fact that we are being deprived of these things. If it did, then being dead wouldn’t be preferable to being a zombie. Being dead would be on par with being a zombie, in terms of badness. Moreover, although zombies do not enjoy many of the finer things in life, it’s not clear that they don’t experience as much pleasure as do living human beings, or even more. For all we know there is no more satisfying experience to be had than the experience of being a zombie and biting into a fresh living human brain. Until you’ve staggered a mile in someone’s shoes . . . Thus, we can reasonably conclude that the deprivation view does not account for the badness of Undeath.

Proponents of the desire-frustration view of death’s badness reason as follows:

1. If I desire something, then I have a prima facie reason to prefer a state of affairs in which I get it to one in which I don’t get it.

2. Death precludes some desires being fulfilled.

3. Thus, I have a reason to avoid death.

4. If something is to be avoided, then that thing is bad.

5. Therefore, death is bad.

So life is preferable to death, because when one is alive, one’s desires can be satisfied, but when one is dead, one’s desires are necessarily thwarted. Of course, if one desires death, then this argument doesn’t work, but, in such cases, it’s not clear that death is a bad thing. Typically people don’t desire death, unless life is bad (or at minimum, life seems bad).

Will this line of reasoning also serve to capture the badness of Undeath? At first glance it is a promising strategy. If one becomes a vampire or a zombie at some point in the future, then most of one’s present desires will go unfulfilled. For example, my desire to win the first Nobel Prize in Philosophy certainly won’t be satisfied if I am a zombie. My desire to spend my retirement lounging in the sun on a beach in Santa Barbara will go unfulfilled if I am a vampire. My desire to be invited to the office holiday party will not be realized if I am either a vampire or a zombie (my colleagues are adventurous and fun-loving, but they have their limits).

Though promising, the desire-frustration account cannot account for the badness of Undeath. The problem is that mere desire frustration is not sufficient for a state of affairs being bad. For example, when I was around ten years old I had a desire to be a major league baseball player when I grew up. When I was in my twenties and thirties, this desire was going unfulfilled. It doesn’t follow that because my desire was not being fulfilled, my situation was bad. This is because desires change. When I was in my twenties and thirties I had no desire to be a baseball player. In fact, since I wouldn’t have enjoyed being a baseball player, it is plausible to suppose that the situation in which my desire had been fulfilled would have been worse than the one in which it had not been fulfilled.

This does not pose a problem for the desire-frustration account of death’s badness. A proponent of the desire-frustration view can hold that as long as a previous desire has been cancelled or replaced by some later desire, then desire-frustration is not a bad thing. So my unfulfilled desire to be a major league baseball player didn’t lead to a bad state of affairs, because it was replaced by my desire to be a philosophy professor. Death is bad, on this view, because it is a state that involves unfulfilled desires that have not been cancelled or replaced. Undeath, on the other hand, is a state in which one’s desires have been replaced. A desire for scotch has been replaced with a desire for blood. A desire for pork roast has been replaced by a desire for raw human flesh. So Undeath does not lead to desire-frustration; rather, it leads to changed desire, which, as we’ve seen, is not necessarily a bad thing. So the desire-frustration account is not able to account for the badness of death.

Human Beings, Vampires, Zombies, Pigs, and Fools

As neither of the main views regarding the badness of death is able to account for the badness of Undeath or to explain why Undeath is generally considered to be a worse state of affairs than death, we’ll shift our focus to an account of the badness of Undeath that focuses directly on the state of being Undead. Since death is thought by philosophers to be an experiential blank, accounts of the badness of death can’t focus on the qualitative aspects of death; that is, they can’t focus on the way death feels. If death is an experiential blank, it doesn’t feel like anything. Undeath, however, is not an experiential blank. Perhaps the key to identifying the badness of Undeath has to do with the qualitative aspects of Undeath—the way that being Undead feels.

It’s not obvious that being Undead feels bad, in itself. As I stated above, vampires are able to have a variety of positive experiences, and it’s quite possible that zombies derive great amounts of pleasure from eating human flesh and brains. That being said, it is possible to suppose of some beings that don’t experience bad feelings such as pain that one still wouldn’t desire to have their experiences. This would hold true whenever the beings under consideration had experiences that are generally less desirable than the experiences that one typically has. John Stuart Mill said, famously, “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.”[6] According to this line of reasoning, even though pigs don’t necessarily have bad experiences from their own perspective—they appear to enjoy lounging in the sty and slopping around in the mud—it would be bad to be a pig in comparison to being a human being. Similarly, one might argue that, while vampires and zombies are capable of positive experiences, their experiences, when compared to the experiences of human beings, are less desirable. Hence it is bad to be a vampire or a zombie.

There are a few problems with this move. First, if successful, this argument only serves to explain why being a zombie is a bad thing. Zombies are clearly lower “life” forms. There is not a whole lot of cognitive activity going on with zombies. Vampires, on the other hand, are frequently portrayed as being quite intelligent, and having a wide range of experiences that humans don’t have, such as turning into a bat or a wolf. It is not implausible to suppose that vampiric experiences are more desirable (even from a human perspective) than human experiences. It would appear that the pig analogy just does not hold between humans and vampires. A second and deeper worry about this argument is that it doesn’t maintain that Undeath is an objectively bad state. At best it establishes that Undeath is bad when compared to certain alternatives, such as being a living human. Here I want to make a distinction between a state’s being objectively bad as opposed to its being comparatively bad. A state is objectively bad when features of that state are bad in virtue of either some qualitative aspect of that state, such as feeling pain or being depressed, or when there is some good lacking in that state that one would not lack under normal circumstances, such as vision or hearing. A state is comparatively bad when it has less total goodness than some other state one might find oneself in. Those who have the intuition that it would be bad to be a zombie or a vampire don’t think this because they are comparing it with being a normal living human. In other words, Undeath is not bad because it is thought to be comparatively bad (even though it may well be comparatively bad). Rather, they believe that there is something objectively bad about being Undead, in the same way people think there is something objectively bad about being in pain.

Here an analogy might be useful. If I am battered by some thug on the street, with the result that I suffer a broken leg, I am in a bad state because I have a broken leg. It is objectively bad to have a broken leg. On the other hand, if the thug robs me, with the result that I am left with $6,984.00 in assets, I am only comparatively worse off than before. Having $6,984.00 in total assets is not in and of itself a bad state to be in. Many persons would be happy to be in that state.

A third worry about this line of reasoning is that it doesn’t account for the fact that most people would prefer death to Undeath. Almost everyone, if given a choice between being a pig or being dead, would choose to be a pig. Similarly, this argument generates the result that it is better to be Undead than dead. It may well turn out to be the case that Undeath is preferable to death, but a satisfactory account of the badness of Undeath can’t yield that result. An argument to the effect that Undeath as a state is preferable to death as a state is for all intents and purposes an argument for the view that Undeath is not bad, since death as a state is essentially neutral.

Evil, All Too Evil

One source of the badness of Undeath that we’ve not yet considered is the fact that the Undead are evil, or, at minimum, perform acts that we tend to view as evil. Vampires and zombies do unspeakable things: they eat human flesh, they drink blood, they destroy property, they maim, they kill, and they cavort with the dregs of hell. The fact that people don’t like to imagine themselves doing such things serves to explain why Undeath is generally regarded as being worse than death. Most people would rather be dead than to become some monster that might potentially kill a loved one or burn down their own village. So we’ve satisfied one of our two criteria that a successful argument for the badness of Undeath must fulfill: we’ve explained why Undeath is generally regarded as being worse than death. We now must consider whether the fact that the Undead are evil (or do things that are generally regarded as evil) entails that Undeath is bad.

It doesn’t follow from the fact that people view certain behaviors as evil that those behaviors are evil. Nor does it follow from the fact that people view certain states as bad that they are bad. As a matter of logic, premises in arguments that refer to people’s attitudes don’t by themselves lead to conclusions about what is objectively the case. For example, from the fact that many people at one time believed that the earth was at the center of the universe, it did not follow that the earth was in fact at the center of the universe. So the fact that people don’t like to see themselves doing things they regard as evil doesn’t mean that it is bad to be the sort of being that does those things.

Still, the brute fact that vampires and zombies behave in bad ways (regardless of how we view them) may account for the badness of being Undead. In other words, we need to consider the possibility that the objective badness of Undeath can be accounted for by the actions and nature of Undead beings. Recall that a state is considered to be objectively bad when it either contains some qualitative badness or it lacks some good thing which one would not normally lack. We’ve already dismissed the argument that being Undead involves being in a qualitatively bad state, so let’s consider the possibility that being Undead involves lacking some good thing which one would not ordinarily lack.

Behaving in good ways is generally held by moral philosophers to be a good thing. Some philosophers value performing good acts because of the consequences they bring. Others value good acts because they believe that good acts have intrinsic value—they are valued purely for their own sake. So if being a vampire or a zombie involves lacking goodness in general or lacking the ability to perform good acts, then it seems that being a vampire or a zombie is a bad thing, in virtue of lacking something of value that one would not ordinarily lack.

Notice, however, that any number of creatures may be viewed as lacking goodness or the ability to perform good acts. Crickets, for example, are not able to do good deeds. Yet we don’t consider it objectively bad to be a cricket (though for most people it is comparatively bad). The reason it is not objectively bad to be a cricket is because the ability to perform good deeds is not something that crickets ordinarily have. The important thing to note here is that one can’t discuss things that are ordinarily experienced (or one can’t discuss lacking things that are ordinarily experienced) without relativizing the discussion to a particular kind of thing. It’s bad for human beings to lack vision, since it is something we ordinarily have, but it’s not bad for bats to lack vision. Conversely, it’s bad for bats to lack sonar, but not bad for humans to lack sonar. Thus lacking goodness or the ability to perform good acts would point to an objectively bad feature of being a vampire or a zombie if and only if being good or being able to perform good acts is a feature that vampires or zombies usually have. Of course vampires by nature are not good and are compelled to do evil things (it’s part of their being cursed or damned), and zombies are hard-wired to be flesh-and brain-eating predators. One might object that humans are good and upon becoming Undead begin to lack these goods that they ordinarily have otherwise. This, however, only points to a comparative badness. Presumably the person who is committed to the view that it is bad to be Undead would hold that even for an inanimate object (such as a rock) that suddenly gets transformed into a vampire, there is still objective badness, in virtue of the evil acts the vampire would perform. It would appear then that we can’t account for the badness of being a vampire or zombie by appealing to the fact that they are evil or do things that we generally consider to be evil.

Not to Put Too Fine a Point on It

Let’s take stock of our discussion. We’ve been attempting to do two things: explain why Undeath is generally regarded as a worse state than death, and answer the question of why Undeath is bad for the person who is Undead. We’ve succeeded on one count: Undeath is generally regarded as a worse state than death because of attitudes people have toward evil things. People don’t like to see themselves as potentially performing evil acts or bringing misery to their loved ones and neighbors. We’ve not, however, been able to satisfactorily answer the question as to why Undeath is bad for the person who is Undead. The badness of Undeath couldn’t be accounted for in terms of the things that make death bad, it could not be accounted for by focusing on the qualitative aspects of Undeath, nor could it be accounted for by appealing to specific properties that Undead beings possess (such as having an evil nature or being compelled to perform bad acts). Thus we have no alternative but to reject the claim that it is bad (in the objective sense) to be Undead. This of course doesn’t mean that one should run out and join the legions of hell. Being Undead may well be bad in comparison to being a human being. On the other hand, if one finds oneself sleeping in a coffin, drinking blood, shape-shifting into a bat or a wolf, or clawing one’s way out of a grave in hopes of dining on fresh brains tartar, one might as well try to make the best of it. It could be worse, blah.[7]

2
Res Corporealis: Persons, Bodies, and Zombies
WILLIAM S. LARKIN

The highpoint of horror in Romero’s classic Night of the Living Dead has to be when little Karen Cooper, newly Undead, proceeds to devour her father’s arm and lay waste to her mother with a trowel. There is something uniquely disturbing about an innocent child turning into a brutal flesh-eating monster. Scenes like this unearth intuitions that bear significantly on the philosophical problem of personal identity. In particular, zombie movies provide a distinctive blend of terror and tragedy that helps reanimate the view that persons are most fundamentally corporeal objects.

Persons

The philosophical problem of personal identity is to determine what, most fundamentally, creatures like us are. We can say that creatures like us are essentially persons, but that just gives us the label and not the explanation we are looking for. The question becomes, “What exactly is a person?” Or better: “Under what conditions exactly does a person continue to exist?” Is a human body lying in a coma a person? Is a human body lying in a casket a person? It is tempting to respond to such questions with something like, “Well, it depends on what we mean by ‘person.’” That’s exactly right; and that’s just what we are trying to figure out. We are trying to determine just what we mean when we say that something is a person. The point of philosophy is not to figure out what we should say about extraordinary cases given the various things we might mean by certain terms. The point is rather to use what we are spontaneously inclined to say about extraordinary cases to figure out what we do mean even in perfectly ordinary cases by those terms. I want to consider the extraordinary case of the walking dead to figure out just what we mean by person.

René “I think therefore I am” Descartes is famous for ultimately holding the view that a person is fundamentally a res cogitans—a thinking thing, a certain kind of mind. But he tells us earlier that when he first applied himself to the “consideration of (his) being” what most naturally sprang up in his mind was the following:

I considered myself as having a face, hands, arms, and all the system of members composed of bones and flesh as seen in a corpse which I designated by the name of body.[8]

On this alternative view a person is fundamentally a res corporealis —a bodily thing, a certain kind of material object. Here in Descartes we have the two competing views on personal identity that I want to consider.[9]

The view that a person is fundamentally a certain type of thinking thing takes a psychological approach to personal identity. This view claims that a particular person continues to exist so long as her thoughts, memories, character traits, and so forth continue to exist. Granted, one’s mind changes from moment to moment; still, there is a clear sense of psychological continuity when a human being at some later stage has all the thoughts that it does precisely because some earlier stage had all the thoughts it did. On the psychological approach, psychological continuity is both necessary and sufficient for personal identity. Psychological continuity is necessary in the sense that if there were a permanent break in psychological continuity, then a perview son would cease to exist: A person could not survive, for example, in a permanent vegetative state in which she has irretrievably lost all higher brain function and all of the psychological contents and capacities that go with it. Psychological continuity is sufficient in the sense that if there were no break in psychological continuity, then a person would survive no matter what else might happen: a person could in principle survive, for example, in a nuts-and-bolts robot body with a supercomputer brain into which all of her particular psychological contents and dispositions were downloaded.

The view that a person is fundamentally a certain type of material object takes a bodily approach to personal identity. This view claims that a particular person continues to exist so long as some critical mass of her material composition does. Granted, one’s body changes from moment to moment; still, there is a clear sense of bodily continuity when a human being at some later stage has all the physical traits that it does precisely because some earlier stage had all the traits it did. On the bodily approach, bodily continuity is both necessary and sufficient for personal identity. Bodily continuity is necessary in the sense that if there were a permanent break in bodily continuity, then a person would cease to exist: A person could not survive, on the bodily view, in a nuts-and-bolts robot body. Bodily continuity is sufficient in the sense that if there were no break in bodily continuity, then a person would survive no matter what else might happen: A person could survive, on the bodily view, in a permanent vegetative state. A person could even survive on the bodily view as a relatively intact corpse—the kind of corpse that might be able to get up and lumber around in search of living flesh.

Bodies

I want to argue for the bodily approach to personal identity over the psychological approach.[10] But before I try to disinter the intuitions that I think support the bodily view, I need to do some ground clearing. I think it is fair to say that the predominant view among ordinary folk and philosophers alike is that some form of the psychological approach to personal identity is correct. In this section I want to weaken the intuitive appeal of that consensus position and motivate the appeal to zombie films that will occupy the rest of the chapter.

The main positive support for the psychological approach comes from the fairly widespread and strongly held intuition that a person could “switch bodies.” The idea started when John Locke imagined a cobbler waking up in a prince’s body, distinctly perceiving his royal surroundings but clearly remembering his humble past. In an updated version we can imagine a successful cerebral transplant, where a patient wakes up in a new healthy body with memories of her agonizing decision over whether to submit to this new fangled procedure or live out her few remaining days in a body dying of some debilitating disease. Concerning these cases, most people claim that a person will follow her memories, thoughts, and character into a “new” body. If psychological continuity is sufficient, as the psychological approach contends, then that is exactly what will happen. But if bodily continuity is necessary, as the bodily approach contends, then the person will stay with the “old” body while the other body would get a “new” psychology.

I don’t think this body-switching intuition settles the issue in favor of the psychological view. First of all, it’s a single case, and there might be something funny going on; like a deep-seated survival instinct clouding our metaphysical intuitions. Second, and more importantly I think, one can see through these cases rather easily. It is pretty easy to see what the psychological approach should say about the case. Thus we may be “finding” in these cases just the intuition that we want to find. In other words, philosophically contrived cases are apt to give us biased intuitive data. Instead of people genuinely reacting the way they would were the case real, they may simply be figuring out what the view they unreflectively hold ought to say about the case. It would be better if we could tap into our more natural and spontaneous intuitions, which are at least less likely to be biased by prior theoretical commitments.

This is where I think the value of good fiction comes in. Good fiction can take us off our theoretical guard and thereby allow us to gather better intuitive data. I will argue that good zombie fiction in particular can catch us off our metaphysical guard and thereby reveal some intuitions that weigh strongly in favor of the bodily approach to personal identity over the psychological approach.

One of the biggest problems for the bodily approach, and so one of the biggest considerations in favor of the psychological approach, is another fairly widespread intuition—that people do not continue to exist as corpses. The bodily approach says that bodily continuity is sufficient for personal identity. There is bodily continuity between me and my corpse. Therefore, on the bodily approach I am identical to my corpse. This is something a lot of people just cannot accept. On the psychological approach, I am not identical to my corpse, since that approach claims that psychological continuity is necessary for personal identity, and there is no psychological continuity between me and my corpse. Indeed, my corpse has no psychological properties at all. So it appears we have a pretty strong consideration in favor of the psychological approach.

My main goal in the remainder of this chapter is to defend the bodily approach by urging that, in spite of your initial denials, you really do think that you will survive as a corpse. I know it sounds odd to say that a person will survive as a corpse. But notice how it doesn’t sound odd at all to say that a person will one day be dead—be a person who is dead. Of course, a person does not survive as a corpse in the sense that it continues to live as a corpse; but on the bodily approach a person does survive as a corpse in the sense that it continues to exist as a corpse. On the bodily approach, people can continue to exist without continuing to live. The intuition that people do not survive as corpses may be widespread, but I hope to show that it is not very deeply held. On the contrary, I think that deep down we believe that we will survive as corpses, and I think this comes out when we get sucked into a good zombie movie.

A good piece of fiction draws us in until we find ourselves subtly mirroring the thoughts, emotions, and even some of the actions of the most sympathetic characters. These reactions manifest our natural and spontaneous intuitions regarding the content of the fiction. Our reactions to a couple of the characteristic ploys of zombie movies in particular reveal our deep intuition that people do survive as corpses.

Zombies: The Terror

Zombie movies are distinctively scary. It is not a simple fear of death that a good zombie film exploits. It is not even the horror of being eaten that accounts for what scares us the most about the walking dead. It is rather our fear of being turned into one of them. In addition to our fear of dying and our fear of being eaten, there is our fear of becoming a zombie. That is what really gets to us and provides the distinctive thrill of Undead drama. It is frightening and grotesque when Tom and Judy get burned up when trying to put gas in the old pick-up in Night of the Living Dead and then zombies line up to feast on their charred flesh. But a richer chord of fear is struck by the idea, suggested by her catatonic state and awkward reaction to Helen Cooper lighting a match, that good girl Barbara might turn into good ghoul Barbara.

Our fear of being turned into a zombie is brought nearest the surface by the quintessential zombie movie scene in which one of the protagonists pleads with another to not let it happen to him or her. In Dawn of the Dead, Roger exhorts his buddy Peter:

You’ll take care of me won’t you, Peter? I mean, you’ll take care of me when I go. . . . I don’t want to be walking around like that!

And in Resident Evil:

RAIN: I never want to be one of those things, walking around without a soul.

ALICE: You won’t.

RAIN: When the time comes you’ll take care of it.

We identify with these characters and completely understand their preference for being shot in the head by a good friend over becoming one of the walking dead relentlessly driven to consume the warm flesh of living human beings. We, like them, would rather be simply dead than Undead. But if that’s right, then we must think that we would become zombies—we wouldn’t prefer death to Undeath if we didn’t think it would be us “walking around like that.”

The distinctive terror that grips us when we surrender to quality Undead fiction manifests our deep-seated intuition that we could become zombies. But if it is possible for a person to become a zombie, then a person must be able to survive death. A person could not become a walking corpse without first becoming a corpse. If persons cease to exist when they die, as the psychological approach to personal identity would have it, then it would not be us that rise from the dead with a taste for human flesh. But that is precisely what we fear; and so deep down we must believe that people can survive as corpses.

Zombies: The Tragedy

Zombie movies are distinctively tragic. It’s not just the travesty of countless innocent deaths that a good zombie movie dramatizes. It’s the tragedy of lost innocence that really gets the pathetic juices flowing—the fall from the mild and the mundane to the monstrous. It’s disheartening to think how many people would, like Harry Cooper, be reduced to a paranoid, pusillanimous prick in the face of an encroaching horde of monsters. But it is truly harrowing to think of how many mothers and daughters there are, like Helen and Karen Cooper, swelling the rotting ranks of that monstrous brigade.

We are made aware of the tragic dimension of the Undead by another characteristic device of the genre—populating the zombie crowd with recognizable characters and costumes. The zombie crowd is not faceless. The faces may be scabby and decaying, but they are faces we recognize. People from earlier in the film reappear. Barbara’s brother Johnny who taunts her playfully at the beginning of Night comes back as a zombie to deliver his sister up to his hungry cohorts. We see old ladies in their nightgowns and middle-aged men in their underwear. We see naked people, nurses, and peewee football players. Not too long ago these creatures were on their way to a supermarket or a softball game. Now they are monsters.

It would not be so much tragic as silly to see monsters dressed up like ordinary folk—a funny kind of reversal of Halloween revelry—if these flesh-eaters were not so recently our family and friends. So if zombies are properly pathetic, we must think that these creatures were once quite different from what they are now. That is, if zombies are proper objects of our pathos, we must think that these very same individuals were once something immeasurably better than what they are now. Tragedy requires a fall; but there can be no fall without continuity of person. If zombies are tragic figures, then we must think that it is the very same individuals who were once our neighbors that are now out to gnaw on our entrails.

The distinctive tragic element of Undead drama again reveals our deep-seated intuition that creatures like us could become zombies. But again, if it is possible for a person to become a zombie, then a person must be able to survive death. A person could not become Undead without first being dead. If persons cease to exist when they die, as the psychological approach to personal identity would have it, then it would not be our friends and neighbors that rise from the dead with a taste for human flesh. But that is precisely what we find so tragic about the Undead; and so deep down we must believe that people can survive as corpses.

“They’re Just Dead Flesh”

I have urged that our natural and spontaneous reactions to some of the characteristic dramatic devices of zombie films reveal an intuition that persons can become zombies and that this intuition supports the bodily over the psychological approach to personal identity. I want now to consider a couple of objections.

First, it might be insisted that zombies are not identical to the people they once were, that those people are gone and have been replaced by the flesh-eating monsters that populate the zombie horde. It might be insisted that there is merely a superficial resemblance between the people who died and their walking corpses. This view is expressly voiced in both Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. In Night, a newscaster is asking a supposed expert, Dr. Grimes, what information they have about the creatures that are going around killing and eating human beings. After Dr. Grimes notes that the time between death and “reactivation” is only a few minutes, the newscaster draws what is to his mind the troubling consequence that people will not have time to make any kind of funeral arrangements. Dr. Grimes retorts sharply:

The bodies must be carried to the street and burned. They must be burned immediately. Soak them with gasoline and burn them. . . .

The bereaved will have to forego the dubious comforts that a funeral service will give. They’re just dead flesh, and dangerous.

In the good doctor’s mind, zombies are not people who are due any kind of respect; they are just so much “dead flesh.” We get the same idea, expressed even more forcefully, by the scientist being interviewed on television in Dawn who exclaims,

These creatures cannot be considered human. . . . We must not be lulled by the concept that these are our family members or friends; they are not.

Here is a clear rejection of the view that zombies are identical to the people they once were. Zombies cannot be considered human, and they cannot be considered as the same people they once were. Those people are gone, and for our own good we must not be taken in by the superficial resemblance between these monsters and the people whom we cared about.

I think these scenes, however, actually serve to draw our attention to and even reinforce our gut-level reaction that these zombies really are our family members and friends. For we intuitively think that the scientists have got it wrong here. These so-called experts are looking at the zombie phenomenon from a safe and clinical distance. They are not out there trying to board themselves up in an old farmhouse or clear out a shopping mall full of monsters. We do not sympathize with the scientists’ point of view. We sympathize instead with Ben’s hesitation in Night when he has to shoot Helen Cooper in the head and with his subsequent remorse. We sympathize too with his relish when he gets to shoot Harry Cooper in the head. It’s pretty awful watching zombies gnaw on the burnt-up bits of Tom and Judy, but it’s nothing compared to seeing Karen Cooper with a mouthful of her father’s forearm. It’s pretty frightening when Johnny gets overcome by the graveyard zombie, but it’s nothing compared to when Barbara gets done in by her own brother. No matter what the cold logic of the removed scientists tells them, our tingly entrails tell us that it matters who these zombies are that are doing the killing and the eating of the people we identify with.

Zombies are dead flesh all right, but not merely so. Just because they are dead flesh doesn’t mean they aren’t also our family and friends.

“This Was an Important Place in Their Lives”

The second objection I want to consider concedes that zombies are people but argues that this does not favor the bodily approach to personal identity. This objection insists that there is psychological continuity between the living and the Undead. People survive as zombies on this view thanks to the preservation of psychology. In Dawn, when our heroes first arrive on the roof of the shopping mall and look down through the skylights at the zombies within, there is the following exchange:

FRANCINE: What are they doing? Why do they come here?

STEPHEN: Instinct, memory, what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.

If we emphasize the idea that the zombies have a memory of how important the mall was in their lives, then Stephen seems to be claiming that there is psychological continuity between the living and the Undead.

I think this scene, however, actually serves to drive home the idea that there is no real continuity between the living and the Undead with respect to the kind of high-level psychological features that are distinctive of people. The emphasis in Stephen’s line belongs on the idea that we are dealing with an instinct here. The sharp satirical edge of Stephen’s comment about the zombies in the mall can only be appreciated if we understand that zombies are not psychologically continuous with living humans. The implication is that going to the mall even in living humans is nothing more than a matter of mindless animal instinct.

There is, no doubt, brain activity and some kind of psychology in zombies—they want to eat warm flesh, and they learn how to use rocks and table legs as tools. But it is not the psychology distinctive of people. Zombie psychology is more like that of a non-human animal that is pretty far down the phylogenetic scale. They are driven solely and relentlessly by a single appetitive desire. Moreover, there is really no continuity of psychology from the living to the Undead. Zombies don’t remember their family and friends. Johnny shows no sign of recognizing Barbara before he drags her off to eat her. Zombies have to relearn some of the simplest skills or those they were most familiar with. Bub from Day and the gas station attendant in Land have to relearn what a gun is and how to use it; a softball player in Land has to relearn how to swing the aluminum bat that she has been carrying around with her through the whole movie.

What is important to zombies now is very different from what was important to them when they were alive—they probably hardly ever had a hankering for human flesh while they were alive—even though there may be some residual animal instincts compelling them in a purely mechanical way. Just because zombies have some kind of psychology doesn’t mean that there is psychological continuity between them and the people they once were.

Dead People

Land of the Dead is the latest in George Romero’s genre-defining series of zombie films, and on Romero’s authority I am going to take it as the last word on the status of zombies. The distinctive devices to which I have drawn your attention are there in somewhat exaggerated form (an indication, I think, that the genre has reached a fairly late stage in its development). The movie opens with a humorous survey of zombies in their daily routine, including a trio of musicians playing in a gazebo band-stand, a gas station attendant who instinctively responds to the distinctive ding of the pneumatic bell, and a pair of teenagers out for a lover’s stroll. A little later on a zombie-bitten protagonist takes the burden off his buddies by shooting himself in the head to avoid turning into a zombie.

When we first meet our hero, Riley, he tells a neophyte zombie hunter and the audience that zombies have started to adapt to their new situation and behave “just like us.” The zombies end up organizing after a fashion and proceeding on something like a mission to take down the last bastion of power and privilege for the select few living at Fiddler’s Green. Indeed, the zombies and some of the less-than-select living humans have this mission in common. At the end of the movie Riley is faced with a dilemma. A zombie horde has overtaken a crowd of humans clamoring to get out of the gated city and one of Riley’s gang is wondering whether to shoot into the crowd. She is unsure what to do because there are “people out there,” and it is clear that she is referring to the humans and means to exclude the zombies. Our hero decides she should not shoot into the crowd and replies with perhaps the best line of the film:

RILEY: Those people are all dead.

It’s clear in contrast that Riley means to include both zombies and humans under the heading “people.” So here the most sympathetic character in the most mature treatment by the undisputed master of the genre refers to zombies as people. And it feels right. We are relieved that Riley chooses not to fire into the crowd at the security fence or to pursue the Undead who are slowly escaping across a bridge out of the city in search of place to call their own. We are relieved because we too think those zombies are people.

We are attracted to zombie films by the distinctive terror and tragedy that the Undead evoke. Zombies are peculiarly scary because we think that we could be turned into one, and zombies are peculiarly tragic figures because we recognize the innocent people that these monsters once were. Our responses to the distinctive ploys of Undead drama reveal our intuition that zombies are people—our intuition that people who were once alive and relatively innocent could continue to exist as walking corpses.

This intuition that zombies are people too betrays our preference for the bodily over the psychological approach to personal identity. If zombies were once our friends and neighbors, then bodily continuity must be sufficient for personal identity and psychological continuity must not be necessary. If creatures like us could turn into zombies, then persons must be able to continue to exist so long as their bodies do. To the extent that we can be taken in by a good zombie film, we must think that a person continues to exist so long as some critical mass of her material properties does and that a person can survive without any distinctively human psychology. To the extent, therefore, that we can appreciate the distinctive terror and tragedy of the Undead genre, we must think that a person is most fundamentally not a res cogitans but rather a res corporealis.

3

“She’s Not Your Mother Anymore, She’s a Zombie!”: Zombies, Value, and Personal Identity

HAMISH THOMPSON

The Value of a Zombie

Why do we have so few qualms about killing zombies? The Undead’s aggressive anti-social behavior usually involves an insatiable lust to eat, kill, or transform us. This no doubt creates a justification for zombie decapitation on the grounds of self-defense. Another reason, retribution, hardly seems a relevant justification given their largely mindless state. Retribution as a justification for punishment presupposes some kind of moral agency that at a minimum requires some substantial notion of self that zombies appear to lack. In White Zombie,[11] some of the zombies are guilty of hideous crimes before their transformation. If zombies possess a minimal self and their zombified identity is continuous with their prior identity, and the zombie in the pre-zombie state is guilty of a heinous crime, we might think that we are still justified in punishing him or her on the grounds of retribution.[12] But what if the zombie before zombification was an innocent child, a girlfriend, a boyfriend, a fiancé, or your mother?

Another reason proposed for the limited moral worth of zombies might be their largely absent mentality, their altered personal identity, or some combination of both. Zombies clearly appear to have something going on “upstairs,” but not much, and presumably what they have is very different from their prior state. Brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s and disorders such as autism also raise questions about absent and altered personal identity. For example, at what point is the person no longer “at home”? Or at what point is a person no longer the same person I once knew? Zombies clearly bring to mind the ravages of brain damage and serious cognitive disorders. Good horror exploits our deepest fears and issues that we rarely like to bring to the surface. To understand these fears it is necessary to explore the metaphors for and analogies to our own general condition.

Another attempted justification for the moral devaluation of zombies, other than an absent mentality, is their altered personal identity. This altered identity perhaps releases us from prior obligations to the pre-transformed individual. If this identity is altered to such a degree after zombification, we might think that out of a certain respect for the prior identity of the individual we are obligated to terminate the zombie.

Three general justifications for zombie termination appear to be as follows: a) they are (or are very close to being) brain-dead; b) because of their radically altered life goals, what personality is left lacks the same personal identity as the original individual, releasing us from prior obligations; and c) after zombification they are usually homicidal cannibalistic killers.[13]

The Philosophical Challenge of Zombies

Each one of these justifications, however, poses a philosophical conundrum to our desire for absolute and sharp distinctions. If zombies are only partly brain-dead, how much is left and does this matter? Is what remains of the personality of zombies after zombification an altered personal identity? If we remove the homicidal tendencies by training the individuals, as in Day of the Dead,[14] or chaining the individuals up, as in 28 Days Later [15] and Shaun of the Dead, [16] presumably the justification for termination on the grounds of self-defense is removed. However, we are still left with questions as to how we should treat these individuals.

Should we use them in service industry jobs or as entertainment on game shows, as depicted in Shaun of the Dead ? Do we have an obligation to terminate them out of a respect for their past identity? If your spouse is zombified, should you divorce him or her? Even if we grant the status of “dead” to the zombie, issues arise concerning our perceived obligations to the body alone.

Obligations to the body are instrumental to the Marine’s absolute commitment to “leave no man behind” (meaning by “man” a dead body), even at the potential expense of other living persons. This apparent obligation is apparent in the massive investment humans have in rituals of burial and cremation. If one takes literally a hoped-for resurrection of the body, the initial mutilation causing zombiehood might be troubling, but the future mutilation required in “finishing off” the body often leaves little of the original. Nobody usually stays behind to bury a decapitated zombie.[17]

The sharpest moral challenge often arises when a character is faced with the realization of the altered state of a loved one and the choice of either terminating the loved one, who is thus transformed, or being transformed oneself. In Invasion of the Body Snatchers,[18] the girlfriend’s personal identity is substituted when her psyche is replaced by an alien psyche in a physically identical body.[19] The father of the girl in 28 Days Later gets “the disease” as an infected droplet of blood falls into his eye. In Shaun of the Dead, Shaun is confronted with the required termination of his mother, whose zombie transformation is hardly great given her somewhat mindless previous state.

Dead or Alive?

Zombies, often described as the “living dead,” confront us directly with the question whether they are alive or dead. If we can classify them as dead, any moral question about termination is largely resolved. Zombies, however, challenge this dichotomy. Zombies present us with beings who appear to be alive, but who lack the rich mental life that we associate with “normal” persons. Their decay and disintegration is rather more indicative of death than life, but on the other hand, their dogged animation and lumbering groaning is more indicative of life than death.

The flicker of awareness that appears to be present in these beings may or may not be sufficient for some semblance of rationality as a criterion for personhood. This limited awareness may or may not be sufficient to argue for a continuity of personal identity in the individual. We get a clear acknowledgment of zombie memory, and even a hint of revenge (and perhaps affection), when the trained zombie in Day of the Dead uses a gun to shoot the killer of his trainer. In White Zombie, we get the striking image of the zombified heroine playing piano despite her complete failure to recognize her new husband. In Shaun of the Dead, Shaun’s best friend at the end is depicted as perhaps capable of playing video games.

Alternatively, we might describe zombies as more dead than alive. In years past, one proposed criterion for death was the absence of a soul. This sharp distinction between being ensouled or not, as separate from the distinction of being alive or dead, allows for the consistent imagined possibility of being alive but soulless.[20] According to this criterion an oak tree satisfies the “in between” condition of being alive but soulless. But souls are a little hard to measure and not just a little metaphysically dubious.

Current debate regarding a brain-based criterion for death tends to focus on what might be termed “total brain death” or, alternately and more controversially, “partial brain death.” If we opt for a brain-based definition of death that considers death as only the loss of the higher cognitive functions while leaving the lower cognitive functions intact, then zombies might be legitimately classified as “dead.”

But what higher cognitive functions are sufficient for claiming that an individual is alive? One possible requirement might be a functioning cerebellum. This allows for consciousness, personality, memory, reason, enjoyment, and worry, as well as a variety of other higher-level cognitive capacities. [21] Lower brain functions such as those that allow for breathing and a heartbeat do not allow for such capacities. The absence of higher cognitive functions and the presence of only the lower would therefore result in a state classifiable as “death.” Zombies appear to lack individual personalities and rich conscious lives. They do appear, on the whole, to possess “behavioral” memories, high levels of aggression, and a rather insatiable hunger. If this distinction between higher and lower cognitive capacities is sound, and zombies are categorically determined to lack the higher, we might legitimately classify zombies as “dead.”

This loss of higher cognitive capacities in zombies is very loosely analogous to real cases of brain damage, in which involuntary motor actions such as spasms and blinking may create the terrible illusion of conscious awareness. A person in such a medical condition is sometimes described as being in a “permanent vegetative state,” or more specifically, when automatic behaviors such as blinking occur, as “awake but unaware.” In these cases there are no specific responses to varied stimuli, despite what individuals might desire to see in otherwise random spasms of behavior. Zombies, however, have fairly sophisticated responses to environmental stimuli. They can recognize non-zombified humans clearly as potential food. They also respond to lights, or a jukebox playing Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now,” as in Shaun of the Dead.

Since we see motion and goal-directed behavior as indicative of “life,” the behavior and rather zealous focus of zombies makes it hard just to automatically classify them as “dead.” When Shaun and his friend witness a zombie in the backyard, they mistake her for being simply drunk. This over-simplistic classification of zombies as dead is also complicated by the rather miraculous recovery of the heroine in White Zombie, which suggests the possibility of reversal of the zombification process. The scientist in Day of the Dead hopes to find a way to effect such a reversal. However, just as zombie films pose a problem with arriving at a clear criterion for death, they do not give us a clear criterion for personal identity.

Self as Fiction

In assuming zombies’ possession of somewhat limited mentality, popular representations pose a problem for us in attributing to them anything like a coherent identity. One solution might be to reject the notion of a personal identity that a being either possesses absolutely or absolutely does not. Perhaps we could opt for a more fluid concept of self that admits of degrees. This strategy mirrors a tradition in philosophy of rejecting absolutist notions of self.[22] The Scottish enlightenment philosopher David Hume challenged such absolutist conceptions when he identified the self as essentially a “fiction” rather than an essence. What we describe as the self is in his account really a continuous series of perceptions and experiences that we bundle into a unity and describe as “me.”

According to Hume, when our psychology ceases, we cease. To think otherwise is to go beyond “serious and unprejudiced reflection.” Thus Hume concludes that mankind is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. . . . The man is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.” He goes on to conclude that there is no simple essence which constitutes our basic identity, however tempted we are to mistakenly imagine such a basic essence, or as he describes it, “simplicity.”[23] Once an absolutist notion of self (and hence, a personal identity that is either possessed or not) is abandoned, this raises the intriguing possibility of degrees of psychological continuity.

Contemporary philosopher Derek Parfit takes up where Hume left off. Once all talk of souls and essences is abandoned in terms of the richer notion of degrees of psychological continuity, then we are in a position to evaluate zombies more carefully. As Parfit remarks, “if there will be one future person who will have enough of my brain to be psychologically continuous with me, that person would be me.”[24] If zombies have some form of psychological continuity, then we have an idea of personal identity that will presumably give zombies a basic potential for psychological continuity which unites their present identity to a previous one. According to Parfit, bodily continuity alone is not sufficient for personal identity—psychology matters. Furthermore, valuing a human in a permanent unconscious state, yet alive, ignores the importance of psychological presence and degrees of continuity.[25]

Curiously, in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, all the memories of the original persons remain intact in the physically duplicated body. This demonstrates some considerable psychological continuity. In the duplicate body, however, the original person’s life goals are replaced with a new mission and a personality apparently devoid of emotion. The prior values and intentions of the original person are entirely replaced in the duplicate with a new objective—to replace all the remaining original humans with “pod people.” This raises the analogous possibility that in addition to acquiring an insatiable hunger for human flesh, zombies’ life goals change. Perhaps this alteration in life goals is sufficient to warrant the claim that the individual after zombification is no longer the same person, despite their limited mental continuity.

“Not Your Mother!”

Of what does remain of the zombies’ mental life, does their personal identity remain constant? We might place a higher demand on psychological continuity and memory for personal identity that goes beyond simple non-autonomous abilities such as how to play the piano, play a video game, or shoot a gun. But even if we grant a limited psychological continuity between the pre-zombified person and the zombie, we might also require a certain continuity of life goals in order to be able to claim strict continuity of personal identity.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers demonstrates an example of a clear substitution of personality in individuals. As humans sleep, they are duplicated in pods, but in such a way that despite considerable psychological continuity between the original person and the duplicate person, there is a radical alteration of personality. This altered personality and adoption of new life goals makes it easier for us to judge that the replaced individual is indeed a new individual.

This is closer to the thought experiment posed by John Locke, another enlightenment philosopher. In this experiment he proposes the possibility that the soul of a prince that carries with it the conscious memories of its past life enters and informs the body of a cobbler. The soul of the cobbler departs as soon as the soul of the prince enters. Locke argues that it is obvious the cobbler would now be the same person as the prince, despite having the cobbler’s body, and that he would now be accountable only for the actions of the prince.[26] This alteration would presumably absolve us of all prior obligations to the cobbler. So can we argue that the zombies’ personality has changed to such a degree that we could treat them as if their personality has been substituted for another personality?

Aspects of zombies’ personalities clearly do change. The hungry animalistic snarl of Shaun’s mother in Shaun of the Dead at the point of transformation appears to indicate an altered personality complete with different life goals. One reason for the moral devaluation of zombies partly arises from the lack of mentality in the new identity after zombie transformation. However, if the zombie is a loved one or friend, then the change in personal identity is crucial, entailing the release of the old obligations created by the prior interpersonal relationship.

Because of the altered personal identity of individuals who undergo radical transformation, the argument runs, obligations to the original individual become moot. Apparent changes in identity allow for Shaun’s killing of his flatmate and mother in Shaun of the Dead, to be at least justifiable, if not easy, given the release from prior obligations. But still, our sympathy with Shaun’s trauma at the killing of his zombified mother is caused by a doubt we might legitimately have about these distinctions. For example, a friend of mine in college professed to be “born again.” His behavior certainly changed in combination with distinct attitudes and life goals.[27] If I made a promise or borrowed money from him before he was “born again,” perhaps afterwards I no longer have an obligation to keep my promise or repay my debts to him despite his bodily continuity. This would make as much sense, I might argue, as repaying a debt to Robert after borrowing the money from Jane: I obviously have no obligation to repay the debt to Robert, and therefore, I have no obligation to repay my debts to my “born again” friend.

Parfit’s account of personal identity in terms of psychological continuity explicitly admits of degree, and this raises serious questions as to the continuity of self as well as the constancy of personality in the zombified individual. This is particularly hard for Shaun, when confronted by his zombified mother, because of her somewhat zombie-like character prior to zombification.

Zombies and Us

Finally, there is the question of “normal” persons’ similarity to zombies. Once sharp distinctions between “dead” and “alive,” “self” and “non-self,” are rejected, and if these concepts are admitted in terms of degree, what then are we? For the “research and development” in writing this chapter, I decided to undergo some video-gaming experiences. After getting hooked, to my horror, it was six in the morning, and I had lectures to prepare the next day. I was in a state of partial zombiehood, with continuous responsive behavior to a visual stimulus, but a state of self-awareness that could hardly be described as present. The portrayal in Shaun of the Dead of the line of checkout assistants who mindlessly (if rhythmically) “beep” the purchases of customers, or of Shaun’s best friend as he whiles away the hours paying video games followed by a rapidly induced drunken stupor at the local pub, raises the terrifying possibility of our own general normal condition of zombiehood.

What distinguishes us from zombies, however, is our potential for brief intermittent actualizations of imaginative goal-directed action. Zombies appear to lack this capacity. One such actualization of self is presented in Shaun of the Dead when Shaun and his best friend are finally popped out of their humdrum existence by the full realization of the violent circumstances of their environment. For the first time in the film they make a conscious decision and plan for their future. This is depicted in the film by a break in the continuous narrative and the portrayal of three possible futures imagined by Shaun and his friend: first, go to Shaun’s mother’s house to get his mother, kill his zombified stepfather, pick up his ex-girlfriend, go over to her place, and have a cup of tea; second, go to Shaun’s mother’s house to get his mother, kill his zombified stepfather, pick up his ex-girlfriend, return to Shaun’s house, and have a cup of tea; third, go to Shaun’s mother’s house to get his mother, kill his zombified stepfather, pick up his ex-girlfriend, go to the pub and have a pint, and wait for the whole thing to blow over. As Shaun’s girlfriend says at the end of the film: it is not so much what Shaun eventually chooses, but the fact that he makes a decision—and presumably actualizes his autonomous self—that matters.

Zombie films challenge the dichotomies that we often take for granted. Just as these films challenge the distinction between being dead or alive, they challenge overly simplistic conceptions of the “soul.” A more reflective analysis of zombies should perhaps lead us to reject the notion that zombies are simply soulless or dead. Presumably our consciences are partially salved as we decapitate or kill them due to the threat they pose to our own survival. A more subtle justification for zombie termination might be offered when we consider their absent or limited “animalistic” mentality in an attempt to classify them as more dead than alive. But they clearly fall above the criterion of death when we consider them in contrast to severely brain-damaged individuals. Zombies can clearly respond to basic environmental stimulation albeit in a somewhat anti-social and ponderous manner.

Perhaps most subtle of all is an attempt to justify their termination on the grounds that they have an altered personal identity given a radical change in life goals and aims. This absolves us of responsibilities we might have to the prior individual. It also opens up the possibility that we might be justified in terminating the zombie out of a respect for the prior identity that is no longer present after transformation. However, none of these justifications are entirely satisfactory, given open questions such as how much of a personality change is required for there to be the categorical claim that a zombie is no longer the “same person.” Perhaps we ought to respect the “new person,” despite the hostility issues. I am not really advocating the implementation of PETZ, a society for the Protection and Ethical Treatment of Zombies. But perhaps a more complex analysis of the relation between personal identity, mentality and value should at least give us pause for concern the next time we bash out the brains of a zombie with a cricket bat.[28]

4

Dead Serious: Evil and the Ontology of the Undead

MANUEL VARGAS

I don’t know whether Undead beings exist. I also think it is an open question whether anyone is evil in, say, the way bad guys are depicted in supernatural horror films and serial killer movies. I do think it’s nevertheless puzzling that the Undead are frequently portrayed as evil in that way. I’m inclined to think that if we were to stumble across any Undead they would be less likely to be evil than any random live person we stumble across. Consider this a call for some Undead understanding.

Some Puzzles about Undeath

Common-sense conceptions of the Undead aren’t perfect, but they are a good place to start. Without a good supply of Undead to study, it simply isn’t possible to proceed by studying them as scientists might. I’ll therefore begin with our ideas or concepts of the Undead.

Some philosophers (the editors of this book, actually) have proposed this account of what we mean by Undead: it refers to “that class of beings who at some point were living creatures, have died, and have come back such that they are not presently ‘at rest.’” This definition seems like a good place to start. It is a perfectly reasonably construal of how we tend to think about the Undead, to the extent that we do, and it is consistent with how the Undead are portrayed in literature, movies, television, video games, and other aspects of popular culture.

On the account we’ve started with, it is a requirement that there be some death involved prior to Undeath. Something Undead can’t have stayed alive. An interesting thing about these elements of our working definition is that we don’t have to have experimented on the Undead to know these things. We just have to have an adequate grasp of the concept of “Undead” to recognize that anything that is going to count as Undead has to have died (and thus lived), in at least some recognizable sense of having died. Because they are grounded in our concepts, let’s call these truths about the Undead conceptual truths.

Conceptual Truths about the Undead

There can be conceptual truths about things that do not exist. There can be conceptual truths about unicorns, even though unicorns surely do not exist (unlike the Undead, perhaps). One such conceptual truth might be that under normal conditions an adult unicorn has a horn. This truth doesn’t require that unicorns exist in any substantial sense. The same goes for any truths about the Undead.

All I mean by the notion of a conceptual truth about the Undead is the idea that from where we currently stand, there are some things that would have to be true of an entity for us to treat it as even a candidate for being Undead, at least right here and right now. Our experiences might give us reason to change our concepts, and thus the conceptual truths about something, but nothing in what follows turns on these sorts of details.

This definition does rule out some things that we might be tempted to think of as Undead. There is a category of creatures called “philosophical zombies.” These are beings who, apart from lacking consciousness, are like normal human beings in their outward appearance. Although the name might distract, I believe that we should hold that philosophical zombies are no more Undead than is the rock musician and horror movie director Rob Zombie.[29]

Most interesting truths aren’t conceptual. Non-conceptual truths require that we learn something about the way the world is put together. Our common-sense concept of a twenty-first birthday party may require that there be someone (or something) for whom the party is intended (a conceptual truth), but this does not settle when and where a particular party is held, nor whether twenty-first birthday parties are generally good or bad. Concepts don’t settle these things by themselves. Similarly, that there are conceptual truths about the Undead does not mean that all truths about the Undead are purely conceptual. We may discover that the Undead are somewhat different from what we expected, just as we might learn that particular parties are better or worse than we expected.

Sometimes we find that a concept is just not decisive on some issue. Consider the idea that the Undead are not “at rest.” Presumably this means that the Undead are not straightforwardly dead. But are they alive? Are they some other thing? I suspect that we will not find agreement in common sense thinking on this issue.

When common sense is unsettled about something, we have to recognize that any attempt to “clean up” or unify our thinking about some concept will require changing how at least some (and maybe even all) of us think about this issue. In the case of the Undead, this might mean that any attempt to decide whether the Undead are alive, dead, or something else entirely will require departures from the way some or all of us tend to think about these things. These departures might be motivated by things we learn from studying Undead specimens, were we to find any. And, these departures might be motivated by reflecting on accounts we have of life. If, for example, some of the things we thought about the Undead relied on erroneous understandings of what life means, then we should expect that a suitably informed understanding of life might change how we think about the Undead.

For now, it is enough that we acknowledge that (1) there are some conceptual truths about the Undead, (2) these conceptual truths provide partial characterizations of the nature of the Undead that require further supplementation, and (3) what supplementation is provided may change the way we think about the Undead.

Kinds of Undead

I now want to turn to one way of supplementing the way we think about the Undead. It’s helpful to think about two different kinds of things, nominal kinds and natural kinds. What makes something a nominal kind is that it is what it is in virtue of our having defined it that way. “The stuff on my desk” is a nominal kind, in that I can think of or treat it as a kind, but the sense in which it is a kind of thing is very loose and largely (perhaps entirely) dependent on my thinking or stipulating that it is a kind. On the other end of the spectrum are natural kinds, things like water and electrons, which are (let us suppose), roughly, real, non-artificial, non-socially constructed kinds of things. In between, there are presumably lots of kinds of kinds, such as social kinds (ethnicity, and maybe race and gender) and artifactual kinds (computers, toasters, and chairs), and so on.

I believe that the Undead do not make up a natural kind (or an unnatural kind, for that matter). Instead, the term Undead refers to something closer to a nominal kind, a motley crew of different things whose unity is more a function of how we happen to have constructed the category and less a function of any unity in the universe’s own organization. For example, apart from being both thought of as “Undead,” there seems to be little that connects zombies and vampires. One lacks higher mental capacities and the other has them. One requires a diet of brains and the other a diet of blood. One has a body that is rotting and the other has a body that is capable of repairing itself from a wide range of injuries. Indeed, whether an Undead creature is identical to the creature associated with the body prior to death seems to vary. Vampires seem to be their old selves (albeit with a case of vampirism). Zombies, while sporting the rotting bodies of former people, do not themselves seem to be the persons who once were in those bodies. It’s not even clear whether a body has to remain even mostly intact in order to count as Undead. At least in principle, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to rule out the possibility of composite Undead, something constructed out of disparate parts, each of which was attached to a different body, each of which died. Perhaps the Frankenstein monster is an instance of an artificially created composite Undead.

If I am right, the Undead do not make up a single natural kind. To put the point somewhat technically (bear with me for two sentences), the Undead make up something like a nominal kind, where various members of that nominal kind (vampires, zombies, composite Undead, and so on) may themselves be further nominal kinds or in some cases natural kinds. What determines the limits of the overarching nominal kind (the borders demarcating Undead and not Undead) is largely fixed by what conceptual truths there are about the Undead, and any constraints imposed by the universe on the reality of the Undead. In other words, there are lots of ways to be Undead, and some of those ways may be more and less a product of our way of thinking about things.

I now want to shift from discussing what we might exaggeratedly call “purely conceptual” issues about the Undead to ways in which some otherwise perfectly boring facts about the world should shape our understanding of the Undead. In particular, I believe we can learn something about the Undead by canvassing some of the possibilities of how Undead creatures might come to be.

First, we must acknowledge Undead of supernatural origin. This would include any Undead brought about by the work of magic. A zombie created by the spell of a sorcerer would be an instance of something Undead of supernatural origin, as would be one created by the will of a demon. Prior to the last part of the twentieth century, this may have been the predominant way of thinking about the origins of the Undead. You might be tempted to think that all instances of the Undead must have supernatural origins (perhaps you think this is a conceptual truth). But this does not seem plausible. Indeed, the trajectory of popular culture has increasingly been to emphasize the origin of the Undead in viruses or biological weapons programs initiated by entirely non-magical agents (see, for example, Max Brooks’s excellent book The Zombie Survival Guide, and movies such as 28 Days Later, Resident Evil video games and movies, Blade comic books and movies, and so on.). Although we might discover that the Undead are entirely of supernatural origin, this is a contingent empirical fact, something we would have to learn from the field and not from the philosopher’s armchair.

A second important class of Undead origin is artificial. These would be Undead who were created by agents (whether human, divine, demonic, or other) by entirely non-magical means. The bioweapons program gone awry in Resident Evil or the accidentally released virus in 28 Days Later would be an instance of the creation of Undead by artificial origin.[30]

The third possibility would be Undead whose creation is by entirely natural forces, devoid of the intervention of agents. Some accounts of vampirism seem to have this structure, treating it as a virus that developed by mutation on its own, as opposed to, say, the intervention of a lab of genetic engineers or the infernal actions of the devil.

Once you realize that the Undead might be of natural origin, you might also wonder whether we have already encountered some Undead and just not recognized them as such. Consider that there are a range of mysterious, “quasi-living” entities that we do not yet understand well. These include viruses and the even less well known viroids. It’s unclear whether these entities count as living. At least for some of them, it is possible to introduce conditions that stop all quasi-living functioning but then to change those conditions so that their functioning is restored. If we come to count viruses and viroids as living, then those capable of ceasing and recovering their quasi-living functioning might be candidates for the Undead. And, given what we know, these might well make up the largest chunk of the Undead population. Moving up several levels of biological complexity, there are a range of plant and animal entities whose biological functions can be brought to a complete halt and then restored or “restarted.” It is natural to think of many of these things as living throughout the process—seeds are commonly taken to be alive, even when frozen or put in some context where all metabolic activity ceases—but this raises interesting questions about the extent to which being alive is not merely a feature of an entity (the seed) but instead an entity and a context together. Maybe whether you are alive or dead depends on facts about more than you, but also facts about the environment you find yourself in.

Working out all the possibilities of a context-sensitive account of life is too big a project for this essay, but it does suggest a few possibilities for our reflections on the Undead. If we acknowledge that contextual features play a role in determining what counts as living, we would have to say a great deal more about what those features are if we are not to count the Undead as living. In turn, this would open up the possibility that some of the living are Undead. Consider that some people (including baseball player Ted Williams) have been cryogenically frozen soon after their death, in hopes that at some later date they might be revived and restored to life. Should we think of this as a case of someone becoming Undead? What about someone who “dies” in the emergency room but is then revived? Puzzling cases abound for supernatural forms of the Undead as well. Was Lazarus of biblical fame Undead? How about the resurrected Jesus? How about everyone whose body is resurrected on Judgment Day? Resurrection somehow seems different from becoming Undead, but maybe this judgment is a result of our piecemeal understanding of both of these categories.

A useful way to sort out some of these complexities is to suppose that there is a multi-axis continuum of phenomena with poles that include alive, dead, and not-ever-having-been-alive-at-all (NEHBAA). Different kinds of beings, Undead or otherwise, will occupy different places along this multi-axis continuum. That is, lots of everyday stuff will cluster in a range of spaces near one end or another of the alive, dead, and NEHBAA poles (see the diagram below). Your current pet is hopefully alive, but depending on its health it might be more or less close to the dead pole. Your great-great-great grandfather is probably at or very close to the dead pole and remote from the alive pole. Viruses and other unusual creatures rest somewhere between alive and the NEHBAA pole.

If we think about things in this way, it becomes natural to think of Undeath as including a wide range of states that fall in between all of these poles. Vampires may be alive enough to be counted as alive. Zombies might fall on the other side of a vague line demarcating life and death. Composite forms of the Undead (think Frankenstein’s monster) might turn out never to have been alive as a unit (although many and maybe even all parts will have been parts of different entities that were themselves alive), and thus they would be somewhere approaching the NEHBAA pole. Depending on their construction, composite Undead might also come in various degrees of livingness. In sum, the class of Undead creatures is likely to occupy a large and diverse state space, with different kinds of Undead clustering in different areas in that state space. There’s more diversity among the Undead than the usual catalog of vampires, zombies, and so on might lead you to believe.

A Touch of Evil

People use the word evil in a lot of different ways. The sense of evil I’m interested in is perhaps most familiar to us from fictional representations, reserved for a kind of person who has a disregard for morality and a special desire to see others injured. Hannibal Lecter may be the clearest example. Sauron and Iago might also be cases, depending on your interpretations of them. Serial killers, or at least our representations of them (think of John Gacy or Jeffrey Dahmer), tend to fit the bill. This sort of evil (although maybe there are varieties of evil here, too) seems to be recognizably different from other things we sometimes describe as evil.

I want to acknowledge up front that there are other senses of the term evil, senses I am not interested in for present purposes. For example, philosophers and theologians sometimes use evil as a trumped up way of meaning “anything bad from a moral standpoint,” as in when they discuss “The Problem of Evil” (roughly, how could an all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful God allow bad things to exist?). However, this usage is a very large departure from how we ordinarily talk about evil, to the extent that we do. If you sneak a cookie from a cookie jar, you might have done something morally bad, but it is a stretch to call what you did evil in the sense in which we think of movie serial killers as evil. The sense of evil I am interested in is something closer to how a wide range of people—religious believers and atheists alike—might describe an extraordinarily malicious or cruel individual.

Let us call the more restricted sense of evil with which I am concerned the malevolent sense of evil. What makes something evil in this sense is having motives to harm others, to damage the welfare or well-being of others, and acting on these motives. Agents are evil to greater and lesser degrees depending on the extent to which they have and act on these motives. An agent who only acted on evil motives would be pure evil. An agent who almost never acted on these motives might be said to be hardly evil at all.

This characterization of evil requires some refinement. Sauron wouldn’t turn out to be evil in the malevolent sense if the reason he aimed to conquer Middle Earth was to secure equality and equal dignity for all races. Although it might be morally wrong to kill innocent humans, hobbits, dwarves, and elves, and generally misguided to try to secure political and social equality for orcs and trolls, it wouldn’t be profoundly, truly, or genuinely evil in the malevolent sense of the term.

In the jargon of philosophers, the motive has to be non-instrumentally held. Non-instrumental motives are motives that cannot be explained by appeal to other beliefs or desires that I have. I just have them. Contrast this with an instrumental motive: my desire to arm myself with holy water and my belief that there is holy water to be gotten at the local church can generate in me an instrumental motive to get out of the chair, to get to church, and to secure holy water from, say, the baptismal fount at the church. Non-instrumental motives don’t depend in that way on other desires and beliefs I have. My desire to be happy is a good candidate for a non-instrumental desire: I don’t want to be happy because I think it is going to satisfy some other set of beliefs or desires; I simply want to be happy.

Something that is evil in the malevolent sense has to have a non-instrumental desire to damage the welfare of others. There may be other things required as well. Perhaps a creature incapable of consciousness cannot be evil in the relevant sense. Still, I will leave aside other conditions that may be required but which seem less distinctive of evil in this sense.

Again, I do not intend to deny that there are other, less demanding senses of evil. We might also learn that there are surprisingly few instances of malevolent evil in the world. Even if we were to discover this, however, it would not mean that there are not other senses of evil. It would simply mean that what evil there is is rarely, if ever, malevolent.

Evil and the Undead

Despite its potentially small range of actual cases, malevolent evil is a sense and perhaps the dominant sense of evil that we associate with the demonic and the Undead. What makes the vampires, zombies, and ghosts of fiction malevolently evil is that they are apparently motivated by non-instrumental desires to do us ill. At least part of what makes the Undead of horror movies so horrific is not merely that they wish to kill us—it has to do with why they wish to kill us. They do not wish to kill us for some further, recognizable cause we can imagine ourselves sharing but do not happen to share. Rather, it is that they have some basic desire to harm us and that’s it.

We might find that the Undead are somewhat different from what we imagine them to be. In particular, we might learn that the Undead, despite what we tend to think, actually lack the motives required for evil in the malevolent sense. This might well be difficult to determine. There are, however, several reasons why we should, on reflection, be skeptical that the Undead will typically turn out to be evil.

First, if it turns out that there are naturally occurring Undead, it seems plausible that a good many of them will not be sophisticated enough to have desires at all, much less desires of the relevant sort. If zombies don’t really have motives (maybe their brains have decayed too much for them to really have motives, even if they preserve certain functions that we might have once called “instinctual”), then they cannot, strictly speaking, be malevolently evil. They would be more like a deadly virus—the kind of thing we have reason to avoid and to try to control, but nothing that is really evil. Moreover, if it turns out that there is a range of naturally occurring Undead from viroids up through insects (assuming these lack motives), then as a matter of numerical considerations it may well work out that most Undead simply lack the mental machinery to count as evil.

Second, even if many archetypal forms of the Undead have motives, it is not obvious that they have the special kind of motive required for evil. Suppose zombies are motivated to, say, eat fresh brains. Would these motives count as non-instrumental desires to see the welfare of others harmed? Nope. To the extent that zombies do have desires to eat fresh brains, those motivations likely depend on a more basic desire to get food, and the belief that fresh brains constitute food. That would make an instrumental and not an evil-constituting motive. Even if the desire to eat fresh brains is non-instrumental, it does not look as if it’s really a desire to harm the welfare of others. If there were a way to get fresh brains without harming the welfare of anyone, I suspect zombies would be perfectly satisfied. Contrast this to Hannibal Lecter—presumably he would reject harm-free brains as a mediocre substitute, at best. At any rate, there is no evidence to suggest that harm-free brains would be rejected by zombies. In the absence of such evidence, we should conclude that zombies lack the desire that marks out malevolent evil. In short, zombies are not evil—they are just misunderstood.

Even if we find that a majority of the Undead have the relevant mental machinery to be capable of non-instrumental desires to harm others, there does not seem to be any reason why they would have those motives in greater frequencies than you or I tend to have them. If they are Undead of a sort that suffers from advanced physical decay, this seems to diminish the chance that they could have the relevant sorts of motives (or motives at all). On the other hand, if they don’t suffer from advanced physical decay, it does not seem likely that they will have motivations significantly different from the ones we currently have. And, as far as I can tell, most people don’t seem to be malevolently evil.

Consider the case of vampires. A vampire simply seems to be the person who was in the body prior to becoming a vampire. There is no obvious reason why having become a vampire would suddenly add non-instrumental motives to harm others. To the extent that vampirism introduces new desires, they don’t (necessarily) seem to be of the problematic sort. That is, on becoming a vampire you might want to suck blood and so on, but it is difficult to see why this should make you want to do bad things to other people when you did not want to do them before. We should not simply assume that vampirism brings with it non-instrumental desires to harm others.

What makes vampires a complicated case, however, is the often-held idea that they are damned or in some sense “fallen.” Perhaps damnation does the work of introducing the relevant non-instrumental desires, making vampires necessarily evil in a way that other forms of the Undead might not be. It is an interesting question whether damnation could/would/should have the effect of introducing desires that give rise to malevolent evil, and I am uncertain about the matter. The vampire as necessarily evil in light of damnation or something like it has received reinforcement in comparatively recent popular culture from at least the early seasons of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television show. Despite its influence, the view of vampirism as necessarily evil (which the show seems to abandon in later seasons, anyway) does swim against an enormous tide of recent popular culture that holds that vampires are not necessarily evil in the malevolent sense, and for that matter, not necessarily damned. See, for example, a good number of Anne Rice’s vampire novels, Tanya Huff’s Blood series, Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries, Laurel Hamilton’s Anita Blake series, and the recent vampire-mystery novels by Kim Harrison. Indeed, I am told that in at least one genre, the contemporary romance novel, a vampire is never evil. In many contemporary comic books vampires are just people with a condition where they live a long time and need to suck blood (the vampire Cassidy in Preacher fits this mold). Something similar can be said for vampires in popular culture outside of fiction, ranging from movies (think Underworld) to video games (for example, Morrowind: The Elder Scrolls 3). So, even if something about vampires brings with it malevolent impulses, it is important to recognize that this problem is apparently rooted primarily in supernatural vampires, and to acknowledge that these impulses might be overcome by other motives or values.

The preceding reflections suggest that vampires never really fail to leave behind a basic fact of the human predicament: We’ve all had bad motives, but with the right upbringing, friends, or environment, most of us tend to do a good job keeping it under control. If so, then even if it turns out that vampires necessarily have malicious motives, it does not follow that they are evil to any great degree, or that they are even evil at all. After all, a vampire might never come to act on any of his or her non-instrumental motives to harm others.

I suspect that the reason why vampires have been associated with irredeemable, malevolent evil is a function of two things. First, there is the need for blood. Wanting to suck someone’s blood can seem pretty creepy, and we may be tempted to think that creepy equals evil. But creepy isn’t necessarily evil. And, if popular representations of vampires are any indication, when a vampire finds a way to circumvent the need for blood we don’t tend to think of the vampire as straightforwardly evil. So maybe the creepiness of needing blood makes it easier to interpret the average vampire as having non-instrumental desires to harm us. After all, if they wished us well, surely they wouldn’t want to suck our blood? (For what it’s worth, I think that in reasoning this way we are reasoning badly. But I also think bad reasoning is widespread. However, I also think that there are oftentimes good reasons for reasoning badly.)

There is also a second reason, connected to the first, which provides some culturally influential impetus to the thought that at least vampires are typically evil. The original vampire of fiction seemed to act out motives that are easiest to make sense of as non-instrumental desires to harm others. And, at least in some chronicles, the figure Dracula was modeled after—“Vlad the Impaler”—committed atrocities on a scale that we seem to find easiest to explain by appeal to motives of the malevolently evil sort. Ascribing non-instrumental desires to harm others to someone gives us a way of making sense of what otherwise tends to seem radically senseless. By appealing to non-instrumental motives we can “explain” certain horrific acts: he is someone who wishes us ill for no good reason—he simply wants us to hurt.

Resting in Peace

So what have we learned about the Undead?

• First, if there are Undead, the largest number of Undead are likely to be of natural origin. Comparatively simple entities (biologically speaking) such as viruses, virons, or even more complex things like seeds and insects, likely make up the largest chunk of the Undead, much as they do among the not-yet-having-died living.

• Second, there is no reason to think that among the most-likely-to-exist forms of the Undead (the comparatively biologically simple), many will have the capacities required to be evil in any genuine or profound sense.

• Third, even among more sophisticated forms of the Undead, many of the Undead of classical lore seem to lack the capacities required to be evil.

• Fourth, even if there were Undead agents with the right capacities to be evil, there is no special reason to think that they have the motives that make one evil in any greater frequency than we find in regular, not-previously-dead humans. Even if they did have those motives, there is no reason to think that they would be fundamentally different from us in the capacity to act against those motives.

It’s time for us to abandon our prejudices about the Undead. It may not be evil to portray them as we tend to, but it is wrong.[31]

5

Zombies, Blade Runner, and the Mind-Body Problem

LARRY HAUSER

RACHEL [TO DECKARD]: Or we could live in sin, except that I’m not alive.

—PHILIP K. DICK, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Zombies and Replicants

J.R. SEBASTIAN [TO ROY BATTY]: You’re so perfect!

—Blade Runner

Zombies are Undead. Something animates them, but whatever it is—whether voodoo or science run amok—it’s not their departed souls or, as philosophers (not wanting to prejudge the theological question of souls) would have it, their conscious selves or minds. Zombies enter philosophy where horror fantasy and science fiction meet dawning scientific fact. Robots, many believe, are unconscious, soulless automata. Many further believe robots will remain unconscious and soulless no matter how convincingly human their appearances and behavior become, even robots able to fool the most careful unaided observer—like the androids in Blade Runner.[32]

That zombies enter philosophy in this vicinity partly explains the peculiar way in which philosophy zombies are Undead. Much like computers (according to the general supposition), typical philosophy zombies are unfeeling, but capable of sophisticated thought (or at least the appearance of it). This is quite unlike the stereotypical zombies of George Romero’s Living Dead series which are severely cognitively and emotionally diminished, if not completely unthinking or unfeeling. Maybe they have sensations—maybe brains taste like something to them. Who knows? On the other hand, they are certainly intellectually challenged. One can’t reason with a Living Dead zombie.

In Romero’s Land of the Dead zombies develop rudimentary communication and tool-use skills. Philosophy zombies’ intellectual abilities are imagined to be even further developed—typically, as well developed as yours and mine. “As human as human” is the rule with zombies in philosophy: zombies in philosophy are more akin to the wives in The Stepford Wives or the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers than to the brain-munching ghouls of Night of the Living Dead. Still, with Stepford wives and pod people there’s something discernibly, albeit subtly, amiss. Philosophy zombies resemble normal humans more perfectly still. In philosophy, zombies are typically, outwardly, indistinguishable from normal humans, at least to the naked eye, like the Replicants in Blade Runner. A Replicant can only be detected by a special test measuring “capillary dilation of the so called blush response, fluctuation of the pupil, involuntary dilation of the iris” and other involuntary emotional responses. They call it “Voigt-Kampff,” for short. Some philosophers have even imagined zombies literally identical to humans; some philosophy zombies are humans. We’ll return to that.

Zombies that haunt philosophers’ imaginings these days are fully humanoid agents, information processors, and even organisms. Outwardly, or objectively, philosophy zombies appear to be typical individuals. Inwardly, or subjectively, however, there’s no conscious “light” behind their eyes, however much they seem to shine. Objectively, philosophy zombies are perfect human replicas, as human as human; subjectively, however, there’s “nobody home.”

Despite their seeming intelligence—or rather precisely because of it—philosophy zombies do eat brains . . . in a sense. And herein lies their horror for materialistic philosophies of mind and, consequently, for scientific psychology. In the philosophy of mind, materialist theories maintain that mental functions can all be accounted for in physical terms, or identified with material processes, without recourse to immaterial entities like souls. In philosophical thought experiments, however, zombies seem to “devour” everything about brains that various materialist theories might suppose thoughts and sensations to be. Philosophy zombies “eat brains” by seeming to be counterexamples to every attempt to identify thoughts and sensations with the things about brains materialists propose to identify them with. Behaviorists propose to identify mental states with adaptive behavioral output. Functionalists propose to identify mental processes with computations that produce such output. Mind-brain identity theorists propose to identify minds with the underlying neurophysiology that, perhaps, implements such computations. All these alternatives seem to be ruled out by zombies. In philosophy, zombies eat behavior, programs, and brains.

And Bears! Oh No: Zombies Invade Philosophy

DECKARD [TO ZHORA]: Is that a real snake?

The first reported sighting of what philosophers have since come to call “zombies,” however, was not of humanoid zombies, but of zombie animals.[33] In the wake of William Harvey’s discovery that the heart is a pump, René Descartes proposed in 1637 that every life function could be explained materialistically on mechanical principles. Even adaptive intelligent-seeming behavior, such as birds’ nest-building and navigational abilities, Descartes argued, could be explained as the activities of unreasoning, unconscious mechanisms. Proposing to regard animal bodies as machines, Descartes concluded that all animals are “automata,” furry (or scaly or feathery) robots, totally lacking reason and consciousness. Shades of Pet Sematary . . . except in Pet Sematary, the resurrected pet corpses—like Romero’s zombies and unlike philosophers’ zombies—are manifestly not themselves. They’ve changed, turned vicious. Zombie animals, as conceived by Descartes, on the other hand, are indistinguishable from our pets, wildlife, and cattle, because they are our pets, wildlife, and cattle!

Descartes, notably, did seem to glimpse humanoid zombies once. Having introspectively assured himself of his own consciousness, looking out his window to see other “men crossing the square,” he still wondered whether what he saw were “any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons.”[34] What do I really know about anyone else’s inner life—or lack thereof—except what their words and acts seem to reveal? Zombies are us! Oh no! Or, rather, since I know from my own first-person experience that I am conscious (or so Descartes taught) zombies might be you. Philosophers call this the “other minds problem.” Descartes, however, dismissed the possibility of humanoid zombies. The variety and flexibility of human actions “guided by the will,” he reasoned, could not be mechanically replicated. Since the infinite variety of conscious reason outstrips the necessarily finite resources of material devices, Descartes concluded that no machine could ever use words or other signs to “produce different arrangements of words so as to give a meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence”; neither could a machine “act in all the contingencies of life in the way in which our reason makes us act.” Whereas “reason is a universal instrument which can be used in all kinds of situations,” Descartes reckoned such scope of application and flexibility of operation would be “impossible for a machine.” [35] Only the presence of an immaterial principle or soul in us (a theory called “dualism”) could explain the virtually infinite variety of human behavior. Whereas life-processes could be mechanized, thought-processes could not.

Descartes, it now seems, dismissed the possibility of humanoid zombies too soon. He underestimated the potential of machines. In 1937 Alan Turing demonstrated the theoretical possibility of fully programmable devices, or “universal machines,” paving the way for the development of digital computers and showing how the infinite variety of behaviors “guided by will,” such as speech, might be, in principle, explained as mechanical effects of computation. Much as the heart is a pump, and biological inheritance is DNA replication, Turing-inspired “functionalists” (or “cognitivists”) hypothesize that the brain is a computer. Thought is computation.

Zombies Ate My Brain!

RACHEL [TO DECKARD]: Have you ever “retired” a human by mistake?

Just when everything seemed to be going materialism’s way—just when it was finally dawning what sort of mechanisms minds might be and what sort of material processes thought might be—along came zombies. At first materialists were in denial. They wanted to say, “A thought experiment—the mere possibility of zombies—proves nothing. Only if there really were NEXUS 6 units like Rachel, and they really weren’t conscious, would it refute behaviorism; only if there really were NEXUS 7 units (say) that computed the same subfunctions as brains, yet unconscious, would it refute functionalism; only if there really were NEXUS 8 units (say) with brains physiologically indistinguishable from human brains, yet unconscious, would it refute mind-brain identity theory. That such units conceivably might not be conscious proves nothing.” It was here that zombies in philosophy turned ugly. Modern materialism says that everything mental is identical (and scientifically identifiable) with something physical, just as water is identical (and scientifically identifiable) with H_2O. Such scientific identification, however, entails that water is not just actually H_2O (“in this possible world,” philosophers say); water is necessarily H_2O (“in all possible worlds,” philosophers say). It has to be H_2O, or else it wouldn’t be water. Essential scientific identifications such as that of water with H_2O, when true, are not possibly or conceivably otherwise. So the best philosophical opinion, following Saul Kripke, now has it.[36]

But to imagine the presence of adaptive behavior, or underlying computational processes, or even brain processes as such, is not ipso facto to imagine conscious experience. Zombie thought experiments seem variously to imagine beings with humanoid behavior, programs, and brains, without subjective experiences. Zombies, so conceived, seem possible in ways inconsistent with the truth of all would-be materialist identifications. So the story goes.

“And since subjectivity can’t be identified with any sort of material processes—and I am directly aware in my own case that it exists—it must be essentially separate and immaterial, confirming dualism. On the main point, Descartes was right after all!” So, it seems, the story would continue—if zombies really are conceivable. Alas, it seems they too readily are.

To evoke zombies, John Searle instructs, “always think of [the thought experiment] from the first-person point of view”: you have to imagine yourself as the zombie. As Searle sets the stage, suppose that doctors gradually replace your brain with silicon chips, perhaps to remedy its progressive deterioration. From here, you may conjure yourself a zombie by imagining as follows:

. . . as the silicon is progressively implanted into your dwindling brain, you find that the area of your conscious experience is shrinking, but that this shows no effect on your external behavior. You find, to your total amazement, that you are indeed losing control of your external behavior. . . . [You’ve gone blind but] you hear your voice saying in a way that is completely out of your control, “I see a red object in front of me” . . . imagine that your conscious experience slowly shrinks to nothing while your externally observable behavior remains the same.[37]

You have imagined yourself gradually becoming a zombie. And no sooner are such zombies conjured, of course, than they’re off on their rampage. Against behaviorism, “we imagined . . . the behavior was unaffected, but the mental states disappeared.” And there’s no way to stop them before they transmogrify. Suppose the replacement chips implement the same programs, maintaining all the same internal functions as the brain cells replaced. The replacement chips perform exactly the same computations as the brain. There goes the functionalist idea that thought is computation—zombies ate its program.

Here Searle, himself hoping to spare some vestige of materialism, leaves off. But zombies are not so easily stopped. Suppose silicon-chip-replacement therapy is unavailable. The medical doctors are powerless. You have heard of a certain witch doctor. Desperate, you fly to a remote isle, voodoo rites are enacted, and voilà. The deterioration of your brain is magically reversed. To the amazed medical doctors back at the clinic, your brain is indistinguishable from your very own predeteriorated brain. But wait! As your brain is being magically restored . . . it’s just as before. Your conscious experience slowly shrinks to nothing. You’re a zombie. There goes mind-brain identity. Zombies ate its brain. Though some (including Searle himself) deny that such fully human bio-zombies really are conceivable, none have shown the contradiction in it. Indeed, it is just this that possibility that philosophers who have raised the “other minds problem” seem to be conceiving.

Plan B from Inner Space: Revenge of the Zombies

TYRELL [TO DECKARD]: “More human than human” is our motto.

Since they do seem to be conceivable, bad brain-eating zombies must be stopped before they destroy civilized philosophy of mind and scientific psychology as we know it. I have a plan. Much as Earth enlisted Godzilla to battle Ghidrah in Ghidrah the Three Headed Monster, I propose to create new breeds of zombies to battle their evil cousins. Familiar zombies, conjured, as it were, from the second-person familiar perspective, increase our attachment: there’s I and thou and thou art zombie. Super-smart zombies are not just as smart as us, but smarter. Being in these ways superlatively human, such zombies resist dementalization. Their imagined or stipulated lack of subjective experiences seems not to impugn the genuine-ness of their apparent intellectual endowments. These zombies can battle their evil cousins to a standoff, at least, and perhaps even defeat them.

To conjure familiar zombies, put yourself in Deckard’s shoes. Imagine your own true love to be a zombie. Imagine your beloved has no subjective experience of sensations, no inwardly felt experiences (what philosophers call “qualia”) whatsoever. Yet your beloved, we’re imagining, behaves in every way just as your real-life beloved (who, presumably, is not a zombie) really behaves: smiles as warm; kisses as sweet; loyalty as steadfast; words as tender; love as true. Only the “light” isn’t on. No qualia.

I submit that you should not deny your true love’s cognitive abilities and attainments. He or she still wants you to prosper, still knows your preferences, still prefers scotch to bourbon, and so on. To strengthen the intuition, extend the fantasy to your mother, your father, your children, all your friends, siblings, colleagues, teachers, everyone you know. They’re all zombies! Should you conclude that your beloved and the rest don’t think, that they know nothing at all and don’t understand English? It was from Mother, Father, and the rest, in particular, that you got your English, and such words as think, know, and understand. I think you should conclude, “How odd! I alone have these peculiar subjective experiences besides the wants, beliefs, and so forth, that others have.” The thought of mental life without subjective experiences may be horrible, but it’s conceivable. Familiar zombies show this.

As for super-smartness . . . since the NEXUS 6 Replicants were “at least equal in intelligence to the genetic engineers who created [them],” let us suppose, off-world, they undertake genetically re-engineering themselves or their descendents. Suppose these descendents, NEXUS 9s, are decidedly more intelligent than the human genetic engineers who created their forebears (except, still no qualia). Suppose these NEXUS 9s return to earth. They show us how to make our microwaves synthesize food out of thin air and how to turn our Ford Tempos into time machines. They show us how to achieve peace on earth, with liberty and justice for all. What should we say? That our NEXUS 9 benefactors didn’t really know how to turn Tempos into time machines? That they didn’t really understand the revolutionary physical principles involved, but now we do? I think we’re not as ungrateful and conceited as that. We’d say our subjective-experience-bereft benefactors knew how to turn Tempos into time machines.

Finally, imagine zombies both smart and familiar—or, rather, venerated. Imagine it is discovered that many, most, or even all of the leading contributors to our human intellectual heritage(s) were zombies (Descartes, especially, included). Nevertheless, I submit, we should not deny their mental attainments. Despite not meeting the would-be dualistic essential condition for thought, despite being bereft of subjective experiences or “qualia,” these famously smart zombies remain paradigm thinkers on the strength of their achievements. Intelligent is as intelligence does, absence of itches, aches, tingles, visual images, and such, notwithstanding. Indeed, the surpassing greatness of their intellectual attainments makes super-smart venerable zombies especially easy to imagine, especially given the well-known antipathy between thought and feeling. No one ever solved an equation or proved a theorem in the throes of agony or orgasm.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Zomb

DECKARD [TO BRYANT]: And if the machine doesn’t work?

It seems that intuitions about thoughts (cognitive states like belief and inference) and feelings (sensations such as itches and afterimages) diverge under different zombie-thought-experimental conditions. Brain-eating zombies like Searle’s undermine materialist accounts of sensation; qualia-eating zombies like mine undermine dualistic accounts of thought. Furthermore, the supposition that thought somehow requires feeling—besides being contrary to the well-known antipathy just noted—would be indecisive in its upshot. Even assuming this no-thought-without-feeling “Connection Principle” (as Searle dubs it), the question remains: should we conclude that intelligent-acting androids are not really thinking (given their imagined lack of feelings); or should we rather conclude (given their evidently thoughtful behavior) that they have feelings after all?

Is it a standoff, then? Does dualism rule the experiential realm and materialism the intellectual? Yet, even this partial “triumph” of dualism would seem to be strangely empty and inconsequential. As pure sensations or experiences, shorn of every concomitant physical (behavioral, functional, neurophysiological) element, qualia are “saved” from materialistic identification precisely by being conceived as ineffectual; as events lacking further effects, what philosophers call “epiphenomena.” This is suspicious. Not everything thought to be conceivable really is so. Materialists who were in denial thought they could conceive of water not being H_2O, but they were mistaken. Perhaps it’s the same with the supposed conception of beings “which are physically and functionally identical [to us], but which lack [subjective] experience”: perhaps such “phenomenal zombies,” as David Chalmers calls them, likewise, only seem to be conceivable, but really are not. Chalmers notes parenthetically, “It is not surprising that phenomenal zombies have not been popular in Hollywood, as there would be obvious problems with their depiction.” “Problems” to say the least! They look and act exactly like you and me. In the case of NEXUS 8 bio-zombies (imagined above), neither CAT scans nor MRIs nor any other conceivable objective tests could distinguish phenomenal zombies from ordinary human beings. This being the case, the “problems with their depiction” that Chalmers notes, are likewise problems with their conception. What exactly are we supposed to be imagining when we imagine beings “physically identical to me (or to any other conscious being), but lacking conscious experiences altogether”? [38]

Here we are in a position to appreciate Searle’s observation that the conception of phenomenal zombies has to be done “from the first-person point of view”; but who is that first person? Whose point of view is it? It must be the zombie’s, but the zombie, “lacking conscious experiences altogether,” is supposed to lack a “first-person point of view”! Like mad scientists in the movies who are destroyed by their own creations, it seems that the zombie-spawning thought experiments destroy the experimenters themselves, and with them the experiments. If qualia are required for a first-person point of view, the experiment abolishes the viewpoint on which it depends. It seems that zombies, then, are not coherently conceivable after all.

So is that the end? Have zombies been defeated? Has Plan A prevailed after all? Has thoroughgoing materialism been saved? I wouldn’t be too sure. First, it seems we can imagine the process of zombification (as in Searle’s evocation) even though we can’t quite see our way to the end. So long as the subject’s awareness hasn’t shrunk to zero, there’s a first-person point of view that can be imaginatively taken. Perhaps, where imagination leaves off, we extrapolate (“and so on”) our way to the end. Furthermore, the incoherence of a first-person narrative minus the first person only arises where qualia are totally absent: for so-called “absent qualia” scenarios. “Inverted qualia” (I-see-red-where-you-see-green type) scenarios would still seem conceivable, and pose similar challenges to materialism. If either green experiences or red experiences might conceivably “supervene” (as philosophers say) on the very same state of the brain, then that state cannot be identified with either experience.

Fortunately, while good, qualia-eating zombies, do not provide full immunity, they do provide a measure of protection, like flu vaccine: you still get zombies, but a milder case. It is only so far as the mental states in question depend on qualia for their existence, only so far as they are inconceivable without qualia, that bad, brain-eating, zombies show that the mental states cannot be identical with brain states. Good zombies show that this is not that far for mental states involved in cognitive thought. For a good portion of our mental life (the whole cognitive part, it seems), qualia are inessential; so good zombies seem to show.

As for sensations (itches, aches, afterimages, tastes, and the like), though prospects for materialistic identifications of these remain in jeopardy, even here, good zombies diminish the havoc brain-eaters would otherwise wreak. Computers equipped with sensors, for instance, are “sentient” in a sense. They get information about their surroundings from ambient light (as in vision), vibration (as in hearing), and chemistry (as in taste) even if not in the sense of having subjective visual, auditory, and taste experiences. They can still be said (I think unequivocally) to “see” things they visually detect, “hear” sounds they aurally discern, and “taste” flavors they chemically differentiate.

What about consciousness? How can zombies behave intelligently if they’re unconscious? Good zombies are conscious in the sense of being cognizant of things (registering their presence) or being cognizant that certain things are or aren’t the case (representing them as so being) despite not being “phenomenally conscious” (possessed of qualia). Conceivably, your imagined zombie lover is in this manner aware of your presence: he or she registers it, and responds just as your real lover would. Conceivably NEXUS 9 astro-zombies are aware that Tempos are gas-powered: they represent that fact and respond accordingly. This much is cognitive. It’s the specifically phenomenal (subjectively felt), not the cognitive (rational representational) aspect of consciousness that’s supposed to be lacking.

As for self-consciousness and subjectivity, good zombies, it seems, can even be “self-aware” in the sense of having access to their own internal states. Some computer programs, for instance, maintain state variables. Good zombies, it seems, can have points of view both literally (the loci of their visual sensors) and figuratively (in the form of unique overall representations of reality).

As for the soul, being pure sensations or “raw feels,” qualia seem very far removed from that spiritual concept and from actions “guided by the will.” Even if they do lack raw feels (as we have been imagining), Replicants still realize they are all-too mortal, fear death, and “want more life,” or so they say. And they say it with feeling. Or so it seems.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

DECKARD [TO TYRELL]: How can it not know what it is?

Much as philosophy zombies are supposed to copy human beings in every way except their feelings, Blade Runner Replicants were “designed to copy human beings in every way except their emotions.” However, “the designers reckoned that in a few years they might develop their own emotional responses. Hate, love, fear, anger, envy” (Bryant to Deckard); and in the film, it seems their designers were right. From hot-headed Leon (“let me tell you about my mother!”) Kowalski, to Blake-misquoting Roy (“tears in rain”) Batty, Blade Runner Replicants seem far from emotionless; indeed, they are almost overwrought. Perhaps they protest too much. The question Leon asks Deckard—“Painful living in fear, isn’t it?”—is repeated by Roy in the climactic scene. Is it just a canned response, simulating emotion? When Rachel says to Deckard, “I love you . . . I trust you,” is that a lie?

In Blade Runner it takes Deckard more than a hundred questions to determine that Rachel is inhuman. Being inhuman, she is denied moral standing. She can be summarily “retired” without trial or justification. To be morally disenfranchised on the basis of barely discernible differences in involuntary emotional responses—“capillary dilation of the so-called blush response, fluctuation of the pupil, involuntary dilation of the iris”—seems like picky grading, unless these involuntary emotional response differences are indicative of some deeper lack. But how would we know that?

We do have evidence, in the inhuman way Pris convulses when shot through the solar plexus, that Blade Runner Replicants differ from humans in their internal wiring, their sub-functional architectures. Plausibly this makes a difference in the way it feels to be them. But how would we know that? And why should it be supposed to be the difference between having feelings and having none? Perhaps Rachel’s loving feeling is merely different from ours, not absent.

We have further evidence in the way Leon reaches into the beaker of liquid nitrogen and Pris into the beaker of boiling water, without sustaining bodily damage, that Replicants are made of different stuff. Perhaps rather than being made of carbon-based stuff, like humans, Blade Runner Replicants are made of silicon-based stuff, like computers. Plausibly this makes a difference in the way it feels to be them, also. But why, again, should it be supposed to be the difference between having feelings and having none? And how, again, would we know that? Again, perhaps Rachel’s loving feeling is merely different from ours, not absent.

And if she has no feelings whatever—if she really is a philosophy zombie—what then? “I love you,” she says. And if she not only talks the talk, but walks the walk ever after, if she wishes him well, and wants to be with him, is it all a lie for lack of some subjective amatory itch? [39] And if it was no subjective feeling that moved her to pull the trigger, killing Leon, to save Deckard’s life, doesn’t Deckard still owe her? Deckard says he has never retired a human by mistake, but it seems he has been “retiring” persons—intelligent and possibly sentient beings—all along.

But wait! Even if qualia are required for true love, and Rachel has none, her profession of love is no lie. She will have spoken untruly, but she will not have knowingly done so. What she thinks—including what she thinks about her feelings—is supposed to be unchanged. Good zombies, among other things, enforce this supposition. Lack them though she may, she still thinks she has feelings; as does Deckard. As do I. Conceivably, I too am deluded! Based on Descartes’s intuition of infallible self-awareness (the first person point of view) as the zombie thought-experiments are, yet seeming to undermine that very intuition, philosophy zombies may not be coherently conceivable after all. Plan B has led us back to plan A.[40]

PART II

Undead White Males

6

Heidegger the Vampire Slayer: The Undead and Fundamental Ontology

ADAM BARROWS

Sympathy for the Vampire

Count Dracula has proven the most persistently adaptable and resilient of popular icons, retaining his power to intrigue and frighten audiences across generational and cultural divides. While Bram Stoker didn’t invent the vampire, his treatment of the monster in his 1897 novel, Dracula, was immediately more compelling than earlier English fictional attempts, like Varney the Vampire (1847). Stoker’s many original additions to vampire lore have now become inextricably bound up with our popular imagination of the creatures. Among these additions were the use of garlic as a protective charm, the location of the neck as the privileged site of blood-sucking, and the Count’s ability to shapeshift, particularly into bats.

Stoker’s greatest innovation, though, was his use of the vampire story to explore deeper metaphysical questions about the true nature of humanity. Far from representing the vampire as a coldly grotesque monster, Stoker explored the pathos and psychological terror of a human being, with a core of goodness, becoming trapped inside a godless and eternally Undead body. As the original working titles for the novel suggest, the terror of becoming Undead captured Stoker’s imagination far more than the personal figure of the Count himself. Stoker’s working title for Dracula was The Dead Undead and, only weeks before publication, the novel was to be called simply The Undead. The Count, in fact, only physically appears as a character in roughly forty of the book’s three hundred pages. The rest of the book is occupied with the other characters’ fear of Dracula and what he represents. The fear of becoming Undead makes the Dracula story consistently compelling.

Compare Stoker’s killing of a vampire with the killing of a vampire in the sensational anonymous serial, Varney the Vampire, published fifty years before Dracula. Here is the killing of Clara Crofton in Varney the Vampire:

The eyes of the corpse opened wide—the hands were clenched, and a shrill, piercing shriek came from the lips—a shriek that was answered by as many as there were persons present, and then with pallid fear upon their countenances they rushed headlong from the spot. (Dracula, p. 338)[41]

And the killing of Lucy Westenra in Stoker’s Dracula:

The thing in the coffin writhed, and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions. . . . Finally it lay still. The terrible task was over. . . . There, in the coffin lay no longer the foul Thing that we had so dreaded and grown to hate that the work of her destruction was yielded as a privilege to the one best entitled to it, but Lucy as we had seen her in her life, with her face of unequaled sweetness and purity. True that there were, as we had seen them in life, the traces of care and pain and waste; but these were all dear to us, for they marked her truth to what we knew. (Dracula, p. 192)

Note how strikingly different is Stoker’s approach to the killing. In the earlier novel, we witness the slaughter of an animal. In Stoker’s novel, we witness the liberation of a human soul. The author of Varney the Vampire plays the stake through the heart for pure grotesque shock value, with a screech that draws the narrative away from the evil scene along with the crowd of onlookers, so that we are not allowed to look at the results of the killing. Stoker borrows the scream but does not pull away from the coffin. If we were to represent the two killings cinematically, we might use for the Varney scene a quick cut from a close-up on the face of the screaming Clara to a long shot of the crowds fleeing the tomb. For Stoker’s scene, in contrast, our camera would linger on the impaled vampire, zooming in on her transfigured features. Stoker describes the change in attitude of the killers from a hatred and bloodlust for the “foul Thing” to an appreciation of Lucy’s “truth.” To kill a vampire, for Stoker’s “vampire-hunters,” is not just to satisfy blood-lust or to combat evil, but to liberate a “true” humanity which is trapped inside a “false” inhumanity.

In her rally to the troops as they prepare to hunt the Count in Transylvania, Mina Harker reminds the hunters that they have to pity the poor soul stuck inside the Count’s Undead body:

I want you to bear something in mind through all this dreadful time. I know you must fight—that you must destroy even as you destroyed the false Lucy so that the true Lucy might live hereafter; but it is not a work of hate. That poor soul who has wrought all this misery is the saddest case of all. Just think what will be his joy when he too is destroyed in his worser part that his better part may have spiritual immortality. You must be pitiful to him too, though it may not hold your hands from the destruction. (Dracula, pp. 268-69)

For Mina, humanity is “true” and vampirism is “false.” Her friend Lucy Westenra, killed earlier by the hunters, has been cured of vampirism by a stake through the heart, as if murder were an antidote for the “false” orientation of vampirism. The dead Lucy is the “true” Lucy, while her Undead manifestation is the “false” Lucy.

Stoker’s greatest contribution to the vampire legend is to focus our attention not only on the physical grotesqueries and violence of blood-sucking, but also on the far more troubling psychological fear of becoming “false,” of having one’s death, a fundamental part of one’s natural being, taken away, leaving the core of “true” humanity encased in a pallid deathless shell of skin and bone. What is endlessly compelling about Dracula is the monster’s subversion of our most deeply held metaphysical beliefs. “I know now the span of my life,” writes Jonathan Harker in Transylvania (p. 45). Although the knowledge is frightening for him, it distinguishes him from Dracula, whose life, being endless, has no span. It stretches from endlessness to endlessness, from abyss to abyss. The life of the vampire is an unpunctuated succession of feedings, denied the common human bond of death. In an early conversation with Harker, Dracula explains his desire to come to London:

I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, all that makes it what it is. (Dracula, p. 26)

It’s possible to understand this speech as a glimpse of Dracula’s buried “true” self, struggling to become a part of humanity, a plea for the changeless to know change, for the deathless to feel death, for the Olympian outsider to share in a common humanity.

The Philosophy of Death

Death teaches us to be “true” humans. This lesson of Stoker’s Dracula will be repeated exactly thirty years later by a German philosopher named Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). Nowhere in the western philosophical tradition does Death play such a key role as it does in Heidegger’s book, Being and Time (1927). The key insights that ground Heidegger’s study of Being are that 1) death cannot be public but must be faced alone, and 2) life without death is existentially meaningless.

Heidegger didn’t just modify Western philosophy, but hoped to radically refocus it. For Heidegger, what was wrong with Western philosophy was that it was epistemological and not ontological. These are fairly daunting terms, but they can be defined quite simply. Epistemology is the study of how we know. Ontology is the study of (among other things) what we are. The entire philosophical tradition from Plato through Descartes to Kant, Heidegger wrote, focused on how we acquire knowledge about the world. Kant’s landmark Critique of Pure Reason, for instance, concluded that we always confront the material world with the help of certain categories like Time and Space, ideas that are not learned but rather are hard-wired. This is all very fine, Heidegger felt, but its failure was that it put the cart before the horse. How can we talk about how we know things until we have decided what the word “we” is referring to in the first place? What is the “being” that knows Time and Space? Does it have any fundamental characteristics that can be agreed upon?

Heidegger’s ontology was “fundamental ontology,” he argued, because it cut thorough all biological and social explanations of human nature to get to the more primordial, deeper, metaphysical core of what we are. In order to understand what is fundamental to being, Heidegger suggests that we must separate what is truly “authentic” about our being from the common, everyday, “inauthentic” knowledge of being. We already know deep down what we are, but that knowledge is clouded and distorted by all the distractions and deceptions of everyday life. Throughout Being and Time, then, Heidegger explains that there is always a true and a false way of “being.” In our everyday, run-of-the-mill, nine-to-five existence, we are “cut off from the primary and primordially genuine relations of our being” (p. 159).[42]

What do we learn about ourselves when we cut ourselves off from our immersion in the “inauthentic” daily round of routines? For Heidegger, the key revelation for humanity is that it ends—it will die. Without death, we could understand ourselves only as existing forever in a succession of empty moments. Instead, death provides us with a temporal arc—an experience of being thrown forward towards an indisputable end. The problem of existence, however, is that inauthentic, everyday experiences act relentlessly to conceal and obscure death. It’s not, of course, that there is some conspiracy to hide the biological fact of death. Tombstones abound and it is a truism that everyone dies. But these public acknowledgments of death only act to obscure the fact of one’s own personal death. Consider the following excerpt from Being and Time in which Heidegger explains how the “they” (his term for inauthentic, everyday beings) try to trick a dying person into not facing his death:

. . . the “neighbors” often try to convince the “dying person” that he will escape death and soon return again to the tranquilized everydayness of his world. . . . This “concern” has the intention of thus “comforting” the “dying person. . . .” But basically, this tranquilization is not only for the “dying person” but just as much for “those who are comforting him. . . .” Even “thinking about death” is regarded publicly as cowardly fear, a sigh of insecurity . . . and a dark flight from the world. (Being and Time, pp. 234-35)

For Heidegger, a confrontation with death is not simply some kind of perverse morbidity. It is an act of “courage.” Inauthentic beings (“they”) cover up death and are thus always partial and incomplete, living blindly and deludedly into a future that will be an endless succession of present moments. Since the life of “they” has no end, it has no borders or limits and is unable to be grasped by the mind. “True” being, in contrast, is a bordered whole, with Death making it a complete entity. For Heidegger, this state of being is described almost ecstatically as a “passionate anxious freedom toward death which is free of the illusions of ‘the they’ . . . and certain of itself” (p. 245). Societal pressures try to “tranquilize” or “veil” this freedom, but authentic beings reject such pressures.

“Inauthentic” beings live forever in an endless succession of moments. What better example of this “inauthentic” being is there than the vampire? To kill the vampire is to teach him to understand his life as a bordered whole, to teach him to confront and accept his own death. Vampire-hunting, in the light of Being and Time, becomes a kind of philosophical task—making “true” dead humans out of “false” deathless vampires.

Dracula as Inauthentic Being

Dracula’s entire existence gives the lie to death, presenting a possibility of life without end. Stoker, in the early 1890s, wrote a checklist of Dracula’s most important characteristics in preparation for writing the novel. Number four on the list was: “absolutely despises death and the dead” (p. 343).[43] Stoker conceived of Dracula as a sworn opponent not of humanity, but of the very idea of death itself. The vampire’s promise is to give life without end to chosen beings. His promise to the wretch Renfield is to give him the life force of thousands of rats. “All these lives will I give you, ay, and many more and greater, through countless ages” (p. 245). In this instance of vampiric seduction, Renfield is like the dying person in Heidegger’s scenario and Dracula acts as “they,” convincing the diseased mind that death is only what happens to other lowly forms of life, like rats.

Dracula’s attitude toward death is “inauthentic.” His notorious inability to be reflected by mirrors is a metaphor for his inability to “reflect” on his own true state of being. There’s a veil of inauthenticity drawn over Dracula that the mirror only makes painfully obvious. Dracula, as compelling a figure as he is, resembles Heidegger’s “they” in his lack of a stable self-image. In the same checklist of Dracula’s attributes, Stoker wrote, “painters can’t make a likeness of him—however hard the artist tries, the subject always ends up looking like someone else” (p. 344). Even though it was undeveloped in the final version of the novel, this aspect of Dracula nevertheless clarifies Stoker’s understanding of Dracula’s lack of “reflection.” A painting of Dracula would end up “looking like someone else.” Dracula has no distinct character himself. He is sometimes like you and sometimes like me. When Mina sees him in Piccadilly, he is a young thin man with a dark mustache (p. 155), while Harker knows him in Transylvania as aged and white-haired (p. 51) Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation, with its use of elaborate makeup, makes much of this aspect of Dracula’s fluctuating appearance. Dracula is not distinct, but shifts from one form to another. He is mist as well as beast, old as well as young, masculine as well as feminine (his conquest of Mina, as many critics have noted, places him in the feminine role, with Mina at his breast). Despite what Van Helsing constantly asserts about Dracula’s “selfish child-brain,” Dracula is in actuality self-less. He is a kind of perverted communal force that transforms victims into his own likeness, a likeness that is, we are reminded, indistinct and unstable. Lucy, when she becomes a vampire, is not a self, but a pale imitation of Dracula. When Dracula smashes Jonathan’s shaving mirror, he calls it “a foul bauble of man’s vanity” (p. 31). The vanity of self does not translate into vampiric terms, in which self is unfocused and indistinct.

Dracula is self-less, and the vampire-hunters despise selfless people. This attitude comes out early in the novel, when Dr. Seward makes the following observation in his diary about Renfield:

. . . a possibly dangerous man, probably dangerous if unselfish. In selfish men caution is as secure an armour for their foes as for themselves. What I think of on this point is, when self is the fixed point the centripetal force is balanced with the centrifugal; when duty, a cause, etc., is the fixed point, the latter force is paramount, and only accident or a series of accidents can balance it. (Dracula, p. 62)

Seward’s point here, which is clouded with his odd Victorian language of weights and balances, is that the self is a “fixed point” that balances the various potentially dangerous forces we contain. “Unselfishness,” far from being a goal for noble altruistic behavior, is here seen as a pathological condition. To put all this bluntly, Stoker sees self as good and selflessness as evil. It is the loss of one’s self as a “fixed point” that constitutes the vampire’s main seduction. The hunters, keeping as dispassionate and “selfish” as possible, militate against this seduction. Note how Van Helsing, confronted with one of the female vampires in Transylvania, characterizes their power:

. . . in old time, when such things were, many a man who set forth to do such a task as mine, found at the last his heart fail him, and then his nerve. So he delay, and delay, and delay, till the mere beauty and the fascination of the wanton un-dead have hypnotize him, and he remain on, and on, till sunset come. . . . I was moved to a yearning for delay which seemed to paralyse my faculties and to clog my very soul . . . certain it was that I was lapsing into sleep, the open-eyed sleep of one who yields to a sweet fascination. (p. 319)

To yield to the vampire is to lose one’s self-consciousness and self-preservation. One is reminded here of Heidegger’s description of how “they” tranquilize the invalid, making him think his death is always far away—too far to worry about. The sensual pleasure that the vampire promises is a prolonged time of drugged delay, of constant waiting, as if one were suspended forever in the moment between sleep and wakefulness. For both Stoker and Heidegger, this moment is dangerous because the self loses its focus and centrality. The vampire hunters strip away this veil of inauthenticity, exposing it to the harsh and sober sunlight, courageously plunging a stake of authenticity through the heart of the inauthentic vampire, asserting the sheer force of self against selflessness. Their selves are “fixed points” which sharpen readily into vampire-slaying stakes.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula was unique among vampire novels in its focus on the metaphysical condition of vampirism and its evocation of pity for the “true” human trapped in the false deathless state of the vampire. With a philosophical orientation towards death that would later be repeated in Heidegger’s Being and Time, Stoker insisted that only an authentic self, claiming death as its indisputable freedom, could have the strength and courage to destroy the false seduction of the selfless “they,” symbolized as a potential horde of vampires who all resembled each other while paradoxically resembling nothing.

Heil Heidegger? Dracula’s Willing Executioners

Is Heidegger’s philosophy a sound one? Are we willing to embrace his language of “authenticity”? To answer this question, I believe, is at the same time to decide whether we really like Stoker’s vampire hunters. Isn’t there something dogmatic, righteous and brutal about Van Helsing and crew? Are there dangerous implications in asserting that only a certain type of being is “true” or “authentic”?

As readers familiar with Heidegger will be aware, the philosopher’s career was marred by controversy over his membership in the Nazi Party. While many prominent German intellectuals fled the Nazi regime, Heidegger remained and enjoyed great prominence in the Third Reich. After the war, he was stripped of all his professional duties for his involvement in the Nazi Party. That Heidegger was technically a Nazi is indisputable. What remains a subject of controversy is whether his program of fundamental ontology can be divorced from his own involvement with fascism or whether it is inherently implicated. In other words, is there something about Being and Time that, even in the Weimar period before the Nazis took power, was pointing Heidegger towards fascism? I can only begin to approach this controversy here, but the reader is directed to a particularly useful collection entitled Martin Heidegger and the Holocaust which presents the views of both Heidegger’s supporters and detractors.

The most troubling aspect of Heidegger’s ontology for our purposes here is its sometimes Olympian dismissal of the everyday and the ordinary. The simple designation of “idle chatter” to signify everything from advertising slogans to the consolation one finds on a deathbed, seems frighteningly contemptuous. The move from contempt of the everyday to brutality towards those who “chatter” can hardly be far. Further Heidegger never attempts to describe the possibility for a social and communal relationship between individual authentic beings. So, if I tune out the chatter and confront my death, how do I go about forming an “authentic” community, for instance? Would privileged beings build a gated community? Wouldn’t it be something of a drag to have to live there? Though Heidegger makes clear that “authentic being” is not a biological designation, his failure to answer these objections allows a sizable gap in his philosophy for racial and cultural prejudice to creep in, even if it wasn’t already there in the first place. Heidegger’s later writings are chockfull of nationalistic paeans to the hale and hearty German peasantry, particularly from his own region, the Black Forest. In these later works, authentic being is used less as a metaphysical category and more as a marker for racial purity. Perhaps Heidegger took the ideas of Being and Time in the wrong direction, or perhaps Being and Time, with its language of “authentic” and “inauthentic” beings, was hopelessly open to racial and cultural prejudice from the start.

How we interpret Heidegger will largely reflect how we interpret Bram Stoker, with his opposition of a “true” humanity against a “false” vampirism, or his embrace of a fierce self-possession that fuels what Van Helsing himself describes as “butcher work” in the novel’s most chilling description of vampire slaying. Read the following passage and imagine how it was possible for Nazi concentration camp doctors, guards and Hitler’s other “willing executioners” (to borrow a controversial phrase) to slaughter men, women, and children:

Oh, my friend John, but it was butcher work; had I not been nerved by thoughts of other dead, and of the living over whom hung such a pall of fear, I could not have gone on. I tremble and tremble even yet, though till all was over, God be thanked, my nerve did stand. Had I not seen the repose in the first face, and the gladness that stole over it just ere the final dissolution came, as realization that the soul had been won, I could not have gone further with my butchery. I could not have endured the horrid screeching as the stake drove home; the plunging of writhing form, and lips of bloody foam. (Dracula, p. 320)

I am not the first to reflect on the troubling implications of the vampire slayer’s brutality. The vast majority of interpretations of Dracula over the last fifty years have focused on the vampire as a victim (sometimes guilty, sometimes innocent) of wildly disproportionate violence. He has been interpreted as a symbol of the Jew, the homosexual, the Oriental, the victim of patriarchy, the victim of imperialism—the list goes on and on. The clearest example in film of a revisionist interpretation of Dracula is John Badham’s 1979 version, with Frank Langella as an attractive and sympathetic Count, killed by Laurence Olivier’s bumbling and dogmatic Van Helsing.

While vampires can and do serve as markers for a universally applicable terror, as marketable in the early twenty-first century as in the late nineteenth, the novel which first made their terror evocative did so on the basis of a philosophy that many have found utterly tainted with the same stain that created the horrors of Auschwitz and Dachau. In adaptation after adaptation, we become Dracula’s willing executioners, ritualistically expelling the “inauthentic” beings from our zone of ontological purity. Can we justify our gleeful involvement in the ritual?

7

When There’s No More Room in Hell, the Dead Will Shop the Earth: Romero and Aristotle on Zombies, Happiness, and Consumption

MATTHEW WALKER

The flesh-eating zombies of George A. Romero’s Dead films turn stomachs—sometimes by twisting them right out of mangled bodies. Like vampires, they’re creatures of hunger, human beings who’ve returned from the dead to feed on the living. Yet unlike those Undead whose razor-sharp fangs complement their razor-sharp refinement, Romero’s zombies (un-)live not in some foggy Transylvania, but in an all-too-contemporary America. They have nasty table manners and are bad conversationalists. They are the mindless Undead, living corpses who’ll surround you en masse in search of a warm meal. And that hurts.

In his apocalyptic zombie masterpiece, Dawn of the Dead (1978), Romero hints that the Undead are around us, as close as the local shopping mall. Doubt it? Go and you’ll see them, shuffling down the aisles, staring vacantly into space, consuming without end. At Christmastime, you’ll find them pressed against store windows, hell-bent on hot bargains.

In depicting zombies as the ultimate consumers, Romero satirizes consumerism—the search for happiness through material acquisition. Although consumerism’s rise as an unofficial secular religion began after World War II and reached its apex in the “I shop, therefore I am” yuppie culture of the 1980s, human beings have long been acquisitive animals. Indeed, it’s striking that Romero’s sly criticisms of consumerism echo certain arguments offered nearly two thousand years ago by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.).

At first blush, Aristotle might seem an odd guide to elucidate the character of our contemporary zombification. After all, the philosopher whom Dante called “the master of those who know” lived and thought long before the advent of shopping malls, global market economies, and the sort of large-scale manufacturing that made mass consumption a viable possibility. And nowhere does Aristotle ever mention creatures like “zombies” or “the living dead.” While some spurious pseudo-Aristotelian works offer reports of iron-eating mice, you won’t find any commentary about flesh-eating corpses.

Despite the historical distance that separates Romero from Aristotle, though, we can still imagine the two sharing a Cinnabon at the local food court. Like Romero, Aristotle isn’t above providing gross-out descriptions of cannibalistic mayhem. For instance, in the fifth chapter of Book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics—Aristotle’s major treatise on ethics—the philosopher serves up some memorably gag-inducing accounts of “bestial” vice so far beyond the pale that it seems simply to fall outside the boundaries of humanity. In these odd pages, Aristotle introduces us to feral women who devour unborn fetuses, Black Sea tribes who sacrifice babies and munch on raw human flesh, and mad slaves who feast on other people’s livers.

Okay, so maybe this bestiary would be more at home in the low-rent gore-shockers of some of Romero’s Italian imitators—think Lucio Fulci or Joe D’Amato—but the point remains: Aristotle finds a philosophical role for the disgusting if it can help clarify the nature of the human good. And even if the ancient agora is no match for the modern mall, reading Aristotle can help us understand the motivations and desires that Romero’s zombies share with today’s devotees of consumerism. It can also help us get clear about why a life organized around material acquisition might constitute the sort of “living death” that Romero suggests.

“Let’s Go Shopping First!”: We Are the Zombies

In Romero’s Dawn of the Dead—unlike Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake, which I won’t discuss—a zombie plague has been ravaging the world for years. With the ranks of the living dead steadily swelling, and with humanity’s petty squabbles only making things worse, society faces imminent meltdown and collapse. Fleeing Philadelphia, a quartet of survivors hole up in an abandoned but fully stocked shopping mall in suburban Pittsburgh. Although the foursome initially plan only a short stay, they end up remaining once they discover all the mall has to offer. The chirpy Muzak notwithstanding, everything they could ever want seems to be there for the taking—and all under one roof.

Seizing the mall for themselves, the survivors pick off the zombies who continue to stagger down its cold white corridors. Having sealed off the entrances, the quartet set out to shop till they drop. They try on clothes, watches, hats, rings, cosmetics, coats; they load up on candy, cheeses, salamis, coffees, spices. One of the survivors, Peter, says it all when he breaks out in a big grin and holds up a giant loaf of bread: “Mangia!”

Eat!

Consume.

But after their Hickory Farms and J.C. Penney orgy, the quartet grow finally and unshakably bored. The mall, despite its endless supply of material goods, ultimately fails to confer happiness. The survivors soon kill their time playing records on high-end stereo systems, getting sloshed on gin, skating aimlessly at the mall rink, gambling with worthless piles of cash lifted from the mall bank. Their life degenerates into glitzy despair, until they show all the vitality of the zombies in the outside parking lot. From behind her deluxe ’70s vintage fondue kit, Fran asks, “What have we done to ourselves?”

Romero is fairly explicit about the parallels between the living and the Undead. In one scene, the survivors—absurdly overdressed in fancy furs—survey their maximum-security consumer utopia. While the groaning hordes of zombies try to claw their way back into the mall, the survivors wonder what drives them.

PETER: They’re after the place. They don’t know why. They just remember. Remember that they want to be in here.

STEPHEN: What the hell are they? PETER: They’re us. That’s all.

As the hero and moral center of the film, Peter isn’t just speaking about himself and the other survivors in the mall. He’s speaking about us the viewers as well, consumers in our own right, viewers tempted by the fantasy of unlimited access to a mall full of stuff. And presumably, he’s speaking for Romero as well. Yet Peter’s words also have a sense of implied criticism. By equating “us” with the walking dead outside the mall, Peter hints that we the living might not be so much better off than the zombies.

“I Don’t Want to Be Walking Around Like That!”: Living versus Living Well

So what might we consumers have in common with the living dead? Why might we both have ceaseless desires to consume things?

In Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, Chapter 1, Aristotle calls the overreaching desire for the goods of fortune pleonexia. In ancient Greek, the word pleonexia literally means “the disposition to have more,” but carries the sense of “graspingness,” of “grabbing for extra when you have your share.” In Politics, Book I, Chapter 9, Aristotle tries to explain pleonexia by reference to people’s unlimited desire for sheer survival: “The cause of this disposition is being serious about living, but not living well. Now with their desire for living extending into infinity, so too they desire without limit the things productive of living.” In other words, pleonexia is motivated by an excessive desire to hold on to life. By taking more than their fill of the goods of fortune—which Aristotle identifies in Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, Chapter 2 as honor, wealth, security, and the like—those who “grasp” seek to keep at bay the inescapable bad fortune with which death confronts us. To this extent, the grasping differ from those whom Peter says “still believe there’s respect in dying.”[44]

In Dawn, graspingness is probably best personified by Stephen (a.k.a. “Flyboy”), the well-meaning, but tragically flawed, proto-yuppie who convinces his girlfriend Fran to take off with him in a stolen TV news chopper. When she expresses ethical reservations, he interrupts with an appeal to the ultimate, brute value of sheer self-preservation: “We’ve got to survive, Fran. Somebody’s got to survive.” Later on at the mall, Stephen rhapsodizes to Fran about his virgin “shopping trip” with Peter and Roger. “You should see all the great stuff we got, Frannie,” he says. “All kinds of stuff! This place is terrific. It really is. It’s perfect. All kinds of things. We’ve really got it made here.” Thus, when an outlaw biker gang invades the mall toward the end of the film—“We don’t like people who don’t share!” yells their leader—it’s Stephen who takes to his rifle and fires the first shots in a final battle to defend his spoils. “It’s ours,” he mutters. “We took it. It’s ours.”

One of the great mysteries of Romero’s zombie films is just why the dead return. In the first, Night of the Living Dead (1968), newscasters speculate that radiation from a returning Venus space probe is somehow involved. In Dawn, there’s some chat about a virus, and at one point, Peter proposes that hell is full, but no one really knows. No answer is ever settled upon.

Perhaps pleonexia plays a role. To desire living without limit is to desire immortality, or in ancient Greek, to be athanatos. But one might be a-thanatos—literally, without death, deathless—in at least two ways. On one hand, one could be immortal by living like the gods to whom Aristotle alludes in Nicomachean Ethics, Book X, Chapter 7, the divinities who spend eternity in the exalted contemplation of the cosmic order. On the other hand, one might be immortal simply by continuing to metabolize, simply by surviving, even if the resulting survival left much to be desired. To be without death in this sense might count simply as not being dead, or as being un-dead. So maybe one “explanation” for the dead’s return to life is that their graspingness in life—rooted in their unlimited desire for life—knows no bounds. From beyond the grave, they grasp for more living, even if such survival fails to count as living well. As Stephen speculates, the walking dead haunt the mall out of “a kind of instinct . . . memory . . . what they used to do.” As the Undead, the zombies continue to act on the desires that governed them during their lives. It’s not surprising, then, that once the walking dead have turned him into dinner, it’s the now-lurching, Undead Stephen who leads the zombie army upstairs into the protagonists’ makeshift penthouse.

“Attention All Shoppers: If You Have a Sweet Tooth, We Have a Treat for You!”: The Limits of Hedonism

Even if both zombies and consumers are driven by graspingness, why join Romero in thinking that consumerism should turn us into zombies? Or, to put it another way, why should Dawn’s hard-shopping quartet zombify themselves through unlimited acquisition?

Once again, Aristotle offers a clue. Immediately following the Politics passage quoted earlier, he argues that the unlimited desire to consume for the sake of mere living typically assumes a certain picture of good living. In his trademark crabbed Greek, Aristotle writes, “And as much as they aim at living well, they seek after bodily enjoyments, so that since these also seem to find their source in acquisitions, all focus is on obtaining wealth.” In other words, those who grasp after material goodies are prone to identify the good life with a life of enjoyment, a life devoted to the kind of pleasure that we can procure through consumption. (In Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, Chapter 2, Aristotle calls such gratification “the pleasure from gain.”) In fact, so far as such a pleasure-focused life promises to be free of suffering, it might seem to offer the same insulation against fate that mere living does (see Smith, Revaluing Ethics, pp. 142-46).

It’s fitting, then, that Romero’s original screenplay for Dawn describes the mall’s “bright store fronts, with their displays of goods designed to attract shoppers to the sweet life the items pretend to represent.” Romero’s use of the term “sweet life” is revealing. In ancient Greek, the word “sweet” translates as hêdus, which also means “pleasant.” Hêdus is the word from which we get the English “hedonistic.” The sweet life that Romero thinks the mall advertises, we might guess, is a hedonistic life—a life of enjoyment like the one Aristotle talks about. But given what happens to his gang of four, Romero seems skeptical about the sweetness of this life. It wouldn’t seem to be so sweet after all.

In Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle examines the sweet life as a model for good living, or what he calls “happiness” (eudaimonia). When Aristotle talks about “happiness,” though, he doesn’t do so in a narrowly “psychological” way. He’s not using “happiness” the way I might if I were to say, “I was so happy when I found a limited first edition Japanese pressing of Goblin’s Dawn of the Dead soundtrack!” Our modern notion of happiness usually refers to a transitory elevated mood or feeling. Aristotle, by contrast, is speaking about something like the best possible life for human beings, the life in which human beings flourish most, the life in which they most fully shine forth as the kinds of beings they are.

To see what Aristotle’s driving at, consider plants and animals. While neither can be “happy” in any strict sense, they can still live better or worse as plants or animals. The best life for a spider plant will be the life in which it flourishes most as a spider plant, blossoming forth with sturdy green shoots and photosynthesizing without a hitch. The best life for a bulldog will be the one in which she flourishes most as a bulldog, with all the barking, tail wagging, slobbering, and eating that should entail. In turn, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics searches for the best mode of life for human beings. Aristotle wants to spell out the features of a life in which the highest capacities of human nature most fully come to light.

Although he ultimately rejects the life of enjoyment as a model of happiness, Aristotle tries to give it a fair hearing in Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, Chapter 5. After all, he notes, this is the life in which most people—“and the most vulgar”—think that happiness consists. Even if he’s a bit snobbish here, Aristotle doesn’t think common opinion about the life of enjoyment is totally wrong or crazy. Surely, we’d all agree pleasure should have some place in happiness. No doubt we’re tempted by the lives of those who possess the material resources to enjoy whatever sensual indulgences they wish. If we’re honest with ourselves, part of us is probably tempted to say, “That’s the life!” Aristotle considers the life of Sardanapallus, a mythical Assyrian king who spent his palace days eating, drinking, and loving. In Dawn of the Dead, we might think of Roger, who finds the mall’s master keys and quips, “Keys to the kingdom.”

But can happiness really be reduced to a life of enjoyment through consumption? Like Romero, Aristotle thinks not. He dismisses the life spent in the pursuit of pleasure as “fit for cattle.” Aristotle’s not just being a prig here: he really means it. As he argues a few chapters later, such a sensation-focused life might actually do the trick for horses, oxen, and other animals, which lack capacities for reason and which flourish by living in accord with their sensitive capacities. But such a life cannot fit the bill for human beings, organisms best defined by their capacities for practical and theoretical reason.

To put the point another way, Aristotle thinks the life of enjoyment gets its priorities wrong. Neither the unlimited pursuit of stuff, nor its use in a life devoted to bodily enjoyment, grants sufficient weight to our key capacities. At best, a life of enjoyment treats these capacities as purely instrumental means for getting more stuff and more bodily pleasure. Like the flesh-eaters who always fall for Peter and Roger’s diversionary tactics—mindlessly following their tap-tap-tapping against store windows—those devoted to enjoyment through consumption ultimately get tugged around by whatever pleasures and wayward distractions come their way. So described, the life of enjoyment is not one somebody can truly lead. And since it leads to the atrophy of those capacities that most fully manifest our humanity, Aristotle believes that it can’t fully satisfy us. As the path to frustration taken by Dawn’s characters, it proves a kind of living death.

“Hey, Let’s Get the Stuff We Need!”: Putting the Mall in Its Place

That’s not to say that Aristotle thinks material goods and sensual pleasure have no place in the best human life. As he argues in Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, Chapter 8, we need material goods because they provide the equipment necessary for performing those noble and virtuous actions that best display our rational capacities at work. If we lack these goods, the happiness we obtain through our virtuous activity is apt to be stunted and deformed. Moreover, sensual pleasure can and should be enjoyed in a happy life—temperately, in a virtuous manner guided by practical wisdom. So even if he challenges the goodness of unbridled acquisitiveness, Aristotle defends some forms of consumption after all, provided that they stay within reasonable limits. In Politics Book I, Chapter 9, he insists that these limits are set by the good life itself. Acquisition that supports such a life is beneficial; acquisition that hinders it is bad.

Likewise, we go astray if we see Romero as a cranky scold in high Puritan mode, tsk-tsking us for being enticed by the day-dream of living in a shopping mall. Romero’s satire of consumerism, while sometimes savage, is never nihilistic, never merely cynical. More than anything, Romero’s treatment of this life is melancholic. Although the zombies horrify us, they are sad creatures, lost souls condemned to wander the mall in search of an elusive satisfaction.

While he’s clear that the mall encourages a false view of the good life to the extent that it encourages passive consumerism, Romero doesn’t necessarily reject the mall completely. Although the mall misleads us by identifying the good life with “gadgetoriented affluence” (as Romero’s script calls it), the mall at least offers temporary sanctuary for the film’s main heroes, Peter and Fran. For Romero, then, the mall is at least instrumentally valuable as a place where you can get useful goods—and surely, that value is nothing to scoff at. Ultimately, however, Peter and Fran have to leave the mall at Dawn’s conclusion if they’re going to preserve any of their humanity. As their helicopter ascends the shopping center teeming once more with zombies, Peter asks how much fuel is left. “Not much,” Fran says. The film ends on an ambiguous note: while the dawn sun brings with it the prospect of a happier day, even if Peter and Fran have to face it empty-handed, these last survivors ultimately have no place to go. To the extent that a life of unlimited means has blinded them to the ends that make a life worth living, it has left them without a clear destination.[45]

8

Zombies, Rest, and Motion: Spinoza and the Speed of Undeath

K. SILEM MOHAMMAD

Zombies are, one might say, the deadest of the Undead. In the classic Hollywood depiction, they are shambling, cadaverous beings whose creeping, halting motions are one of the most unsettling aspects of their appearance. Even in cases where a zombie is not technically dead, but hypnotized like Madge Bellamy in White Zombie (Victor Halperin, 1932), or in a coma—arguably—like Christine Gordon in I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943), the eeriness of the cinematic spectacle consists in the separation of the person from her consciousness at the same time that she continues to walk and perform simple actions. A similar dread infuses the replacement of living persons by alien pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956) or by androids in The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes, 1975): the body looks the same, but the consciousness is gone or transformed into something inhuman.

We don’t want the dead to get up and walk, even—or especially—if we loved to see them moving in life. Nor do we want to see our loved ones acting slowed-down and emotionless as if they were “dead,” even in a figurative sense: it creeps us out. In the absence of what we think of as the vitality of conscious existence, the ability to walk or clutch or even eat amounts to little more than the grisly reflexive spasms of rigor mortis. Either what ought to be vivacious and spirited has become still and lifeless, or what ought to be dead somehow, uncannily, is not. Either way, we react with horror.

But why exactly does slowness or stillness play so central a part in the horror we associate with zombies? Often invoked in this context is Sigmund Freud’s famous theory of the “uncanny” (unheimlich), derived from Friedrich Schelling’s idea that “everything is uncanny that ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light.” Freud describes the uncanny as “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” Whatever we perceive as uncanny, he argues, is connected with memories that we have repressed since childhood and that are reawakened by unexplainable, disturbing recurrences. Things that we have shoved back into a dark corner of our awareness—even things that were initially familiar and comforting—undergo a disturbing transformation when they reemerge, especially if they reemerge by some means other than an exertion of our own will.

“Many people,” Freud observes, “experience the feeling in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts.” Vampires, zombies, and other Undead beings, accordingly, are often represented as (un)living embodiments of the return of the repressed. Their sluggishness replicates the motionlessness of death, but at the same time enacts a suppressed wish: that the dead might return to us, move among us again as they did in life. In its new, uncanny manifestation, however, this once-familiar motion terrifies us rather than giving us comfort or joy.

This dynamic of the uncanny is not limited to human bodies, or even to animate beings. Terms like “zombie” have enjoyed increasing currency in both theoretical and popular discourse as ways of referring to any attenuated modes of existence in which an original presence is supplanted by a phantasmic placeholder, as when Bulent Diken writes that the World Trade Center survives after its destruction as a “spirit, zombie, or fetish” in media consciousness.[46] In this image, perhaps, we see the ultimate emblem of Undeath: an edifice endowed with consciousness by public sentiment only after its destruction, at which time it becomes a kind of inanimate zombie. Or it has in a sense been animated, but only as a set of phantom tombstones for itself. A stillness that in “life” was in no way remarkable (all skyscrapers are still) becomes uncannily inextricable in “death” from our association of it with a haunting and haunted absence.

Recently, however, popular-culture developments have thrown a spin on this traditional equation of zombies with creeping slowness and stillness. A new zombie walks—or rather runs—among us. Zombies (some of them, at least) are now scary in a speedier way.

Slow Zombies

Zombies of the original Caribbean variety, as depicted in films like White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie, only move when bidden, or when set by some external cause into automatic motion. It may never occur to them, accordingly, to cease from such motion until they are commanded otherwise or stopped by some accidental force. They are, that is, only contingently animate. It is significant that these voodoo-charmed slaves first struck the popular imagination of western capitalist society at the dawn of industrial automatization: they are the perfect metaphor for an utterly alienated modern workforce.

In the intervening years of the twentieth century, however, a host of social and technological innovations conspire to create the conditions for a new evolutionary phase in the un-life of this figure, chief among which are the pervasive specter of nuclear annihilation and the increasing spasms of unrest among various underclasses. By the 1960s, a different kind of zombie rears its rotting head: one that does not merely shamble obediently, but pursues its own gruesome agenda.

The archetypal incarnation of the radicalized postmodern zombie emerges in George Romero’s 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. Like its predecessors, this zombie is dull, slow-moving, and low on affect. Unlike them, it acts on its own initiative, a seemingly inexhaustible compulsion to devour the flesh of living humans. Perhaps more accurately, whereas the voodoo zombies are under the control of human masters who manipulate them in order to achieve their own ends, these ghouls are under the control of an impersonal force that nevertheless manifests itself in the zombies’ uniform compliance. That force is radiation, supposedly released by a satellite that has crashed to earth.

Romero’s radioactive Undead are aggressive, relentless, and highly efficient. By the end of Night, the living characters have all either been overpowered by them or killed trying to escape them. This is due in part, to be sure, to the protagonists’ isolation: recurring emergency broadcasts indicate that although the zombie menace is widespread, law enforcement and military authorities have been able to contain the outbreak in populated areas to some degree. Homegrown armies equipped with rifles, gasoline, and metal hooks manage to surround and demobilize great numbers of the walking dead with minimal difficulty, owing chiefly to one liability on the Undead’s part: like the voodoo zombies of the past, they are slow. As a rural sheriff proclaims during a televised news report, “They’re dead, they’re all messed up.”

In Romero’s later films, however, containment of the Undead has not been so successful. By Dawn of the Dead (1978), the first sequel, it is clear that the crisis is global, and that there is no clear solution in sight. In Day of the Dead (1985), the third film in the series, it appears that humanity has been driven almost entirely underground. Land of the Dead (2005), the most recent installment, hints that while civilization has regained some of its foothold, the threat of zombie rebellion indicates what may be a permanent state of crisis for two competing “class” structures: the privileged but besieged living and the disenfranchised but ever-more organized Undead.

The slowness of these zombies, then, does not necessarily result in failure. Like ants, they are relatively easy to kill, but as soon as you turn your back there are more of them. Romero’s message at the end of Land appears to be that the Undead, like Mother Theresa’s poor, are always with us. In fact, the Undead in this fourth film are in many ways indistinguishable from the living poor: they are hungry, unruly, and unattractive, and no one wants to become one of them. They are no longer really even truly scary, so much as a grim, intractable nuisance. From a certain perspective, Land is the most “optimistic” film in Romero’s tetralogy: despite all the horror and slaughter, there is still, it suggests, something like a choice to be made, and accordingly there is a potential solution. What this solution might be is unclear, but at least there is still some time to work towards it. This much at least the leaden pace of the zombie masses allows.

Before we move on to the sped-up zombies of more recent cultural productions, let’s take a brief look at Spinoza’s Ethics (1677), wherein he derives a theory of ethics from the natural physical relations of acting and being-acted-upon that obtain between bodies, and of the speeds at which those relations occur.

(De)composing Bodies

In order to apply Spinoza’s thought to the concept of Undeath, it may be helpful first to examine his account of the difference between life and death itself. He argues that death is by no means a cut-and-dried state, and that the body might in fact “die” though certain vital signs persist:

I understand the Body to die when its parts are so disposed that they acquire a different proportion of motion and rest to one another. For I dare not deny that—even though the circulation of the blood is maintained, as well as the other signs on account of which the Body is thought to be alive—the human Body can nevertheless be changed into another nature entirely different from its own. For no reason compels me to maintain that the Body does not die unless it is changed into a corpse.[47]

To talk about life and death as points on a continuum in this way rather than as absolute states of existence, and to define life itself as a set of relations between moving parts rather than as a mystical force that exists independently of the body, is to posit a radical definition of consciousness or soul.

In his earlier book, The Emendation of the Intellect (published posthumously with the Ethics in 1677), Spinoza describes the soul (or mind) as a “spiritual automaton” (II/18), a mechanism that is autonomous but subject to fixed laws of thought in the same way that material bodies are subject to physical laws. In the Ethics, Spinoza treated mind and body as two separate modes of the same essence, and was especially concerned to refute dualist theories that attempted to explain the motions of the body by positing the dominance of mind:

And of course, no one has yet determined what the Body can do, i.e., experience has not yet taught anyone what the Body can do from the laws of nature alone, insofar as nature is only considered to be corporeal, and what the Body can do only if it is determined by the Mind. . . .

Again, no one knows how, or by what means, the Mind moves the Body, nor how many degrees of motion it can give the Body, nor with what speed it can move it. So it follows that when men say that this or that action of the Body arises from the Mind, which has dominion over the Body, they do not know what they are saying, and they do nothing but confess, in fine-sounding words, that they are ignorant of the true causes of that action, and that they do not wonder at it. (Ethics III, P2, Schol.)

From a Spinozist point of view, we might observe, there is no material difference between a zombie and, say, a ghost. Both are the mobile, uncanny residue of living subjects, toxic complexes of actions that continue past the point when they should be able, or when none desire them to. A Spinozist would then reject any idea that they are opposites, that one is “body” and the other “mind.” Such distinctions finally amount to little: both move, both touch, both bring death to life. What is a body, if not a presence that imposes itself on experience? What is a mind, if not the principle that translates the actions of such presences into intentions and desires?

Spinoza’s emphasis on bodily autonomy, as well as on motion, rest, and speed, goes some way toward demonstrating why he is an ideal writer from whom to derive a philosophy of zombiedom. One of the things that made it difficult for him to publish his theories in his lifetime was the tendency for his thought to challenge the tenets of scriptural theism, suggesting as he does that the soul can be conceived as a complex of determinate actions and reactions—that is, in much the same way that he conceives the physical body. For Spinoza, we are all, in at least one sense, automatons or zombies.

Spinoza conceives of death as a disruption or redisposition of parts, or of simple bodies within composite bodies, wherein “the simplest bodies … are distinguished from one another only by motion and rest, speed and slowness” (II, P13 A2”). Deleuze refers to the process here described by Spinoza as one of “composition” and “decomposition”: certain bodies make themselves faster and more complex (that is, more powerful) by decomposing the relations between parts of other bodies and absorbing those relations so that they are recomposed as their own.

When a bird eats an insect, or when a person eats a bird, the relations conducive to life are absorbed by the consuming body, and that body is thereby made stronger. When a zombie decomposes the relations of a living human by consuming its flesh, it not only thereby gains sustenance for its own body, it also facilitates a larger process of de- and re-composition wherein the victim’s body itself becomes a zombie body which in turn seeks other living bodies to de- and re-compose. Because by far the greatest amount of energy expended by zombies goes toward this process of assimilation, in some ways it makes more sense to think of the zombie’s body not as the individual, animated human corpse it occupies, but as the larger mass of bodies that constitute the total zombie organism.[48]

One might wonder where ethics comes into all this. Just as Spinoza got in trouble with the religious authorities of his day by espousing a theory of pantheism (God is everything, everything is God) that in their minds—and, more approvingly, in the minds of later readers—amounted to atheism, he also courted endless recrimination by anticipating Nietzsche in rejecting the moral concepts of good and evil in favor of the more narrowly ethical (or ethological) concepts of good and bad:

Those things are good which bring about the preservation of the proportion of motion and rest the human Body’s parts have to one another; on the other hand, those things are evil which bring it about that the parts of the human Body have a different proportion of motion and rest to one another. (IV, P39)

From this point of view, that which is good or bad is so only from the perspective of the body that is either composed or decomposed by other bodies. Accordingly, concepts such as “evil,” considered in an absolute sense, are merely abstractions that get in the way of our achieving the the greatest fulfillment possible in our lives; they cause us to tend toward sadness rather than towards joy, and therefore should be avoided. Phenomena like poisoning, sickness, and death, in this ethical system, are no more than what Spinoza, as rendered by Deleuze, calls “bad encounters”:[49] bad for the body that gets decomposed, good for the decomposing body (in the case of zombies, decomposing in more sense than one).

A workable ethics, then, consists in finding out what relations are possible between different bodies, and in what way those relations can most effectively contribute to our well being both as individuals and as a collective community. Deleuze frames the questions relevant to a Spinozist ethology as follows:

How do individuals enter into composition with one another in order to form a higher individual, ad infinitum? How can a being take another being into its world, but while preserving and respecting the other’s own relations and world? . . . In what order and in what manner will the powers, speeds, and slownesses be composed ? [50]

I want to suggest that zombies represent the progress of an imaginary counter-human ethology: one in which questions such as Deleuze’s have failed to be adequately considered, and accordingly, in which another more powerful body (or body of bodies) steps in to enact its own process of recomposing its decomposing self by decomposing our compositions.

We say that zombies are “mindless”—it is practically part of the definition. What we mean, a Spinozist would say, is that they are very focused (“single-minded”). They have no time to spare on abstract reflection or moralizing. Or they are not permitted that privilege. Zombies, whether they are the will-sapped slaves of Haitian voodoo lore, or the bloodthirsty ghouls of Romero’s living dead movies, are radically task-oriented beings. They have a job to do, and nothing else. And herein lies their true difference from ghosts: ghosts are often highly imaginative, even fanciful. They can afford to be, as they are far less subject to the constraints of time—that is, to the relations of rest and motion. A ghost, as a result, need hardly move at all. Zombies, on the other hand, are the products of imaginations in the grip of tremendous and immediately present real-world anxieties. And if they were at one time apprehended as a sluggish but steadily progressing horde on the horizon, symbolic of some vaguely imminent but still dormant catastrophe, they are now a violently swift and powerful explosion of nightmares spawned by our actual daily headlines.

Fast Zombies

As though sensing that Romero’s relatively hopeful political idealism has overtaken his grasp on the severity of crisis, younger filmmakers have instituted a new modification of the Undead mechanism: the fast zombie. Two recent films get maximum mileage out of this innovation: Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002), and Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead.

In 28 Days, we are to understand the force driving the “zombies” as chemical, not radiological: they are impelled by a virally induced “rage” that apparently has nothing to do with hunger or any other bodily desire beyond the will to inflict harm. This compulsion is so strong that the actions of the infected ultimately lead to their own demise, as they do nothing to sustain their bodies, which finally break down. Contributing to this breakdown, no doubt, is the frantic pace with which they pursue the uninfected. Shots in which huge crowds of the infected chase the film’s protagonists through the streets of London are chilling in their suggestion of real-life scenes of politically and religiously motivated mob violence, and even more chilling in that the social impetus for the violence is absent; there is no specific social grievance, only the mayhem that generally attends such grievances.

Similarly, in Dawn, rioting swarms of Undead surrounding a suburban shopping mall break windows, overturn burning vehicles, and shriek with what sounds like the extremist fervor of revolutionaries (but is in actuality brute blood lust). As with Boyle’s infected, there is some suggestion that Snyder’s zombie epidemic is virally or otherwise biologically induced, but unlike the former ghouls, these zombies don’t wear out; they rot and break apart, but keep on coming. In both cases, there is a pronounced swerve from the “classic” model in which zombies are relatively easy to evade once one has gained a little distance and secured some fortification. It finally matters little whether the zombies in these films are “really” Undead or merely “sick”: the physiological conditions they have entered fundamentally change their ethological composition, and thus their status as persons or nonpersons.

The first few minutes of Dawn constitute what should come to be considered one of the premier set pieces of zombie cinema. Ana (Sarah Polley) is a hospital nurse who drives home one evening at the end of what seems like a normal day, except for largely ignored media reports in the background (car radio, TV) of some vaguely developing crisis. Ana distractedly switches the station and turns the channel. When she pulls into the driveway of her suburban tract home, she is greeted by Vivian, the neighbor girl (the name connotes life and innocent vigor). Ana and her husband Luis go to bed.

In the next scene they awaken to see that Vivian is standing in the dark doorway to their bedroom. She is bloody and crazed. She hurls herself forcefully at Luis and tears out a big chunk of his flesh. Ana shuts herself in the bathroom. Luis, now also a zombie, batters down the door, and she manages to escape through the window. In a subtle visual shock, we see that it is not night-time, as the scene has seemed to suggest, but broad daylight. As Ana gets in her car and flees, pursued by the now-running Undead Luis, we see first that the neighborhood is in a state of chaos, and beyond that the entire city.

There are flames, sirens, and people running in the streets. Frantic residents run from sprinting zombies only to be struck down by speeding ambulances. As Ana makes her way onto the open road, the camera pulls back to give us wider panoramic views of the catastrophe. The city skyline is a haze of smoke and helicopters. In a computer-enhanced aerial shot, Ana’s car narrowly escapes another car coming at her from a cross street at a T-shaped intersection, and the second car goes on to crash into a gas station, which explodes spectacularly. Ana’s car goes off the road, into a secluded woodsy patch, where it collides with a tree.

Coinciding with Ana’s implied unconsciousness, the credits begin. Documentary images of global unrest are montaged against news reports of the unfurling zombie crisis, to the accompaniment of Johnny Cash’s jangling end-times anthem “The Man Comes Around.” Shots of rioters in the streets and Muslims bowing their heads at prayer in mosques are juxtaposed with Undead faces and limbs gaping and clutching at the camera. Talking heads on TV inform us that no one knows anything and that there is no end in sight to the terror.

At this point the viewer may already be exhausted, and indeed, although there are other memorable moments in the film, nothing quite compares to these first nightmarish minutes in terms of sheer adrenaline-surging shock. These fast zombies, unlike Romero’s, are never presented as poignant embodiments of desire, whether for food or for lost identities. When Luis pounds on the window of Ana’s car with his fist, he seems more angry than hungry. There’s no indication that Snyder’s zombies bite their victims in order to eat them rather than just to attack; like Boyle’s infected, they are driven primarily by naked, irrational aggression.

If, at the end of Romero’s Land, there is the implication that the class of the living must find some way to adjust its own all-consuming demands in order to accommodate the irresistibly emerging class of the Undead and thus avoid annihilation at its hands, the implication of Boyle’s and (especially) Snyder’s films is yet more alarming: the living have had their chance and blown it. More to the point, the alarming shift from representations of zombies as slow-moving to fast-moving predators signals a mass awareness that these Undead figures, without losing their fierce relevance to our contemporary condition of permanent crisis, have changed the visceral referent of their terror-inducing power from the relatively placid, yellow- to orange-alert realm of the Uncanny to the full-bore red-alert level of the Real.

Zombies, we might conclude, are the monsters par excellence of late-capitalist culture. If voodoo mind-controlled zombies translate the uncanny into a twentieth-century context of alienated labor and an oppressed third world, postmodern and postnuclear zombies such as Romero’s—and to an even greater extent, fast zombies like Boyle’s and Snyder’s—push us beyond uncanniness. They are not just symbols of repressed desire or anxiety; they are the radically embodied, limit-breaking consequences of repression in its social totality, the inevitable eruption of crisis on a global rather than personal level. The increase in zombie velocity we see in recent films is an extreme expression of a Spinozist-Deleuzean bad encounter which outstrips humanist imagining. The perspective from which we view these zombies is one we cannot rationally assume: the perspective of the Body transitioning into the greater composition of the Body by which it is decomposed.

Vampires play to a fantasy of quasi-imperialist dominance, of identification with Evil as a force of powerful immortality (and accordingly, of Good as a convenient escape hatch). Zombies afford no such flattering binary constructions of morality. They confront us with a world reduced to the elemental valences of good and bad, bodies in motion and bodies in faster motion. If we identify with zombies, it is an impossible identification with the dissolution that must inevitably ensue in the failure of our species to assimilate other bodies into ourselves in a mindfully ethical way.

PART III

Dirty Rotting Scoundrels

9
Zombie Gladiators
DALE JACQUETTE

Those unmindful when they hear for all they make of their intelligence may be regarded as the walking dead.

—HERACLITUS, Fragment 3

On the Prowl

Hollywood zombies are easily distinguished from ordinary civilians like you and me. They are ravenous, stalking, reanimated dead people with superhuman strength, overturning cars and breaking through doors. They feed on the living flesh of hapless victims, and with a single infectious bite they can turn others into zombies in a growing mob of the marauding Undead. We know them by their rotting limbs, sunken dull lifeless eyes, and gnashing teeth. The classic Hollywood zombie stagger gives them away even from a distance as we flee in our SUVs from one ravenous horde to the waiting maws of another hulking throng blocking the street at the edge of town.

Often we do not know even by the end of the movie where zombies come from. It’s a virus, or a curse, or just something that happens every once in a while. Filmmakers can cook up the flimsiest plots about why the Undead are loose, or they can just picture the world of today as though it suddenly had to barricade itself against an onslaught of the predeceased. It scares the pants off of us in the theater to watch these ghouls rampaging on the screen, just as it is meant to. The point, dramatically, is to portray these unfortunates as a frightening life- and even civilization-threatening menace, and then to blow their heads off in interesting ways. They are, after all, already dead, and they will thoughtlessly destroy us all if we don’t destroy them first. Hollywood zombies nevertheless are not the most frightening kind of zombie that might be encountered.

Philosophical Zombies

We need to distinguish Hollywood from philosophical zombies, the latter of which are still more insidious than their Hollywood prototypes, even though as a rule they do not feed on human flesh. They terrify precisely because they are so difficult—practically impossible in many contexts—to discern from ordinary human beings.

Philosophical zombies were dreamed up by philosophers as a thought experiment to test concepts and illustrate a variety of theoretical problems about the nature of consciousness and the mind’s relation to the body. Philosophical zombies look and act just like you and me, so that, in contrast with Hollywood zombies, there is often no way to know the difference. Indeed, the only difference between philosophical zombies and non-zombies is the stipulated fact that the former have no conscious states of mind such as feelings of pain, joy, belief states, desires, or the like.

A rock presumably has no conscious mental states, whereas a dog probably does. Philosophical zombies are more like rocks than dogs in this regard, even though they behave and even talk in a manner indistinguishable from that of normal conscious persons. David J. Chalmers proposes in this light “to consider the logical possibility of a zombie: someone or something physically identical to me (or to any other conscious being), but lacking conscious experiences altogether.”[51]

If we look around at the persons in our community, standing in line at the bank or grocery store, or even members of our family and friends we have known for many years, we should consider the logical possibility that any of them might be philosophical zombies. The problem is that we would have no way to know it from their external appearance or behavior. You and I, on the other hand, can rest assured that we are not zombies, and in a sense we could not be, as long as we are thinking thoughts such as these.[52]

Automata Among Us

How is it possible for human beings who look and act just like you and me to exist without any conscious states? It may be conceivable for such a thing to occur, if all motor actions including a subject’s verbal behavior are governed autonomically by those parts of the brain that in normal individuals are solely responsible for such unconscious functions as heartbeat, breathing, digestion, and the like, over which we do not generally exercise volitional control.

Suppose, then, that all aspects of zombie behavior are controlled by autonomic functioning of the brain stem. This would leave completely inactive the frontal lobes of the brain where consciousness is supposed to reside. The brain of a philosophical zombie manages all the creature’s behavior, including body language, speech acts and verbal interaction, by purely unconscious neural functioning. The outward appearance of a philosophical zombie is indistinguishable from that of a conscious psychological subject, but there is, so to speak, nobody home.

A philosophical zombie is an automaton. All its movements function autonomically without any accompanying conscious mental states. The philosopher’s zombie is so fluid in its movements, and sufficiently natural-appearing in facial expression and what to it is meaningless verbal exchange in conversation, that it blends in perfectly in all walks of life in human society. No one can tell philosophical zombies apart from what I will call “conscios”: that is, those of us with conscious inner mental lives. Philosophical zombies are capable of articulate speech that cannot be told apart from that of normal conscious persons. They can write and publish books, including novels, scientific monographs and abstruse treatises in philosophy. They can be President of the United States, members and even chairpersons of the boards of directors of major corporations, television evangelists, university administrators, and no one need ever be the wiser! One way to describe the difference between Hollywood zombies and philosophical zombies is that philosophical zombies are so well-behaved as a rule that you can invite them to dinner (contrast evangelists and administrators), whereas a Hollywood zombie, given half a chance and without benefit of cutlery, will have you for dinner.

A Plea for Zombie Gladiators

Let’s now take this philosophical thought experiment a crucial step further. It would be useful to have a visible way of distinguishing between zombies and conscios. We cannot see into their souls, because zombies have no thoughts, just as we cannot know for certain in ordinary circumstances whether another person, even one of long acquaintance, is truly conscious. Similarly, we cannot tell from behavior or conversation with another individual whether or not he or she has any interior light or is a philosophical zombie, a living robot devoid of mental states.

Let us therefore suppose for the sake of argument that all and only zombies have a birthmark on the backs of their necks, shaped like the little round yellow smile or happy face we often find in advertising, but with a straight line for a mouth and x’s for eyes—

The birthmark implies that zombies are born, not made, and that they stay that way for life. How do we know that all and only persons with the birthmark are zombies? Conceivably, the correlation could be verified when a CAT-scan detects the abnormal neurophysiology by which zombie behavior is autonomically controlled through neural exchange in the brain-stem only, with no activity in the brain’s frontal lobes as in normal conscious subjects.

If we can visually distinguish zombies from conscios, then the practical possibility arises of treating them discriminatorily. Zombies, lacking conscious mental states, cannot experience pain, nor are they capable of intentions, beliefs, or desires. If morality presupposes these specific kinds of thought, as many moral theorists have assumed, then it would appear that zombies are in every sense amoral. They are never morally responsible for what they do, and their behavior as a result can never be morally right or morally wrong. If we can tell who (or what) is a zombie and who (or what) is not, then we might suppose that we can use zombies with moral impunity in any way we like, just as we use inanimate objects. Zombies will rebel and behave with indignation if we try to abuse them, just as we would. They will weep, strike back, protest, organize resistance, print leaflets condemning their treatment, and give lectures to rouse public opinion in their support. They will argue that the bad reputation they have received from the depiction of Hollywood zombies has created prejudice against them on the part of the conscious citizenry. From a moral point of view, on the present hypothesis, if we can restrain them, it nevertheless appears that we might be able without acting immorally to use zombies just as we use wood and stone and plants and lower animals for our own purposes in whatever ways we please.

If zombies have no moral rights or responsibilities, then there should be nothing morally objectionable about organizing blood sports events involving zombie gladiators. Zombie gladiators can hack each other to death for our entertainment, just as conscious gladiators did in ancient times during the glorious days of the Roman Empire. Armed combat is exciting to watch, and we can think of zombie gladiatorial events as an extension of reality television and cinematic violence brought together as a live spectator sport. There are moral objections to pitting conscious persons against each other as gladiators, to be sure, since they are subject to sensations of pain, panic and the anticipation of death, and other kinds of psychological trauma. We would be wrong to allow such experiences to be inflicted on conscious subjects, even if they were to volunteer as gladiators.

Where zombies are concerned, however, we need not concern ourselves about their mental states, because we know in advance that, despite their physical actions and reactions, they do not have any. Zombies no more hurt one another or feel pain when they battle it out in the coliseum than cartoon characters do when they clobber each other with mallets or flatten each other with steam rollers. Morally, their bloody confrontations are no more immoral than the mechanical contests we see waged between Battlebots on TV.

It may take the public some getting used to. When zombies are cut with swords and hacked with halberds, they will not only gush blood, but exhibit the same pain behavior as conscious human beings. With enough advance publicity about the differences between zombies and conscios, however, there should eventually be no serious conscientious complaints about hosting zombie gladiatorial competitions in every major city, much as in Roman times.

We turn to Lucius Annaeus Seneca, in his Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, with these disparaging words about the matinée gladiatorial contests in his day: “All the earlier contests were charity in comparison. The nonsense is dispensed with now: what we have now is murder pure and simple. The combatants have nothing to protect them; their whole bodies are exposed to the blows; every thrust they launch gets home.”[53]

In contrast, zombies ought to make morally unobjectionable gladiators. They experience no pain when they are battered and stabbed, bludgeoned and mutilated, even though they bleed and behave exactly as if they were in agony. They also die in the biological sense just as we would, which adds to the pathos and drama of witnessing their combat. When zombies expire, however, there is no destruction of a person in the sense that there is no cessation of thought, no bringing down the curtain on what had been a more or less continuous stream of consciousness, no elimination of memories or expectations, no collapsing of intentions, and in particular no fear of impending death or anticipation or awareness, or any of the psychological trauma we may otherwise associate with violent death by sword and mace and trident in a gladiatorial confrontation.

Zombie gladiators can go at it full tilt. They can put on a splendid carnal spectacle that will instruct at the same time that it fascinates. It will teach martial values, as it did for the ancient Romans, providing daily emotional catharsis and illustrating valuable techniques of strategy and self-defense. It will offer its audience a sublime surrogate confrontation with death and dismemberment that will help them to better appreciate the relative safety and comfort of their own lives. They will be glad that they are not gladiators, and, however irrationally, they will be glad that they are not zombies. At the same time, zombie gladiatorial events can be highly lucrative for everyone associated with the enterprise. Zombies themselves can be made to work (fight) for free, and the outlay for arenas, advertising and promotion, equipment and training, security and logistics should be minimal compared to the potential box office earnings from ticket sales, merchandizing, cable television franchising, and all the surrounding industry that is sure to grow up around the new sport.

There are other respects too in which we can hope to improve on Roman gladiatorial events. We have more interesting and devastating weapons that require special kinds of skills to wield and do visually more absorbing kinds of damage to a human body. Thus, we read in Max Brooks’s manual, The Zombie Survival Guide,[54] a playbook for dealing with outbreaks of Hollywood zombies, the following advice:

The Flamethrower. This device, perhaps more than any other, strikes people as the ultimate zombie eliminator. A jet of flame, two hundred feet long, composed of jellied gasoline, can turn an Undead crowd into a wailing funeral pyre. So why not acquire one?

Why not indeed? While we’re at it, why not outfit entire teams of zombies with these curious devices and turn those suckers loose on each other? And this is just the beginning. There are chainsaws and spear-guns, nail-guns, napalm and mustard gas, automatic machine guns of many different calibers, samurai swords, and all kinds of things that it would be cool to see zombies put to use in fighting each other to the death.

There are likely to be some, perhaps even significant numbers of individuals, who choose not to attend gladiatorial battles, who will be offended or repulsed by the violence and bloodshed, or are afraid that they might be. There is, we must say at the outset, no accounting for taste in this or any other field. The same is true among a certain percentage of the citizens and visitors to such countries as Spain that continue to sponsor bull fighting, not as a sport, but, as Ernest Hemingway reminds us in Death in the Afternoon, the ritual killing of a bull.[55] With such a striking comparison in mind, we can conclude that while there is a sound moral basis for objecting to the sufferings of a bull besieged by picadors and the matador in a bull ring, there are no similar grounds for moral complaint against the maiming and slaughtering of zombie gladiators. The most ardent animal rights advocates can have no sound reason for objecting to zombie gladiatorial conflict. Zombie gladiators are meat robots, we might say, and nothing more. They are not persons with conscious feelings, beliefs and intentions; they do not hurt, and they do not intend to do what they do or have any beliefs or doubts, hopes, fears, expectations or disappointments. They are hollow shells, psychologically speaking, lacking all moral meaning and value.[56]

Amorality of Zombies and Moral Obligations of the Conscious

Or are they? Can there be good reasons after all for objecting on moral grounds to the institution of zombie gladiatorial competitions? There may still be questionable aspects of the proposal to use zombies as gladiators, even though they lack consciousness.

Zombies, birthmarks aside, look superficially just like you and me, sharing the same characteristic human DNA type. They are capable of the same complex repertoire of behavior, “intelligent” conversation (at least from an external point of view to which we as conscious subjects are also limited), and apparent displays of feelings and emotions as the rest of us. Conscios are likely, therefore, in at least some instances, to develop emotional attachments, friendships, and feel sympathy, even concern and love, for zombies. The fact that they are indistinguishable from living persons encourages the possibility that some conscios may genuinely come to care for and even love zombies. When zombies have the backs of their necks checked and are taken away in armored vans to serve as gladiators, their plight might cause pain, suffering, and distress to the conscios who have developed personal feelings for them. If this were to happen, then even on the assumptions we are considering, it could be morally wrong for indirect reasons to promote blood sport competitions among zombie gladiators.

The remedy is nevertheless quite simple. We need only keep zombies destined for gladiatorial combat isolated from the general population, raised by other zombies in zombie camps, and managed by zombies in every phase of their preparation for the sport. That way, no conscio could ever form an intimate emotional attachment to any zombie slated to become a gladiator. Similarly, we should probably suppose that zombies are never born to or raised by non-zombies once the gladiatorial games are instituted, so that there are no familial relations tying zombies to conscios. Zombies must be total strangers to those who are in attendance in the audience at a zombie gladiatorial event, if the moral probity of such events is to be maintained.

Having started in this direction, we must then ask whether even these sorts of extreme precautions can possibly be enough to uphold the amorality of zombie gladiatorial contests. We must also somehow try to guard against vicarious suffering on the part of conscios at zombie bloodbaths. This challenge to the amorality of zombie gladiatorial competitions reveals something interesting about our understanding of the interrelation between consciousness and morality. Now perhaps we must expect to screen the members of an audience attending zombie gladiatorial events carefully and reliably to exclude any individuals who might suffer more emotional pain, anxiety, or trauma than an average audience member at the cinema, theater, or any non-gladiatorial sport. Assuming that these more conventional activities are morally unobjectionable, we cannot blame zombie gladiatorial competitions on moral grounds if those in attendance do not vicariously suffer more mental anguish than at less violent non-lethal entertainments, such as hockey tournaments, certain inflammatorily confrontational talk shows, or compelling performances of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

There is still another moral consideration to be taken into account in contemplating zombie combat sports. We should try to judge the potential effect of witnessing socially approved massacres of creatures who, to all external appearances, except for their birthmarks, look and behave exactly like conscios capable of feeling pleasure and pain. The issue of widespread desensitization to repetitive acts of violence in movies, video games and gangsta rap as a factor in personal crime has already gained scientific and media attention. Whether or not these influences contribute significantly to violent behavior is likely to remain an open question in social psychology. It is nevertheless hard to see how exposing large numbers of viewers to live-action armed bloody killings as a sports event can help to improve the social climate of good will and compassion among the general population, on whom our happiness and security, such as they are, vitally depend.

We must remember that the audience members pre-screened for admittance to zombie gladiatorial contests are precisely those who have demonstrated the least emotional distress in the presence of the sufferings of others. These of all persons are surely the greatest sociological risks to the population at large, after dosing on a steady diet of the most ferocious kinds of live action violence. Reflect also that we are imagining the whole entertainment industry apparatus organized behind zombie blood sports. There will be souvenirs, memorabilia, details of gladiatorial fights published in newspapers and broadcast on TV, documentaries, movies, T-shirts, coffee table books, and refrigerator magnets celebrating the most popular gladiators and the most dramatic maiming and killing. There will be everything, in short, that can contribute to the understanding that terrible violence has society’s full blessing, provided that it involves only zombies.

For all intents and purposes, anyone attending a zombie gladiatorial event will nevertheless experience the carnage just as though it were perpetrated by and upon conscios. Officials can emphasize the fact that the gladiators are not conscious, that they are mere automata. What they cannot be expected to do is to fully dispel the impression that the combatants are thinking beings like ourselves, that they feel pain and know fear as they are crushed and ripped apart and do their best to crush and rip apart their opponents. The audience will know at a rational level that these Undead martial arts warriors have no interior mental life. At an emotional level, however, as they watch the violence unfold, they may find it impossible to draw what is supposed to be the crucial moral distinction between conscious subjects and zombie automata. They will see human beings killing human beings in what look to be the most painful ways possible, even if no pain is actually experienced by the participants, in a context of unqualified moral permissiveness. The audience members, many of them anyway, are certain to come away from the repeated experience with the ingrained sense that killing human beings as sport is socially acceptable.

It should be obvious upon reflection that none of this is a particularly good thing. Even if no audience member ever becomes a dangerous psychopath and goes on a murder spree killing innocent conscios, there is still something morally objectionable about the proposal. What is wrong with using zombies as gladiators is that it enacts the socially condoned slaughter of genetically fellow human beings who just happen not to be conscious, and who as a result just happen to be incapable of feeling pleasure or pain. Human beings, even if they are transformed demonically into howling Hollywood zombies, strangling and cannibalizing all whom they may devour, are still human beings, however posthumous, as we can readily verify by counting their chromosome pairs (twenty-three). To validate killing members of our own species solely for the sake of entertainment, curiosity, morbid fascination and blood lust evinces an ideal that deprives all human lives of dignity. Thus, Roland Auguet argues:

A gladiator, with movements clumsy and stiff because of his armour, half kneels and raises his hooked visor, pierced by mysterious holes, towards an imaginary grandstand, menacing with his curved sword the man prostrate at his feet. . . . In one sense these pictures, a little morbid and shocking, teach us a lesson: that the life of a man has not always had the value that our own morality strives to give it. In the past it could be a mere episode, and death the instrument of a collective pleasure.[57]

Zombies have no moral rights. In the movies, Hollywood zombies are made morally acceptable targets of the worst acts of desperate violence. We can blow them up with dynamite, toast them with flamethrowers, lop off their heads with machetes. They are, after all, already dead, slightly warmed over, and they threaten the rest of us unjustifiably with a most unpleasant end. We identify accordingly with the co-eds, deputy sheriffs, and shopkeepers pursued by roving gangrenous hordes of the Hollywood Undead.

The zombie gladiators thought experiment, in stark contrast, says of human beings generally that it is morally permissible to have them kill one another for the enjoyment of conscious viewers. It is this symbolic statement that is made about the dispensability of human life that we may come to regard as morally indecent, a reprehensible public statement of a value judgment for which we, unlike zombies, would be morally responsible. The same is true whenever such life-cheapening values are acted out on the field of mortal combat, as much in the zombie thought experiment as in ancient Rome when the gladiators were conscious thinking subjects like ourselves. The symbolic import of setting up an institution in which human zombie gladiators slice and dice and slash and bash each other’s brains out as a form of popular entertainment is intrinsically morally objectionable. It is wrong, we might conclude, because of what it says about us and about our attitudes concerning the value of human life, even if the victims never feel pain and never suffer death throes when they are defeated, subdued, and delivered the final coup de grâce.

If we conclude that it is morally wrong for a society to make such a symbolic statement concerning its sense of the cheap value of human life, then why might we not say the same with respect to big screen depictions of the horrifying treatment of Hollywood zombies in films like Dawn of the Dead and Night of the Living Dead that are also produced for entertainment? In the recent Land of the Dead, the writers envisioned something very much like Hollywood zombie gladiatorial battles, using zombies for target practice, and pitting them against a living person in a cage for the crowd’s amusement and political edification.

There are two important differences. First, patrons of the cinema, even children old enough to attend, know that they are watching actors in makeup with a dazzling array of special effects. The whole institution of filmmaking and of viewing projected images that are shown over and over again in many places, that can be owned in VHS or DVD format, is understood as a work of fiction. Zombie gladiator mutilations and slayings, by contrast, would be real, taking place in real time before the spectators’ eyes. Secondly, in the movies there is always an opportunity amidst all the carnage to incorporate morally and socially redeeming values as a part of the entertainment. In the zombie gladiatorial arena, there is at most only the possibility for a false display of such virtues as courage, cunning, clemency, among others, in the struggle to survive, and the nobility, strength and determination of what might look to an audience to be force of will.

If these qualities happen to surface in a live gladiatorial performance, it can only be by sheer accident, as in real life, and not by artistic design. In the cinema, if moral values are to be communicated, they must be built into the choices that determine a film as a product of art. It is to the filmmaker’s moral credit when such redeeming features are made part of a Hollywood zombie production. If virtues appear to be exemplified in a real-life zombie gladiatorial contest, they are not due to the combat organizers, who cannot plan for or direct the spontaneous behavior of zombie combatants, nor to the zombies themselves, who are utterly devoid of all conscious mental states, and hence of all moral intent or responsibility for their “actions” on the battlefield, as the audience also well knows.

Postmodern Postmortem

What can philosophy learn from the zombie gladiators thought experiment? As we take stock of our findings, it seems inescapable that being a person presupposes consciousness, which in turn is presupposed by morality. It follows, then, as we have emphasized, that zombies, as automata falling outside of moral judgment, are altogether amoral.

Zombies are never morally responsible for what they do or fail to do, never right or wrong in their behavior, never morally blameworthy or praiseworthy. These facts need not preclude the possibility that it may turn out to be causally effective in shaping their behavior to praise or blame, reward or punish zombies physically, even though they cannot be aware of what we are doing or saying, and even though they experience no pleasure or pain as a consequence of such actions. In this as in other respects, again, philosophical zombies are remarkably different from those wanton flesh-gnawing Hollywood zombies milling about the shopping mall after dark. What is not true, as demonstrated now by the zombie gladiators thought experiment, if we have correctly understood its implications, is that morally, therefore, we can do whatever we like to zombies.

There are good solid reasons for thinking that we should not use zombies as gladiators. To do so with no higher purpose than entertainment makes a morally objectionable symbolic statement about our (dis-)regard for human life, conscious or Undead. What this proves in turn is that consciousness or personhood is not both necessary and sufficient in deciding all questions of moral responsibility. We can act wrongly, in a sense, toward ourselves, in the way we treat zombies, even though we cannot hurt or in other ways psychologically traumatize them. The blame, if any, and moral responsibility, will always be entirely on our side, shouldered exclusively by those of us who are conscious thinkers with an understanding of the difference between moral right and wrong. Zombies get a moral pass for whatever they do; we conscious beings, with a sense of moral right and wrong, do not.[58]

10

Should Vampires Be Held Accountable for Their Bloodthirsty Behavior?

JOHN DRAEGER

Vampires versus Zombies

Flesh-eating zombies have been known to feast on innocent people in a violent frenzy. Vampires often keep their victims alive only to kill them another day. Any human being performing such actions would be considered morally despicable and rightly so. But while human perpetrators should pay for their violence, it’s unclear whether the Undead can be held to the same standard.

The zombies in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, for example, lack the cognitive sophistication to be held accountable for their bloodthirsty behavior. Operating according to some set of (un)natural laws, they smash through doors and devour people in a kind of catatonic trance. They behave more like a plant drawn to sunlight than a rational creature aware of its surroundings. If a poisonous plant were to inadvertently take an innocent life, it wouldn’t be subject to moral condemnation. The nuisance might reasonably be destroyed, but a plant cannot be held accountable because it is unaware of the damage it inflicts. Similarly, Romero’s zombies should be stopped, but they shouldn’t be blamed.

By contrast, Dracula meticulously plans his move to London. He secures the services of Jonathan Harker. He carefully considers which pieces of real estate to purchase. And he arranges passage aboard a cargo ship. Furthermore, he willingly makes short-term sacrifices for long-term gains. He isn’t some mindless zombie lacking self-control. If he were, then he would have gorged himself on Harker before they reached his castle. Because Dracula understands the nature of his actions, he seems accountable in a way that Romero’s zombies aren’t.

Dracula: Amoral or Immoral?

Not everyone should be blamed for their harmful actions. Some people, such as those with severe mental deficiencies, cannot comprehend the nature of their actions and thus lack the where-withal to be held accountable. Romero’s zombies fit this description. Other people, such as those with certain emotional deficiencies, lack an emotional connection with those around them. Psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley, for example, describes the puzzling behavior of a patient, named Milt, who seemed utterly indifferent to the needs of others.[59]

By way of illustration, Cleckley tells us that Milt once went to the hospital to pick up his mother. While driving her home, the car broke down and he set off to find the parts to fix it. On the way, however, he became engaged in one distraction after another. He watched football and talked to a friend. Cleckley suggests that Milt was not absentminded. He knew that his mother had just been released from the hospital and he knew that she was waiting by the roadside, but he couldn’t see her condition as being “any big deal.” When he returned hours later, Milt was annoyed to find the car empty. He could not understand why his mother would be unwilling to wait. This lack of empathy helps explain why he was indifferent to his mother’s situation.[60] In the literature on moral responsibility, Milt’s case is often taken to show that those incapable of a certain level of basic empathic concern should not be held responsible for their behavior and should be treated as amoral creatures.[61]

Romero’s zombies lack both the cognitive and the emotional sophistication to be held responsible for their behavior and thus they are amoral. Dracula’s case, however, is less cut-and-dry. I’ve suggested that vampires have the cognitive sophistication necessary to be held responsible for their behavior, but it is unclear whether they are emotionally sophisticated enough to fully appreciate the gravity of their actions. It all depends upon how vampires are portrayed. If they can empathize with others, then they can know of the suffering they cause. And this would demonstrate that they are capable of moral reflection and thus accountable for serial murders. However, if they are like Cleckley’s Milt and are incapable of appreciating the pains of others, then they should be considered amoral. They can be locked up, but they can’t be blamed. A vampire’s emotional capabilities are morally significant because they mark the difference between an amoral and an immoral creature.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for example, seems devoid of moral emotion. True, he is enraged when his brides feed on Harker, but this is because their actions might undermine his long-term plans and not because he is particularly interested in the man’s well-being. Throughout the novel, he seems more interested in satisfying his own desires than worrying about the value of a human life. In a particularly callous moment, he tells Mina, “You may as well be quiet; it is not the first time, or the second, that your veins have appeased my thirst.”[62] Shortly thereafter, he forces her to drink of his blood. The extreme narcissism exhibited by Stoker’s Dracula suggests that he may be incapable of appreciating the needs of others. Thus, he seems akin to the amoral Milt.

Francis Ford Coppola’s film adaptation of Dracula is faithful to the novel in many respects, but Mina’s conversion is importantly different. Before turning her into a vampire, Coppola’s Dracula respectfully explains that everlasting love comes at the cost of her mortal life and hints that immortality cannot guarantee bliss. Unlike Stoker’s Dracula who seems willing to use Mina for his own purposes, Coppola’s Dracula asks Mina to give her informed consent to the life he has planned for them. As he slits his chest and Mina begins to drink, he cries out, “I cannot let this be. You’ll be as cursed as I am to walk in the shadow of death for all eternity. I love you too much to condemn you.” These words indicate that he is fully aware of the consequences of his actions. His love for Mina compels him to sympathize with her future misery and causes him to regret the pain he is about to inflict. These feelings are important because they demonstrate that he has a deep appreciation of the value of a human life. In the end, however, he relents and she drinks.

It is somewhat of a mystery why anyone would hurt those they love, but this kind of behavior is all too common. Like many human beings, Coppola’s Dracula finds that he just can’t help himself. He knows Mina will be hurt, but he gives into temptation anyway. Unlike Stoker’s Dracula, Coppola’s Dracula is capable of “feeling Mina’s pain” and thus seems capable of appreciating the gravity of his actions. And, like most human beings, Coppola’s Dracula seems capable of self-control and thus can be faulted for his immorality.

Noble Louis and Villainous Lestat

Neil Jordan’s film version of Anne Rice’s novel Interview with the Vampire provides us with another example of a vampire tormented by his feelings for others and offers perhaps the clearest example of an Undead creature responsible for his behavior. Not wanting human blood on his fangs, Louis prefers to feed on poodles, chickens, and rats. He does give in to temptation when he tastes the blood of the young Claudia. However, he quickly runs away in self-disgust and spends the rest of her life caring for her as a member of the family.

Despite being a vampire, Louis tries to live a moral life. Time and again, he exhibits a “lingering respect for life.” He is not only aware of the consequences of his actions, but he makes the self-conscious effort to treat others as he believes they ought to be treated. He refuses to turn Daniel Malloy into a vampire because he knows the misery it will bring. The fact that he self-consciously rejects Armand’s call to be “beautiful, powerful, and without regret” demonstrates that he is capable of both moral reflection and self-transformation. In short, Louis’s guilt as well as his decision to live with it suggests that he holds himself accountable for his bloodthirsty behavior and perhaps we should too.

Romero’s zombies might enjoy the taste of human flesh, but they cannot enjoy watching terrified human beings beg for their lives because they cannot appreciate the nature of human terror. As we’ve seen, zombies are amoral and not evil. Lestat, by contrast, takes fiendish delight in the suffering of others. Like the cruel torturer, he knows of the pain he inflicts and enjoys it for this reason. He especially likes tasting the blood of aristocrats because he likes seeing the mighty fall. He understands their arrogance and so takes added pleasure in watching them wither in fear. Achieving this level of immorality took some work: Lestat had to find ways of silencing his inner conscience. As he tells Louis, “The trick is not to think about it.” He knows that if he were to think about it, he would feel guilty and that would spoil his fun.

Lestat’s behavior resembles that of someone wanting to commit common acts of immorality (say, adultery). Deceiving oneself about the true nature of one’s bad behavior certainly makes it possible to continue down that road. And once someone has made a habit of behaving badly, it becomes easy. However, an action doesn’t become morally permissible because people trick themselves into believing that it is the right thing to do. Marital infidelity, for example, is wrong despite the fact that lots of people do it. Similarly, a life of murderous cruelty is still wrong even if some folks enjoy it and some subcultures find it acceptable.

Warped sensibilities might explain why people (including vampires) behave as they do. The fact that someone was a victim of childhood sexual abuse may explain why they become child predators as adults. However, the fact that someone has warped desires doesn’t change the fact that we can (and should) hold them responsible. Similarly, the fact that vampires must drink blood to survive explains why they kill so frequently, but it doesn’t mean that their actions should be excused. The fact that Lestat must engage in self-deception shows that he knows (at some level) that his actions are wrong. The fact that he has an insatiable thirst for human blood makes overcoming temptation difficult, but it doesn’t mean that his actions are above moral scrutiny. Like the human sex offender, if Lestat is capable of appreciating the consequences of his actions, then he should. The fact that he doesn’t engage in moral reflection merely shows that he is morally lazy. And the fact that he enjoys being cruel shows that he understands what he is doing and he is all the more despicable because of it.

In sum, Coppola’s Dracula as well as Jordan’s Louis and Lestat should be held accountable for their bloodthirsty behavior. Each acts with an awareness of the consequences of his actions. Each can distinguish right from wrong. Each is capable of sympathizing with the needs of others and acting on their behalf. And even if they sometimes fall victim to temptation (or have become hardened over time), each is capable of exercising self-control. In short, they should be held responsible for their crimes because they share all the characteristics of human perpetrators of violence. This suggests that vampires aren’t so different from us. Stoker’s Mina recognizes as much when she urges Harker to punish Dracula for his crimes, but not to lose sight of the fact that under the bloodthirsty exterior is a pitiable (almost human) creature.

Some Implications: Equal Rights for Vampires

There’s no question that wrongdoers ought to be punished. We want them off the streets and we want them to pay for their crimes. But most civilized societies recognize that even the moral scum of the earth deserve certain basic protections. Legal systems, for example, demand fair trials and moral systems prohibit torture. Once we recognize that someone is capable of moral reflection and self-transformation, we must also recognize that he deserves to be treated as such. If, as I have argued, vampires are capable of moral reflection, then they deserve to have their rights respected.

Van Helsing, Morris, and Harker indulge in a form of vigilantism when they hunt down Dracula as if he were some animal. They don’t attempt to capture him in order to bring him to justice. They don’t provide him with adequate legal counsel capable of presenting his version of events. They don’t allow him to be judged by a jury of his peers. Instead, they presume he is guilty or, worse, assume that he is incapable of being held to account for his crimes. They are justifiably afraid of his violent actions, but fear can’t justify vigilantism.

Most civilized societies recognize that everyone deserves their day in court. If vampires deserve equal rights, then they deserve this legal protection as well. Of course, justice isn’t always done. History is full of mobs taking the law into their own hands. However, we should not confuse the treatment that some people actually receive with the treatment that they actually deserve. If vampires deserve equal rights, then they should not be victims of vigilante justice.

Vampires may be difficult to capture and even more difficult to incarcerate. However, we should not suspend our system of justice simply because it is easier. After all, executing shoplifters would effectively prevent theft, but surely delinquent children deserve a chance to learn from their mistakes. Despite their ease and effectiveness, some punishments are unjust. Moreover, if Louis is any indication, then it seems reasonable to suppose that vampires can be rehabilitated. But even if they must be executed, we should at least feel bad about it. Any creature capable of moral reflection and self-transformation should be regarded as a thing of value. It is at least regrettable when this is not or cannot be done.

Criminals aren’t typically allowed to participate in civil government because they are thought to forfeit such rights as soon as they commit a crime. But suppose Louis were to survive on a strict diet of chicken, lamb, and cow blood. If he were to behave like any other decent citizen, then why shouldn’t he be allowed to vote or run for public office? There are legitimate worries about the feasibility of this new form of government. Should legislative assemblies meet at night or during the day? What kind of meals should be served at state functions? Even so, practical concerns should not be confused with the question of whether vampires deserve the right of civic participation.

Recognizing equal rights for vampires has an even more startling implication. If my sister were to announce her upcoming nuptials (or civil union) with a vampire, there may be little that can be said. This arrangement would be undoubtedly odd. But if the Undead are capable of rational action and capable of a full range of emotions, then they seem capable of forming meaningful bonds. This suggests that a vampire could be as good as any other suitor.

There are many reasons she might choose not to marry a vampire. Vampires can’t procreate and she might want biological children. Vampires are immortal and she is not. These might be legitimate reasons not to marry someone, but they have nothing uniquely to do with the fact that her suitor happens to be a vampire. If biological children and a similar life expectancy are truly important to her, then my sister will reject any human suitor who does not fit the bill. And if she does not value these things, then there is no reason she shouldn’t marry a vampire (at least not on these grounds).

Of course, there’s the obvious worry that my sister will fall victim to the vampire’s violent desires. But the fact that someone can be victimized by those they love is nothing new. As with humans, spousal abuse is reason to call the authorities. But the fact that someone happens to be a vampire is irrelevant. Violence and not Undeath is the problem. Similarly, if a vampire waited until his wedding night (or tenth wedding anniversary) to disclose his true identity, then this deception provides a reason to call things off. In this case, however, deception and not Undeath is the problem. I may not like the fact that my sister plans to marry a vampire, but I can only legitimately object if he gives me a reason (say, violence or deception). It seems reasonable to suppose that a well-behaved vampire may never provide such a reason. If so, then perhaps I should rather see her marry a non-violent vampire than a violent human being.

Current debates over same-sex marriage suggest that many people will reject arrangements that seem unfamiliar, unconventional, or unnatural. Marrying a vampire would surely be all of those things. As with the case of same-sex marriage, however, we shouldn’t confuse discomfort with a principled objection. If vampires are capable of entering into meaningful relationships, then they ought to be considered as prospective life-partners. If they aren’t, then they should be rejected because they make terrible lovers and not because they happen to be Undead.

Universal Rights: Vampires, Space Aliens, Robots, and Humans

All of this may seem absurd, but the argument is simple. In the human case, it is wrong to discriminate on the basis of race, class, gender, or sexual orientation. All those capable of understanding their environment well enough to engage in self-conscious moral reflection ought to be considered moral agents. If they behave badly, they should be held responsible. Indeed, holding people accountable for their wrongdoing demonstrates that we respect their ability to behave better.

Extending this well-established principle, I’m suggesting that all those capable of self-conscious moral reflection should be held accountable for their choices even if they are aliens from outer space, artificially created humanoids, or Undead creatures of the night.[63] If they behave badly, then we should respect their ability to behave better by holding them responsible. It would be wrong to hold them to a lower standard simply because they are old, ugly, and eat strange foods. Since at least three vampires exhibit the capacity for self-conscious moral reflection, we can reasonably conclude that some Undead creatures can be held responsible for their bloodthirsty behavior. And if being a full moral creature demands being treated with dignity, then vampires deserve equal rights as well.

11

The Bloody Connection Between Vampires and Vegetarians

WAYNE YUEN

DR SEWARD: Your diet, Mr. Renfield, is disgusting.

RENFIELD: Actually, they [flies] are perfectly nutritious. You see, each life that I ingest gives back life to me.

—Francis Ford Coppola’s film Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Vampires should not drink human blood. This is not a terribly controversial statement, but asking ourselves why this is so leads to the underlying moral principles that govern how we make decisions about what is right and wrong. It’s our job as moral individuals to investigate these principles and try to live a life that is consistent with them. If we look at the situation of vampires and come to understand why it is that we evaluate their particular eating habits as immoral, we will discover the moral principles that can help us gauge whether or not our own eating habits are consistent with our belief that vampires should not eat people.

We get plenty of examples of the eating habits of vampires from Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but we actually see a vampire learning to become a vampire in the film Interview with the Vampire. So this chapter will concentrate, for the most part, on that particular film.

Reasoning with Vampires

Before we look at the principles governing vampires’ eating habits, we should examine what it takes for something to have moral responsibility. Moral agency, the ability to have moral responsibilities, at minimum requires two conditions: sufficiently developed rationality and free will. For example, I wouldn’t say that my cat, Fizzgig, has a moral responsibility not to kill birds in the backyard, even if the birds are endangered species. I would like it if she would not kill the birds in our backyard, especially the endangered ones, but she does not have what it takes to be a moral agent. She lacks moral agency because she does not have the rationality necessary to think about the world in moral terms.

Are vampires rational creatures? The answer is an unequivocal yes. Aristotle believed that if an agent can envision the best outcome of a situation, and can successfully bring that outcome about through acting in a way that best and most consistently promotes the desired outcome, then he or she holds practical wisdom, a high form of rationality. The ability to deliberate well is difficult to obtain, but vampires can clearly envision a goal, such as kidnapping or seducing a woman, and produce fairly intricate plans to achieve the goal. Although Aristotle would disapprove of most of the goals envisioned by vampires as the “best outcome,” vampires match all of the other criteria set forth by Aristotle to be a rational deliberator.

By this standard of rationality, vampires are rational creatures. In Interview Lestat is intelligent enough to make financial investments for the future so that he can live a comfortably luxurious lifestyle. Vampires can reflect intellectually (if not in mirrors) about the world and, more importantly, upon their own actions. They are aware of the consequences of their actions. They even make moral judgments. Lestat believes that “evildoers are easier and they taste better,” referring to Widow St. Clair, who blamed a slave for the murder of her husband. Lestat’s claim is an aesthetic judgment about the tastiness of evil people, but to make this judgment at all, one must be able to morally judge people to be good or evil.

The second quality, free will, is much more problematic. Some philosophers believe that free will does not exist, and that all actions are fully determined. However, since we are concerned about ethical behavior here, we may rightfully assume that free will is possible. If there is no free will, then it makes little sense to talk about ethical behavior at all. It’s beyond the scope of this chapter to offer a defense of free will;[64] the question at hand is whether vampires have free will. Just because free will exists, it does not follow that vampires have it.

Free will is the capacity to act in a way of our own choosing, without being forced by something external to ourselves. Imagine if someone were to hold my family hostage and ordered me to rob a bank or they would kill my family. In this case an external force would be compelling me to commit an act that I know was wrong. My free will has been compromised. If I am in a straitjacket, I do not have the freedom to pet my cat.

To say that somebody ought to do something, in the moral sense, implies that they could do it. Imagine this scenario: a woman dies during childbirth. It would make little sense to say that the baby is morally responsible for killing his or her mother. The baby is the cause of the mother’s death, but is not responsible for her death because the baby could not do otherwise. Similarly it wouldn’t make sense to say that vampires should not drink human blood if they did not have an alternative. If the blood of humans was the only thing that could sustain them, then we couldn’t say that vampires should not drink human blood. I believe that vampires in popular culture have an alternative to drinking human blood.

In Interview we get an intimate look at the life of a particular vampire, Louis de Pointe du Lac. After Louis is turned into a vampire by Lestat, he confronts the nature of the vampire, feeding on human beings, and is disturbed by it. He struggles with the morality of his previous life as a human being and his existence now, dependent upon blood. But when Lestat reveals to Louis that he could live off animal blood, he tries living off rats, but eventually drinks human blood. Other examples of vampires living off of non-human blood can be found in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel television series: Angel, and later Spike, survive by drinking the blood of animals.

Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t

The freedom of vampires is closely connected to the nature of what vampires are. Vampires at the most basic level are human beings who have been condemned to an eternal life. Most people would see eternal life as a gift, or a blessing. But the vampire is damned because of this “gift.” Vampires are left to live their lives with an eternal hunger. Dracula hungers not only for human blood, but for love. He is only released from his curse when Mina finally is able to satisfy that craving. With such a craving driving the vampire’s action, can a vampire exhibit free will? Again this is a difficult question to answer, but let’s imagine that it does annihilate the vampire’s free will. If this is so then any case of extreme craving would remove a person’s free will. A heroin addict, who because of her compulsion for the drug robs a store in order to get money to get more drugs, would not be considered morally responsible for her action. If we cannot accept this conclusion, we must reject the initial assumption that leads to this conclusion, that the craving for blood annihilates a vampire’s free will. This leads one to believe that vampires have free will over themselves when choosing to drink human blood.

To make matters worse, there seem to be important differences between the heroin addict and the vampire. Firstly, vampires seem to be in full control of their faculties even while they crave human blood, whereas drug addicts typically cannot control themselves. They are compelled, depending upon the degree of addiction, to seek the drug. Consider another example of compulsion: people who are lost at sea have been known to drink ocean water, even when they rationally know that they should not drink the water. Their thirst is so great that it overwhelms any kind of rational ability. Dracula, Louis, and Lestat all exhibit restraint even when they are in densely populated cities. This suggests a difference between a craving and a compulsion: a compulsion cannot be resisted. A drug addict is under a compulsion to seek drugs. A craving is a strong preference. When I crave vanilla ice cream, I have a strong preference, but I would not rob the grocery store to satisfy it.

A second problem that is unique to the vampire is a question of character. If a vampire is damned, then perhaps nothing that the vampire can do is good, because the character of the being prohibits any good from being done. Being damned then does not compel a being towards evil acts, but rather it taints all their acts with evil. This idea is rooted in a model of virtue ethics associated with Aristotle. Developing a good character is primary. From a virtuous character, virtuous acts follow, and from a vicious character, vicious acts follow. Hitler is the typical example of a person who has a stained character. No good that Hitler has done can change the fact that he is a morally vicious character. Vampires are stained with evil, someone might claim, and so consequently nothing that they do can ever make them good moral agents. When it comes to new vampires like Louis, however, there are few if any character traits that we can point to when trying to evaluate his moral character. Louis is a different person after he becomes a vampire. Perhaps more importantly, we can evaluate an agent’s character separately from his or her actions. For example, if Hitler decided to give a large donation to famine relief in the world, the act of donating can be evaluated as good, even though the person’s character (Hitler) is vicious. In this chapter, we’re mostly concerned about a particular action of vampires: their feeding habits.

A third and final problem that is unique to the vampire is rooted in a different conceptual model of the vampire. If the vampire is not merely an Undead human cursed with a craving, but rather a demonically possessed body whose human soul has left,[65] then do vampires simply have different moral values? This might be true in a cultural sense of the word. In America most people believe that it is wrong to eat dogs, but acceptable to eat cows; in other parts of the world, it is acceptable to eat dogs; and in still others, wrong to eat cows. However, all things being equal, there are principles that appear to be universal. For example, a world with more unnecessary suffering is worse than a world with less unnecessary suffering. Even our model vampire Lestat tells Louis that vampirism is a gift that helps him escape a painful world. It is precisely this principle that motivates Louis to live off rats instead of human beings. Ironically, Lestat appeals to the same principle, in a short-sighted way, to justify drinking human blood, to spare himself from the unnecessary discomfort of not drinking human blood. It’s short-sighted in that Lestat does not consider the unnecessary suffering that is brought about for the victims.

It’s a Matter of Taste

The obvious “justification” for vampires eating people is that, for vampires, humans are really tasty. If humans taste better than rats, then that may be enough reason to choose to eat them. Louis describes Lestat’s killings as if describing a gourmet dinner: “A fresh young girl, that was his favorite for the first of the evening. For seconds, he preferred a gilded beautiful youth. But the snob in him loved to hunt in society, and the blood of the aristocrat thrilled him best of all.” Compared to rats, humans are a marvelous delicacy. But the pleasures of the palate do not excuse the immorality of drinking human blood either. Given the choice between killing a person and killing a rat, killing the rat is the lesser of the two evils. Saying that killing the human is the better choice, because they taste better, does not make the act any less evil.

All of this, of course, presupposes that human beings do have some kind of value that is of greater worth than that of a rat. All kinds of justifications have been offered for the greater worth of humans, but many of them fall flat: that human beings have souls, and animals do not, for example. It’s hard to prove either way that humans have souls and animals do not, without appealing to the authority of a religious text, which draws its authority from faith, not reason. However, since we are discussing vampires as possibly humans who have lost their souls, we should entertain the notion. The intrinsic value of a soul might provide a reason to choose animals over humans. Something is intrinsically valuable if we value it for no other reason other than for what it is. Money has instrumental value because it can get us stuff. Happiness has intrinsic value, because we value it for what it is. The Judeo-Christian tradition is pretty clear on the non-soul status of animals, but this does not mean that animals should receive no consideration when we make decisions that concern their well-being.

Another quality that should be considered is human rationality. Although it’s safe to say that humans reason, since we are aware of our own internal mental states and operations, we cannot say with any kind of authority that animals cannot reason in any manner. On the contrary there are many animals that seem to have an intellect that is at least equivalent to a human child’s.[66] Finally, consider that both humans and animals can feel pain and suffering.

What separates humans from animals may not be any particular quality, but more precisely, the degree to which humans possess the quality. Humans clearly have a greater capacity for reason than animals do, and this extends our capacity for suffering in unique ways. We as humans can worry about our futures. We can be actively aware of the things we have not acquired yet and be aware of our lost capacity for acquiring those things. When I see my lemon tree slowly withering from disease, I realize that I have lost all the future fruit that the tree will bear, which makes the loss of the tree that much more unfortunate. When my life is put into danger, I realize not only that I may lose my life, but also that my wife may lose her husband. Choosing to kill a human over a rat is choosing to bring more unnecessary pain and suffering into the world, which is universally undesirable, something that even some vampires try to avoid.

Perhaps vampires don’t need human blood to survive, but to thrive. To reach their full potentials, they need to eat humans. Vampire popular culture is a mixed bag on this point. Vampires in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, notably Angel and Spike, can thrive on butcher’s blood fighting off a litany of demons and gods.[67] However, when Lestat survives and grows stronger “on the diet of the blood of snakes, toads, and all the putrid life of the Mississippi” he still looks likes a corpse. Without human blood Lestat is weak and putrid; with human blood, Lestat can read people’s minds and is handsome and vital.

There are two problems with this position. First is the problem of what is meant by full potential. Peak physical condition is not always necessary for a person to reach his or her fullest potential. Steven Hawking is an excellent example of a person who has been hampered in reaching his fullest potential, yet still greatly excels in life. Or perhaps Hawking has reached his own individual physical potential. In either case, the condition of his physical body is irrelevant to whether or not Hawking is excelling in life. Few would argue that Lou Gehrig’s disease has made Hawking less of a physicist. The second problem with this position is to assume that there is only a singular maximum that people can reach. Imagine Louis swearing off humans, and surviving solely on rats. He could have a lucrative career as an exterminator. What makes this choice better or worse than his eating human beings and developing mystical empowerments? Any answer that could be given to this would rely on either an arbitrary social standard (being an actual mind reader is better than being an excellent exterminator), or on some moral standard. It’s almost not worth stating that being an excellent rat exterminator is better, morally speaking, than being a serial killer.

In Interview Louis says, “I knew peace only when I killed. When I heard her heart in that terrible rhythm, I knew again what peace could be.” So, another reason that vampires drink human blood is because it brings them a spiritual peace of sorts. But this doesn’t give us the kind of justification Louis might hope for as to whether it is right for vampires to eat people. For example, a cult that derives spiritual satisfaction from human sacrifice would not be morally justified in their practice, especially if the people being sacrificed were unwilling, like the victims of vampires. David Berkowitz claimed a great feeling of peace after his killings as well. Robbing a person of their life for an individual’s temporary spiritual gain fails the simplest moral litmus tests like reversibility, equality, and fairness.

When Louis is first turned into a vampire, Lestat has to teach him to overcome his feelings of guilt and anguish. “You’ll get used to killing. . . . You’ll become accustomed to things all too quickly.” No doubt, a person can become accustomed to many things, even killing, but Louis feels the guilt that comes with it. Louis gets no spiritual peace from killing people at first. Perhaps the spiritual peace that comes with killing humans is a feeling that comes only through habituation. Only through his love of Claudia, who is arguably more psychotic than Lestat, does Louis ironically lose his humanity and begin to drink human blood. Louis’s love for Claudia encourages him to engage in the habit of drinking human blood, much as the love for a child may encourage a parent to engage in the habit of exercise. In both cases they aid in the improvement of the self for the sake of another, but of course the analogy breaks down when we compare the two morally, which is the question at hand.

Thus far, we have seen that vampires are moral agents, because they possess both reason and free will; that vampires have a viable alternative to eating humans, namely animals; and that we cannot morally justify drinking human blood over animals via a preference of taste, a fulfillment of maximum potential, or because of a spiritual peace that is derived from it.

Cold Clammy Consistency

There is much to be learned from beasts.

—Dracula in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

If vampires have a moral obligation not to drink human blood, what does that mean for us as humans? On the surface it may allow us simply to say that vampires who kill humans are morally corrupt, which can give us justification for slaying them. More importantly, however, it offers us an opportunity to evaluate our own actions to see if our actions are consistent with what we would demand of vampires. Consistency can be conceived of in a few related but different ways. Consistency may mean a lack of contradiction; that is, it is not possible for both claims to be true at the same time. We cannot within our moral beliefs hold that it is acceptable to stab innocent people in the heart with a stake, and that murder is wrong. Consistency also means that we should apply rules and justifications in a consistent manner. If I use an argument in one case, I must apply that same argument in every similar case, unless there are relevant differences. Consistency in our moral beliefs is imperative. Barring relevant differences, we assign rights and freedoms to everyone consistently. The Golden Rule demands that we treat other people according to the standard by which we would like to be treated, and we expect consistent application of the law. If I were to get ten years in jail for murder and someone else were to get only a fine for the same crime, it would be a gross miscarriage of justice, precisely because the law would not be treating two similar cases equally.

We have examined and rejected a number of arguments for why it is acceptable for vampires to drink human blood. Vampires get a spiritual peace from eating humans. Vampires need human blood to reach their full potential. Humans are pleasing to the palate of vampires. We’ve also found a reason why vampires should drink the blood of rats rather than humans: More unnecessary suffering is caused when a human dies at the hands of a vampire than when a rat does. If we are to be consistent in our condemnation of vampires for eating humans, then we must examine our human eating habits in a similar fashion. Clearly, cannibalism, a type of human-eating, is wrong under normal circumstances.[68] But most people don’t eat other people on a daily basis; instead we eat chicken, pork, or beef, with a generous helping of potatoes. If we are to be consistent in our condemnation of vampires, can we continue eating like this?

We are in a very similar position to the vampire’s to begin with. We are rational creatures who can reflect upon the morality of our actions. We also have options before us. It’s not absolutely necessary for us to eat meat to survive. There are eight essential amino acids that people need to ingest to survive (ten for children), and they can all be found in plant sources. All vitamins and minerals that are necessary to avoid deficiency diseases like scurvy, pellagra, and rickets can either be manufactured by the body or readily found in fruits and vegetables.[69] Vegetarianism is the alternative to the human diet, just as rats are the alternative to the diet of vampires.

So why do we eat animals? Few would argue that they get some kind of spiritual peace from eating chicken, beef, or pork. But even if they did, it seems like there is a more important concern that we must take into consideration: the pain and suffering inflicted upon animals. To meet the demand of human consumption, animals are often raised in what are known as “factory farms” that aim to produce the greatest amount of meat with the least amount of input in the shortest amount of time. Little concern is given to the animals’ welfare at these farms. Chickens’ beaks are cut off and talons are removed, so they do not peck or scratch each other to death in overcrowded conditions. Pigs’ tails are cut off to prevent them from being chewed on by other pigs. Slaughterhouses (which almost all animals go to before they reach the supermarket) sometimes skin or boil animals alive because their conveyer system runs too quickly for the animal to bleed to death.[70] Reducing these creatures’ pain and suffering is much more important than achieving some kind of spiritual peace from eating them. Indeed, it may be rather difficult to attain spiritual peace knowing that the animal you are eating lived a life of painful misery, solely to provide meat at $4.50 a pound instead of $6.00 a pound. The efficiency of the factory farm keeps prices low, but the cost savings is at the expense of the quality of animals’ lives.

Perhaps humans need to eat meat to reach their fullest potential. Again the question arises: what do we mean by fullest potential? But even if we push that argument aside for the moment, we are faced with yet another problem: the world-class vegetarian athlete. Athletes that win gold medals at the Olympics and hold world records are generally considered the pinnacle of human physical potential. Dave Scott is a six-time Hawaii Iron Man Champion (a triathlon competitor) and a vegetarian. Andreas Cahling won the Olympic gold medal in the ski jump in 1980. Bill Pickering swam from England to France in 14 hours, 6 minutes—a world record time—and is a vegetarian. Bill Pearl won the Mr. Universe Bodybuilding title in 1971, without steroids, on a vegetarian diet.[71] These are just a few examples of people who have reached the pinnacle of physical human performance, and are vegetarians. Peter Singer (a philosopher who holds the chair of the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University), Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso) are all vegetarians who have arguably reached the pinnacle of mental human performance. If fear of not reaching one’s own fullest potential is keeping a person from being a vegetarian, then these examples show that it can be done. It may not be easy, but reaching one’s full physical or mental potential is not an easy task, vegetarian or not.

Finally, we reach the last argument: that animals are pleasing to the taste of human beings. Just as vampires prefer the taste of human blood, many people prefer the taste of animals. But for the same reasons, this provides little justification for the eating of animals. Morality is not about satisfying our preferences, but rather evaluating our actions and choices to make the best one. I may have an intense desire to bite Kirsten Dunst in the neck, but it would be wrong for me to do so, at least without her (and my wife’s) permission. The wrongness in eating animals stems from the pain and suffering that is caused not only from raising them, but from their unnecessary slaughter. It is unnecessary because we have a viable option to do otherwise—vegetarianism.

There are many opponents of vegetarianism. Some may argue that animals in the wild will kill each other, so what makes it wrong for us to kill them? The difference is that animals, for the most part, are not moral agents. They cannot think and reflect about their actions in a moral fashion, so they cannot be held morally accountable for their actions. It would be wrong for me to relieve myself on the lawn of a neighbor—in fact I could be arrested for such an act—but my cat would not be arrested for such an act since she doesn’t know any better and cannot do otherwise.

Some might wonder why vampires should be allowed to eat animals, while humans should not. If vampires could exist without drinking blood of any kind, then perhaps they would have a moral duty to do so as well. But by most accounts vampires need some kind of blood to continue in a minimal way. Usually insanity is the result of a lack of blood for a vampire. When a vampire is insane, he or she cannot reason, and would be free of moral responsibilities not to drink human blood. Much like a person who is so drunk that they are not aware of what they are doing, they technically have no moral responsibilities. However, this is not to say they are off the hook entirely, since they have the ability not to get that drunk in the first place. Similarly if vampires simply refuse blood until they go insane, they can still be held accountable for that action. This accounts for a need to drink blood. Without blood, they cannot be moral agents. So between the lesser of two evils, they should choose to drink animal blood in the most humane way, rather than human blood. When vampires choose to drink human blood they cause unnecessary suffering to the victim and to the victim’s loved ones. Since it is necessary for vampires to eat, choosing to eat a less intelligent animal would cause less suffering. Similarly, we as humans must choose between killing vegetables or animals. Since vegetables cannot feel in any sense of the word, because feeling would require a nervous system of some sort, there would be less pain and suffering generated by eating the plant than the animal.

The connection between vampires and vegetarians is a simple one: we as human beings are vampiric. We need to ingest life for us to live, just like vampires. But how we choose the life that we ingest determines whether or not we are monstrous like vampires, or virtuous.

12

Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t: Vampires and the Hedonistic Paradox

ROBERT ARP

The Vampire’s Plight

How long have I shunned the caress of soft light upon my cheek, how long have I longed to feel the gentle wind in my hair, love in my heart, and hate? Yet, my soul is dead; I cannot feel, cannot see the light of day. Still, my curse is the greatest of gifts. The taste of blood is sweet as the sweetest honey to me. I embrace each passing night of my unlife, and the call of blood is my blessing.

This anonymous quotation from the Internet captures the plight of the vampire. Imagine having the capacity to live for several lifetimes driven by a thirst for blood, while not really being able to feel or experience what you are going through in those lifetimes. At best, there is some sort of relief when you have had your fill of blood. The hollowed-out life of a junkie might be the closest thing to a vampire’s life we could imagine, with the desire for the next “fix” consuming all of one’s existence.

Think of Jason Patric’s vampire character, Michael, in Joel Schumacher’s 1987 film The Lost Boys, or Brad Pitt’s vampire character, Louis, in Neil Jordan’s 1994 Interview with the Vampire. When they try to resist their urges for blood, they become wild-eyed, frantic, and driven to “feed their need.” Add to this picture the fact that the vampire is aware of the inability to feel, then one can see how the vampire’s situation kind of sucks (pun intended)! Again, talk to ex-junkies, and they will tell you that they knew their lives were hollowed-out, devoid of anything other than the desire for the next fix.

Such is the plight of a vampire’s unlife, in a nutshell. I do not mean to say that all vampires in every vampire story have such an unlife. There are vampires who seem to be content with who and what they are, as appears to be the case with the vampire community in the movie Underworld.[72] But, there are a great number of vampires in a great number of stories whose unlives really do suck. And a vampire’s unlife can teach us valuable lessons about our own real lives. After all, vampire lore emerges from our innermost desires, not only to live forever, indulge in our basest passions, and be subversive, but to embrace our mortality, control the animal within, and blot out evil wherever it may lurk.[73] There are many different vampire stories as well as many different kinds of vampires. As one might expect, the personalities of vampires and the stories told about them are as varied as the authors who tell us the tales.[74]

I Am Neither Living nor Dead—I Am Undead

What is the fundamental nature of a vampire? How and in what form exactly does a vampire exist? These questions are metaphysical in nature. Metaphysics is the area of philosophy that investigates the nature and principles of things that exist. Metaphysicians want to know what really exists in reality, what kinds of things make up reality, and how things are related to one another. If vampires really did exist, then we would see that, as members of the Undead community who make their way around the planet earth, vampires seem to be a composite of a dead material body and an immaterial soul/spirit/mind. This view is akin to a version of metaphysical dualism in the philosophical subdiscipline of metaphysics known as philosophy of mind. According to metaphysical dualism in philosophy of mind, a person is made up of a material body and an immaterial mind.

Let’s consider two versions of metaphysical dualism, substance dualism and property dualism. According to substance dualism a person is made up of two wholly distinct substances, a mind and a body, that can exist apart from one another. Those who believe in the immortality of the soul are substance dualists because they think that the death of the body does not mean the death of the soul. The soul lives on after the death of the body. According to property dualism a person is one substance that is made up of two wholly distinct properties, an immaterial mental property (the mind and mental states) and a material bodily property (the brain and neurophysiological states). On this view, the mind and brain are distinct properties of some one person similar to the way “roundness” and “blackness” are distinct properties found in the one period at the end of this sentence. Just as we can distinguish the property of roundness from the property of blackness in some one period, so too, we can distinguish an immaterial mental property from a material bodily property in some one person. However, just as the roundness and blackness of that particular period can exist only while that particular period exists, so too, according to property dualists the mental and bodily properties of a person can exist only while that person is alive. So when we delete the period, the properties of roundness and blackness in that particular period cease to exist along with the period. Likewise, when a person dies, both that person’s body and mind cease to exist. Such a view of mind in relation to body seems to be consistent with scientific data, and is appealing to those who do not believe in the immortality of the soul.[75]

According to some vampire stories, the vampire’s cursed soul will continue to live on in hell or some other non-worldly realm after its dead body has been destroyed, indicating a substance form of dualism. This seems to be the case for Lestat, Louis, and the other vampires in Anne Rice’s stories; also, Bram Stoker undoubtedly had this conception in Dracula. In other stories, the vampire’s soul ceases to exist when its dead body is destroyed by sunlight or a stake through the heart, indicating a property form of dualism. This seems to be the case in Marv Wolfman’s Blade the Vampire Slayer comic book series as well as with Carol Jones Daly’s 1947 vampire novel, The Legion of the Living Dead.[76] In either form of dualism the dead body, in some form, seems to be necessary in order to maintain the vampire’s existence as it makes its way around in this world. At the same time, in both substance dualism and property dualism a distinction can be made between characteristics or properties of one’s bodily life, and characteristics or properties of one’s mental life. In other words, both substance dualists and property dualists think that there is something about the mental realm that makes it distinct from the bodily realm—again, either in substance or in property. In a moment, we will see why this distinction is important for understanding how it is that a vampire might be able to experience a certain form of pleasure and pain.

Many vampires are portrayed as unable to experience the pleasures and pains associated with things like love, food, and drink or, like the vampire in the opening quotation, the pleasure of the wind in one’s hair or the pain of hatred. Not only do Lestat and Louis have this problem in the Anne Rice stories, but the vampires in Jeff Rice’s The Night Stalker,[77] Jacques Cazotte’s The Devil in Love,[78] and James Gunn’s The Immortals[79] as well. The vampire Strahd bemoans his lack of feeling in I Strahd: The Memoirs of a Vampire,[80] and even Dracula himself, the original bloodsucker, can’t seem to get any satisfaction. These portrayals should strike us as strange because the vampires usually appear to be in some state of anger, pain, or anguish when describing their state, indicating that they can, in fact, feel something . . . pain! Consider the movie Van Helsing when, during a conversation with his two female vampire minions, Dracula screams in anguish that he feels nothing, but longs to feel nonetheless.[81] Or consider what George Hamilton’s vampire character says to Renfield in Love at First Bite when Renfield asks the vampire if he is happy: “Happy? How would you like to dine on nothing but a warm liquid protein diet while all around you, people are eating lamb chops, potato chips, Mallomars . . . Chivas Regal on the rocks with a twist?”[82] Maybe it is just that, because they are cursed in some way or damned by a god, vampires can experience only pain and will never be able to experience pleasure as part of their continual cursedness or punishment. If the idea of vampires experiencing some form of pain seems unconvincing, there are plenty of instances where vampires seem to be experiencing pleasure while sucking blood, deceiving, wooing women (or men), or engaging in sexual intercourse.

The most straightforward reason usually given as to why vampires cannot feel pleasure or pain is their bodies are dead, or no longer functioning. Since pleasure and pain are feelings requiring a functioning body to experience them, it makes sense that vampires cannot have these feelings. Yet, Dracula’s frustration in Van Helsing is a common theme among vampire personalities and their stories. So, it seems that vampires both do and do not have experiences of pleasure and pain. What accounts for this contradiction?

A way to clear up this problem might be to distinguish between two different senses of pleasure and pain, the way that the moral philosopher, John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), does in his famous work Utilitarianism. There are those “lower” pleasures or pains that are most appropriately understood as feelings associated with a body. Examples of these pleasures and pains would be aches, pains, and “butterflies in the stomach” as well as euphoric surges and adrenaline rushes. Normally when we think of pleasure and pain, we think of them in this bodily way, associated with the neurophysiological processes of a living animal with an intact nervous system. Then there are “higher” pleasures and pains understood as qualitative experiences associated with a mind. Examples of these would include the pleasure of discovering the solution to a complex math problem, the pain of having made an immoral decision that cannot be undone, or the pleasure of knowing one is loved by a friend. Here, the pleasures and pains are less bodily and more mental, and have names like joy, contentment, satisfaction, regret, and sorrow.

Armed with this distinction between lower and higher pleasures and pains, we might be able to clear up some of the confusion concerning a vampire’s experience of pleasure and pain. We can make sense of the quotation at the beginning of this chapter by noting that the cursed soul or spirit or mind of the vampire, its immaterial, mental part, is expressing regret or sorrow (qualitative experiences associated with the mind) at being unable to be pleased by wind in its hair or the taste of fine wine (feelings associated with the body). The vampire is expressing a higher, mental pain about a lack of a lower, bodily pleasure.

Either Way, I’m Damned if I Do

Even though we hear vampires lament the fact that they cannot experience pleasure and pain, we have to question their sincerity. They seem to be in some kind of pain while lamenting and seem greatly to enjoy sucking blood from their victims. The distinction between higher and lower pleasures may help us out here. Vampires may be cursed with a higher, mental pain while lamenting their lack of feelings in their bodies. Similarly, they may gain a higher, mental pleasure from satisfying their need for blood. (By the way, it is a curious thing that vampires should need blood in the first place. What do they need it for? On most vampire accounts, their bodies are dead, so the blood does not act like a food product.) However, on several accounts, it appears that the vampire is deriving a kind of base, physical, bodily pleasure from its evil pursuits of blood-sucking, deception, and “turning.” Recall that the taste of blood is “sweet honey” and a “blessing” for the vampire in the opening quotation. And consider what Louis says about Lestat in Interview with the Vampire:

Lestat killed two, sometimes three a night. A fresh young girl, that was his favorite for the first of the evening. For seconds, he preferred a gilded beautiful youth. But the snob in him loved to hunt in society, and the blood of the aristocrat thrilled him best of all. (p. 46)

If we put aside the obvious problem that a vampire’s body is dead, and we imagine that there is some connection between its bodily desires and its own cursed mental satisfaction, then there is another way in which we can make sense of the vampire’s plight. It may be that the vampire “can’t get no satisfaction” because of its inappropriate focus on the pursuit of “bodily” pleasure. One of the reasons why the vampire Lestat is so fascinating in the Anne Rice stories is that he is somewhat of a pleasure-seeker who continually searches for, but never really finds, satisfaction or contentment in his cursed life. His cursed, fictitious life reminds us of our own real lives. As we shall see, there are problems that arise from focusing either on pleasure itself, or the wrong pleasures in life.

Both vampires and mortals must confront the hedonistic paradox.[83] The basic idea behind the hedonistic paradox is that whenever pleasure itself is the object sought, either it is not found or it is found. If pleasure is not found, the result is the pain associated with not finding the pleasure one seeks. In an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I watched recently, one of the vampire characters says to another vampire that he “hates not getting what he wants,” in reference to having to suck the blood from a less-than-desirable woman.

On the other hand, if pleasure is found, especially on a consistent basis, the result is still pain. The pain results from either finding pains that are mistaken for pleasures in the long or short term, or from the boredom of always getting the pleasures one wants. Think of the way that Louis fools Lestat into sucking the blood from the already dead twin girls in Interview with the Vampire, and how Lestat mistakes this painful experience for a great pleasure; albeit it was a mistake, in part, prompted by Louis’s deception. Or think of the vampires who are destroyed by Blade (presumably, a great pain) at the “rave” in the beginning of the movie Blade, and how they mistakenly think that they have come to a bloodfest featuring fresh young human meat (presumably, a great pleasure).[84] Concerning the issue of boredom, consider Lestat’s complaint of virtually “seeing it all” and being bored in The Vampire Lestat, or a deluded man who thinks he’s a vampire in Katherine Ramsland’s Piercing the Darkness: Undercover with Vampires in America Today claiming that “it’s somewhat boring, living forever.”[85]

Either way, whether pleasure is found or not, the result paradoxically is still pain. The hedonistic paradox is “hedonistic” because of the focus on the pleasure being sought (hedon is Greek for pleasure). It is a paradox because one consistently finds the exact opposite (pain) of what one set out to find in the beginning (pleasure).

Is there any way out of the hedonistic paradox for a vampire who wants to continue pursuing pleasure for the sake of pleasure itself? Vampires may not fall victim to the hedonistic paradox for a couple of reasons. One of the problems with pursuing pleasure is the boredom associated with always getting what one wants. A central question that needs to be answered is whether there could be innumerable pleasures to be had at one’s disposal. Put another way, given the number of possible activities imaginable, and the pleasures associated with those activities, is it possible to exhaust all of those activities, gain the pleasures, and become bored with the pleasures attained? If there could be innumerable pleasures out there to be had, then it seems as though it would not be possible, even for a vampire with many lifetimes at its disposal, to achieve all of them—in which case, boredom would never ensue.

Now it would seem that a vampire, who has the capacity to live several lifetimes, surely would become bored after a certain amount of time. But this would depend upon whether that vampire had experienced each and every possible pleasure to be experienced. If one is inclined to think that the amount and range of possible pleasurable experiences are limited or finite, then it is more likely that boredom would result for a vampire who lives several lifetimes. On the other hand, if one is inclined to think that the amount and rage of possible pleasurable experiences are unlimited or infinite, then it is more likely that boredom would not result. Again, the primary question that needs to be answered is whether there could be innumerable pleasures to be had at one’s disposal. If the answer to this question is yes, and one never gets bored or experiences pain, it would seem that one horn of the paradox can be avoided. If the answer is no, and one does get bored or experience pain, it would seem that it cannot.

Further, the distinction between lower bodily pleasures and higher mental pleasures may help us out once again. Within the bodily realm, there seem to be a variety of different pleasures associated with a variety of different bodily activities. In fact, any pleasure or pain is only a pleasure or pain as it is associated with some form of bodily or mental activity for a human. There are no lower or higher pleasures or pains without bodily or mental activities. This being the case, pleasures are aligned with activities that run the gamut from hurting us in the short term and hurting us in the long term to helping us in the short term and helping us in the long term. For example, there’s a difference between the pleasures to be had from smoking crack and from pursuing a variety of extreme sports. All things considered, the likelihood of the crack harming you regardless of the precautions you take is much higher than the likelihood of being harmed while consciously and cautiously pursuing an extreme sport.

Is it possible to pursue pleasure and avoid the paradox? It’s easy to see how a life of pursuing lower, bodily pleasures leads one into the pains of not finding what one seeks, mistaking pain for pleasure, or even boredom. This becomes all the more obvious in the case of a vampire that can live several lifetimes. But could one fall victim to the hedonistic paradox in the pursuit of higher, mental pleasures? Consider the distinction between pleasures that result from ongoing activities and pleasures that result from the knowledge of being in certain completed states. Recall the earlier examples of solving a math problem and being loved by a friend. These are not ongoing activities, but completed states of being, where one has knowledge of these states. The knowledge of these states brings with it a sustaining, almost satiating, form of mental pleasure.

Aristotle has something like this in mind when he investigates various forms of pleasure in Book Ten of his Nicomachean Ethics. It may be that bodily pleasures are more the result of ongoing activities, while mental pleasures are more the result of being in a certain state. With this distinction in mind, we may be able better to understand how hardcore mathematicians or true friends achieve satisfaction, contentment, or joy associated with these states. If math equations don’t do it for you, think of some tough project, assignment, or task that you completed and are happy about having completed. Or, think of the runner who trained all of her life for and actually finished the big marathon, the father of three who finally got his Masters in Business Administration through night school, or the hero who saved the child from drowning. Now think of these folks reflecting upon their accomplishments with joy. Such joys would seem to be of the kind that, when reflected upon, last a lifetime. A stronger case might be made for one falling victim to the hedonistic paradox in the pursuit of either the solution to a math equation, a lasting friendship, a marathon race, or an MBA prior to achieving a completed state, in that one may never find what one seeks. However, once in a certain completed state it would seem that the pleasure is continuous with the knowledge of the completed state.

Good Guy Vampires?

If a vampire engages in physical pleasure-seeking for its own sake, then we can see how such a lifestyle would lead to a kind of hollowed-out existence, not unlike that of a junkie. A junkie gets to the point where he or she physically must have the drug in order to survive, at least in the short term. Most junkies choose, at first, to use drugs and can change their ways. Maybe vampires should be pitied for their blood-sucking ways. After all, it seems that they are unlike junkies in that they are just built to suck blood. In fact, for most vampires, human blood is a necessary food source.

As Angie says to Joel, the serial killer who is becoming a vampire in the movie Addicted to Murder: “You can’t change your nature. You can’t contain it, you can’t shift it. You can only be what you are meant to be.”[86] But even those members of our community who cannot control themselves, like pedophiles, must regulate their desires or have their desires and actions regulated for them. Vampires could ask members of the human community to donate enough blood to their cause so that they need not take it forcibly, and I am sure that there would be kind-hearted souls willing to oblige. In Barbara Hambly’s book Those Who Hunt the Night, we are told that vampires “can—and do, at need—live upon the blood of animals, or blood taken from the living without need of their death.”[87]

Starting in the 1960s with vampires like Barnabas Collins in the television series Dark Shadows and Forrest J. Ackerman’s comic book character Vampirella, and continuing through the 1980s and 1990s with Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s vampire hero, St. Germain, and Nick Knight in the series Forever Knight, there have been “good guy vampires.” These vampires actually recognize that, although they must feed upon blood to survive, they can do so without either giving in to their basest needs or harming people in the process. Further, they have been able to generate moral codes, establish vampire cultures, create strong bonds with mortals, pursue “loftier” activities such as are found in academia and the arts, and find contentment in using their “dark” powers for the good of their own kind as well as humankind.[88][89] In other words, these vampires have been able to skirt the hedonistic paradox altogether either by pursuing higher mental pleasures or by engaging in activities for the sake of the activities themselves, rather than for the pleasure to be gained from the activities.

Vampires, like the humans who invented them, have varying degrees of desires for different kinds of things. Consequently, certain vampires will fall victim to the hedonistic paradox. If one’s focus is consistently the pursuit of bodily pleasure itself, then we can see how pain will result, especially if one is a vampire with the capacity to live several lifetimes. More banal vampires could live lives that are both blessed and cursed. They could be “blessed” in that they have the potential to live forever, indulge in their every physical desire, and do what they want irrespective of any moral code. Yet, these are the very things that ultimately become “cursed” for them. Living several lifetimes gets boring because they have “seen and done it all.” Indulging their physical desires becomes either painful or boring, and doing what they want makes them targets of evil and corruption to be hunted down and destroyed.

One need not be a vampire, nor live several lifetimes, to see that the pursuit of pleasure solely, especially bodily pleasure, offers few blessings. There is wisdom in the famous moral philosopher John Stuart Mill’s claim that happiness in life is attained by not making pleasure one’s focus: “Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own pleasure. . . . Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness along the way. . . . Ask yourself if you are happy, and you cease to be so.”

13

Deserving to Be a Vampire: The Ethical and Existential Elements of Vampirism

TED M. PRESTON

I was once paid an extraordinary compliment: “Ted, I can’t say this about many people, but I think you would make a great vampire.” I swelled with pride. Vampires are powerful, mysterious, immortal, and sexy (just review the vampire “headquarters” in the film, Underworld, if you have any doubts). I have sometimes found myself daydreaming about what it would be like to be a vampire. In my daydreams, it’s always good (though I’d have to teach only evening classes if I wanted to continue in my current profession). But (and here the “professional philosopher” bares his fangs), upon reflection, I have to wonder, would it truly be good to be a vampire? Morally good? Desirable?

If there’s something immoral about vampirism, and if being a good person is of some importance to me—shouldn’t that give me an overriding reason to reject vampirism (in the fantastic and fictional scenario in which it’s offered), no matter how super-naturally sexy I might become?

It’s often assumed that vampires are evil by their very nature. There’s a strong and immediate objection to vampirism from within a Christian perspective. If Jesus of Nazareth is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” and the only legitimate source of eternal life, then any alternative route to immortality could easily be regarded as rebellion against God. Indeed, many of the stereotypical weaknesses of vampires depend upon this perception that they have somehow rebelled against God. Consider their aversion to crosses, their “allergy” to holy water, and so on. Indeed, in the film Dracula 2000, this notion of rebellion is expressed by making Dracula’s true identity none other than Judas Iscariot (the betrayer of Jesus) himself.

But not everyone agrees with the explicit and implicit claims and assumptions of Christianity. If our sole concern with respect to vampirism is that it’s “sinful,” then anyone who can’t appreciate or take seriously the notion of sin (or at least sin within that particular religious context) will already be alienated from our investigation. Accordingly, I will focus on the concerns potentially arising from vampirism in a way that doesn’t rely on any overt theological assumptions.

Got Blood?

Perhaps Vampirism is both immoral and undesirable due to the unquenchable thirst for blood it causes. If vampirism is akin to addiction, then perhaps we have available a secular interpretation of being “cursed”—especially if a vampire’s thirst causes irresistible compulsions to feed. In the tragic television series finale of Forever Knight, vampire-cop “Nick” loses control of his hunger and drains to death the mortal woman he loves. So distraught is he when he realizes what he has done, that he begs for his maker (“Lacroix”) to stake him out of his misery.

Either vampires can control their feeding, and exercise discretion, or can’t. If they lack the ability to exercise restraint or judgment, wouldn’t we be inclined not to hold them morally responsible for their actions anyway? This doesn’t mean, of course, that we wouldn’t defend ourselves against them—much as we do against dangerous (but deranged) mortals. What’s important, though, is that we don’t hold responsible (morally or legally) those who literally could not help but do as they did—with one important qualification: we often do hold persons responsible if it is their own free choice that leads them to the point of compulsion. As Aristotle claimed long ago, we are responsible for becoming the sorts of persons we are. If someone knows the consequences of certain choices and behavior, they are, in some sense at least, responsible for those consequences even if they lose the power of free choice later on.[90] We might have compassion for an alcoholic, but nevertheless hold him responsible for drinking himself to the point of addiction. Accordingly, we might have pity (rather than moral condemnation) for unwilling (“infected”) vampire spawn, but regard with contempt those like me who might actively seek it out.

Alternatively, vampires can control their hunger. Note that it doesn’t matter that their hunger is never fully satiated. Neither is ours! Mere mortals must feed again and again, or else grow increasingly weak and die. So, if vampires can exhibit self-control, despite their hunger, they’re no worse off than mortals are, and the only concern is how they feed.

Vampires, like the rest of us, must feed to survive. It just so happens that (with a few questionable exceptions) the only food that (apparently) serves to sustain them is human blood.

If feeding on the living in order to survive is, in itself, morally unacceptable, then predatory behavior itself is evil, and at least those of us who have a choice with respect to what we eat are in a lot of moral trouble. After all, this is something we all do, with the possible exception of fruitarians (who consume only fruits, nuts, and seeds so as to avoid killing anything whatsoever). If consuming other living things is morally wrong, then vampires have a lot of similarly immoral company, since billions of mortal humans consume other living things every day. What’s more, when we mortals consume a hamburger, that cow is dead, regardless of how little of it we personally consume. On the other hand, typically it’s not necessary for a vampire to drain his or her victim of all blood. Accordingly, feeding only results in death if the vampire chooses to make it result in death. Then it’s just good old fashioned murder, and the fact that the murderer is a vampire has little, if anything, to do with the moral condemnation.

It stands to reason, then, that the typical feeding pattern of mortals is far more destructive and lethal, on average, than that of vampires. If they are in the wrong, how much more so are most of us?

In summary, vampires can either control their feeding habits, or not. If they can’t, we have a reason to find vampirism undesirable, and we might well be culpable if we seek it out anyway. If self-control is possible, however, we’ve not yet arrived at a reason to find vampirism either immoral, or undesirable.

Does It Hurt?

We must acknowledge that it’s entirely possible that mortals and vampires alike are doing something morally wrong when they consume other living things, on the assumption that simply inflicting pain on something capable of experiencing it is morally suspect. A basic (and overly simplified) utilitarian assumption, for example, is that pain and unhappiness are morally bad to inflict, and pleasure and happiness are morally good to “inflict.” If our mental image of a vampire feeding is that of a hungry monster leaping from the shadows to wound and drain a helpless and shrieking victim (as is the case, for example, in the “feeding” scenes of the film The Lost Boys), such activity does appear to be morally wrong, and if vampirism requires such activity, it appears to be morally wrong as well.

At the least, getting bitten by a vampire probably hurts! But, the “pain,” the harm inflicted, is not merely the physical trauma of the bite. Unwilling victims are harmed in a way analogous to being sexually assaulted.

The sexual associations and imagery long associated with vampire lore are apt. The experience of penetration, unwelcome intimacy, and commingling is applicable to the vampire’s “embrace.” We can easily imagine how terrifying it would be to be attacked from the shadows by someone with the power to do with us whatever they desire. Beyond the fear, we can imagine the humiliation as our personhood is violated even as our veins are. It just seems intuitively obvious that, if anything is morally wrong, grabbing someone against their will, wounding them, weakening them through loss of blood (and maybe even killing them in the process), is wrong. However, it should be clear that the moral problems arising here are not unique to vampires. It’s not the fact that a vampire is doing such things that makes them wrong; it’s something about the actions themselves.

Certainly, not all pain-infliction is unjustifiable. We can imagine all sorts of contexts in which even an intentional, premeditated infliction of pain is not regarded as morally wrong. Going to the dentist often hurts, but we recognize that the normally morally-questionable infliction of pain is overridden by the greater good of preventing even more pain due to tooth decay. Moreover, when we’re taking ourselves to the dentist, we introduce another (important) mitigating factor: consent to being “harmed.” Why should we assume that a vampire’s “meal” must be a victim rather than a willing partner? We could easily imagine an entrepreneurial vampire establishing a blood bank and soliciting voluntary donations (presumably for pay). Indeed, the main character of Blade (the series’ namesake, and another conscientious vampire—morally conflicted to the core) relies on stored blood preserved in his refrigerator for sustenance, rather than going out for something more “fresh.”

If vampires sucking up vials of blood isn’t romantic enough, we can instead easily imagine vampires seeking out, and finding, any number of people who would willingly, and perhaps even happily, submit themselves to a non-lethal “embrace.” In the first Blade film, the character Dr. Karen Jenson altruistically offers her blood to Blade in order to restore his depleted vitality. In Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, Madeleine offers herself to Louis in hopes of becoming a vampire mother-figure to “Claudia.” Accordingly, while pain might be experienced due to the bite, the infliction of pain might be justifiable—particularly if we consider the stories in which vampire “victims” experience a state of ecstasy akin to orgasm.

Vampire feedings could be violent and unwanted, just as sex can be. But, in neither case is violence or coercion a necessary feature of the act. Once again, we come to a common-sense conclusion. It’s not the fact that a vampire is performing a certain act that renders it morally problematic; it’s the nature of the act itself. Acts of violence against unwilling victims are typically regarded as morally wrong whether it’s Dracula doing the deed, or you, or me. It would seem to follow, then, that if a vampire is morally “bad,” it’s because of his or her choices and actions, and not simply by virtue of being a vampire.

Undeath Sure Beats the Alternative

Perhaps the greatest appeal of vampirism is the immortality it promises. One never grows old, never grows weak, never suffers the inevitable decline of body and mind due to age, and never experiences death (unless slain by another, or too long deprived of blood). David, in The Lost Boys, encourages the newly-embraced vampire Michael, “You’ll never grow old, Michael, and you’ll never die.”

Contrast this with the lives we all know, recognize, and expect for ourselves and our loved ones, and the appeal of vampirism is obvious. Who wouldn’t be tempted to evade becoming infirm or senile, to be spared from cancer, Parkinson’s disease, arthritis, and the fear of what awaits us when our bodies are all worn out? Vampirism promises an escape from all such things, and the time to pursue any project we might imagine, do anything we might wish to do. And at what expense (excluding religious concerns)? Daylight? Garlic? As much as I love garlic, and can appreciate a good nap in a sunbeam (a treat taught me by my cat, Morgana), they seem like small prices to pay for an eternal life of strength, vitality, and precious time.

Are we misguided, though, when we try to prolong our lives and avoid death? The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-271 B.C.E.) famously argues that death is not a bad thing (for anyone, mortal or vampire, we might suppose). Assuming that there is no afterlife, he claims that death is “nothing” to us “since when we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we do not exist. Therefore, it is relevant neither to the living nor to the dead, since it does not affect the former, and the latter do not exist.”[91] In other words, when we’re alive, we’re not yet dead (and so we don’t experience death). And, when we’re dead, since we don’t exist, we don’t experience anything at all (including death).

Even if we grant Epicurus his assumption that nothing persists that would actually experience what it is like to be dead, we can nevertheless find ourselves losing sleep about the anticipated pain of the dying process. Maybe death is “nothing,” but getting there might hurt a lot! Even if my loved ones cease to exist at death, I’m still around to grieve their passing. Their death is certainly something to me even if it’s “nothing” to them. Before Rice’s Louis is made immortal, he reports: “I had lost my wife in childbirth. She and the infant had been buried less than half a year; I would have been happy to join them. I couldn’t bear the pain of their loss: I longed to be released from it.”[92] So deep was his pain from their death, he longed for death himself.

Moreover, some have argued that there are ways in which it makes sense for us to say that even nonexistent people (that is, the dead, if they truly cease to exist) can be “harmed” by their death, even if they aren’t around to actually experience it. Contemporary philosopher David Furley puts it in this way: death is bad for the one who dies because it renders empty and vain the plans, hopes, and desires that a person has during life.[93] As an example, imagine that (unbeknownst to you), you have a terminal disease, and have very little time left to live. Of course, you’re unaware of this fact, so you continue to make plans, assuming that you’ll be alive to pursue them. Also unbeknownst to you, your friends and family know of your true condition, and know all too well that you’ll soon be dead. From the perspective of your better-informed friends and family members, your hopes and plans for the future seem (presently, to them) vain, futile—even perhaps pathetic—since your goals are doomed to incompleteness. How sad that you’re planning a vacation that you’ll never take! Moreover, the futility is not removed by removing the knowing spectators. Furley claims that any death that frustrates hopes and plans is bad for the person who dies since it reflects, retrospectively, on that life, and shows that the hopes and projects the person entertained have been, at the very time the person was forming them, empty and meaningless.

Another contemporary philosopher, Martha C. Nussbaum, appreciates this argument because it shows how death reflects back on an actual life, and how our intuitions about the “badness” of death don’t depend on “the irrational fiction of a surviving subject.”[94] This has the advantage of sidestepping Epicurus’s claim that death is “nothing” because we don’t exist to experience it. After all, it’s not a non-existing (dead) person who is being harmed by death, but an actual living person (like you or me) that is being threatened right now by the power that death has to ruin all our plans and make us look like fools for assuming we had a future in the first place.

In an impressive (and depressing) move, Nussbaum adds to Furley’s argument by appealing to the apparent fact that the relationships and activities we tend to cherish all take place over some span of time, and by showing how death threatens them by threatening that span. Our relationships have a structure that evolves and deepens over time; they project into the future and involve planning and hoping. Our projects and activities, too, develop over time.

The sorts of “projects” referred to are not necessarily discrete activities, but can also be complex projects involving plans to do something, or certain sorts of things, repeatedly over the course of a complete life. Projects such as having a good marriage, or being a good philosopher, or a wine enthusiast, are subject to frustration by death not because some particular activity is interrupted. That is, the threat doesn’t arise because death interrupts a honeymoon, or the completion of an essay for The Undead and Philosophy, or finishing a glass of Vampire Merlot (not a joke—this wine label really exists!), but because of the interruption of “a pattern of daily acting and interacting, extended over time, in which the temporal extension, including the formation of patterns and habits, is a major source of its value and depth”[95] Death threatens to bring to an abrupt halt the project of my marriage, and any sort of project whatsoever. In fact, death interrupts the most basic (but perhaps most profound and important) project of all: living a complete human life.

The appeal of vampirism should now be obvious, if it wasn’t already. Being a vampire allows us to defy death. In so doing, our projects remain open. We always retain hope that our goals can be accomplished, whatever they might happen to be. Thus, the avoidance of death alone makes it a good (desirable) thing to be a vampire. So long as vampires don’t abuse others (for example, by feeding on unwilling victims), that is, so long as they are not bad vampires, then there is nothing bad about being a vampire.

Undeath: Ultimately Uninteresting?

Even if we can agree that being a vampire isn’t itself morally objectionable, it might yet remain undesirable. What on Earth could make a potentially eternal life undesirable? Eternality.

A common theme in vampire stories, especially the contemporary variety, is the ever-present threat of boredom. The idea is this: once you’ve had a few centuries of life, let alone a couple millennia, you’ve “seen and done it all.” Novelist Susan Ertz writes, in Anger in the Sky, “Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”

If your life is boring, death eventually becomes an attractive and preferable alternative. Rice’s “Armand” says, “the world changes, we do not, there lies the irony that finally kills us.” One can then imagine vampires, suffering from ennui, intentionally hurling themselves chest-first onto stakes or venturing too far from their coffins to make it back before sunrise.

I suspect that many of you, like myself, have little sympathy for this concern. The solution that presents itself seems obvious enough: don’t let your life be boring!

This criticism of the value of immortality assumes that existence necessarily becomes wearisome, given enough time.[96] To combat this line of reasoning we need only believe that there are “repeatable” pleasures—pleasures that are satisfying when experienced, but such that one would desire to repeat the experience in the future (though not necessarily right away). Candidates for such pleasures are the delights of sex and food and drink, experiencing fine art, pleasant conversation, and so on.[97]

I doubt that I’ll ever get tired of really excellent food. There are so many different types of cuisine and dishes, after all. On the very plausible assumption that there are a great many repeatable pleasures (admittedly relative to each person), does it really seem plausible that vampires would necessarily be overwhelmed by boredom? Why couldn’t “the simple things” continue to entertain them? As “Kraven” from the film Underworld poses (rhetorically): “What’s the point of being immortal if you deny yourself the simple pleasures in life?”

Billions of humans (with new ones born every day) offer seemingly limitless potential for interaction. Ever-evolving human creativity and invention means vampires will enjoy new technologies and art forms. Imagine the possibilities opened by cyberspace for an ancient vampire! Is it really plausible that vampires would necessarily be doomed to boredom? I don’t think so. Having “done it all” only seems possible in a static world, but our world changes. Even if I’m wrong, sunlight always remains as a release from the alleged tedium of Undeath.

Although I remain convinced that vampirism is awfully appealing, I will consider one final (though related) concern. Despite arguing that death is, indeed, a “bad thing,” Nussbaum also claims that the intensity and dedication with which we pursue certain of our tasks is necessarily related to the awareness we have of our mortality. We don’t have the luxury of an eternity ahead of us. “In raising a child, in cherishing a lover, in performing a demanding task of work or thought or artistic creation, we are aware, at some level, of the thought that each of these efforts is structured and constrained by finite time.”[98]

If I had (literally) “forever” ahead of me, would I ever get around to pursuing my goals? Couldn’t I always put them off, knowing that I could always come back to them? It was a recognition that I’m getting older, and that I don’t have too many decades left (at best!), that inspired me recently to return to my martial arts training in preparation for opening my own dojo when I’m ready to retire from academia. Without the limits set by mortality and declining health and vigor, would I have seen any pressing need to resume training?

The answer is a resounding, “I don’t know.” What I do know is that an awareness, even a keen awareness, of mortality, is certainly no guarantee that one will “seize the day.” Thoreau’s words in Walden are beautiful: he “wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life . . . to put to rout all that was not life; and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” However romantic it might sound, how many of us actually live like that despite our mortality staring us in our face? Mortal that I am, I know that I value the present moment far less frequently, and far less intensely, than I should. I doubt I’m alone in this. The point is that mortality is no more a guarantee of a life lived to the fullest than immortality is a guarantee of boredom and value lost. The determining factor is our own idiosyncratic contribution to our own lives.

So, having shown that vampirism needn’t be intrinsically immoral, and that there are certainly reasons to desire it for oneself, we’re left with an uncomfortable but uncompromising fact: neither I, nor you, however much we might desire otherwise, is going to become a vampire. So what’s the point of musing about it at all?

Deserving to Be a Vampire

In the end, the thought-experiment of Unlife serves us as a means of understanding the mortal life we actually know and experience, and allows us to focus on just what it is that makes life valuable in the first place. A life that wouldn’t be much good over a span as long as eternity might not be terribly worthwhile for a mere eighty years either. On the other hand, a life overflowing with joy and stimulation, with healthy and thriving relationships, with the satisfaction that comes from dreams pursued and goals accomplished—who wouldn’t want that to last forever? And wouldn’t it be wonderful if it could?

Vampires can be immoral just like we can. It all depends on choices made. A vampire’s eternal life might be as unbearably unsatisfying as our own can be. It all depends on choices made. Since it’s unlikely any of us will find ourselves vampires some day, why not do the next best thing? Try to live a life that would be worthy of eternity.

PART IV

Digging Up the Body Politic

14

The Political Economy of Non-Coercive Vampire Lifestyles

DOUGLAS GLEN WHITMAN

In a Season 5 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy discovers the existence of a vampire brothel, where thrill-seeking humans pay vampires to suck their blood.[99] The vampires benefit from the arrangement because, as Buffy’s friend Anya observes, “they get cash, hot-and-cold running blood, and they don’t leave any corpses behind, so they don’t get hunted.” An angry Buffy eventually burns down the brothel. But her Watcher, Rupert Giles, adopts a more accommodating attitude, noting that all the brothel’s customers are “willing victims” and suggesting that Buffy’s efforts might be better spent combating a “less ambiguous evil.”

In the movie Blade, occasional reference is made to blood banks that take deposits from humans and allow withdrawals by vampires.[100] Although the movie does not state clearly whether the donations are mandatory or voluntary in nature, the strong implication is that the human government requires humans to contribute blood in order to placate the vampires, thereby forestalling a war between the two groups.[101]

The Buffy and Blade scenarios present radically different templates for interaction between humans and vampires. The former “brothel” model shows the potential for peaceful and non-coercive coexistence, sustained by the possibility of voluntary exchange. The latter “blood bank” model reveals a quasi-peaceful but coercive coexistence, enabled by forced transfers from humans to vampires.

In this chapter, I will use these two models of vampire-human interaction to explore the conflict between two popular perspectives in political philosophy, which I will refer to as “libertarian” and “welfarist.” In the libertarian perspective, represented by such thinkers as Robert Nozick,[102] Loren Lomasky,[103] and David Schmidtz,[104] people have individual rights the violation or curtailment of which cannot be justified by the needs of other beings, except perhaps under very unusual circumstances. Ideally, interactions between rights-bearing persons should be voluntary in nature, and social cooperation is sustained by the possibility of many such voluntary interactions. In the welfarist perspective, represented by such thinkers as Peter Singer,[105] Peter Unger,[106] and G.A. Cohen,[107] society should be structured to ensure that the basic needs of all people are met, even when it entails sacrifices by others. Social co-operation for this purpose may properly be mandated if it does not occur voluntarily.

Either perspective must specify what kind of beings should be included in the moral calculus. Do only fully developed humans have rights or interests worthy of consideration? Or does moral consideration extend to other types of beings, such as animals, fetuses, and the Undead? I will argue that, on almost any plausible definition of moral personhood, vampires ought to be included. Yet humanity does not seem inclined to adopt such an inclusive definition. On the contrary, most humans believe vampires’ interests ought to be actively opposed. I will suggest, however, that intolerant human attitudes toward vampires are neither fixed in stone nor fully malleable, but instead are influenced by political and economic institutions. People will be most willing to recognize vampire personhood under a more libertarian system (the brothel model), which emphasizes voluntarism and gains from cooperation. On the other hand, a more welfarist system (the mandatory blood bank model) will motivate humans to adopt more restrictive notions of personhood in order to avoid the burdens—in blood and money—of supporting the vampire population.

Libertarianism and Welfarism Defined

I Have Learned Not to Think Little of Any One’s Belief, No Matter How Strange It Be. [108]

Libertarian philosophers are united by their support for limited government and individual rights of person and property. They envision a social world in which people interact, for the most part, on the basis of consent and contract. Individuals are regarded as self-owners: they have the moral and legal right to determine the use of their own bodies as they see fit. They may also own parts of the world outside their bodies, usually in the form of private property. In the libertarian vision, people strive to meet their needs and wants through voluntary cooperation and trade with others. Although most libertarians agree with these general conclusions, they arrive at them by various routes. Some, like Robert Nozick, rely on a Lockean notion of natural rights that people possess by their nature as human beings (or perhaps by the grace of God). Others, like Henry Hazlitt[109] and (arguably) Friedrich Hayek, [110] justify libertarian conclusions on utilitarian grounds; they contend that individual rights provide the social structure most likely to maximize the happiness of the members of society. Neo-Aristotelians, like Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl,[111] ground individual rights in classical notions of virtue and human fulfillment.

Welfarism[112] is not a label self-consciously adopted by many thinkers, but a label I have chosen to designate various related perspectives that stand in opposition to libertarianism. Welfarists generally believe that people’s basic needs, including survival and health, outweigh or invalidate individual claims to wealth or personal assets. Such wealth or assets may therefore be forcibly transferred from some people to others for the purpose of meeting the recipients’ needs.[113] The welfarist perspective usually either rejects individual rights outright or else regards them as interests that can be overcome by the sufficiently weighty needs of others. In some accounts, the needs of others actually create positive rights to certain services or outcomes (such as healthcare or a minimum standard of living) that other people have a responsibility to provide.

As with libertarianism, these are conclusions, not justifications. Probably the most common justification for welfarist conclusions is utilitarian: if some act or policy of coercion generates greater gains for its beneficiaries (say, the recipients of government welfare) than losses for others (those made to pay taxes), then the act or policy is justified because it creates net benefits to society. Peter Singer and Peter Unger—whose views will be examined more carefully later—both represent the utilitarian brand of welfarism. Others, like G.A. Cohen, assert equality of outcome as a valuable goal in and of itself. Yet others, like John Rawls,[114] justify welfarist conclusions on the basis of a contractarian model in which people deliberate over the rules of a just society.

This chapter will not resolve the debate between libertarianism and welfarism. Instead, it will draw attention to a conflict within welfarism that libertarianism avoids. The conflict begins to emerge when we ask the question: are vampires persons?

Vampire Personhood

I Am Neither Good, Nor Bad, Neither Angel Nor Devil; I Am a Man, I Am a Vampire.[115]

To put the question another way, do vampires possess whatever characteristics would entitle them to moral consideration? In a libertarian framework, moral consideration would imply the possession of equal rights for vampires; in a welfarist framework, the consideration of vampires’ needs and wants would be on equal terms with those of humans. Either way, we need to know whether vampires count as persons from a moral perspective (where “person” means any being that merits moral consideration). Not to put too fine a point on it: if vampires are persons, then hunting and staking vampires constitutes an egregious violation of their rights, a gross indifference to their interests, or both. More provocatively, in the welfarist approach, morality would require providing vampires with regular opportunities to drink human blood.

Robert Nozick summarizes the candidates for characteristics that might signify the possession of rights or morally relevant interests:

The traditional proposals for the important individuating characteristics connected with moral constraints are the following: sentient [i.e., capable of feeling or perception] and self-conscious; rational (capable of using abstract concepts, not tied to responses to immediate stimuli); possessing free will; being a moral agent capable of guiding its behavior by moral principles and capable of engaging in mutual limitation of conduct; having a soul.[116]

Let’s apply each of these criteria in turn. Are vampires sentient? Clearly they perceive the world around them, and they possess the capacity for pleasure and pain. They can suffer from lack of blood, exposure to sunlight, even emotional disappointment. Peter Singer argues that any being that can suffer deserves as much moral consideration as humans: “No matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like suffering—in so far as rough comparisons can be made—of any other being. . . .”[117] Under this permissive standard, vampires obviously qualify for moral consideration. Since vampires are also, in most depictions, aware of themselves and the nature of their existence, they still qualify if we require self-consciousness.

Are vampires rational? Like humans, vampires use abstract concepts to impose order on the world around them, allowing them to observe relationships and patterns, to think about the future, and to create plans and execute them.[118] There may exist vampires who, like animals, respond instinctively to stimuli—biting at the first scent of blood—but if so, they appear to be the exception. Unlike killer sharks or deadly viruses, vampires are generally depicted as having minds capable of weighing the benefits of alternative courses of action. According to most accounts, certainly those in Buffy and Blade, vampires can resist immediate pleasures to obtain longer-term rewards.[119] If they sometimes succumb to their base instincts, the same is true of humans, who sometimes overindulge in food and drink. The difference in rationality between humans and vampires is at most one of degree. Some individual humans have much greater difficulty resisting their passions than the typical vampire. The difference in rationality between the two groups, if any, hardly seems great enough to justify disparate moral consideration.[120]

Free will is more difficult to assess—for both humans and vampires. As humans, we certainly feel as though we make free choices, but that feeling could be an illusion. There does not exist direct evidence of free will. What would constitute indirect evidence? The answers turn out to be characteristics already discussed: sentience, self-awareness, rationality. If vampires possess these characteristics, then there is just as much evidence for free will in vampires as in humans. As for the intuitive feeling that one possesses free will, any self-aware, thinking organism will most likely experience the same feeling. We can therefore conclude that there is as much warrant for attributing free will to vampires as to humans (while admitting the warrant may be weak in both cases).

Nozick’s next candidate, “being a moral agent capable of guiding its behavior by moral principles and capable of engaging in mutual limitation of conduct,” bears a strong resemblance to John Rawls’s notion of “moral personality.” [121] A being with moral personality is one to whom one can make moral arguments and stand some chance of affecting her choices. This criterion seemingly has greater potential for excluding vampires, at least given popular prejudices about them. Vampires are regarded as indifferent or even hostile to moral constraints on their behavior.

One difficulty with the moral personality standard, as Peter Singer notes, is that it errs by under-inclusion, since infants and young children obviously don’t meet it. More importantly, even grown human beings differ in their degree of moral personality. Some humans are more susceptible to moral argument, others less; yet we generally assume the moral agency of humans as a class.[122] Since apparently we do afford consideration to humans with smaller degrees of moral personality, why should we deny such consideration to vampires?

Moral personality is an appealing criterion because it relates to the changeability of behavior: someone with a moral personality can possibly be persuaded to act differently. But there is every reason to believe that vampires can be induced under certain circumstances to behave in a moral manner, even if they do so for purely selfish reasons. In the Buffy episode discussed earlier, Anya observes that vampires seek willing victims at blood-brothels to avoid being hunted. Thus, they can be motivated by strong enough incentives to engage in less harmful behavior. [123] If vampires had greater opportunities to meet their needs without using violence against humans, as would be true if blood brothels and blood banks could operate without fear of attack, the incentive for vampires to eschew violence would be even greater. Without social or legal sanctions, it is likely than many more humans—though certainly not all—would engage in self-seeking behavior at the expense of their fellow humans. If humans and vampires differ in their responsiveness to incentives, it’s only a matter of degree.

Nozick’s final candidate is possession of a soul. This is, of course, where the vampire literature typically draws the line. But soul-possession is vulnerable to the same critique as free will. Lacking direct evidence of the existence of a soul, we must rely on some other signifier. The most plausible signifiers are characteristics already discussed—sentience, self-awareness, rationality, or moral personality. If it cannot be shown that vampires in fact possess souls, it is because we cannot verify the existence of souls at all, even in humans. We simply assert that humans have them and vampires do not.

We need not try to decide among the many possible criteria for moral personhood. There are reasonable arguments for and against each one. Instead, we should simply note the great difficulty of finding any standard for moral personhood that simultaneously includes humans and excludes vampires.

Ethical and Political Implications of Vampire Personhood

I Was in a Totally Black and White Space, People Versus Monsters, and It Ain’t Like That.[124]

If vampires are recognized as persons, how should a just society deal with them? The dilemma is that vampires can’t live without human blood.[125] This need seemingly creates an unavoidable trade-off between the needs of vampires and humans. The survival and prosperity of vampires requires regular sacrifices—of blood, perhaps lives—by humans. Humans naturally resist such sacrifices. At least on first consideration, vampire-human interaction looks like a zero-sum game: the gains to one species are losses to the other. If vampires are just monsters, the conclusion is obvious: humans and vampires will always be at war, and the best interest of humans lies in eradicating the vampires. But if vampires are persons, what then? Could humans justifiably be forced to donate blood for the sustenance of vampires?

The welfarist answer is yes. So long as the gains to vampires exceed the losses to humans, in terms of life, health, longevity, and personal fulfillment for all persons involved, forced transfers of blood are in principle justified. If a pint of blood could save the life of a human child, while causing the donor only temporary weakness, the moral correctness of the sacrifice would hardly be in doubt. With vampires on equal moral footing with humans, a similar sacrifice would be justified to save a vampire child.

But isn’t there an important difference between the obligation to help a particular individual in danger, such as by rescuing a child drowning in a shallow pool, and the obligation to help many anonymous people on a regular basis, such as by making frequent donations to UNICEF? Welfarist authors Peter Singer and Peter Unger both argue otherwise, contending that the two scenarios are morally comparable. Both affirm a simple principle: “If we can prevent something bad without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, we ought to do it” (Singer 1979, p. 169; Unger 1996, p. 8). That principle, when applied to the vampire dilemma, would mandate regular contributions of blood to vampires in need.

The claim is not just ethical, but also political, for while voluntarism might be nice, it is not necessary in the welfarist mindset. Singer and Unger affirm that full implementation of their principle would mandate massive increases in government aid to foreign nations to abate starvation and disease. Doing so would assuredly involve sacrifice by the domestic population—higher taxes and lower spending on domestic programs. But the same principle that justifies massive aid to needy humans in foreign countries also justifies massive aid to needy vampires at home. Both blood and money donations meet the requirements of Singer and Unger’s principle, so long as the amounts donated per capita aren’t too large. We could easily imagine Blade-style mandatory blood banks as the logical implication of welfarist policy.

The libertarian answer to the question of whether humans could be forced to donate blood, however, is a clear no. Even if vampires are persons, they do not possess rights that humans lack. Just as humans may not violate others’ rights to get money or food, neither may vampires. If vampires wish to sustain themselves, they must find willing victims.

Would libertarian policy lead to the mass starvation of vampires? That’s one conceivable outcome, especially if we cannot imagine humans who would be willing donors. But the blood-brothel in Buffy raises another possibility: perhaps humans and vampires could coexist peacefully, meeting each others’ needs and wants through voluntary exchange. If there’s something that humans can do for vampires and vice versa, then the vampire-human interaction need not be a zero-sum game. It is actually a positive-sum game, in which everyone can come out ahead for having participated. Libertarian philosophers place great emphasis on the capacity of voluntary cooperation and trade to generate happiness and prosperity for the members of society.[126]

While Buffy’s blood-brothel scenario had humans paying vampires, it is entirely possible that payments might flow in the other direction. Who paid whom would depend on the relative magnitudes of the human supply and vampire demand for blood. If willing donors were scarce, vampires would have to pay humans, and the market price might be too high for some destitute vampires. If the vampire population grew faster than the human population, the rising demand for blood would push the price even higher. While some vampires might find employment—as club bouncers, nightshift guards, and so on—others might not find a way to contribute enough to society to pay their way. Such vampires would have to subsist on the voluntary charity of other vampires and humans.

From Politics Back to Personhood

We Gladly Feast on Those Who Would Subdue Us.[127]

A clever welfarist might claim that the libertarian argument above actually supports his position. Vampires able to pay for their blood would not have to rely on forced transfers. Coercive transfers would only be needed to support those vampires who could not support themselves. In addition, if there were well-developed markets for blood exchange, welfarist moral requirements could be met through transfers of money instead of blood. The government could use tax dollars to subsidize blood brothels or voluntary blood banks, or it could offer “blood stamps” (much like food stamps) for needy vampires. Although everyone would be forced to pay higher taxes, no one would be forced to donate blood.

In this context, it’s worth noting that some welfarists oppose policies that involve substantial infringement of bodily integrity, even if such infringement would bring great benefits to others. These welfarists take the more modest position that only external wealth and assets may be forcibly transferred for the good of others. They would not, for instance, force a person with two working kidneys to forfeit one to a person with none, though they would force him to pay taxes to pay for dialysis. While this variant of the welfarist position would dodge the possibility of forced blood transfers, it would have to affirm a “blood stamp” program or similar policy.

What would be the economic consequences of adopting such a policy? First, the policy would encourage dependency by some vampires. Given the chance to have blood for free, fewer vampires would find it worthwhile to contribute to society by performing some useful job. There would be a tendency for the burden to grow as more vampires became “hooked” on the system. Second, higher taxes on productive humans and vampires would reduce their incentive to work, because they would get a smaller share of the fruit of their labor. The magnitude of these effects could be small or large, depending on how responsive each group is to its economic incentives.

More important to my argument, though, are the political consequences of the welfarist policy. While it might seem obvious to philosophers like Singer, Unger, and perhaps you that vampires deserve the same moral consideration as humans, that point could easily be lost on a citizenry saddled with providing blood-money to a parasitic underclass. As a result, they would be more inclined to oppose any extension of personhood to vampires.

The claim here is relatively simple: people’s willingness to extend moral consideration to the interests of others depends, at least in part, on the burden that results. If the burden is merely having to respect a minimal set of rights, as under a libertarian system, it is likely to be met with some resistance, but there is a reasonable chance of overcoming it (witness, for example, the gradual emergence of equal rights for women and ethnic minorities). When the burden rises to the provision of goods and services, however, the level of resistance naturally increases. It is one thing to allow others a chance to succeed; it is another to be forced to support them.

Ample historical evidence supports this claim. One of the earliest and best examples is related by philosopher and economist Adam Smith, in his description of the Poor Law of England.[128] That law of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries required each parish to raise money for the support of indigent people within its borders. In response, parish officials raised difficult barriers to laborers who wished to settle in their parish, for fear they might come to rely on public charity. A tangle of regulations arose to define the conditions under which laborers could legally settle in another parish. The regulations substantially impeded the mobility of labor, effectively confining most poor people to their places of birth.

In modern times, similar events have occurred with respect to immigration. One of the most frequently invoked arguments against allowing more immigrants into the country is that immigrants will take advantage of the welfare system. Organizations like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) routinely point to immigrant claims on welfare to justify restricting immigration into the U.S. One typical FAIR news briefs says, “If we are to have any hope of reducing poverty in the U.S., our immigration laws must be revised and returned to the sensible practice of excluding aliens who are likely to become public charges and to deport those who do.”[129] The perception that immigrants depend disproportionately on welfare may or may not be correct, but that is not the point. Even the appearance of dependency can generate opposition to the inclusion of new members in society.

In short, when people believe their pocketbooks are endangered by the extension of public support to some group, they become more willing to exclude that group from the community. The prospect of paying for the upkeep of outsiders stokes the fires of xenophobia.

Possibilities for Human-Vampire Co-operation

These People are Our Food, Not Our Allies.[130]

Philosophers should not blithely assume the good will of man toward his fellow man and proceed from there to a discussion of the morally best public policy, because public policy influences the degree to which people are willing to extend such good will to others. As economist Ludwig von Mises observed, feelings of sympathy and friendship are not the cause of social co-operation, but the result. Without opportunities for mutual gain, Mises says, “Each man would have been forced to view all other men as his enemies; his craving for the satisfaction of his own appetites would have brought him into an implacable conflict with all his neighbors. No sympathy could possibly develop under such a state of affairs.”[131] But voluntary co-operation transforms this zero-sum game into a positive-sum game; it transforms war into commerce.

What kind of society, then, creates the greatest room for the acceptance of vampires? The welfarist vision creates the distinct possibility that humans will have to support vampires with blood and money, and without compensation for their sacrifices. The resulting resentment would only exacerbate the intolerance of humans toward vampires, possibly driving vampires to have even less regard for the interests of humans. The libertarian vision, on the other hand, emphasizes the potential for humans and vampires to work together and to improve the condition of all—at least, all those willing to do their part. Only in the latter scenario will humans and vampires be likely to develop the sympathy and good will necessary for them to treat each other as persons and moral equals.

15

Rousseau and the Vampires: Toward a Political Philosophy of the Undead

PHILLIP COLE

“No Evidence Is Lacking”: A Plague of Vampires

Vampires have not always been works of fiction. At the start of the eighteenth century, reports came out of eastern Europe about plagues of vampires—the dead were rising from their graves in vast numbers to inflict terror and death upon the living. These epidemics began around 1670 and ended around 1770, throughout what was then the Hungarian Empire. The best source of information is the official reports written by representatives of political and religious powers sent to the regions afflicted by these outbreaks of “revenants,” as the Undead were called, to discover what was really going on.

One especially notorious case was that of Arnold Paole, a peasant who died in 1726, the subject of an official report published in 1732.[132] According to that report Paole returned from the dead and tormented the people of the village of Medvegia, causing the death of four of them. The villagers decided to disinter his body, which they did forty days after his death. The report reads: “His flesh was not decomposed, his eyes were filled with fresh blood, which also flowed from his ears and nose. . . . His fingernails and toenails had dropped off, as had his skin, and others had grown in their place, from which it was concluded he was an arch-vampire.” The report continues that the villagers decided to drive a stake through his heart. As this was done, Paole “gave a great shriek, and an enormous amount of blood spurted from his body” (Vampyres, p. 21).

But it didn’t stop there, as the victims of vampires were believed to become vampires too. The four people thought to have died from Paole’s attacks were disposed of in the same way, as were other people who died from eating the contaminated flesh of animals also thought to have been attacked by him. Those, too, had to be disinterred, staked, and their bodies burned. These included a woman who had died in childbirth three months before who had claimed she washed in the blood of a vampire. The report states: “She was in an excellent state of preservation. Cutting open her body, we found much fresh blood . . . her stomach and intestines were as fresh as those of a healthy, living person . . . fresh and living skin had grown recently, as had finger and toenails” (p. 22). And a sixty-year-old woman who had eaten contaminated meat was, after ninety days of burial, “much plumper,” and “still had much liquid blood in her breasts” (p. 22).

These reports were received with incredulity in western Europe. This was the time of the Enlightenment, when philosophy and science were supposed to have won the struggle against superstition and dark fantasies. Vampires certainly had no place in the modern world view, and philosophers tried to explain them away in terms of science or of the primitive state of eastern Europe. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the exception. In a famous passage he says: “No evidence is lacking—depositions, certificates of notables, surgeons, priests and magistrates. The proof in law is complete” (Vampyres, p. 31). In fact Rousseau was noncommittal concerning whether vampires existed—this was not the point. Rather, the epidemics were important because they revealed something about the nature of political authority.

The explanation Rousseau sought was political, because in the end the epidemics were a political phenomenon. First, we can take the vampire as standing for our social and political condition, for the exploitative relations that arise from private property (p. 34). Second, we can see the ways in which religious and political authorities seek to control populations by appeal to popular myths and superstitions, by exploiting irrational fear of imaginary monsters (p. 33). In this chapter I follow Rousseau’s lead in placing such imaginary monsters at the center of political philosophy. If political philosophy’s focus is on the nature and purpose of political communities, then Rousseau has shown the role of fear in constituting those political communities. Vampires and other Undead beings represent some of our deepest insecurities, and so can tell us something crucially important about the politics of fear. So this essay takes a first step towards developing a political philosophy of the Undead.

Hunting Satan’s Brood: The Enemy Within

Rousseau claims that authorities—religious or political—seek to create and exploit panic in order to gain and hold on to power. An earlier panic, the witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe and North America, shows the same pattern, and is useful because it has received far greater attention from historians. Hugh Trevor-Roper, in one of the best treatments of this period, concludes that the witch crazes arose because of a struggle for power.[133] They flared most strongly between 1560 and 1630 when religious warfare blazed across Europe. In the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, both the Catholic and Protestant sides identified their enemies as being in league with Satan. Trevor-Roper observes: “Every crucial stage in the ideological struggle of the Reformation was a stage also in the revival and perpetuation of the witch-craze” (European Witch-Craze, p. 88).

These were times of great fear and insecurity, and, as usual when a society is in the grip of a panic, it fixed upon a stereotype of the enemy within. This stereotype, once established, “creates . . . its own folklore” (p. 120). Here, then, we have a treatment along Rousseau’s lines, in terms of the struggle to assert authority over resistant communities, and there is evidence that similar forces were at work during the vampire craze. What seems to have happened in the vampire case is a struggle between local religious and regional secular authorities, with local religious figures invoking fear of the diabolical supernatural to reassert their power, and the regional authorities seeking to understand and control that fear. But a puzzling question remains: why are communities so responsive to this kind of strategy? Why are we so easily “spooked” such that we join enthusiastically in the “witch hunt”?

Beyond Hunger

Vampires—and the Undead in general—generate a particularly deep horror. Sigmund Freud, in his famous essay on “The Uncanny,” [134] identifies “anything to do with death, dead bodies, revenants, spirits and ghosts” as “perhaps the most potent” example of the uncanny, and argues that “in hardly any other sphere has our thinking changed so little since primitive times or the old been so well preserved under a thin veneer, as in our relation to death” (The Uncanny, p. 148). One commentator on the essay, Michiel Scharpé, makes the insightful point that what is crucial is not so much our relationship with death, but our relationship with the dead.[135] The boundary being challenged is not that between life and death, but between the living and the dead. These are, of course, connected, but not all journeys between life and death and vice versa are disturbing. What strikes us as most uncanny, or rather, as we might say, spooky, is the return of the dead themselves into the realm of the living.

The fear of vampires, ghosts and zombies becomes clearer when we see it as a fear, not of death as such, but of the dead. What is at stake is our relationship with the dead and the fear that they are going to return. Fear of our own death is, of course, connected, because they bring the threat of our destruction with them from beyond the grave. But there is something special about this particular form of death. Death is to be feared in many forms. Flying, disease and illness, acts of war, road accidents, murder, old age; these can all give rise to fear of death. But death can also be welcomed; death holds the prospect of peace. In the HBO television series Six Feet Under the Fisher family run a funeral home and encounter death and dead people each week. In one episode, David—one of two brothers who run the business after the death of their father—is confronted by the violent prospect of death when he is sadistically robbed at gunpoint.

But in the same episode we get a radically different picture, as his art-student sister Claire displays her self-portrait photographs to the rest of the class for comment. One of the students says of them: “Dead. That’s what I like about them. This girl who’s, like, dead, and beyond everything—beyond hunger, beyond sex, beyond boredom. And really it’s so beautiful to be in that state. Like, nothing can reach her, nothing can get to her.” The dead people in the funeral home have a serenity even when they have met violent ends, and occasionally they return in a benign way to have discussions with family members. Quite often these discussions are comforting and revealing, as the dead seem to have acquired a depth and a wisdom lacking in the living. Here, then, both death and the returning dead hold, not fear, but an attraction. By contrast the Fisher family’s lives are filled with disappointment and torment. The attraction is, perhaps, that of being absorbed into a greater whole, even if that whole is a complete nothingness, an emptiness. But even in this attractive, beckoning form, death must be resisted, and the Fishers do resist it, stubbornly sticking to the living despite their seemingly remorseless misery. In Six Feet Under existence appears in all its absurdity, but in the end the program, despite its darkness, is a comedy, albeit without a laughter track, and represents one of the traditional existentialist responses to the absurdity of existence: wry amusement.

Itchy and Scratchy: Cartoon Cannibalism

The point is that death is not necessarily something to fear, and in the forms in which we do fear it this is not necessarily based on anything to do with the uncanny or the spooky. So we are left with the question: what is so especially chilling about the dead in the form of vampires and zombies, and what is especially horrifying about the prospect of death they offer? Perhaps what they represent is motiveless malignity, evil intent to destroy us for no reason. The dead, then, bring with them a supernatural malice towards us, which is inexplicable and irresistible. And so there is something especially disturbing about the death these creatures offer, in contrast to the death we encounter in Six Feet Under. Here, again, there is absorption, but this time it is not a promise but a threat, a violent absorption— we will be consumed. The vampire will drain our blood; the zombie will eat our flesh. We are reduced to blood and flesh in this act of absorption. Here we become nothing, not by entering a pool of greater nothingness, but by being eaten. But what’s the difference between this and dying, say, in a traffic accident? It may seem a nonsensical question, but it has a point—in both cases we are dead, whether we enter the Fisher’s funeral home or the vampire or zombie’s digestive tracts. Why should the latter be so horrific?

One answer, oddly enough, lies in the cartoon series The Simpsons, and in the cartoon-within-a-cartoon, Itchy and Scratchy. Itchy and Scratchy are cat and mouse, a parody of Tom and Jerry and of its extremities of violence. In each episode Itchy the mouse kills Scratchy the cat in an imaginative and shocking act of murder—but the true appalling horror only starts after Scratchy’s death. For whatever Itchy then does to Scratchy, Scratchy’s eyes always remain present, watching the whole process. Whether the cat is liquefied in a milkshake and then drunk by the mouse, or whatever other cannibalistic or brutal act Itchy perpetrates, Scratchy’s eyes blink and widen in shock and horror as he watches. And it is this—that throughout whatever is happening after his death, Scratchy is a witness, conscious and aware of it—that is most deeply and horribly disturbing about this cartoon-within-a-cartoon. Horror films and literature disturb us so deeply because as the vampire drains us or the zombie eats us, as we are reduced to the blood and flesh and skin that make us, we are aware, we are watching, we are not yet really dead. Despite our death we continue to watch, our eyes wide and blinking in horror, as the cannibal Undead eat us; we are dead, but not dead, the Undead audience, being violently consumed by our malignantly evil pursuers. At the center of this disturbance is a problematic relationship, not so much with our own death, although this is ultimately implied, but with our own dead bodies.

Revulsion: Our Dead Bodies, Our Selves

Here, a psychoanalytic narrative, that of Julia Kristeva, can help us to understand the forces at work.[136] For Kristeva the key idea is that of the abject, which has its source in the moment that the infant child separates itself conceptually from its mother—the infant experiences horror at its dependence on the mother’s body, and at the way in which its identity is consumed by that body, but it is also fascinated by it and clings onto it. This horrified fascination is what Kristeva calls abjection. The mother’s body, indeed anything to do with the physical body, has become abject. Our physical bodies embody death; we are already in the process of dying, and the dead bits of us (discarded hair, fingernails, skin, and shit and piss) are sources of revulsion and we flush them away in panic. But the abject has the power to disrupt the boundary of the body because it is both inside and outside of that boundary. However much we try to expel it and keep our borders secure, the abject undermines all such attempts. The abject is precisely that which connects us with death and shows us that death is already within the boundary, however much we try to expel it.

Barbara Creed uses this idea to psychoanalyze the horror film,[137] and notes that all sorts of religious taboos, such as sexual perversion, physical decay and death, human sacrifice, murder, bodily wastes, the female body, incest, are things that threaten our identity as a member of humanity. We want to expel them behind a border which will protect us from them, but they are all part of who we are, so this process of expulsion has to be constant. Perverse sexual desires, our bodies themselves and their waste products, our own violence and ferocity, are all things we place beyond a border in order to preserve our humanity, but they constantly erupt inside that border.

These encounters with abjection are played out in horror fiction and film, and were also played out during the witch trials and the vampire epidemics. The woman as witch is abject because she represents human sacrifice, sexual perversion, perverted sexual relations with animals, and cannibalism (Monstrous-Feminine, pp. 74-76). The vampire too is such a disturbing figure. It is because the corpse is the ultimate representation of abjection (p. 9). The physical body is the site of the struggle between the subject and the abject, and the dead body is the representation of defeat. It is, in Kristeva’s words, “the most sickening of wastes” (Powers of Horror, pp. 3-4). The corpse is a body without a soul, and so the vampire is the ultimate form of body without a soul. Creed finds it significant that “such ancient figures of abjection as the vampire, the ghoul, the zombie and the witch . . . continue to provide some of the most compelling images of horror in the modern cinema” (Monstrous-Feminine, pp. 9-10).

The corpse, then, is the most powerful symbol of the abject, but even in this extreme form the abject both horrifies and fascinates. Émile Zola captures this perfectly in his novel Thérèse Raquin,[138] in Laurent’s visits to the morgue to seek the corpse of Thérèse’s husband, Camille, whom they plotted to murder and whom Laurent pushed from a boat into the Seine and drowned. When there are no drowned corpses to see, “He then became a mere sightseer, and found a strange pleasure in looking violent death in the face, with its lugubriously weird and grotesque attitudes.” He sees the body of a young woman who had hanged herself: “He lingered over her for a long time, running his eyes up and down her body, lost in a sort of fearful desire” (Thérèse Raquin, p. 109). But the two lovers are doomed by the horror of Camille’s corpse, which is with them, haunting them, constituting an impossible boundary between them:

When the two murderers were lying under the same sheet, with eyes closed, they seemed to feel the slimy body of their victim lying in the middle of the bed, and it turned their flesh to ice. It was like a loathsome obstacle, separating them. A feverish delusion came over them in which this obstacle turned into solid matter—they could touch the body, see it spread out like a greenish, putrefying lump of meat, breathe the horrible stench of this mass of human decomposition. . . . (Thérèse Raquin, pp. 175-76)

The theme of the corpse that won’t go away is a recurring one in the horror film, especially the drowned corpse returning from the depths. In The Fog and Pirates of the Caribbean these are literally corpses come to life. In What Lies Beneath Michelle Pfeiffer’s character is haunted by the ghost of a young woman her husband has drowned and dumped in a lake, but in the end it is the corpse itself that intervenes and drags the husband (Harrison Ford) down to his death in the depths.

Oceans of Time: The Romantic Vampire

In the end, our physical bodies are our source of fear because they are the site of the struggle between life and death, humanity and inhumanity. We can now see the special horror that the vampire epidemics represent, as corpses rose from their graves to destroy the living, transgressing the boundary between the living and the dead. But this connection with death and the inhuman is a source of both horror and fascination, for both death and inhumanity offer different forms of freedom. While death offers freedom from everyday life in the sense of peace, inhumanity offers freedom from the mundane moral constraints of everyday life, so that we can be powerful and ferocious monsters. This is a romantic freedom and vampires represent this as well, and contemporary vampire narratives have perhaps stressed this aspect over that of death. In Francis Ford Coppola’s film Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), the Count is a romantic hero searching for his lost love, Elisabeta, and his pursuit of Mina is an expression of that love and devotion, as he has “crossed oceans of time” to find her. Anne Rice’s series of novels The Vampire Chronicles also pursue the romance of the vampire figure, and in Neil Jordan’s film version, Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994), the vampires are the romantic leads: Tom Cruise as Lestat de Lioncourt, Brad Pitt as Louis de Pointe deLac, Antonio Banderas as Armand. The vampire therefore combines both the corpse and the “romantic” monster who defies morality. The point, however, is that we combine both. We are the living dead.

Alien Invasions: The Vampiric Immigrant

At the psychoanalytic level the vampire represents the threat of being consumed, and at the political level this is most often expressed by the fear of invasion—what is consumed is our territory, our culture, our identity. The invader here can take various forms but in contemporary political debate the most potent are the immigrant and the global terrorist. However, the connection between the vampire and the immigrant is an older one, going back to the late nineteenth century when Jewish migration from eastern Europe was thought to present particular problems of assimilation, and therefore a particular danger to the identity of the political community. Ken Gelder points to the figure of Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel, noting that Stoker represents the Count as “a tall, thin, man, with a beaky nose and a black moustache and pointed beard” who hoards riches and moves across borders evading regulation.[139] The person who helps him escape from England is Immanuel Hildesheim, a Jew who arranges illegal entry and exit, “a Hebrew of rather the Adelphi Theatre type, with a nose like a sheep, and a fez.” [140]

So here the vampire is the unassimilated immigrant who threatens the identity of the nation. National identity is lost through unregulated movement across borders and growing diversity within them, as one’s nation “dissolves,” and in Stoker’s novel this becomes “the fear of dissolving into vampires” (Reading the Vampire, p. 12). The British Empire was going through an uncertain period with economic competition from the United States and from Germany, and Stoker’s novel, published in 1897, was just one reflecting this theme of vulnerability. H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds was published in 1898, with alien invaders who live off human blood (Reading the Vampire, p. 12), and the central theme of another of Wells’s famous stories, The Time Machine, published in 1895, is cannibalism. The current trend in American popular culture for vampires, zombies and hostile alien invaders may also reflect this fear of degeneration, as the United States enters a similar phase of economic vulnerability. Both The Time Machine and War of the Worlds have been made into major Hollywood movies in recent years.

The Evil Enemy

At the center of the witch trials and the vampire craze, and our contemporary fascination with the Undead, is this fear of invasion by an evil enemy who will consume us—take our territory, our identity, our culture, our bodies. Politically, in Europe there is a growing hostility to immigration of any kind, and in the United States the evil enemy is the global terrorist. Both highlight the fragility of borders. What is fundamentally disturbing about the vampire and the witch is their ability to pass among us undetected, to appear to be one of us, but to be secretly scheming our destruction. The person sitting next to you now as you read this could be a witch or a vampire, and this possibility undermines the foundations of our world.

Vampires and other supernatural enemies have the power to render borders meaningless, and it is this that takes us to the beginning of a political philosophy of the Undead, because they draw our attention to the nature and importance of boundaries, political or otherwise. What they reveal is how important these boundaries are to us, and also how arbitrary and fragile they are. Political philosophy has had little to say about boundaries. It usually assumes that the limits of the political community are given, and that all political questions concern those who are already legitimately members of that community. This means the political philosophy has rarely addressed the question of the outsider, and it is this figure that the vampire represents in its most demonic form.

The immigrant is therefore a threatening figure, who will drain away our resources, destroy our identity, bring disorder and disease, or, in the shape of the terrorist, plot our murder. But just as the vampire is an imaginary monster, so is this figure of the immigrant. When we free ourselves from these nightmares we can see the outsider in different, non-threatening terms. The vampire should warn us against such demonization and the representation of those we fear as malignant monsters who only wish to destroy us.

We need to question how borders and boundaries are constructed and note their deeply arbitrary nature and so no longer mistake them for moral boundaries. We also need to question how those on the outside are constructed and so no longer mistake them for mortal enemies. What is at work here is a two-world picture of demonic evil—that here is an evil enemy intent on destroying us, and they enter from another world, distinct from our own so that all we have to explain is their journey, not their nature. In taking this view we draw a boundary between us and them, so that we are not infected with this kind of evil. Although this conception obviously has its place in the worlds of mythology and fiction, we see it erupt again and again as a representation of actual human agency—migrants, Jews, and those engaged in global terrorism, for example. Once these take on the dimension of the demonic, then there can be no negotiation, no understanding, and no possibility of redemption.

In the Borderlands of Buffy World

The television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer plays with the fragility and fluidity of these boundaries, as the vampires and demons cannot be condemned as malignant enemies in any simplistic sense. Some of the demons Buffy and her friends battle against live in our world, but the most dangerous and potentially apocalyptic enter from a demon dimension through the hellmouth over which the Californian town of Sunnydale is situated. In the early episodes of the series, the demons that are found in Sunnydale are exterminated brutally and quickly, and there is something faintly disturbing about the way in which Buffy and her comrades perform this task with relish and very little evidence of what we might call thinking.

However, as the series progresses a more complex view is taken, and the vampires and demons take on other dimensions. They have their own underworld in the back streets of Sunnydale, where they lead their lives out of sight of humans for the most part, running businesses and performing services—in other words, a typical community of illegal immigrants. Angel, the vampire with a soul, is an ally in the struggle against evil, and Spike, a vampire without a soul, eventually joins that struggle and performs heroic acts of self-sacrifice in attempting to protect Buffy’s younger sister Dawn from a ferocious enemy that seeks her destruction. In the series finale he has acquired a soul and is the figure who saves the world from the ultimate apocalypse.

The most shocking moments in the series, however, are not demonic at all. The first is the killing by the slayer Faith of a human being who works for the demonic mayor of Sunnydale, and who is actually trying to assist the Buffy gang in their struggle against this latest apocalypse. She kills him by mistake, believing herself to be under attack by supernatural enemies. It is a moment of misjudgment in a battlefield, when a tragic mistake is made which has enormous consequences for all the characters in the series.

The second occurs when Warren, a human attempting to be a supervillain, shoots and kills a member of the Buffy gang, Tara. He is in a state of irrational rage, having had his masculinity humiliated. Warren takes a gun and, in his rage and humiliation, lets off a stream of bullets at Buffy, hitting her and wounding her—but a stray bullet kills Tara. This plunges the narrative into darkness, with the shock of the suddenness of death caused by irrational anger. Neither Faith nor Warren are demonic, and neither are their victims. Faith is eventually redeemed, but Warren never gets the chance, killed in an act of terrible revenge by Tara’s partner, Willow, an act for which Willow herself must seek redemption. And so within all the demonic and supernatural dangers, the most shocking moments are human, all too human. This is Freud’s uncanny in reverse. Here the supernatural world is disrupted and disturbed by the ordinary—what is most shocking is what ordinary people do. In the end, Buffy forces us to look away from the comforts of the demonic conception of evil, with its clear boundaries and sharp distinctions.

A Political Philosophy of Vampires

And so we should no longer take the boundaries of our political community as given, but recognize the extent to which they only become important to us because of fear of what is outside—and, of course, the alien inside. Political authorities seize upon these figures or create them through the language of abjection, in terms of pollution, of sexual perversion, of disease and death: the witch, the vampire, the Jew, or in contemporary times the immigrant, the asylum seeker, the terrorist. Driven by this horror, we join forces with the authorities in hunting down those who have found their way inside our community already, and in erecting more secure fortifications to prevent further invasions. This means they have to be policed more stringently and frantically when they are threatened; imaginary enemies are always the hardest to protect ourselves against. The border is constituted by fear of the abject, but the abject is such that it exposes that border as a fabrication, as no protection at all. The vampire, the witch, the terrorist, already pass among us. This is not because of the lack of secure borders, but because the enemy is always within us, in the form of our deepest fears and insecurities about who we are, fears that are exploited in the struggle for power and legitimacy. What Rousseau shows us in his perceptive analysis of the vampire epidemics is that the real subjects of the ever more elaborate and encroaching powers accumulated by the authorities in the name of protecting the “genuine” members of the community from their “enemies” are those members themselves. And he shows us that, if the task of political philosophy is to subject our political communities to reason and clear thinking, then a political philosophy of the Undead—of the vampire as the “demonized” outsider—reveals the extent to which political philosophers have, so far, failed us.

16

The Undead Martyr: Sex, Death, and Revolution in George Romero’s Zombie Films

SIMON CLARK

A figure lies prone on an operating table, its bloodied rib cage exposed and empty. All of the vital organs have been surgically removed. But this body is not dead, not completely. It is struggling against the restraints that pin it down, straining to bite a doctor whose hand is just out of reach. “See, it wants me. It wants food, but it has no stomach—it can take no nourishment from what it ingests,” says the doctor, toying with the Undead corpse. “It’s working on instinct—a deep dark primordial instinct.” Suddenly the corpse breaks free. The Doctor grabs a surgical drill and bores a hole deep into its skull. Only now is it completely dead.

In this scene from Day of the Dead George Romero unveils human instinct as the true star of his zombie films. Throughout Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985), and Land of the Dead (2005), human instinct is the motor that drives the endless ranks of Undead corpses ever forward. From this we can straightforwardly deduce that Romero portrays pure and unrefined instinct as a dangerous force that is threatening to human life. But why should our most natural urges be seen as hostile, and why does Romero visualize them as stumbling Undead corpses with an insatiable appetite for human flesh?

Repressive Civilization

The Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) states that civilization, since its origins, has demanded the constant control and repression of the primary human instincts. Civilization’s main job, he says, is to overcome the inhospitable forces of nature. The necessities of human survival—food and shelter—are not in natural abundance, but they become easier to procure when people team up and work as a group. This is the beginning of civilization. Everyone develops a role, and as long as they stick to it they guarantee their own survival within the larger group. This contribution to the group’s cause is what we now call work. It is what we have to do, rather than what we want to do.

Work basically means sacrifice, compromise, and a lot of unrewarding toil, but it is necessary (for the vast majority of us) to ensure our inclusion within the civilized order. But Freud says that the primary human instincts reject this order. They demand constant and unadulterated pleasure—they want to be freely and completely gratified at all times. Therefore civilization is unable to grant what the instincts crave, and the two forces fall into direct conflict with each other. Civilization attempts to control this conflict by offering its citizens attractive substitutes for pleasure such as wages, security, and leisure time. None of these compensations quench the instinctual thirst for absolute pleasure, yet the individual accepts them so that he or she can survive within the civilized group.

But Freud goes on to state that deep down, the individual rages against the injustice of this deal. There is part of the individual’s mind that still longs for instinctual pleasure, even though it is banned. Freud says that this unlawful desire sometimes bubbles up within the social order and manifests itself as the dark and murky underbelly of civilization. Freud calls this lawless presence the “return of the repressed.”[141] It is a blister on the social order—an unwanted by-product of authoritarian control. Civilization is therefore in a constant state of hostile negotiation, always trying to manage the chaos that it created by repressing the instincts in the first place.

So the instincts are dangerous because they nurture an unlawful desire for pleasure that haunts the repressive order of civilization. Romero’s zombie, as an embodiment of these pleasure-seeking instincts, becomes nothing less than a visual metaphor for the return of the repressed. The conflict between humans and zombies in Romero’s films can now be understood as a dramatization of the struggle that exists between civilized individuals and their own repressed instincts. The basic instinctual urges are ripped out of the civilized population by repression, and are manifested in a separate body altogether—the Undead corpse. Freudian theory therefore invites us to conceive of the zombie as a drooling embodiment of an instinctual pleasure that refuses to give in to the repressive forces of civilization—that quite literally refuses to stay dead. A zombie can only be completely killed off when the part of its brain that generates instinctual impulses is destroyed. But throughout Romero’s films there are always more zombies, so repressive civilization never manages to totally subdue the instincts. Crucially, it is civilization’s repressive squeeze on the instincts that forces the zombies to come oozing out into the social order in the first place. So in Romero’s films the Undead corpse is the nemesis, but also the product, of a repressive civilization.

Freud says that repression is not only carried out and enforced by powerful institutions; it is something that individuals do to themselves as well, like an internalized self-censoring mechanism. This develops when the individual’s infantile fear of his or her father is converted into an adult sense of reverence towards authority in general. The father’s stern morality manifests itself inside the individual’s own mind, and this internalization of authority is the basis of the individual’s conscience. Freud calls this the “superego.”[142]

In his first two zombie films Romero presents scenarios in which the individual’s superego—the sense of servitude to a higher authority—is overtaken by an aggressive and unlawful quest for power. In Night of the Living Dead, Mr. Cooper is the traditional patriarchal figure, but he is weak, selfish, and disrespected. He is constantly undermined by the other individuals who are struggling to survive the night on their own terms. This lack of a common authority leaves them vulnerable and accelerates the zombies’ advance.

Ben, who survives until daybreak, is mistaken for a zombie by other humans. The sheriff’s men shoot him dead and then throw his body onto a pile of zombie corpses. This scene subtly suggests that Ben’s disrespectful and violent struggle with Mr. Cooper actually puts him in league with the zombies. Consequently he is shot by the repressive patriarchal regime and disposed of in the same way as the Undead corpses.[143]

In Dawn of the Dead, those who normally serve the controlling order abandon their posts in an effort to ensure their own immediate survival: Stephen and Francine work for a television network, and Peter and Roger are both policemen. They all desert their civil duties and escape together as the zombie chaos swells out of control. This collapse of common authority creates a void in civilization’s defenses that sucks in the advancing hordes of zombies. In both films Romero presents a battlefield in which the struggling humans are effectively caught in a noman’s land between civilization and instincts. Those who reject the civilized hierarchy and plot a course towards their own immediate gratification are either consumed by the Undead or murdered by other more civilized humans. As the unlawful individuals attempt to reclaim their prohibited desire, the zombies, as an embodiment of this desire, close in on them. The only survivors are those who surrender their immediate pleasure and attempt to crawl back to civilization’s front line.

In Dawn of the Dead the civilized economy is now redundant. Within the mall, Francine, Stephen, Peter, and Roger are able to take whatever they want for free. The mall has become a domain of lawless pleasure. The zombies in the mall may have been destroyed, but an Undead throng is steadily gathering outside. Once the gang of bikers violently force their way through the barricade, destructive incivility takes hold and the zombies return to wreak their bloody havoc. Stephen refuses to surrender the luxurious mall to the marauding bikers without a fight. Because he gives in to his selfish instinctual desire, he is savaged by the Undead hordes and becomes a particularly flamboyant zombie himself. Francine and Peter only survive because they leave the mall behind and fly off into an unknown, but more civilized, future.

The presence of zombies becomes inversely proportional to civilization’s ability to enforce its repressive regime. The more we see humans violating civilized law, the more the zombies close in and destroy the social order. The number of zombies steadily increases throughout the four films, so Romero effectively portrays a dysfunctional society that is descending into unlawful chaos. It is unable to cope with the forces it has unleashed against itself. A reading of Freud allows us to state that the horror of Romero’s films is founded in this nightmarish vision of a civilization that is losing its repressive grip on instinctual pleasure.

The Destructive Union of Eros and Thanatos

But what is this instinctual pleasure that the zombies embody? What is pleasurable about being a moaning, mindless corpse? Freud claims that the human instincts are composed of two primary drives. He refers to them by the names of the Greek gods that personify them: Eros and Thanatos, the life and death instincts respectively. Freud says that every human pleasure, from passionate love to sadistic violence and greed, can be boiled down to one or both of these primary instinctual drives.

Eros is the urge to create and reproduce—to unite, nurture, and protect all human life. It embodies the basic principle of survival and growth. Eros is the instinct that brought humans together and created civilization in the first place. But as Freud establishes, civilization represses the raw human instincts, so Eros is in fact betrayed by its own creation. This is because Eros not only creates all the emotional and psychological bonds that pull groups of people together, it fuels a more extreme desire for immediate sexual gratification as well. Within this sexual dimension of Eros, reproduction and the continuation of the species are only incidental by-products of the overwhelming urge to obtain total physical bodily pleasure from other humans.

This is where Eros starts to come into friction with civilization. The repressive order decrees that the body must be primarily engaged as a tool of labor, and this immediately alienates the individual from his or her erotic pleasure. Civilization would soon grind to a halt if everyone constantly pursued their own physical gratification, so any manifestation of erotic desire that is not an act of civilized reproduction is heavily repressed by the social order. This allows us to recognize the zombies’ thirst for pleasure as a specifically sexual urge.

In Romero’s films the repressed Eros returns to haunt civilization in the form of the zombies’ rampant desire for flesh. The Undead refuse any sort of curfew on their erotic pleasure; they want it bad, and they want it all the time. They will bite any flesh they can sink their teeth into. This reactivates the entire body as an erogenous zone and takes the focus away from civilized genital contact. This desire to bite and consume human flesh is an act of reproduction that causes the Undead population to grow at a terrific speed. But as Freud establishes, this reproduction and self-perpetuation—the hallmark of Eros—is merely a by-product of the immediate urge for total sexual gratification.

Thanatos, on the other hand, expresses the instinct to regress—to return to the inertia of inorganic matter. It is the urge to reduce life to something base, crude, and simple, and so becomes associated with destruction and violence. Thanatos yearns to reverse the turbulent process of growth, and summons the universal inertia of death to stifle the friction of organic existence. Civilization represses this destructive instinct by channeling its energy into socially useful aggression and competition. Some examples of this are aggressive contact sports, hostile economic rivalry, and the entertainment industry’s commercialization of violence and gore.

In Romero’s films the repressed Thanatos returns in the form of the zombies’ violent bite that transforms civilized humans into rotting corpses. Everyone who is bitten will sooner or later turn into a zombie. So the Undead bite is not only erotic; it aggressively reduces individual identity to a crude and base level as well. Living people, as the working parts of the civilized infrastructure, are dismantled. The zombies stumble around, wearing the uniforms that used to define their roles within civilization when they were still alive. These uniforms speak of a civil function that is rendered obsolete under the reign of the destructive instinct. The individual regresses to dead matter—becomes no more than walking decay—and is therefore released from the tension of civilized human life.

The repressed instinctual pleasures of Eros and Thanatos are therefore both manifested in the zombie’s erotic and destructive behavior. This sheds more light on the main characteristics of the Undead corpse. The zombie walks in a very striking way. The zombie shuffle, as I shall call it, is stiff and awkward, motored by a single and overwhelming urge to consume flesh. If this urge is specifically erotic as we have discussed, then the zombie’s body is effectively engorged with desire—bloated by its own sexual appetite. The awkward, stumbling zombie can therefore be compared to a swollen erection, stiffly swaying this way and that in its quest for pleasure. It is an unruly swelling of desire within the civilized order—an erotic presence within the very institution that tries to stifle, like a tight pair of pants, all manifestations of sexual arousal. Civilization demands that the body be soft and malleable, but the sexually primed and defiantly stiff zombie refuses to be molded into a pliable and subservient human tool.

The Undead corpse’s sexual desire is realized when it bites into human flesh. But as we have discussed, this bite is more than just erotic; it also satisfies the instinctual urge to regress—to turn life into base and inert matter. Freud says that the regressive desire of Thanatos can be compared to that of a consuming and all-encompassing womb that wishes to draw life back into itself. In response, Barbara Creed suggests that this idea of a devouring femininity conjures up the notorious and mythological image of the vagina dentata—the toothed vagina—that literally consumes life and returns it to the womb from whence it came.[144] We have seen that the zombie is a manifestation of the urge to reduce and destroy life. If this instinct to regress plays out the desire of the devouring womb, then the zombie’s mouth—the very thing that consumes living flesh and turns it into decaying mater—becomes nothing less than a manifestation of the vagina dentata. The bloodied mouth of the Undead corpse can be interpreted as a horrific depiction of the consuming female genitals, whose deadly bite removes the individual from the tensions and frustrations of civilized life.

And so the zombie’s bite, in Freudian terms, unites the sexual component of Eros with the violently regressive urges of Thanatos. This coalition nurtures a double-barreled instinctual pleasure that is in direct conflict with the civilized human body. Freud emphasizes the fact that repression squeezes Eros and Thanatos into a destructive union against civilization. The repressive order therefore triggers its own demise, and Romero’s zombie films take this proposition to its horrific conclusion. In Day of the Dead, Romero presents a scenario in which the traditional, hierarchical, and repressive model of civilization is outmoded. He shows a civilization at breaking point, in which the individuals in the army base no longer adhere to the repressive principles of the social authority. Disorder gains the upper hand, and the full force of the repressed Eros and Thanatos is eventually unleashed. The resulting wave of zombies swiftly consumes all that remains of the tattered civilization. There’s no going back for the survivors; their only option is to disregard the previous repressive system and move on in an effort to pioneer an alternative social order.

The Possibility of a Non-Repressive Civilization

The German philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) came up with a new relationship between civilization and the instincts that goes beyond Freud’s version.[145] The mere existence of the return of the repressed testifies to civilization’s inability to harness the instincts effectively. Marcuse says that this point alone justifies the quest for a new and more successful model of civilization that can accommodate the instincts without repressing them. He highlights the fact that civilization is a product of the historical processes that have molded it through the centuries. If it has evolved to become what it is today, then it can evolve again to become something else. Marcuse focuses on the dissident content of the return of the repressed—on the fact that the instincts refuse to be culled, modified and channeled into something they are not. He says that the primary instincts hold onto the memory of a time when they were free—a time prior to their subjugation by civilization. It is this memory that makes Eros and Thanatos constantly challenge civilization’s repressive conquest, and keeps alive the prospect of a reality that is built entirely on pleasure. The Undead corpse, as an embodiment of the return of the repressed, is transformed by Marcuse into a tireless campaigner for non-repressive civilization. So beneath the rotting surface of Romero’s zombie we can now discover a revolutionary blueprint for freedom.

Marcuse says that a non-repressive civilization would prevail once the curfew on instinctual pleasure is abolished. In a free society, the instincts would no longer be the enemy of the state. A liberated Eros and Thanatos—total and unrestrained instinctual pleasure—would be the currency that holds the new order together. Within this order, work would be transformed into a sense of play. Whereas work is the perpetual delay and repression of pleasure, play is gratifying in itself—it serves no purpose other than that of creating pleasure. This playful pleasure would form the basis of a non-repressive civilization.

This initially seems to take us back to the beginning of Freud’s argument. He claims that civilization would soon crumble if total pleasure were suddenly unleashed. The social order would experience a fatal resurgence of destructive sexuality and violence. Marcuse crosses this impasse by stating that a vital transition must take place before a new non-repressive civilization can be realized. He argues that sexuality is only destructive because it is distorted by the regime of repression. If sexuality is freed from the clutches of repressive civilization, it manifests itself in an entirely different way. Liberated sexuality becomes re-united with the pure version of Eros—the instinct to “combine organic substances into ever larger unities.”[146] The task of building and maintaining a free civilization now becomes erotic and therefore instinctually gratifying in its own right. This civilization would be an entirely pleasurable institution, free from all repressive frictions. Thanatos, as the urge to be relieved from suffering and tension, would now pull away from death and find total satisfaction in staying alive instead. Eros and Thanatos would write a new constitution—a mandate for freedom and pleasure.

In Day of the Dead, Sarah, John, and McDermott escape from the army base and finally end up on a deserted beach. John is fishing, and this can be understood as a relaxing and enjoyable activity that provides food for the group at the same time. They have finally stopped struggling with their repressed instincts—in the form of the zombies—and have discovered a situation in which surviving is pleasurable in its own right. Zombies only exist under a repressive regime, so the absence of zombies in this scene equates to an absence of repression. This fledgling society on the beach can therefore be recognized as a portrait of a free civilization. In an entirely pleasurable social order Marcuse says that repressed sexuality transforms into Eros. This is played out on the beach as we see that the zombies’ engorged and selfish desire has been replaced by the living humans’ newly released erotic instinct to survive pleasurably as a group.

Eros is symbolically released from the Undead body, and is reunited with the human individuals from whom it has been separated throughout the entire film. The jerky zombie shuffle is ironed out into the smooth-flowing and fully-functioning human bodies that are completely satisfied by their own playful survival on the beach. We have seen how Thanatos targets death as the only way of being rid of the pain and tension of a repressive existence. But the beach itself can now provide this release. Death and destruction are no longer needed to free the individual from his or her suffering, because in a non-repressive order he or she is already free. The gratified survivors have an intimate and pleasurable connection with their idyllic environment without having to return to the devouring womb.

The previously subjugated and alienated instincts, as embodied by the Undead corpse, are now freely reunited with the three survivors. The return of the repressed transforms into the very fabric of the free order, so the zombies in this scene are effectively vaporized and re-constituted in an entirely new form. Eros and Thanatos are still visible, but they are no longer manifested as a sexually destructive and regressive desire; they exist instead, and are completely gratified, within the pleasurable relationships of a non-repressive civilization.

The zombie yearns for freedom. It refuses repression and strives instead for an entirely liberated future. Yet this future is at the same time the zombie’s downfall. The Undead corpse might herald a new dawn, but it will never see the sunrise. The zombie, as the manifestation of a violent cry for instinctual emancipation, is eventually decommissioned by the very freedom it campaigns for so fiercely. Marcuse’s philosophical framework allows us to cast the zombie as a self-sacrificing martyr; its demise sparks a new beginning for civilization.

Romero’s survivors pioneer a pleasurable reality in which their instincts are entirely gratified. For the moment at least, the survivors have found their instinctual paradise, but as Sarah looks out to sea, we can’t help noticing the clouds gathering on the horizon. At the end of the film Sarah has a nightmare. She cannot simply forget all the zombies that are still roaming around and feasting on dead flesh in the underground army base.

Marcuse states that the memory of all those who suffered painful deaths in the past “darkens the prospect of a civilization without repression.”[147] This is near the end of his book. It is decidedly downbeat, and seems almost to retract everything that he has argued before. The remaining zombies become this blemish that Marcuse speaks of—they are literally a walking reminder of all the people who died violently under the previous order. And so in Day of the Dead the legacy of a repressive civilization still remains. The zombies cannot be forgotten; they haunt the survivors as a memory of the old regime and threaten to return at any time.

In subsequent writing, Marcuse states that his vision is unrealistic—that there will always be some form of repressive order dominating human life. If we now jump to Land of the Dead, any semblance of the harmonious civilization depicted on the beach has disappeared and been replaced instead by another repressive regime. The zombies are fenced out of the city, and so civilization is segregated from the instincts once again. As in the previous films, the zombies eventually bring about the demise of the controlling order. The skyscraper owned by the power-hungry business man Kaufman becomes the primary target for the advancing Undead corpses. Kaufman has illegally hoarded a massive wealth for himself and his cronies at the expense of the underprivileged majority living on the streets. He ignores the growing zombie threat and focuses instead on his own selfish plans. As we have already seen in Romero’s films, greedy and unlawful individuals open up a fatal gap in civilization’s defenses. This chink in the armor is soon exploited by the growing zombie army.

At the end of Land of the Dead the human survivors are still fighting with their instincts even though Kaufman’s regime has been overthrown. Mulligan and his revolutionaries still wish to inhabit the walled city—the traditional seat of repression. Riley and his gang drive off to the north because they want to escape the city altogether. Even though they want to survive harmoniously, they are still inside “Dead Reckoning,” their zombie-killing armored vehicle. They continue to be alienated from the zombies outside, and therefore reject the possibility of a peaceful reconciliation with their own instinctual pleasure.

Kaufman is only overthrown because the zombies themselves evolve and work out how to penetrate the city’s defenses. Throughout the film we see zombies being taunted, abused, and massacred, but this all changes when they rise up and march together on the city. The zombies display a newfound sense of cunning and ambition. They are communicating with each other and learning how to use tools. Social organization emerges within the zombie population; they are becoming civilized on their own terms.

At the end of the film, it is not the humans but the evolved zombies who seem to be drafting the plans for a non-repressive marriage between civilization and the instincts. As a manifestation of the dissenting return of the repressed, the zombies have broken through the barriers, cages and chains that used to keep them imprisoned. Motivated by the constant persecution of instinctual pleasure, they have finally overthrown the repressive regime. Now that they are free, the future is theirs to pioneer on their own terms. The zombie garage attendant, who kick-starts the Undead revolution and eventually kills Kaufman, turns away from Riley and leads his new breed of zombies off into the unknown. We cannot see where they are going among the tattered remains of the city, but Romero makes it clear that they are no longer closing in on the surviving humans with ravenous intent. Instead of pursuing their appetite for flesh, the zombies have turned their backs on humans and are stumbling towards their new collective existence together.

The repressed Eros, previously manifested by the violent sexual bite, is liberated. Released from the clutches of repression, Eros expresses itself in the zombies’ newfound desire to survive, grow as a community, and organize a new harmonious way of existing. The evolved zombies now embody the transformation of repressed sexuality into Eros that is the hallmark of Marcuse’s non-repressive civilization. Thanatos—the urge to regress and be rid of all tension—is also liberated because the zombies are free to rot away pleasurably, untroubled by the constant burden of being alive. They reject the struggle with other humans in favor of creating their own community in which they can decay in peace. Both Eros and Thanatos are released. The zombies no longer embody repressed instinctual desire; they embody fully-gratified instinctual pleasure—the bedrock of a non-repressive civilization.

We previously understood the zombie as a martyr whose eventual demise signifies the end of repression. The zombie is still a martyr because it can only serve the cause of freedom once it has given up its human life. But now it is the continued presence of the zombie, and not its absence, that hails the new order. So the martyr is no longer completely dead; the martyr is Undead.

We can finally claim that the evolving zombies represent the beginnings of a pleasurable union between civilization and the instincts. So Romero is able to create the very system that Marcuse reluctantly deems impossible. Romero’s work is no more than a fantasy, of course; so too, it would seem, is the prospect of a free civilization. But let’s not end on a sour note. Imagine, for a moment, a possible scene from Romero’s next zombie film. Imagine leagues of living humans lining up in front of their Undead counterparts, happily sacrificing their flesh so that they might be liberated from repression and delivered into a realm of instinctual pleasure. The erotic and regressive bite would no longer be hostile; it would become a caring gesture that heralds a sensuous release from the tribulations of life. There would be a renegade band of humans who resist this journey to utopia and reserve their right to be unhappy and repressed instead. This would set up a fascinating philosophical question for Romero to explore: is it better to be Undead, happy, and free, or alive, miserable, and repressed? In this emerging new order, to give oneself to a zombie would be a radical act of self-initiation; it would be a rite of passage into the land of the dead—into a realm of pleasure and freedom.[148]

17

When They Aren’t Eating Us, They Bring Us Together: Zombies and the American Social Contract

LEAH A. MURRAY

George Romero’s series of zombie films, Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985), and Land of the Dead (2005), engages one of the fundamental questions of the last two centuries in American political philosophy: which is the superior position, individualism or communitarianism ?

Individualism is the idea that the success of a society depends on self-reliance—individual hard work, ingenuity, and entrepreneurship. The individualist’s America is a place where individuals can reach their full potential unfettered by overreaching government or the constraints of traditional societal norms and hierarchies: in essence, a place where the individual shapes society, not vice versa. Individualists tend to reject communism, for example, because it limits individual freedom, especially by placing too much emphasis on the needs of other people.

Communitarianism is the idea that societies prosper most and best when citizens co-operate. The Civil Rights Movement in America succeeded, on this account, because many citizens worked together to put the needs of the society above their own individual desires. Communitarians embrace neighborhood connectedness and group activities. They believe that a good society results from a sense of community and self-sacrifice, according to John F. Kennedy’s famous dictum: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

Individualism and communitarianism represent two dominant American political tendencies that have been fundamentally at odds since the founding of the nation. Both these strains are found at the heart of the American social contract (more on this term in a little while). Indeed, much of American political philosophy is committed to the ideal of individualism and the notion that one person standing alone can fight the torrents. Our political, historical, and literary culture is littered with lone-actor hero-types who are represented as saving the day by behaving in a strictly American individualistic fashion. Some political philosophers, however, have argued that individualism is not necessarily the best thing for democracy, as it has increasingly led to detachment on the part of citizens from each other. The less people feel connected by their social contract, the more likely they are to allow their sovereignty to slip away. Should they be self-reliant and only look out for themselves? Or should they connect with others and develop an ideal of the common good?

I argue that Romero’s Dead films evoke the problem of what should be at the heart of an American social contract, and that they implicitly advocate communitarianism over individualism.

Civic-Mindedness versus Fear

According to Thomas Hobbes’s theory of the social contract, as developed in his 1660 work The Leviathan, people are brought together because they are terrified. Hobbes famously claims that life for man in a “state of nature,” devoid of government and authority, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”; that is, individuals basically go around trying to kill each other, much like the zombies in Romero’s films. The characters inside the besieged farmhouse in Night of the Living Dead demonstrate how a community can be formed simply out of fear. Most of the characters have never met before the terrifying events of that evening bring them together. They quickly form a governing apparatus in which two male antagonists, one black (Ben) and one white (Mr. Cooper), vie for a position of power while a horde of zombies advances outside.

Ben is the hero of the communitarian position, working from the very start to save as many people as possible. He tries to make the farmhouse as safe as possible for himself and the traumatized, useless Barbara, even when she does nothing to help him. He exemplifies the social contract by drawing all parts of his community into the protective equation. On the other hand, Cooper, who is soon found hiding in the basement with his wife, child, and two other persons, embodies the individualist position of “every man for himself.” He admits openly that even though he heard screaming upstairs, he refused to risk his own life by coming up to help. He also advocates not going to the central community location prescribed by emergency broadcasts, in favor of maintaining the relative safety of their basement fortress (Ben argues that if they must remain in the house, it is safer upstairs).

The conflict in Night could be seen as representing the beginning of the end of individualism as an appropriate core for the social contract. It is interesting in this context, however, that by the end of Night even the predominantly communitarian Ben ends up shouting that upstairs, he is the boss, thus reverting to a more individualistic position. When Ben tries to get the gas required to escape from the farmhouse, Cooper locks the door in an attempt to keep him out, and Ben finally shoots him out of rage. Cooper, wounded, staggers back into the basement, where he is attacked by his own daughter, now a zombie. Eventually the zombies overcome all the characters except Ben, who makes it through the night by barricading himself in the basement (Cooper’s favored site, ironically), but is mistaken for a zombie and shot by the vigilante mob as he emerges in the morning (it is difficult not to infer that his being black has something to do with it as well).

Alexis de Tocqueville argues in his 1835 treatise Democracy in America that democracy will only work in this nation if individuals are civically minded. Note that Tocqueville is attempting to explain how democracy can work to a Europe that has much stronger communal ties, a Europe whose people are connected to each other in a vast hierarchical fabric. For government to work without that vast tapestry, people need to be connected to each other in order to further the aims of a government based on the rule of everyone over everyone—in other words, a society with more Bens and fewer Mr. Coopers. The more Americans join various groups ranging from the political to the religious, Tocqueville says, the more they connect with each other, thus furthering both the ends and the means of democracy. The warning he issues concerning the larger democratic project is against individualism. His concern is not that people might want to be distinct individuals (in fact, Tocqueville champions the personal rights of people to make their own choices), but that they might care more about themselves than about the community as a whole.

In Dawn of the Dead, these themes are played out even more elaborately. As the film begins, the zombie threat is in full force. Since the social contract has already broken down, panic has set in and we see Americans reverting to a Hobbesian state of nature. The usual organs of social control, government and the media, are on the brink of collapse. Near-panicked analysts on television attempt to tell people what to do to survive, but no one listens because all, including the “experts,” are gripped by total fear of a hideous death. This fear has led to what Leviathan envisions: the declaration of martial law in the city. Only by completely giving up our individual freedoms to an outside authority can we hope to survive.

Whereas Night depicts the catastrophic failure of individualist isolation, Dawn demonstrates the next step in the social contract: coming out of the state of nature, driven by fear of death, to an untenable social living position. First, poor people are mowed down by the military as fear and anarchy give people an excuse to kill whomever they want. Sadly, these are the same groups that society has taught them to fear the most: the blacks and Hispanics who live in the projects. We also see remnants of a more communitarian social contract when the priest tells Peter that he could not kill the zombies, and so has just forced them into the basement. This is the first time in the Romero films that any concern for what happens to the zombies is implied, and the first time we see an explicit non-individualistic tendency given words. The priest says:

Many have died, last week, on these streets. In the basement of this building, you will find them. I have given them the last rites; now, you do what you will. You are stronger than us. . . . But soon, I think they be stronger than you. When the dead walk, señores, we must stop the killing . . . or lose the war.

When the two military men, Peter and Roger, connect with two media people, Stephen and Fran, they eventually develop a little social contract in the abandoned shopping mall that they occupy together. Immediately they hook into the old institutions of the former world, which has taught them not to think of the zombies as human. The media reports that zombies should be destroyed: despite their human appearance, they should be considered mindless, soulless animals undeserving of respect—exactly the opposite advice of that given by the priest. The team at first takes the offical advice to heart, whole-heartedly taking pleasure in shooting the zombies inside the mall from moving vehicles with high-powered rifles, and using the ones milling outside for target practice from atop the safety of the roof. Eventually, however, the official advice is difficult for our little group to follow, when Roger is bitten and they have to face the fact that he must be destroyed. Once it happens to someone in their group, they cannot be so callous—the “humanity” of the zombie is more difficult to ignore. Whereas the group has taken the other zombies they have killed and put them in the freezer, they bury their friend Roger in a patch of interior landscaping.

When they are attacked by a biker gang, the group reacts in a classically individualistic mode. Stephen says “it’s ours, we took it,” referring to the the mall and all its resources. Instead of working together, the two different groups fight each other and both end in a bad situation. The biker gang is destroyed by the zombies, and Stephen also becomes a zombie. Because the two competing groups do not display communitarian tendencies, Fran and Peter are finally forced to flee the temporary consumerist paradise of the mall.

Communitarian Impulse

In Day of the Dead, the zombie threat has evolved to a near complete takeover of the world, and we see a group of scientists and soldiers holed up in a bunker in an effort to survive. Sarah, one scientist, hopes to solve the problem by curing the zombie virus, while Dr. Logan, another scientist, tries to figure out how to train the zombies not to kill living people (or not just any living people; it is suggested that there may be profitable military applications for domesticated zombies).

We feel more sympathy for the zombies in Day than in any of Romero’s previous films. For one thing, they are rounded up and subjected to scientific experiments that are very uncomfortable to watch. The more individualistic characters do not feel sympathy for the zombie plight, while the communitarian hero, Sarah, does. The soldiers are only able to feel sympathy when it is one of their own who is being experimented on. Again, the individualistic instinct only allows you to connect with those like you—a fatal flaw. All of the soldiers are eventually eaten by zombies, while Sarah, and two other communitarian characters, John and McDermott, survive to leave the bunker. The zombies, meanwhile, are beginning to show startling new abilities. As Dr. Logan says, “it’s the beginning of civil behavior”—the zombies begin to demonstrate the capacity to develop their own social contract. We root for “Bub” the zombie to destroy Captain Rhodes, leader of the soldiers, at the end because Rhodes has demonstrated such nasty individualistic tendencies.

Land of the Dead, the most recent film in the series, explores another aspect of the problems with the Hobbesian social contract. The movie begins with the quote “if these people ever learn to think, to reason in any way, the outcome will be disastrous.” This could be a Rousseauian statement made by someone watching humans coming out of a state of nature. Jean-Jacques Rousseau argues in On the Origin of Inequality (1754) that as soon as humans reasoned and formed societies, vanity and civilization were born and brought man to a corrupt state. In Land, the corrupt state is the result of a social contract born out of individualism.

In Land, we see that the zombies have clearly taken over, but pockets of people have formed city-fortresses, and some semblance of order has been restored. Kaufman (Dennis Hopper), the leader of one of these cities, organizes a social contract that puts him at the top of a very strict hierarchy—exactly as Hobbes would predict would happen with a contract born of fear—and becomes the Leviathan. Only wealthy white people can live in “Fiddler’s Green,” where they are fed very well and live in beautiful apartments. They are isolated from the zombie threat, and also from the unkempt poor who are housed in the slums surrounding Fiddler’s Green. Kaufman and his minions provide vices such as prostitution and extreme (if unsophisticated) gladiatorial games for the poor to keep them distracted. For example, we are introduced to Slack, a communitarian hero, when she is thrown into a cage with hungry zombies. Surrounding the cage are poor people cheering the zombies on in a manner reminiscent of the Roman arenas where Christians were fed to the lions. When the poor begin to organize, Kaufman either has them imprisoned or killed. The Tambourine Man, who has been leading protests in the streets, is very quickly rounded up and put in prison (Slack is thrown in the zombie cage because she worked with the Tambourine Man).

Kaufman has also enlisted people to serve in a makeshift military to defend the city and its surrounding environs from the zombies. In his military we find Cholo, a Hispanic individualist, who risks and ultimately loses the life of one of his men to bring back liquor to Kaufman to secure a place in Fiddler’s Green. This loss of life is the result of an individualistic instinct and gains Cholo nothing (Kaufman refuses him, implicitly because he is Hispanic).

The communitarian Riley also serves in Kaufman’s military. Unlike his colleague, Riley works to make the world a better place for people immediately around him. He strives to bring back goods to the poor people, and saves as many people as possible while putting his own life at risk. The people he saves (Slack, for example) eventually become his community. Riley is rewarded for these choices in this movie when he is able to leave the corrupt city successfully. Note that his community is not formed out of fear but from a mutual bond to make the world a better place. We are led to think that this community might actually be better when Riley tells the Tambourine Man, who gains control of the city after the zombies topple its leadership, that leading the city the way he wants will result in more of the same corruption suffered under Kaufman’s regime. The message is that a contract based on the survivalist motive of fear cannot sustain itself and will eventually collapse under the weight of its own individualist contradictions.

The other communitarian leader in the movie, interestingly enough, is a zombie. We are introduced to Big Daddy during a raid on a town controlled by zombies, when he displays sympathy for other zombies who are distracted by fireworks and mowed down by Kaufman’s military. This also evokes Rousseau’s social contract, as developed in On the Social Contract (1762), based on something he calls the general will. Rousseau argues that people do not form communities because we are afraid, but that we connect to each other because of a common bond—that is, a communitarian contract. Big Daddy and the zombies demonstrate this type of social contract when they stop focusing on the fireworks and eating human flesh, and focus on working together to bring down the Leviathan. Watching the zombies organize is like watching an emergence from a state of nature into a social contract. Like Riley, they form a mutual bond to survive, and their contract is similarly based on community rather than individual needs. By the end of the movie, as a result, the Undead form a more sympathetic community than the living inhabitants of the city. They take out Fiddler’s Green, and we root for them as they do so. We are thus left with two communitarian heroes: Riley and Big Daddy, who base their contract not on fear but on communitarian ties.

Importance of Community Connection

One theme that plays out in all of Romero’s movies is the “us versus them” attitude that develops when the original social contract falls apart. The introduction of the zombie threat causes all people to become completely individually driven. Thus the live people begin to see themselves in compartmentalized groups as well. Night demonstrates this when Cooper refuses to help anyone that is not his family. In Dawn a SWAT team officer calls the poor people living in the projects “spics” and “niggers.” Throughout Day the all-white soldiers refer to the other characters in racist language, and their conversation is overlaid with a distrust and suspicion of science and intellectuals; in addition, they constantly subject Sarah to sexual harrassment. In Land the wealthy white people who live in Fiddler’s Green have pushed the poor minorities out into the city’s outskirts.

In all these movies, the implosion of the governing authority brought on by the zombie threat causes people to revert to a “protect your own” mentality. This is the basest individualistic tendency, and it is not a sympathetic position in any of Romero’s films. Each, except arguably Night, demonstrates the fatal flaw of not working together as the individualistic heroes die and the communitarian heroes survive (and even in Night there is the vague suggestion that Ben’s abandonment of his communitarian ideals somehow precipitates—if only because it precedes—his death at the hands of the living mob).

Though Tocqueville argues that we need to join groups to begin our deliberative democracy, to fuel communitarian tendencies, we cannot simply join groups where everyone looks like us. Indeed, Romero’s films dramatize our need to connect across a diverse range of people in order to survive. Throughout, those groups that exhibit isolationist, racist, and other exclusionary tendencies—the rednecks in Night, the biker gang in Dawn, the soldiers in Day, and the white wealthy people in Land—fare poorly.

Another marker of individualistic chauvinism is the inappropriate laughter, elation, and general sense of superiority that attends the living’s treatment of the Undead: in Night, vigilante hicks treat the mass shooting of zombies like a hoedown; in Dawn, the bikers make a macabre game of killing zombies when they invade the mall (to the perverse accompaniment of pie-throwing and circus music); and in Land, the urban poor set up humiliating “have your photo taken with a zombie” amusement stands.

These individualistic travesties do not present a pretty picture of human nature, and for Romero, the arrogance they represent is the path to destruction. Conversely, his communitarian heroes are notable for their compassion and empathy. They are leaders who understand that cooperation and not fear of others is the only way to survive. Ben in Night says we need to work together and help each other, not hide in the basement while someone is screaming upstairs. Peter stays with Roger until the very end and is the one who shoots him (reluctantly) when he comes back as a zombie in Dawn. Sarah in Day asks “Why can’t we just work together?” when faced with the soldiers’ threat of death. Riley in Land leaves Big Daddy and his fellow zombies alone, saying, “They’re just looking for a place to go, just like us.” Throughout these movies, the message is that the communitarian tendency is the preferable position.

No Way Out

And yet this pro-communitarian message might appear to be complicated in a number of ways. In Night of the Living Dead, Romero kills off all the characters, on both the individualistic and the communitarian side, intimating that the question has long since lost relevance in our thinking. Romero himself has commented in interviews that what is most scary is one’s neighbors. Thus the fact that zombies are the people we know makes them even scarier.

Is it Ben’s communitarianism or his individualism that enables him to survive the longest? And which, if either, is most relevant to his ultimate destruction? The suggestion in Night is that these two driving concepts in American political thought have wiped each other out, leading to a bureaucratization of our lives. This bureaucratization, symbolized by the police that kill Ben at the end of the film, has numbed our sense of individualism and made it impossible to connect in any real way. Ben’s “success” is casually ended by an overwhelming apparatus, and presumably his heroic story is lost forever.

Although Night seems to offer an ambiguous understanding as to what is actually the better tendency, individualism or communitarianism, the rest of the movies in the series make a clear case for commitment to a communitarian-based social contract. Indeed, the zombies in Land provide the perfect example of a community working and making decisions together in an effort to save their world. For Tocqueville, this is exactly what a democracy needs: a system which allows all members of the community to be accountable for what happens to each other.

The Romero Dead films ultimately depict the communitarian social contract as preferable to one based on pure individualism. If there are still some irresolvable contradictions—if it is not clear whether Land, for example, should be interpreted as a nightmare vision of the inevitability of Hobbesian totalitarianism, as a Rousseauian rejection of civilization outright, or as a hopeful Tocquevillian gesture toward democratic equality—it still appears clear that even if Romero no longer believes in the viability of communitarianism as a “way out” for humanity, he nevertheless believes it was once the right choice to make.

PART V

Leaving a Good-Looking Corpse

18

The Fear of Fear Itself: The Philosophy of Halloween

NOËL CARROLL

Halloween: The Festival of the Wandering Undead

Halloween is the night of the living dead. In all likelihood, the festival originated in Ireland where it was celebrated on November 1st, Samhain, which was, for the ancient Celts, the first day of winter, the season of death.

According to legend, on Samhain, the souls of all those who had died in the previous year gather from hither and yon to enter the otherworld. The living would put out food, drink, and other offerings to placate the traveling souls of the dead, perhaps to expiate any wrongs that they had done to them. Bonfires were lit and recently harvested food was fed to the flames as a sacrifice.

This should sound somewhat familiar to you. For it is very probable that the practice of going from door to door dressed as skeletons, vampires, zombies, ghosts, mummies, ghouls, Frankenstein’s monster, and other assorted living dead in the expectation of receiving candy, money, and the like is a re-enactment of the itinerary of the wandering Undead on Samhain.

Catholic missionaries penetrated Ireland in the fifth century, entering into competition with the indigenous Druidic religion of the Celts. But rather than attempting to stamp out Samhain entirely, they appropriated it. In accordance with a strategy developed by Pope Gregory the Great, Catholic missionaries melded their myths with the local ones. In this way, pagan fertility imagery, like painted eggs and rabbits, was dragooned into the iconography of Easter, and pre-Christian symbols, like the Germanic Tannenbaum, were re-identified as trees of special significance to Jesus. In Ireland, Samhain became All Saints Day—the day in which all those saints without feast days of their own were honored—and the day after that—November 2nd—became All Soul’s Day, a day, like Samhain, dedicated to all of the souls of the departed. Though now in Catholic vestments, these days were still marked as belonging to death and winter as clearly as Easter is associated with spring and rebirth.

Halloween, of course, is the day before All Saints Day. Saints, needless to say, are hallowed. So, “Halloween,” in other words, is “All Hallows Eve,” or more archaically, “All Hallows’ Even,” which was shortened to “Halloween.”

The Catholic missionaries also re-described the gods of the Druids as demons, devils, fairies, goblins, and monsters, and their priests and devotees as witches and wizards. Their kingdom was identified as the underworld. So, on Samhain, that enchanted moment on the seam between two seasons, the gates of hell are opened not only to receive the wandering dead but also, in the process, to loose onto the world the denizens of the domain of death, including devils, demons of every monstrous shape, and witches, not to mention the prisoners of the underworld—ghosts and other Undead in every manner of degeneration from the horrifically mutilated, fraying, and decaying to bone-dry skeletons. This is, of course, a cast of characters whom you already know, even if you never heard of Samhain. In their trail, evil and chaos reigns.

This superstitious belief then was given embodiment by mummers and maskers who, dressed like the minions of hell, go from door to door exacting tribute. For whenever the Undead appear, they typically want something from the living. When the Irish emigrated to America, they brought this custom with them, and they came in such large numbers that it became a national theme. As I recall the Halloweens of my youth, it is easy to re-imagine them as visions of hellish chaos—with piles of autumn leaves burning in the twilight, and clusters of witches and skeletons and ghosts scurrying madly in every direction, driven by too much sugar.

The predominant imagery of Halloween revolves around death. The most traditional costumes allude to the wandering dead—ghosts, ghouls, skeletons, and so forth. The devil, of course, is the lord of the dead and witches are his missionaries. Since they are often members in good standing in the league of the living dead, many movie monsters are naturals—or, perhaps more aptly, supernaturals—for Halloween masking, including the Mummy, Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, zombies, and so on. Likewise, any demon from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, especially perhaps from the episode devoted to Halloween, is ripe for masquing.

In fact all manner of monsters can inspire Halloween mumming—even those who hail from outer space—since they would fit into the Christian redefinition of the Halloween universe as demons, soldiers of Satan’s armies of hell. Of course, not every costume on Halloween is monstrous. But what is nevertheless very striking is that so many of the most frequently recurring ones are connected to the realm of the Undead in one way or another. Over three-fourths of the Halloween outfits and masks at my local costume shop were of monsters, most of them of the Undead variety.

Halloween decorations also invoke death imagery. The Jack O’Lantern refers to an Undead trickster—a blacksmith named Jack—who, having been exiled from both heaven and hell—wanders the world, some say with his head in his hand. Dummies—sometimes scarecrows, perhaps to ward off carrion feeders—are often set up or hung from porches, and they are joined by effigies of witches, ghosts, corpses, and, more recently, movie monsters. Mock spider webs, replete with rubber arachnids, imitate the interiors of crypts, while various vegetables, like cobs of corn, are hung on doorways. Often these vegetables are already in a state of deterioration, reminding onlookers that they were mowed down in the recent harvest. Leaves, already in the colors of autumn decay, are everywhere, whether intentionally or not. And, of course, there are cut-outs of Halloween figures like witches and ghosts plastered on windows, blackboards, and the like.

Nowadays, many of these decorations are store-bought, rather than homemade. And the entertainment industry uses this celebration of death as a marketing ploy. Horror movies, like the recent remake of The Fog, a ghost story, are released around Halloween, as was John Carpenter’s classic Halloween, in order to exploit the seasonal taste for death. You’ll recall that Michael Meyers becomes one of the Undead in the course of that film. For similar reasons, the DVD of George Romero’s Land of the Dead, a zombie thriller, was released on October 18th, 2005, so as to give everyone who desired a copy time to buy one in order to horrify themselves and their friends on Halloween night.

And, of course, broadcast television literally goes into its vaults to exhume a veritable bestiary of the Undead for the weeks approaching Halloween night. Starting at noon of October 23rd, 2005, the American Movie Channel ran a solid week of horror films. Obviously, the programmers at this station were quite confident that there are, at any given moment at this time of year, a sufficient number of viewers eager to have the bejesus scared out of them to warrant a non-stop fright fest.

Though AMC—and, of course, the Science Fiction Channel—may be the most extreme examples here, other stations feature an upsurge of horror fictions during this season. It is, for example, a perfect occasion for marathon re-screenings of The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits. Nor was it an accident that Showtime chose the beginning of the 2005 Halloween weekend to premiere its new series Masters of Horror. For on and around Halloween has come to be the time of year when people gather before their flickering hearth not to tell ghost stories, but to watch them.

And finally, another frequently observed trend is that Halloween is becoming more and more of an adult holiday—an opportunity for masquerade parties, where the traditional costumes of the Undead are never far from sight. The fancier parties may even have TV monitors scattered about, re-running favorite monster movies continuously.

The Paradox of Halloween

A great deal of what I’ve just said is not news to most of you. Except for the bits about the history of Samhain, the rest is widely known and very familiar. But—and this is where this chapter really begins—it is so familiar that I think we lose sight of the fact that this is all very peculiar, even paradoxical. Many derive some strange kind of pleasure or satisfaction from the horror films that bombard them during this season. Indeed, they seek them out. They revel in spectacles of corpses and decomposing bodies.

But how many among them would jump at the opportunity to spend the afternoon in the city morgue viewing dead and decaying bodies, and, even if they did, would they derive the same sort of satisfaction they get from the horror movies? If some of those stiffs could be re-animated, would they be willing to dance with them? The Undead in reality would be pretty revolting, not entertaining.

Moreover, the paradox extends beyond the motion pictures customarily marketed around this time of year. It pertains to Halloween itself. For, the strange pleasure or satisfaction that we take in these movies prefigures the larger mystery of how we can enjoy Halloween. For, Halloween is about death, perhaps the most fearful aspect of human life. According to the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), it’s the source of Angst so deep that most of us spend our lives denying the inevitable fact of death. Rather than face it, we turn ourselves into social robots.

And yet on Halloween, we appear to embrace death’s imagery. Many thrill at the prospect of the representatives of death reeking evil and mayhem in our popular entertainments, and we derive a strange satisfaction from our fellow citizens wandering the streets in the make-up of the Undead. Of course, not all this imagery is, so to speak, “straight.” Much of it is parodic, from Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy to the capering skeletons in Halloween parades. In 2005, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride and Wallace and Gromit’s The Curse of the Were-Rabbit arrived just in time to satirize the myths of Halloween horror. But isn’t it just as anomalous that we should laugh at mortality as that we should find any satisfaction in being, as we say, “scared to death”? These are the paradoxes of Halloween that philosophy needs to address.

Needless to say, this is not an issue that most schools of philosophy have broached. However, since many of the traditional figures of Halloween are associated with the kinds of creatures who haunt nightmares, and since psychoanalysis has advanced hypotheses about the significance of these figures in our dreams, psychoanalysis is an obvious place to look for suggestions about our attraction to imagery of the evil dead which, one would think, should repulse us. One book that would appear to be especially pertinent is On the Nightmare by Ernest Jones,[149] perhaps best known as Freud’s biographer and the person responsible for bringing Freud to England in his flight from the Nazis.

A Psychoanalytic Solution

Jones’s book employs Freudian analysis in order to plumb the symbolic portent and structure of such nightmarish figures of medieval lore as the vampire, the devil, the witch, and so forth. Since many of these imaginary beings correspond to the recurring figures of Halloween, some may be tempted to adapt Jones’s analysis of the relevant dreams to the costumes and entertainments of October 31st.

Jones’s account, moreover, seems initially promising, if only because it has the right structure. For he appreciates that the fantastical beings that concern us are simultaneously attractive and repellant. As a hard-line Freudian, Jones is committed to the notion that all dreams involve wish-fulfillment. However, many wishes are for things forbidden. So dreams driven by forbidden desires putatively camouflage their objects in symbolism—often symbolism that makes the objects appear to be anything but desirable—indeed, sometimes symbolism that transfigures the objects of desire into something loathsome. It’s as if the dreamer is saying to his psychic censor “I can’t be desiring this, because I find it so repulsive.”

That is, the selfsame item may be both the subject of a wish and of an inhibition. The inhibition component takes the form of negative imagery or affect. The function of the dreamwork, including the nightmare, is to construct situations that, in a manner of speaking, forge a compromise between our wishes and our inhibitions.

Jones writes:

The reason why the object seen in a nightmare is frightful or hideous is simply that the representation of the underlying wish is not permitted in its naked form so that the dream is a compromise of the wish on the one hand and on the other of the intense fear belonging to the inhibition (p. 78).

For example, on Jones’s analysis, the vampires of lore have two essential characteristics: they are Undead revenants and they subsist on the blood of the living, which they extract orally. According to the vampire legends that serve as the basis for Jones’s investigations—and as opposed to the way in which the vampire is represented in contemporary popular culture—vampires first return from the dead to visit their relatives and to feast upon them. This imagery, Jones hypothesizes, can be interpreted initially as the wish, on the part of the living, for the dearly departed relative to return from the dead. But the alleged loved one is a horrific figure. Specifically, what is fearful about the revenant is bloodsucking, something that Jones associates with sexuality and seduction. Moreover, since the revenant is a relative, the sexuality in question is incestuous. So the wish that underwrites the symbol of the vampire is a wish for incest. However, this wish is simultaneously inhibited by the dreamwork inasmuch as the vampire is represented as an abominable and dangerous predator.

That is, the forbidden desire for an incestuous liaison with a dead relative is transformed, by a process of denial, into something very different—a vicious attack. Attraction and love for the relative is alchemized into fear and disgust. Instead of yielding lips, the living quarry imagines himself or herself to be penetrated by merciless fangs. The humans portray themselves as passive victims and the Undead as aggressors. It’s the vampire who is the active agent, not its prey. This supposedly allows the pretended victim to consummate, in the dream, a sexual, indeed an incestuous, relation with the vampire without blame. For, in this scenario the mortal must be innocent, since she is being ruthlessly savaged. The sexuality here, on Jones’s account, is primarily regressive, a blend of the sucking and biting characteristic of the oral stage of psychosexual development. But all this nuzzling can be indulged without guilt, since it has been reconfigured as an unwanted onslaught.

Jones then goes on to analyze the iconography of other fantastic beings, many of whom are the staples of our popular entertainments, including Halloween. Given his Freudianism, in case after case he discovers that the imagery masks sexual wishes. The horrific imagery functions to deflect the sanctions of the psychic censor, also known as the super-ego. For the wish is disguised as its negation, namely as fear and disgust, and delight masquerades as aversion. In the case of the nightmare, the dreamer putatively cannot be charged with sexual transgression, because she is having the attentions of the vampire, the ghost, the ghoul, and so forth forced upon her. As anyone can see, she is not enjoying herself; she is being violated. Her predominant feeling is ostensibly not pleasure, but horror, though, according to Jones, this horror is actually the price that she has to pay for pleasure that comes from the dreamland gratification of her sexual desires.

In favor of Jones’s hypothesis is the fact that sexual themes are germane to some of the figures that concern us. Often witches are first encountered as beautiful young maidens, only to reveal their horrific aspect the morning after. And Dracula is usually depicted as a handsome seducer, though not when he sports his Nosferatu look. Satan is a seducer too, but not a carnal one. Some of these monsters abduct women; maybe that is supposed to insinuate rape. Perhaps all the rough-house to which these nightmare figures subject their victims belies the childhood confusion over sexual congress and violence of the sort that Freud maintains occurs when children witness the primal scene.

Furthermore, with special reference to Halloween, the notion that all these figures are fundamentally transgressive fits with the ritual suspension or carnivalesque inversion of the rules on the holiday. For, like April 1st, Halloween is an evening when tricks are permitted, as well as being a time when excessive eating and drinking is the order of the day (or night). One might also say that Halloween is a period when a major ontological role-reversal occurs: the living “become” the dead.

But there are also problems with expanding Jones’s hypothesis to cover Halloween. Some of the figures at the intersection of the nightmare, Halloween, and popular culture may have explicit sexual connotations, but just as many do not. Skeletons, on the face of it, are not sexy. The suavely attired Count Dracula may be alluring, but the case is less convincing with zombies, ghouls, milky wraiths, and creatures or demons from outer space like the Predator and the Alien from the film series bearing those names.

The psychoanalyst may reply that these examples are beside the point, since, according to Jones, the sexual significance of these figures is concealed by design. It is precisely the fact that these creatures strike us as the opposite of sexually inviting that enables them to trick the censorious super-ego into admitting them into the bedroom. The advantage of this “black means white” mode of interpretation is that it can account for from whence the pleasure or satisfaction comes with regard to this otherwise vile imagery. However, it does require the presupposition that these fantastical beings always stand for a wish, indeed a sexual wish, often one connected to the putatively universal desire for incest, and that the horror that accompanies exposure to these figures is only ever a diversionary tactic cloaking a deeper source of satisfaction.

And yet, might it not be the case that sometimes a zombie is just a zombie, and being devoured by one is simply cannibalism? That is, might it not be that frequently we are just horrified by our Halloween entertainments? When the leprous revenants in the re-make of The Fog pummel Mayor Malone into the cemetery to the sound of startling claps of thunder, my blood runs cold, which is not a tingle of sexual arousal. Nor does it seem plausible to speculate that I have any incestuous inclinations toward these ghosts, since they are not my relatives. Likewise, as Moonface drills out the eyes of his victim in “On and Off a Mountain Road” (the first installment of the aforesaid Masters of Horror), I am squirming, but not with pleasure. Isn’t it possible that I am just horrified by the spectacle?

It may be alleged that I am merely in a state of self-deception here. My ego, along with my super-ego, has been duped; only my id knows and it’s not talking. Moreover, if I say that I’m simply horrified by the spectacle, how are we to explain the satisfaction that I take in it? But again, notice that this explanation comes with an expensive theoretical price-tag.

One has to presume an awful lot of hypothetical states, laws, and processes, including a universal desire for incest, the reducibility of all the pertinent desires to sexual desire, the idea that all such fancies are wish-fulfillment fantasies, the mechanics of repression, the homuncular behaviors of the different parts of the psyche, indeed, the supposition that the psyche is partitioned in this way, the existence of the unconscious, and so on. In short, one must accept large portions of psychoanalytic theory in order to get this hypothesis off the ground, including the idea that we are always in a mental state of disavowal regarding what is really happening to us as we consume horror fictions.

This is a very elaborate—some might unsympathetically say “Rube-Goldberg-like”—explanatory apparatus. Would not a simpler model be far more compelling? For example, might not the notion that we are literally terrified by the appropriate moments in The Fog be a better account of what is going on, especially if we could say how that terror can be satisfying without resorting to the complex paraphernalia of psychoanalytic theory? All things being equal, a more economical explanation of the phenomenon should make us less confident of the more Byzantine psychoanalytic account. So let us see if we can find one.

The Meta-Fear of Fear

We can start to evolve an alternative explanation to the psychoanalytic one by focusing on part of the phenomenon before us in order to see what the part can tell us about the whole. So let’s ask: what is it about the popular entertainments, like horror movies and television programs, that seem to yield pleasure or satisfaction at the same time that they are designed to raise negative emotions—emotions of fear and disgust? [150] It is perhaps useful here to recall the primary audiences for such entertainments—adolescent and young men, though, in recent decades, more young women are joining their ranks. What is it that they might derive from horror spectacles?

The adolescent male viewers—who often tramp to the Cineplex in groups—are engaged in a rite of passage. Speaking as one who enacted this ritual himself, they wish to demonstrate to themselves and to their peers that they can endure spectacles of substantial amounts of violence, carnage, filth, and impurity. They come to the theater with a certain fear of their own fear, namely that their feelings may swing out of control when subjected to particularly gruesome stimulation. For the adolescent horror aficionado, Franklin Roosevelt’s aphorism—that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—might be amended to say “we, untested as we are, are very afraid of being afraid.” Exposure to the horror spectacle, then, confirms that the viewer will not lose it, at least in the culturally controlled situation of the movie theater where the viewer has been insulated from genuine danger by the ontologies of fiction and the screen.

Adolescence is a time, at least in our culture, when one is especially prone to anxiety about one’s emotions This is true not only of fear but of anger, love, desire, and so forth. The fear is that one will be unable to handle one’s emotions—that they will take control of us with untoward consequences. With the changes in our bodies, attendant to adolescence, our emotions and desires begin to seem mysterious to us. We develop a nagging fear of what might occur under their aegis.

A large part of that fear is that we are entering an emotional terrain that is, as of yet unknown, a terra incognita. Various aspects of adolescent popular culture enable us to explore that country to a limited degree and to become familiar with it in such a way that we no longer feel utterly “out of it” and helpless with respect to our affects. Perhaps electronic shooter-games enable us to play with rage in this manner. It is my hypothesis that horror fictions, especially audio-visual ones, allow us to test our own fear factor. Its power over the viewer—at least to the extent that that power rests upon the fact that our emotional dispositions are frighteningly obscure for being untried—can be reduced by giving our fear a reassuring trial run.[151]

One objection to this is that an adaptive account like this overlooks the obvious. We are never going to encounter vampires, ghosts, ghouls, Undead skeletons, and the like, so the fears we test at horror screenings are not really relevant to the experience of any kind of fear-producing situation that we are going to encounter in life. What we see in horror fictions are scientifically impossible events; they are not the right sort of things to test our authority over our feelings.

Nevertheless, the imagery of the Undead does combine many elements of legitimate anxiety. First, there is the prospect of death. Halloween spectacles of the Undead invite us to confront the fact of death itself. The Undead, moreover, are often in some pronounced state of decay or deterioration. This too is a fact of life that horror fictions bring to the fore. The impurity of the zombie is connected to an automatic fear of corpses that most of us feel, while the misshapen and twisted bodies of many Halloween horrors are exaggerations of actual abnormalities that may affront us in the real world. Likewise the aggressiveness and ferocity of many fantastic beings have real world parallels. The war of the worlds, in the film of the same name, is a form of intergalactic genocide.

So one source of satisfaction to be drawn from typical Halloween horrors is a kind of control or mastery that some can derive from experiencing fear close up. This is not to say that horror fictions inoculate us against fear, but rather that they can alleviate the meta-fear of fear by permitting us to explore the first-order level of fear itself. Extrapolating, then, from the satisfaction that can be found in typical Halloween entertainments to the holiday itself, I speculate that the festival itself, with its convergent horrific iconography of the living dead, is a cultural platform that invites experimentation with the negative emotions that surround death and deterioration for the purpose of palliating the fear of fear.

That the holiday is primarily an affair for the young and for adolescents may be offered as corollary support for this hypothesis, since they are probably especially prone to fear of the emotions. Halloween is a social occasion that affords the opportunity to educate youth in the process of emotional management. It is a folk remedy for the fear of fear whose medium is primarily the iconography of the Undead. Nor is it without efficacy for us oldsters who feel death approaching as our bodies ourselves show signs of decay.

Another piece of corollary, albeit informal, evidence for my hypothesis has to do with a feature of Halloween to which many of you may feel I have not yet paid sufficient attention. As mentioned earlier, much Halloween iconography, including that of the Undead, is offered in a parodic spirit. Scream is just as likely to be shown on Halloween night as is The Curse of Frankenstein. Halloween parades of the Undead and campy imitations of Bela Lugosi belong to the holiday as much as the imagery designed to make onlookers cringe.[152] This is probably especially true of adult masquerade parties.

Halloween levity may, at first blush, appear to contradict my hypothesis about the function of the holiday to mitigate the meta-fear of fear by means of inducing fear. However, as is well known, humor is a widely acknowledged device that is used by people in professions, like medicine, mental health, the military, and law enforcement, which professions bring them into close contact with death, injury, decay, and malevolent behavior. These professionals use laughter—what the philosopher Henri Bergson called the anaesthesis of the heart—in order to control their emotional reactions in such a way that they can get on with their work. That is, laughter too is a well known means of emotional control. That laughter and horror exist side by side on Halloween may be the result of their sharing the same basic function for revelers: both contribute to enhance their feelings of self-control with respect to the emotions, most notably fear and disgust.

The conjecture that Halloween iconography of the Undead—both media-made and handmade—imparts satisfaction and pleasure due to the alleviation of our fear of fear and, thereby, to emotional control, is in competition with better-known explanations like psychoanalysis. But the fear-of-fear hypothesis is not only simpler than its psychoanalytic rival. Its leading assumption—that many of us, at least at certain times in our lives, are prone to the fear of fear—is readily confirmed introspectively, whereas much of the psychoanalytic account relies upon the existence of operations and entities that defy direct confirmation. To its dialectical advantage, then, the fear-of-fear hypothesis of the pleasure taken in the Halloween iconography of the Undead is more economical both with respect to the number and complexity of the concepts and operations it presupposes as well as being simpler in terms of the kinds of observations that contribute to its confirmation.

Fear itself may not be the only thing that frightens us on Halloween; but it is one of them.[153]

19

“Powerful, Beautiful, and Without Regret”: Femininity, Masculinity, and the Vampire Aesthetic

JOAN GRASSBAUGH FORRY

“They have forgotten the first lesson. We must be powerful, beautiful, and without regret.” When Armand speaks these words to fellow vampire Louis in the 1994 film Interview with the Vampire, he is not just talking aimlessly. Rather, he is reciting a truism about how vampires are portrayed.

Perhaps the most familiar form of the Undead, vampires have appeared in many different guises over the past century. From the umpteenth re-telling of the haunting story of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, to the comedic children’s book Bunnicula, the story of a vampiric pet rabbit that raids the refrigerator at night and sucks the “blood” from the family’s vegetables, all vampire stories play on themes of power, beauty, and moral character.

Vampires are powerful not only because they inspire fear and terror in the living, but also because they escape from the troublesome human burdens of aging and sickness. Vampires are the ultimate affirmation of individualism, escaping from human moral obligation, caring only for themselves, and free from regret or remorse for their actions. But how and why must vampires be beautiful? There’s no doubt that they are; even Bunnicula has sleek fur and the most deep haunting eyes one can imagine in a cute little bunny. But just how does beauty work in the conventions of vampire representation? Are conventional beliefs about beauty and appearance operating in the portrayal of vampires, or do these conventional beliefs get shoved out in the sunlight to get dusted?

Conventional standards of bodily beauty, femininity, and masculinity are at work in vampire films and television; however, these standards often shapeshift to challenge cultural norms surrounding gender and sexuality. The female vampire is terrifying because she is a killing machine housed in an ultra-feminine body. For example, Drusilla, from the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has long flowing hair and only wears dresses, but she is insane, hell-bent on wreaking havoc on the mortal world, and often bites small children and puppies. Strangely, the male vampire is often feminized while simultaneously represented as masculine. Think of Dracula’s stylized coif in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film Bram Stoker’s Dracula or the sensual and refined Dracula played by Frank Langella in 1979. The consequences for these transgressions differ according to gender. Female vampires are usually punished and rendered powerless, either through ridicule or death, while male vampires flourish, or languish, in elegance and style. There are many variations on the visual portrayal of the vampire, and though there are certainly counter-examples to my findings, there are common themes in the representation of the vampire.

Beauty 101

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy concerned with the observation and interpretation of art. Philosophers of art deal with questions of whether things are indeed art or not, the values of art, and properties of art such as beauty. Generally, beauty is associated with goodness because observation of a beautiful artwork, or object in nature, causes some kind of pleasurable experience. Philosophers of art have long debated the definition of beauty and how it can be detected and evaluated in artworks. For example, Pythagoras (582-496 B.C.E.) and other Pre-Socratic philosophers argue that beauty could be assessed according to a “golden ratio,” a mathematical value indicating a degree of balance and symmetry. Plato (427-347 B.C.E.) argues that beauty is a metaphysical property that is always in harmony with goodness, fairness, and the divine. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) separates goodness from beauty, claiming that goodness pertains only to conduct, while beauty pertains to objects. Aristotle instead claims that the forms of beauty are order, symmetry, and definiteness. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) argues that judgments about beauty are subjective in the sense that individuals make judgments about beauty, but these judgments are objective in the sense that others ought to agree on which things are beautiful. The pleasure experienced in observing a beautiful object is, for Kant, present in the act of observation or judgment and in nothing else.

But beauty gets complicated when we talk about human bodies and representations of human bodies. Is beauty really an intrinsic and natural property, or is it an appearance that can be achieved through some set of practices? Feminists and social theorists criticize the naturalness of the human body, arguing that human bodies are not wholly natural, but are largely constructed through practice. The late philosopher Michel Foucault traces the body’s transition from a natural entity to one that can be molded and shaped, using the figure of the pre-modern soldier to discuss the construction of the body through disciplinary practice. The soldier of the seventeenth century, Foucault argues, was “natural”: he was “born” a soldier and possessed physical “gifts” and strength of character that could not be acquired. However, a change took place by the end of the eighteenth century: “the soldier has become something that can be made; out of a formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required can be constructed.”[154] Anyone (any man, that is) could now be a soldier. The body of an ordinary man would be sculpted into the body of a solider through rigorous physical training; this process is discipline.

The important question for Foucault is how these ideas of naturalness and disciplinary practice function. Vampires get around the disciplinary process involved in cultivating physical strength because they are strong and powerful without practice. Following Foucault, we can question how the vampire goes against ideas of both naturalness and disciplinary practice, how vampire stories function to warn, horrify, and excite us, and why the vampire is so appealing.

Feminist philosophers, such as Susan Bordo and Sandra Lee Bartky, have used Foucault’s concept of discipline to discuss how women’s bodies are regulated through beauty practices. Beauty is a gender-specific social construct that shifts according to culture and historical period. Women’s bodies aren’t naturally beautiful; rather, women can make their bodies into beautiful bodies by performing a set of practices deemed appropriate to one’s culture and historical moment. Sandra Bartky examines three categories of disciplinary beauty practices that produce contemporary conventional femininity: (1) practices that produce a body of a certain size or shape; (2) practices that produce certain movements or gestures; and (3) practices directed toward displaying the body as an ornamented surface.[155] Practices that produce a body of a certain size or shape include dieting and exercise. Bodily movements and gestures are restricted through feminine clothing such as skirts and high-heeled shoes. Producing an ornamented surface involves hair removal, intensive hair and skin care, cosmetic application and maintenance, and paying attention to the details of one’s clothing. All of these disciplinary practices require generous amounts of time and money.

The ideal feminine body that is the result of all this is youthful, thin with ample breasts, and walks with smooth movements, preferably with a moderate swivel of the hips. She possesses long styled hair, flawless skin, eyes and lips appropriately accentuated by makeup, and clothes and accessories that match and enhance her body’s shape. Departures from this ideal are seen as unfeminine, or even masculine. Bartky claims that these beauty practices are not applicable to men in the manner and degree that they are to women. However, Susan Bordo analyzes the recent rise in male beauty culture and points out that beauty practices are increasingly marketed toward men, altering representations of men and masculinity in popular culture.[156]

Though women must perform these practices in order to appear beautiful, beauty is still portrayed as “natural.” For example, when Kendra the vampire slayer arrives in Sunnydale, California, emerging from the cargo pit of an airplane in Season Two of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, her eyeliner and lipstick are perfect, and her provocative clothing is unwrinkled, despite her long trip from some unknown faraway place.

“I’m Too Sexy for My Mirror”

But how do these concepts of beauty, femininity, and masculinity apply to vampires? Conventional ideals of beauty, femininity, and masculinity are both reinforced and resisted in the conventions of vampire representation, or what I call the “vampire aesthetic.” First, vampires are exempt from the majority of beauty practices. In escaping from pesky mortal aging, vampires are always youthful, and the only effort they need to make to keep their youthful appearance is to feed regularly on the blood of the living.

Because most vampires have no reflection, they cannot be too concerned with their appearances. Because vampire bodies stay youthful and relatively unchanged throughout their lease on immortality, vampires don’t need to worry about weight or exercise. We rarely see a fat vampire, or a vampire who feels compelled to go to the gym. Their beauty is effortless. But in this effortlessness, conventional ideas about femininity and masculinity are emphasized. One of the tenets of both feminine and masculine beauty is that it must appear natural and not contrived. No matter how much effort went into shaping one’s body, one must always pretend that this body comes naturally.

Second, vampire movements are elegant and smooth because of their supernatural powers. Vampires can shapeshift into other creatures, such as bats or wolves. They can move without obeying the laws of gravity, floating without touching the ground. Their movements are stylish and elegant; when they move swiftly, they move with precision, not with lumbering, erratic motions, unless they are stupid and easy fodder for a vampire slayer. For the female vampire, moving smoothly and suggestively is in line with conventional femininity. But the male vampire’s graceful movements, intended to aid him in seducing his victim, blur the presumed line between masculine and feminine; men are not supposed to walk gracefully and lightly.

Third, male and female vampires are both heavily sexualized. A key part of vampire stories is the seduction of the victim. William Patrick Day writes, “Vampire stories are also tales of sexual sensationalism, the bite that is the kiss, pain that is pleasure, death that is love.”[157] A thinly-veiled sexual voracity, the vampire’s sexuality is synonymous with the thirst for blood. Because the bite functions as a metaphor for sex, the vampire is not only a predator, but also a sexual predator. The promise of a vampire’s sexuality lies in the vampire’s method, seducing victims so that they become willing participants. The bite is often represented as highly pleasurable for both the vampire and the victim. Often, during the bite, both vampire and victim appear as if they are in the throes of orgasm.

The vampire’s sexuality works with constructed norms of gender and sexuality. For the male vampire, seduction is not a transgression according to constructed masculinity, which takes sexual initiation and aggression to be the norm. Also, vampire stories challenge heterosexuality and monogamy. The male vampire often keeps a harem of female victims that he has turned into vampires. Jonathan Harker’s encounter with the three sisters in Dracula is an example. Most vampire stories in which the main vampire character is male are heterosexual; the male vampire seduces and drinks the blood of female victims. In Interview with the Vampire we see homosexual overtones among male vampires. Louis and Lestat are companions for some time until they turn Claudia, a girl child, into a vampire and form a family of sorts. Louis and Claudia eventually leave Lestat, but Louis is soon compelled (seduced?) by Armand, another male vampire, and he arranges to leave Claudia for Armand.

Lesbian vampire portrayals are more common and hence, more widely accepted. The 1983 film The Hunger and film adaptations of the novella Carmilla portray lesbian vampires as the main characters. In addition, a distinct subgenre of lesbian vampire pornography arose in the 1970’s and continued into the 1990’s, with titles like Barely Legal Lesbian Vampires, and Dracula’s Dirty Daughters. The female vampire’s sexual appetite can be interpreted in two ways. First, for the lesbian vampire, her appetite is another invocation of a stereotype because lesbians are popularly represented as sexually aggressive, and thus deviant. But, second, the female vampire’s aggressive sexuality is a transgression because she is female. Conventionally, women’s sexual desire is supposed to be passive.

The Female Vampire as Femme Fatale

Usually presented as accessories to the male vampire main character, few female vampires take center stage in vampire films and television. But those female vampires that we do see generally conform to ideals of femininity. Consider Queen Akasha from the 2001 film Queen of the Damned, the second film adaptation of Anne Rice’s novels in the series The Vampire Chronicles. Queen Akasha, played by the late pop singer Aaliyah, is scantily clad throughout the film, despite the moderately cool climate (other characters wear heavy coats). Her hair is long, with elaborate knots piled on top of her head. Her belly is exposed to highlight her sexuality. When she moves, she seems to slither, and with one graceful arm gesture, she can burn other vampires to ashes. There is only one scene in the film that shows Akasha’s carnage involving any physical contact. This lack of contact, and reliance on some supernatural power, is a feminine way of killing because it is passive. This reliance on supernatural powers and not on physical contact is a common theme in portraying female vampires.

Drusilla is similarly feminine. The vampires in Buffy are either animalistic automatons or sophisticated and developed characters. Drusilla falls into the latter category; she was a recurring character through Season Two of Buffy and she made two guest appearances in Seasons Three and Five. Drusilla and her peroxide-headed companion, Spike, arrive in Sunnydale ready to wreak havoc and kill Buffy. Drusilla always wears long dresses or nightgowns, never pants. Her hair is long and is always styled and her nails are perfectly manicured. Drusilla is cruel and insane to boot, presumably from being tortured prior to becoming a vampire.

Drusilla is often portrayed as if she were a child, and she is treated like a child as well. For example, in one scene from Season Two, she talks to a dead bird in a cage. She asks Spike why it won’t sing to her anymore and he replies, in a father-like tone, that it’s dead and that she kills every pet that’s given to her. She whimpers and Spike comforts her. Drusilla conducts tea parties with blindfolded dolls and rips apart the ones that anger her. Her irrational and emotional tendencies, conventionally associated with the feminine, make her threatening because there is no logic to her wrath. But, because she is portrayed as childlike, her threat is neutralized. However, because these childlike qualities are embodied within an insane creature that ultimately wants to destroy the world, her character is even more uncanny and threatening. In the Season Two finale, Drusilla manages to kill Kendra, the other vampire slayer. Drusilla kills Kendra in a feminine way: like all vampires on the show, she possesses incredible physical strength and well-honed fighting skills, but she kills Kendra by first hypnotizing her, and then slitting her throat with her long, polished fingernail.

Claudia in Interview played by a young Kirsten Dunst, is also portrayed as child-like and incapable. However, unlike Drusilla who is a grown woman, Claudia is actually a child when she is turned into a vampire. Claudia also plays with dolls and is dressed like a doll in frilly dresses. Despite her childlike body and her girlish appearance, Claudia is a vicious killer. The film’s comedic moments center on her child-vampire escapades. When she kills the seamstress and disposes of a number of piano teachers, Lestat reprimands her and reminds her, “Not in the house!” But as Claudia becomes older and begins to understand that she will never grow up into a woman, she becomes bitter and blames Louis and Lestat for stealing her womanhood from her. She deceives Lestat into drinking the blood of a corpse, a form of death for a vampire, in an attempt to kill him. Her childlike face as she lies and deceives Lestat is especially frightening and uncanny because such dark intentions are embodied within a small child.

The feminine appearance of these three characters, like many others, serves to enhance their characters as devastating, threatening women. Ultra-feminine appearance, expressed through conventional dress, movement, and youth, offsets the female vampire’s excessive sexual or vampiric desire. The female vampire has, then, two interpretations. First, her feminine appearance neutralizes her as a threat. Or, second, her feminine appearance adds to her threatening nature; she is more dangerous because her body appears unthreatening. Barbara Creed explains that female vampires are horrifying and attractive because they threaten to undermine the dominant position of men in patriarchal, or male-dominated, society.[158] The female vampire is represented as a femme fatale, a “fatal woman,” shrewd, cunning, and hell-bent on leading men to utter ruin. The femme fatale embodies a set of fears and anxieties about the place of women in general: women might rise from the dead and devour all those who ever wronged them with gross irrationality, emotion, and violence.

The female vampire is also a character that inspires liberation. She threatens patriarchy, even when she appears ultra-feminine, her feminine body performing cruelty and violence. But this liberatory reading doesn’t work, because the femme fatale doesn’t survive; her evil nature is punished through death, or she is made powerless through ridicule. For example, in Queen, Akasha chooses Lestat to be her king, but her desire to dominate the world is too much even for the egotistical and arrogant Lestat. He is horrified when she litters the beach with corpses, and he conspires to kill her in the end. Claudia’s attempt at murdering Lestat in Interview is punished by death when Armand’s crew kidnaps her and she is left to turn to ashes in the morning sunlight.

Drusilla, on the other hand, is made to look foolish. Drusilla and Spike escape Sunnydale at the end of Season Two, and in subsequent seasons we are updated on her story. She dumps Spike for a disgusting chaos demon, a half-man, half-deer creature with large oozing antlers and no personality. She is foolish and juvenile for dumping Spike for a revolting creature with no powers. She returns to Sunnydale in Season Five, only to be made to look foolish again when Spike rejects her and she flees in disgrace. Drusilla’s whereabouts are currently unknown.

The female vampire as femme fatale provides a powerful social message for women. Being bad, beautiful, and immortal might be fun for a while, but girls, in the end it doesn’t pay off.

The Male Vampire as Metrosexual . . . Sort Of

Beauty is connected to power and self-definition in the vampire aesthetic. Vampire characters range from human-like to pure evil snarling monsters. Take the vamps on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for example. Vampire protagonists, or those vampires that have some kind of character or sophisticated power, appear human-like, usually embodying elements of conventional beauty, until they are angered or about to strike, when they uglify, their foreheads going bumpy, eyes turning yellow, and fangs appearing. Those vampires that are subordinate or less powerful, or driven purely by lowly hunger (such as Harmony’s minions), are always ugly and usually meet their demise at the hands of the vampire slayer or flee in a cowardly fashion, never to be seen again.

Sophisticated male vampires usually play the role of vampire protagonist in vampire films and television. In this role, the male vampire is usually a character struggling for self-definition. Having retained some semblance of humanity, he tries to navigate between the loneliness and boredom of immortality, and the ethics of killing humans. Often a self-divided character, the vampire protagonist struggles with delight in killing, need for bodily nourishment, and moral shame. Louis from Interview, Angel and post-soul-restoration Spike from both Buffy and Angel, and some portrayals of Dracula are examples. Because immortality has given him many years to reflect, the male vampire is often wise, articulate, and, last but not least, concerned with maintaining a distinctive image.

The popular slang word metrosexual denotes a stylish heterosexual male who is in touch with his feminine side and possesses “good taste.” Similarly, the male vampire protagonist is in touch with his feminine side, as expressed not only through his appearance and movements, but also in his surroundings. Whereas less important vampires live in “nests” where they feed in filth, and leave the bodies to rot where they sleep, the male vampire protagonist is usually surrounded by gothic elegance, and languishes in a castle or mansion, or at least a well-furnished apartment. Even the masculine Spike from Buffy, who lives in a dirty crypt, is comedically feminine and image-oriented. Buffy catches him painting his fingernails black in one fifth-season episode, and he maintains a love for the soap opera Passions. Commonly, the struggling male vampire is challenged by some situation, like falling in love with a human, and this becomes an opportunity for him to express his emotions, which have been constipated by years of killing without regret. Though he is incredibly strong, the male vampire protagonist is rarely represented as overly muscular, or overtly aggressive. Because he is an Undead creature of the night, he is forced to be subtle, and is persuaded to hunt by his emotional inclinations.

But when the male vampire embodies typically feminine traits, it works not to render him less frightening or less powerful, but instead allows his audience to identify with him. No longer evil incarnate, if he dies, it’s a tragedy. More often, he lives, either to torture himself and do penance for his wrongs, or to live a life of vampire happiness after he has learned his lesson. He expresses his emotions, struggles with them, and he does so with some kind of “good taste” or aesthetic sensibility. He is able to see beauty in everyday worldly objects, even if not in himself, and this brings him solace. He takes comfort in the harsh world that troubles him so deeply; this is the ultimate lesson for the human audience.

Symbolizing a wish fulfillment for immortality, freedom from the mortal coil, carnivorous animalism, and a sexual voracity, the vampire has given us something to both fear and to embrace. The image and appearance of the vampire serves to question a number of boundaries, between real and unreal, dead and Undead, masculine and feminine. Beauty plays varying roles in the vampire aesthetic. Vampires are themselves beautiful and their beauty fits with standards of human beauty. Their visual appeal makes them seem less threatening, as beautiful entities are commonly thought to be pleasurable to gaze at or engage with. However, a vampire’s beauty also works to make him or her more frightening; encountering a beautiful vampire usually means one will meet one’s end. Not only are vampires often physically beautiful, but they seek beauty in their vampiric struggles with immortality. Beauty, especially for the male vampire protagonist, is a comfort, a shield from the bane of immortality. But, as we have seen, beauty functions differently according to gender in the vampire aesthetic. In the realm of the Undead, the male vampire becomes a beautiful martyr while the female vampire becomes a disastrous woman whom we love to hate.

20
True and Untrue Blood
RACHEL ROBISON

The sight of blood makes a lot of people feel strangely threatened. It evokes fascination and terror. Horror movies frequently play on this fact about our psychology—the bloodier the better.

Blood is a matter of life and death. When we see blood, we know that if too much is spilled someone will die. If that person receives a transfusion, blood can save their life. Blood can be dangerous: it transmits a variety of diseases. Blood’s life-giving force has been connected to eternal youth and immortality. Its capacity to bring disease and death has been suggestive of other special powers that blood might bring with it. Vampires, because they thrive on blood, are frequently thought to be able to take advantage of blood’s mysterious properties.

Blood Is the Life

There are two general categories of powers that are commonly attributed to blood, each of which carry with them a distinct set of philosophical questions. These questions do not see resolution within the vampire legend itself; the power of blood is stipulated and, if one believes the story, one must believe that the resolution to the metaphysical questions is somehow, inexplicably, possible, though not sought after.

So, for example, if one believes a standard story about vampires, one must believe that there is something about the nature of blood which makes it life-sustaining for those who have died. If one actively seeks out an answer to the question of how blood can have this property it is likely they will discover that there is no answer to be found

There is, however, a more interesting question which is answerable: Why do we assume that blood carries with it the magical or metaphysical implications that we frequently find in these stories?

The first kind of powers attributed to blood involves youth and age. Blood is connected to the preservation of youth and beauty. This is evident in many legends, a notorious example of which is the tale of the “Blood Countess,” Elizabeth Bathory. Legend has it that the Countess killed over six hundred young female virgins, drained them of their blood, and bathed in it. Her motivation was to ensure for herself eternal youth and beauty. The likely truth behind the story of the Countess is that she was an early serial killer (killing nowhere near six hundred people). Accounts of her activities were exaggerated and sensationalized. People attempted to make sense out of such senseless deaths by locating the motivation for her behavior in the mysterious youth-preserving power of blood.

Our mythologies also attribute healing powers to blood. In Greek mythology, the blood of Medusa had both the power to heal and the power to kill. Her blood was even capable of giving life: Pegasus was said to be born from her fallen blood.

The most noteworthy of the powers that blood is said to possess is the power to make someone immortal. Vampires drink the blood of humans and from it they are ensured eternal life (provided that they are not beheaded, staked, or consumed by flames). After vampires have drained humans of their blood, they may then allow the humans to drink from their own, undead blood. In this way, their victims too are granted—or damned to—eternal life.

The fact that our legends contain such creatures—evil creatures who are capable of escaping death entirely—points to a deep sense of dread. One explanation for the appearance of vampire legends is that they are attempts to explain phenomena that would otherwise go unexplained. Vampirism might be invoked in order to explain death due to a mysterious disease or a seemingly purposeless murder.

But there is a deeper motivation behind the vampire legend. People are curious about and afraid of the fact that they will one day die. The vampire is an entity to whom this will never happen. People can rest assured that there is a way out—to escape death, one can always turn to vampirism. This way out, however, involves a choice to turn toward evil, a choice which, if one is a good person, one will not be willing to make. This choice allows the ordinary person to make their own choice with grace. They will forfeit the potential for eternal life on earth in order to be a good person and perhaps to reap the benefits of eternal life in some unknown world beyond this one.

The Fount of Immortality

These powers also suggest the presence of metaphysical problems, primarily questions related to the connection between blood and life. How is it that drinking blood will cause a vampire to live forever? In order for this to be the case, blood would have to be the very thing that keeps us alive. Blood and no other thing would have to be essential for our continued existence. It would also have to be true that vampire blood is somehow special, even though the heart is no longer beating and blood is no longer being produced.

Drinking the blood of a vampire will turn an ordinary person into a vampire. It’s not merely drinking blood that does it, for drinking the blood of another ordinary person will not turn an ordinary person into a vampire. There must be some property of blood so that, once it is in the body of a vampire, it becomes life-preserving. Traditional vampire stories take these assumptions for granted and don’t try to explain the mechanisms by which they work, though contemporary vampire stories do attempt to deal with some of these questions.

In addition to the powers that have been attributed to blood that relate to youth, life, and death, there are also powers attributed to blood that involve close bonds. The nature of such bonds varies from one legend or practice to another. People connected in some way “by blood”—in other words, by kinship—are thought to have a closer connection than those who are not. Consider the expression “Blood is thicker than water.” We tend to think that we have special obligations to family members even if they are far removed from us because they are our “blood relations.” Consider also the practice of becoming “blood brothers”—a practice according to which two people cut their fingers and mix the blood together as a sign of their undying friendship and loyalty. In both of these cases, blood serves as a binding force which creates certain responsibilities toward those who are connected by blood.

Perhaps the most prominent and significant practice in which a bond is created through blood is the ritual of drinking the blood of Christ, taken either symbolically or literally. According to Christian theology, Christ’s sacrifice on the cross saved humanity. His blood was spilled so that humanity might be saved. He died so that we can live forever.

The spilling of Christ’s blood for our salvation is memorialized in the rite known as communion, mass, or eucharist. Bread and wine are identified with Christ’s body and blood. Christians eat Christ’s body and drink his blood, in order to establish the fact that they have become immortal, they have gained eternal life. Different Christian denominations have different views on just what this means. According to Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Lutherans, the bread and the wine, after they are consecrated, really become the body and blood of Christ, though this is not something that could ever be detected by chemical analysis. According to most Protestants, this ceremony is merely a symbol: the bread and wine do not actually turn into Christ’s flesh and blood.

Our vampire mythology turns this practice on its head. Vampires have eternal life, but not the kind of eternal life that Christians are promised if they live right and follow God’s teachings. Drinking the blood of Christ symbolizes the bond his followers have with God and their devotion to follow his commandments—to live a good life. If they do this, they will be rewarded with eternal life. A vampire, on the other hand, drinks from the blood of humans. He commits an evil act in order to live forever. When a vampire drinks blood, it symbolizes his damnation rather than his salvation, and the bond formed between the vampire and his victim is more sinister. The bond created can lead to the death, manipulation, or corruption of the victim. The vampire is in a position to change the victim physically, psychologically, and even morally.

How is it that blood ties create obligations? If we are, in fact, obligated to other people you would suppose that we would be obligated to them whether we have blood ties or not. What makes these blood ties so important? How is it that blood ties can lead to salvation or to domination and manipulation?

In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, after Mina drinks some of Dracula’s blood, a connection is formed and he is able to control her. How can we make sense of the claim that blood can have this power? How as readers can we be drawn in to a story that allows the mere presence of someone else’s blood in a person’s system to diminish the extent to which that person has free will? Has Dracula somehow become a part of Mina?

HBO has recently provided us with a new bit of vampire lore to sink our teeth into. True Blood is a fun southern twist on the beloved blonde-virgin-falls-in-love-with-a-brooding-vampire story. Our heroine, Sookie Stackhouse, drinks the blood of her civil war veteran beau, Bill Compton, and a close bond is formed between them. Bill knows when Sookie is near. He knows when she’s in danger. The more of Bill’s blood that Sookie drinks, the stronger her ability becomes to sense Bill’s presence and to know whether he’s in danger.

Normally, we tend to take our pursuit of knowledge as an individual enterprise. But when Bill knows where Sookie is or knows that she’s in danger, knowledge has moved beyond the individual level. What Bill knows about Sookie cannot be separated from her union with him—a union formed by blood.

The blood in True Blood also has implications of a more erotic nature. When Sookie drinks Bill’s blood, she finds herself immediately sexually attracted to him. This can’t be explained by claiming that Sookie and Bill are star-crossed lovers. Sookie is frequently put in positions in which she must deal with Eric, the vampire sheriff of Area Five where Bill lives. Sookie despises Eric. Nevertheless, when she is put in the position in which she has to either drink Eric’s blood or die, she does what any reasonable person would do—and finds herself powerfully sexually attracted to Eric as a result.

As readers and viewers we are not always willing to suspend our disbelief. Some explanations are too outlandish to be acceptable, even in fiction or drama. For example, if a detective in a crime story were to randomly pick a name out of the phonebook and by doing so just happen to find the suspect in a murder, the scenario would be too far-fetched for us to swallow. Yet there’s something about blood that we are more inclined to accept in fictional or dramatic explanations. We are willing to suspend disbelief and get sucked in to our vampire stories.

Let It Bleed

Perhaps the reason that blood has these sorts of philosophical implications in our legends, mythologies, and religions can be found in our history of philosophy and medicine. A common, though contentious, view held by philosophers in ancient times was that the heart was the rational, controlling center of the body. Adherents of this view included Aristotle, Empedocles, and the stoic philosopher Chrysippus. Aristotle’s view was that blood was produced in this rational center of the body. Given the mystery of rationality and consciousness, it is little wonder that legends formed about the product of this rational center would involve attributing to it mysterious properties with metaphysical implications.

It’s easy to see how such a heart-centered view would seem to entail that blood might have something to do with personal identity, free will, and even epistemology. When we try to think about what makes us who we are, one of the things that we appeal to is our identity as rational, thinking agents. We might distinguish ourselves from other rational agents because of the particular experiences and cognitions that we have had. If we believe that our personal identity in some way consists in our particular thoughts, experiences, and memories, and that these things are generated in the heart, the psychic relation between sucker and suckee is easier to understand. Blood, the product of the same organ that generates the crucial aspects of our personal identity, might somehow transmit bits of that very identity to anyone who drinks it. (We tend to imagine the heart as the source of blood, even though we know that blood is really made in the bone marrow.)

Similar points can be made about both free will and the kind of mental connection that exists between Sookie and Bill. If a part of the identity of a person who is very powerful is running through our veins, those very bits of his identity might exert force over us. Such a powerful creature might curtail our free will. Similarly, if part of a person is in us and part of us is in them, it may not be surprising that they know what we know and vice versa.

Even those early thinkers who did not think that the heart was the rational center of the human body thought of the presence or absence of blood as being crucial to physical and (what we would now call) mental health. Many diseases, both physical and mental, were thought to be caused by an excessive amount of blood.

In olden times, medicine was dominated by a theory called Humorism. According to this theory, the body was filled with four substances or “humors” conducive to different temperamental dispositions: cold and dry black bile, which inspires melancholy (the poet’s and philosopher’s humor); warm and dry yellow bile, which induces choler (anger, hot-tempered-ness); cold and moist phlegm, which makes one phlegmatic (calm, unemotional), and warm and moist blood, which is responsible for sanguinity (positivity, courage, lustiness). In a healthy person, the theory held, the four humors would be in balance. Galen, a prominent physician and philosopher in the second century, who began his career as an attending physician to injured gladiators, viewed blood as the primary humor. Galen was unaware of the circulatory system and thought that illnesses and mental disorders were often caused by the stagnation of the blood. Bloodletting became common practice and took many forms, including cutting into the sick person’s flesh, using rudimentary syringes, and applying leeches to their skin. Such treatments, unsurprisingly, would frequently lead to the death of those undergoing them.

These practices support the idea, central to many of these legends, that the right amount of healthy, non-stagnant blood is crucial to life. If one has the right amount of blood, one might look young and healthy, contributing to the idea that blood contributes to youth and beauty. Fermented blood can serve as a poison that must be excised from the body, much like the deadly blood of Medusa.

False Blood

Historical anatomical theory may have helped to encourage belief in the otherwise mysterious powers of blood. However, this requires that the substance these powers are being attributed to is actually blood. Here is where an aspect of the True Blood story poses a problem. The story is supposed to take place in a world in which a safe, non-violent substitute for blood has been found—a synthetic plasma called “True Blood” that somehow has the same effects on vampires as actual blood. How can the anatomical stories I have told above account for what is going on here? Perhaps they can’t.

There are at least two ways that we could go here. The first is that there is some property of blood which is essential to its powers, but which can be found in other substances as well. It would be this property, found both in actual blood and True Blood that has the powers described above.

On the other hand, True Blood might be a very different substance from actual blood with no essential properties in common. If this is the case, it may be that it is not the blood itself, but the performance of a particular action that has the power—the action of drinking what is either really or symbolically blood. It may be the act of drinking either blood or what one symbolically takes to be blood that actually has the effect on the vampire. This explanation is not without its problems. In the True Blood universe, vampire blood is so powerful that people can get high on it. It clearly has some power not shared by True Blood. Perhaps this is not a power that it has in virtue of being blood. Perhaps it is a power that it has in virtue of having once been inside a vampire’s body.

Oh Yes, There Will Be Blood

Historical accounts of anatomy may have some explanatory value in answering questions about why blood has so much power in mythologies, legends, and religions. But why do these stories persist now that we have a more scientific world view? The popularity of vampire stories, with their reliance on the mysterious powers of blood, has been growing continually for a long time, and is now greater than ever.

Why do such stories still hit us where we live?

First, we are just as anxious about our mortality now as at any other point in history, and blood’s connection with life and death has the same pull on us that it has always had. Perhaps we are even more scared of blood than ever, now that we are more aware of the viruses it can spread.

Second, even though we have a more scientific world view, we still strongly associate emotions with the heart and even use expressions involving blood to convey that someone has a particular character or is in a particular emotional state. For example, we might still describe someone as being “hot blooded” or “cold blooded.” Even though we know better, the idea that the heart is the emotional center of the body lingers on.

The fact that this connection is still deeply engrained keeps us from viewing the magical properties of blood in books and movies as too outrageous to go along with. Blood has an effect on us that almost nothing else does, and so long as this is true, we will keep coming back for more.

21
The Twilight of Infinite Desire
RANDALL E. AUXIER and EILEEN TOWNSEND

17 Magazine St.
New Orleans, LA 70130

November 14th, 1983

Chère Paulie,

It was such a treat to make your acquaintance two weeks ago at the gathering of the River Fellowship. I have returned to New Orleans without incident, and I am always relieved to find that barge inspection remains lax and that the dock workers are still as corrupt and greedy as the devil could imagine. Without plentiful mortal vice, travel for our kind would be most vexing. Fortunately, the flourishing of mortal vice seems as certain as taxes, and, as you have learned, more certain than death.

The gathering must have been a bit much for you to take in, I would think, given your recent descent into our, well, shall we say, our unenvied condition? Such affairs are uncommon, but needed every quarter-century or so to ensure that our common interests are explicit and maintained. The recent effluviance of mortal interest in our kind, in its reliable cycles, occasions these congresses, since an assessment of the new variations in their stories, and their likely long-term effects, calls for our collective w isdom.

I think we are all agreed that the frenzy over the Michael Jackson recording is of no significance apart from its having piqued the curiosity of so many young people, who are now reading the “blessed” writings of Anne Rice. Last week I heard that the entire World Association is incensed, having concluded that one among our River Fellowship blabbed to that pesky woman. I mean, for the sake of hell, she certainly made up the details, but the outline of the story is true. I personally knew “Louis” and “Lestat” and even “Claudia.” And being a Parisian for many centuries, I was there at the founding of the Théâtre des Vampires. They are none too happy, by the bye, about having been publicly exposed, but they have gotten their just desserts as far as I am concerned. Excess may be the next thing to true satisfaction, but it has never been a part of wisdom. (They weren’t really destroyed of course, and the character of Armand is pure fiction--I would imagine him to be the invention of our betrayer, not of Mrs. Rice.)

In any case, the few times before, when loose lips and sloppy fangs have exposed us to danger, the public ignored and soon forgot the stories--or, as in the case of the Brontës (and whoever was spilling the beans to them, bless his worthless hide), the mortal public was simply too dense to understand the instruction being given. Of course, the sisters were taken care of, but that sainted blabbermouth deserves nothing lower than heaven itself for such lapses in secrecy. The English are among the most competent vampires you’ll encounter, but their reputation for discretion has always been exaggerated. If you have secrets to keep, you’ll do better with the Swiss or the Dutch.

As you will discover, Cher Paulie, we don’t really develop “friendships,” in the proper sense of the word, and indeed, it is a stretch even for us to become “fond” of one another, but we do depend upon each another in various unhealthy ways. Even then, there are degrees among the unclean, and so, while hope is not given to us, aspiration is, and I aspire to strike one of the unhealthiest dependencies between us that might be conceived. And after all, desire is the key to everything, I think. Would it not be in your interest as well?

I am the oldest of our kind in the New World. It is difficult to argue with success, no? And I confess I have some difficulties, these days, keeping up with the pace of change. I believe you could be of some service to me, as I could be of some protection to you. Let us say that you are, oh, my “niece.” Negotiating the niceties of the nightworld is something you will need to know about, and I believe a discreet alliance at this time is very much in your interest, as it is in mine.

If you incline to accepting my offer, perhaps I could persuade you to begin with (my how I hate this), Anne Rice’s novel. The plight of “Louis” early in his immortal existence is a common one--and never before exposed to public view. As you already know, the transition is very difficult for some of us. It was for me. Perhaps you have been squeamish about your hunting. Perhaps not. You will never know hope again, but you may aspire. You will have no joy, but satiety you are allowed. You will know no peace, but power is available, and there will be no patient or kind love, but desire can become, for you, its own end. “Lestat” was a fool and he still is. Don’t be like him--be smart.

The first thing you will have to work out is your dependency on . . . oh, what was his name, there in Memphis? The one who likes posing as a campus minister. In any case, you are clearly an observant and promising companion, and we have centuries to consider. Oh, and please learn French. I despise this barbaric parlance.

Believe me, I am always yours sincerely,

Étienne Lavec

222 S. Cooper
Memphis, TN 38104

November 23rd, 1983

Dear Mr. Lavec,

You’re right about this whole vampire thing being a little much, a little fast. I knew campus life would be a big change, and that it would test my values, but no one ever prepped me for the challenges of a campus afterlife! I thought that joining the Interfaith House and going to worship group were the safe way to live at school--particularly after I met “Dan,” who was so good at leading the Up All Night weekend service. I thought he was just super nice to me because I’ve always been a fun and faithful girl, so it was pretty freaking surprising when our relationship took this turn! My mom always said that older men want you for the wrong reasons, but I don’t think she could have imagined these particular “wrong reasons.”

Now that “Dan” (he hasn’t told me his real name, and I’m not buying that it’s “Dan Christensen.” I mean, come on. He’s a vampire.) has turned me, he wants to leave the Memphis State Ministry and go somewhere else, where he wants me to pose as his fiancée and be super charming so that all the young people will think we’re really trustworthy. “Dan” isn’t a very down-to-earth vampire. He can’t just suck on a person and get it over with; he wants them to believe he’s saving their soul in the process--some wack-job interpretation of the “think of me when you drink this” Bible verse. The guy has some serious issues.

As for me, I like doing it quick and simple. I used to do Meals on Wheels when I was human, so I’ve been sort of forcibly returning myself the favor, if you catch my drift. The old people never know what hit them.

Mr. Lavec, there’s a lot I have to learn. For instance, it surprised me a bunch at the recent gathering that if you drink from a person with AIDS, not only do you not get the disease, but you’re not even gay afterwards! (I’d kind of thought differently, because of how all the boy vampires dress . . . it’s kind of, frilly, you know? If you want to talk about “the pace of change,” let’s look at capes. Not really something you buy at Sears these days.)

And all this Anne Rice stuff is blowing my mind. I started Interview with the Vampire, and it’s really freaking me out. I get it that we’re, like, the top of the food chain and everything, but do we all have to be so morbid about it? I think everybody has just had about a thousand years to think about themselves, and not enough fresh air. I, for one, would rather think of myself like a bear or a lion or a really heavy falling thing--a semi-natural cause of death, not some bla-bla-bla-dark-angel madness.

The one thing that really bugs me so far is that I used to be such a people person, you know? And now I can’t even go to a party without feeling like the girl with bad hair and glasses-except, instead of glasses, I have fangs and the desire to kill. Gives “sucking face” a whole different ring.

Also, I know that God said “don’t kill,” but then he made Abraham almost kill Isaac as if that was all okay, so I guess turning me into a pasty-faced vamp is the clearest celestial command I’ve ever gotten to sort of step outside the moral lines. Maybe it’s like a heavenly population control thing?

I’d really be into being your vampire niece. Mostly because I am going to have to get away from “Dan Christensen.” I can’t pretend to be someone’s fiancée--I’m only nineteen! Plus, he is such a creep-job. I think you could teach me a few things. So, I have some questions: How did you get to be a vampire so long ago? Who turned you? Also, this might be kind of personal, but who were you before you got turned? I need some major details. Because, honestly, you’re not the sort of stranger I’d get into a car with if I weren’t an immortal predator.

About the French: American Sign Language was my language elective at Memphis State, but, like, I haven’t exactly been researching night classes. I’ll see what I can do about picking up some French. Hey, maybe if more of y’all had been vampires back in the day, you wouldn’t have lost all those times to the “blabbermouth” British! Haha, no offense.

Yours Truly,

Paulie Dori Williams

17 Magazine Street
New Orleans, LA 70130

January 16th, 1984

Chère Paulie,

Please forgive my delayed response. Matters of our collective concern have been dominating my attentions. I cannot say a great deal about these problems now, but it should suffice that your observations about AIDS are more than incidental to our present troubles. The mortals are likely to remain perplexed about the origins of the pathogen, but perhaps that is because they have not yet imagined that we have our own sciences, on the other side of the coil, aimed at solving our problems. Sometimes things develop in directions unforeseen, but one must admit that hunting is better now than it has been since the last Yellow Fever epidemic (which you won’t remember, but that was when I relocated to this lovely and decadent city--my, how decades seem like weeks to me at this point; I can no longer quite understand the idea of “nineteen years”).

I am certainly pleased that you are willing to be my “niece.” One truth in the novel of Mrs. Rice is that, as the mysterious “Armand” says, the world changes but we do not.

It is an effort to connect with every new age. There is something both familiar and disturbing about the character of Armand, but I cannot place my finger upon it. In any case, thank you for extending the hand of mutual benefit, and I can take care of Dan Christensen. He cannot move to a new locale without leave from me. As you will gradually learn, the “reward” for remaining active in every new age is that power accrues to him who does. What, then, are your wishes relative to your maker? I can see to most any reasonable request.

Well, Paulie, my dear, there is too much to tell for a letter of polite length, but I will commence a story that can be resumed, perhaps, in another missive. Our society mirrors that of mortal life in ways the mortals cannot see or quite fathom. But just as we have our scientists, we have our statesmen, our artists, and even our philosophers. Usually our immortal vocations follow something of our mortal proclivities, talents, and interests. That is why you still like to draw--you are something of an artist, I think you mentioned when we met. I encourage you to continue developing that interest. It is not so much desirable that we cling to our human passions, but the opportunity you have been given is for the development of beauty, knowledge, and power indefinitely. As you are coming to suspect, mortals are at a great disadvantage relative to us, since we have time to assimilate our learning indefinitely, and to refine our techniques and talents. Most innovations in the arts, the sciences, and even philosophy, begin with our kind and spread gradually into the lower quarters. The exceptions to this are few indeed.

In my case, I was a student of philosophy, and in those days pursuing any academic field meant taking on an official place in the Church, including vows of celibacy (that no one kept, of course). In time I rose to Master, but my Doctor, the finest mind in Paris, quite unbeknownst to me, was not human. His name was Siger de Brabant. You may read about him, if you like, in the specialized encyclopedias. These were troubled times in the University. The native Parisian student fraternities and the rival Picard fraternities (those attached mainly to provincial faculty--

Siger came from what we now call Belgium) erupted into riots.

In the end, the most progressive thinkers, we were later called the “Latin Averroists,” were run out of the city. The secret order of things among us began to crumble, which I later discovered was a productive alliance between mortal and immortal, together to grasp the nature of God. Our supreme leader was actually a mortal, whose name in Latin was Thomas Aquinas. His reputation has continued to grow in the time since. My Doctor, Siger, was his principal immortal collaborator. When everything fell to pieces, we were all on the run, branded as heretics. That was when Siger turned me. I had no understanding then.

He bade me, very much against my will, to drain our Chief Doctor and not to turn him. I now believe this was an act of loyalty, perhaps even pre-arranged, saving Thomas from the flames of the heretic and sending him where he wanted to be, in heaven. Indeed, two years later, the teachings of Aquinas and Siger were condemned by the Bishop of Paris. But at the time, Siger told me I was to drain Thomas as revenge for an affront, because Thomas had written the vampires out of existence in his greatest work, saying that immortal beings could not possess carnal natures, and that among immortals, only pride and envy were within the purview of our “sinful” actions. You may consult this writing in English translation, Summa Theologica, Part I, Questions 63 and 64, the so-called “Treatise on Angels.” Yet, I find nothing offensive in the Treatise, then or now, and incline to believe the Angelic Doctor was actually covering up our existence, for mutual benefit. We were almost unknown to European mortals at that time, since we had only begun exploring Europe a century or so earlier. The first vampires in Europe came back with the Crusaders, as you might suspect, from our more ancient abodes in Persia and Egypt.

But I did as I was told and drained the Doctor, which took a while--he was not a small man. I did not appreciate at the time how excellent and subtle is the taste of a chaste Italian. If anything, I suffer these days from an excessive refinement of taste. Americans remind me of the heavy Bordeaux wines we had in those days, complex mixtures, some almost accidentally nice, others very difficult to endure. I stand on my judgment that Italian pure varietals, taste best, especially those from Umbria (I mean the populace, not the wines--perhaps you may be fortunate to find an Umbrian immigrant to taste among your rolling cuisine).

Anyway, this episode of my life ended when Siger was found out and sent to his permanent hell by a group of monks. It happened in Orvieto just a few years later. I was then “freed” from my master by this, but sooner than I would have preferred. I have continued with philosophy, and indeed with philosophers. I am particularly drawn to the problem of the nature of the self in relation to desire. Are you interested in philosophy? Perhaps you had a class or two? I was drawn to taste the Kantian there at your university, until I learned he was an Episcopalian.

At all events, do tell me of your interests, your art, your reading especially, and what you want done with your maker.

Ever Thine,

Étienne Lavec

222 S. Cooper
Memphis, TN 38104

February 3rd, 1984

Dear Mr. Lavec,

I finished the Anne Rice book. I told Dan to bug off for awhile, because “I had some serious thinking to do” (Yeah right. Like, what, am I going to sit around saying “Okay, Paulie, you have fangs now. Let’s monologue about it for twelve hours.” Boring.), and holed up at my favorite local twenty-four-hour joint, the Steak and Egg Kitchen. The place is a real Memphis classic, and the breakfast steak there is (well, it was) really great--totally undercooked. I used to think I could actually live on the stuff.

Anyway, about this Anne Rice book, you and I have a few things to talk about.

First of all, I didn’t get what everybody was so upset about all the time in the book. Every single frickin’ page is Fatal-Passion-this and Heartbreaking-Despair-that. And all of it because vampires are “immortal,” when, clearly, they’re not. I mean, sure, we don’t age, but we can be killed by tons of stuff. Like, uh, THE SUN. We can just get really, really old without showing it. Which makes us more like sea turtles than fallen angels, you know? Am I missing something here?

Okay, second, I don’t understand Louis. I mean, I know that guilt and alienation are supposed to be the hallmark of his age (it reminds me of the quote in that Hemingway novel about the “lost generation”--was Gertrude Stein a guilty vampire?!), but I just kept expecting him to stop acting like a little girl and get on with things. Armand was right--we’re just another creature under the sun. Figuratively speaking. What I mean is that God created us, and when He did, He must have known that we were mean ol’ predators. So what’s the big deal?

But, maybe I don’t understand. It’s the Eighties now, and they call my generation the Me-Nowers. As in this is Me, a Vampire, Now. I just can’t get behind all the poetic-y feelings about it. I mean, I’m angry that I’m gonna have to pay Social Security taxes forever and never reap the benefits, but it’s not making me cry bloody tears. I guess I’m just young. You’d probably say that I taste like a glass of Welch’s.

I actually did take part of a Philosophy class. Have you ever heard of this guy, Malthus?

As for “taking care of” Dan, that’s another point where you need to get up to speed. The way you said “taking care of” made me feel like I’m in a mafia movie! As you probably know, I have Christian and conservative values that make revenge look bad, but even if I didn’t, nobody settles their problems that way any more. Hello, counseling! Dan obviously needs some help, but I meant something more in the way of a reclining couch and someone to talk to about his mother. You say there are vampire careers--what about a vampire shrink?

It was neat to read about the old days. Please keep writing me, and I’ll keep writing you. I’ve actually been kind of neglecting my art lately. I used to like to paint the sunrise, but that’s obviously out. I’m going to have to go searching around town for some onyx-colored oils and a new subject matter. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Au revoir!

Paulie Dori Williams

17 Magazine St.
New Orleans, LA 70130

February 29th, 1984

Chère Paulie,

You raise so many gnawing questions!

Let me begin by apologizing for that biting tone in mine of last month, relative to your maker, but among our kind he is entitled to a traditional measure of authority over your movements and meals. He answers to me nevertheless. Even though times are changing, you will not want to test him too sorely, or those allied to him (and here I discreetly exclude myself). You should be aware that what stands behind this traditional “order” is not simply the threat of force or of punishment. This is not quite the mafia. We all live with limitations, even those who do not precisely “live” at all.

You did not ask for an explanation, but I will offer it in any case, since it bears upon something I must come to later in this letter. The fundamental idea in our tradition, our common law, is that of “command,” indeed, nothing short of divine command. As you know, when God created the light, He commanded the light into being. Such Words, such commands, are all that lie between the two orders of light and dark. In the dark, our limitations just are the very border of the world of light. We cannot cross into the light because of God’s second act--when God set the darkness in its own realm to make a place for the light, the tension between our realm and theirs was established, and all beings, created or self-created (such as we are), have to conform to the order of the Word. Nearly all of our laws and traditions apply to our intercourse with mortals. We need no laws for dealing with one another, for here our natures provide the limits. You will not drink the blood of a brother or sister because it would bring on your second death, and you need not be taught that it is forbidden because your nature is repulsed at the very notion, and among us, desire and disgust are our most trustworthy guides.

You may defy your maker, in the near term, dear Paulie, but you are no longer a creature of the fickle light. The darkness is before the light and it shall be after, and, if I may presume to be familiar, it was not God that made thee, not as thou art. Defy thou the Word now and the Word defies thee later. For our kind, there is no evasion of consequences because evasion assumes that time will run out before the consequences of a choice or an action can come back around. But for us, all time has already become space, the space of the dark. Remember that for us, “now” simply means “here,” and every “here” becomes, in time, every other. Defy your maker and you may safely ignore the question of when or whether you will be called to account. You will be. The only contingency is where you will be when it happens.

Are we just aging and failing to show it? No, Paulie, we are not. You no longer live in the order of withering time and devouring light, but only the Word, the command, protects you from the devastations of time and light. Light consumes itself and all that it touches, and time is the ultimate weapon of the light. Obey your maker. He occupies the wider part of the dark. He is obedient to me for the same reason that you must obey him, as indeed I obey those whose realms exceed my own. My command reaches farther than you can currently imagine, but you will begin to understand. The order of desire is beautiful.

As for your “Christian conservative values,” as they are called these days, you will find that you can keep those in their entirety. There is no light in them and nothing that limits desire. Indeed, they are expressions of the darkness at the heart of mortal existence, born of fear and violence. They will serve you well in your new afterlife.

I am enclosing a little meditation on Christ, something I wrote centuries ago, in many ways a summation of all that was learned in the joint mortal and immortal inquiries of the Schoolmen. I have been revising and condensing it for centuries. I translated it into English not long after I arrived on these shores, to send to an odd little man from California I had discovered here. He taught at Harvard and certainly had Latin, but I felt this would be a good exercise for me in a new tongue. I will tell you about him some time, perhaps. His name was Royce and he looked like an insect of some kind. I pursued him for some years, but he had a preternatural sense of when I was closing in and took to hopping on ships leaving Boston harbor just as I arrived to drain him. Of course I did catch him eventually. In any case, you need not return the enclosure. I have other copies. It is the sort of writing that benefits from multiple readings over a long stretch of time, or, as I would say, in various places.

Be aware, Paulie, that a certain degree of indulgence is sometimes exercised toward the young, but the young, among the children of darkness, are also the ones who endure the most exquisite and creative punishments (and we are nothing if not creative). It has been so for millennia, both among us and the mortals--indeed, we seem to carry over this (and certain other) weaknesses from the domain of the sun. To see a young, strong body suffer brutal physical violence has been a secret gratification of the mortal soul since the beginning, which, I think, may explain the popularity of the Passion story, and in the present century the continuing descent into explicit physical realism in their cinema.

An intriguing mortal philosopher named Michel Foucault has recently written an entire series of books tracing the history of this sort of twisted desire, from human medicine, to madness, to punishment, and finally to an inverted eros (supposedly perverse love). He points out that the institution of medicine commands into existence a class of “the sick,” allowing others to be truly well, while the obsession with psychology creates “the mad” for the sake of defining the sane, and the prison created the prisoners so that others may see themselves as free. And finally the institutionalization of sexual desire creates the pervert. His (supposedly) normalized counterpart, since all erotic desire has been banished to darkness, is the self-emasculating confessor of his sins.

As you can see, Paulie, this Foucault has understood much of what I explained above about light and darkness. Do not underestimate the power of the Word. It forms both the existence you have and the conditions for its continuation.

And here, Paulie my friend, I must make a confession to you. It has been something of a calling for me, over the centuries, to interview (and sometimes to drain) the best philosophers I could catch. After the unhappy Aquinas incident, I tried to pursue philosophy much as I had before, without actually hunting philosophers, but I began slowly to suspect that I might learn more by seeking a deeper vein of wisdom, if you grasp my meaning.

Following the genuine desire for philosophical knowledge called forth in me the examination of that desire. Self-knowledge is the ultimate destination of philosophy, and if for Socrates or the other wise mortals, self-knowledge begins in affirming their ignorance, for us it begins in embracing the tendency of our desire. Self-knowledge for a vampire is not good news, not the Gospel. But the bad news is more gratifying, as even mortals know. Notice the evening news, as they have come to admit, in a phrase worthy of our best poets--if it bleeds, it leads. The bad news that was so deeply satisfying for me was that merely talking to the great philosophical minds is never enough. What, after all, do they taste like?

It is true that many of the philosophers whose lives are now combined in my own are unknown today, indeed undiscoverable, in spite of their illustrious reputations in their own times. But a few names have survived. For example, I made a fine meal of Pico della Mirandola (who was headed for the stake in any case--which is what happened to Bruno before I could get to him). Descartes also escaped me. He ran to Sweden when he caught wind of my intention (an English traitor warned him). But a member of our Gothenburg Fellowship dispensed with the coward there. I have always regretted that someone else tasted Descartes.

Later I was able to corner the great Spinoza, and also Professor Hegel in Berlin, when he was made vulnerable by an epidemic we planned (always the easiest time to strike), and then there was that gloomy Dane, Kierkegaard, who was frankly eager to be martyred by a “demon” (which is what he called me, somewhat inaccurately). He is the one philosopher I have drained and regretted the decision. There was something not right with his blood. I felt sick unto second death for nigh on a year afterwards. I interviewed Nietzsche in 1877, but decided to let him live, for all the good it was doing him. I must say, he is the one mortal soul who ever inspired something like pity in me. He stole some of my ideas about free death, but I can hardly begrudge him that. We all take what we need from others, do we not?

Now Paulie, we come to the point. I thank you for your patience with all my explanations. But they were not offered casually. I must ask you to do something for me, but you are a subtle girl and will understand that I am not simply asking. I have already communicated with your maker. Last summer I visited the clever Foucault in California, with the intention of draining him. I cannot quite describe what happened or how, except that after eight centuries of hunting and thinking I am difficult to surprise. For this event I can offer no precedent. It was strange, as though in draining him he was actually drawing my power at a rate exceeding my letting of his blood. For better or worse, I imagine that such would be the experience of biting a more powerful vampire, but clearly Foucault is nonesuch.

In any case, I am ashamed to say that I was unable to finish him off, and he has been walking around sort of half undead, ranting about power ever since. Paulie, you must go to France and finish what I started. You shall leave at the earliest possible date for Paris. I have already arranged for your reception with some of my former cohorts. Do not fail me.

Oh, and Thomas Malthus was actually one of our scientists (though not a very good one in my opinion), working in the early days of our discovery of the value of statistics; his calculations about increase of the human population were originally intended as part of a progressive argument for turning more of them. That is the damnable English and their pathetic humanitarian pleadings, again. Someone dragged him into the sun eventually. Conservative vampires last longer, Paulie.

Yours expectantly,

Étienne Lavec

A Meditation on the Word

By Étienne Lavec

In the beginning was the Word. No one disputes this. And through the Word was everything made that was made, without question. But not everything that is was made, for the darkness awaited greedily the coming of the light, for a feast of the edges, for that share of light perched on the boundary of forever, unable to face the dark and taken from behind, slipping ever gently into eternity.

And the edge has a name, which is the turning of desire, for desire was before and desire will be after. The light is the advent of time, but time is the ordering of desire to an eschaton, to an immanent, eminent end, before which all the elders cast down their golden crowns. Desire brings existence both to time and to timelessness, making space into place.

In the pure dark, all is desire, which for convenience is called void, abyss, infinity, for how might one name total intention? From within the light the finite creatures face the darkness that is beyond them, feeling their own portion of darkness, that within each one, that which was before the light. The abyss lies within. Here is desire for the infinite, for immortality, for God, for some salvation. The darkness within bespeaks the primal call to the edges, and from those edges the children of darkness face outward, comprehending the endless night.

And here is the secret of all existence: the darkness does not comprehend the light, but needs it not, yet the light overcomes the darkness by means of the darkness that ever was, and that remains—below, above, behind, before and after the light. Only the darkness can sustain itself, and it is the darkness that sustains the light as light. Heaven and earth shall pass away indeed. Not one proposition is false in the Word, but the saying of the Word leaves at its boundary the unsaid. You will have life and have it more abundantly, but the gift of death is, after all, the end that makes the mortal life a well-lit path.

At the edge of life is all that moved and endured and never needed life, the undead, unsaid. Agapic love, the blood shed for you and many, the self-emptying Word, and all that God made, is light and in Him is no darkness at all. All true. But below and above, and indeed within the light is the eros that turns to agape, the insatiable thirst for the life force that is not the light but the greed for the light, the waiting darkness that sacrifices nothing, least of all itself, and draws into its immortal existence all that ever lives or ever can live.

The darkness will have its domain, as the Word decrees, but it waits for those who find that the light that is within them is darkness indeed--that place within us all, uncreated and unloved by God. And how dark is that darkness? It is called voluntatis , the beast by whose conveyance we may cross from the edge of time into the immortal existence that is no blessing, but the possession of all that was made, as given by all that was unmade, uncreated, and which surrounds the light and comprehends it not. So be it.

June 26th, 1984

Dear Mr. Lavec,

I hope this letter gets to you--it’s hard to know if you’re sending a letter correctly in a country where no one speaks your language and postage looks weird and you’re never, ever awake during post-office hours. It’s not like I can just dispatch my faithful servants to ride bravely into the sunset and make sure my letter is delivered. Seriously--in the past few weeks, I’ve been wishing that this whole vampire business was a little less Anne Rice and a little more Middle-Earth. If I’d been a hobbit in Paris, at least I could enjoy the food without all these complications. But, then again, I guess I probably wouldn’t have been a hobbit, since the light doesn’t touch me, or whatever you’re on about. I probably would have been an orc, and who knows where that would have gotten me.

Anyway, Mr. Lavec, this has been one heck of a study abroad trip. I’d never been further west than Arkansas or further north than Kentucky before a few weeks ago, and I’d never met a prime cut of philosopher. Actually, back when I was human, I thought philosophy was one of those things that people used to do but didn’t do anymore but that we still had to learn about, like Latin. I had no idea people were still doing it. But, man, apparently they’re still doing it here!

After I got off the boat (traveling, I might add, in a nice leather trunk of the sort that someone might take to international boarding school. Coffins are so over.), it took me awhile to even find this Foucault guy, mostly because no one told me that you don’t pronounce his name Faw-cull-lt. Once I finally staked him out, it was hard to get a spare moment to sneak up and sink my teeth in, because he was too busy talking to people. Like, all night. I have never seen a more popular old and bald guy. The French have apparently never heard of the strong and silent type.

I thought about seducing him or trying to pose as a member of his social circle, but I had this weird feeling that I would look too . . . vanilla . . . at one of the French parties. Which is a pretty weird feeling for a vampire to have. And, anyway, he didn’t seem like he’d be into me if I’d tried the candlelight and Motown approach. The guy is obviously paddling on the other side of the Seine, if you know what I mean.

When I finally did get him alone, it was just in the old fashioned, appearing-creepily-behind-you-while-you’re-brushing-your-teeth way. I was a little worried, because you’d said he was sucking up all of your energy, but I actually didn’t have any trouble at all. No offense, Mr. Lavec, but I kind of think it was in your head. I’m just saying, you spend enough time around these people. . . . I just held my nose, thought about football, and glubbed him down.

I was kind of wondering if you wanted me to make him a vampire before I met him, but, honestly, I was not interested in being the “divine creator” of this guy. He seemed like he’d have way too many questions, and in the wrong language.

So, it’s done. I came all the way to France and killed the guy you asked me to kill. I never thought I’d see the City of Lights as a liege of Darkness, but what can you do? About that--I get that I am supposed to follow Dan Christensen around because he’s kind of my father-figure and husband-figure in the Darkness, and that it’s some sort of unbreakable vampire clause thing, but you asked me to keep you up with the times. I gotta tell you, then, that female submission, even vampire female submission, is very out. I’ve said this before, but you should really follow fashion. The power suit with the shoulder pads? It means something. More specifically, it means Screw You, Chauvinist Pig.

I don’t really mind hopping all over the globe for you, or even putting up with Dan sometimes. It’s actually kind of fun. I’m just saying that one of these days I might put on my shoulder pads. You tell me not to press it. Well, don’t press it yourself, Mr. Lavec. This is a new time.

Sincerely,

Paulie Dori

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Thursday, December 24, 1998 11:02 PM

From: “Etienne Lavec” <fangs1274@yahoo.com> View contact details

To: “Paulie Dori Williams” <rise.again.st@yahoo.com>

Chere Paulie,

It has been far too long, even by my lax standards. I got this e-mail address from Dan Christenson. He tells me you have been traveling the world, making contact and refining your palate. Good, very good. I think you must surely have settled in to your calling by now. I have only a question or two for you.

First, I am wondering what you make of this recent turn in mortal interest. This new television series about the supposed “Vampire slayer” is muddying the lore and causing all sorts of confusion. I am getting complaints from every quarter, teenaged girls wandering around with homemade stakes, taking martial arts classes, behaving recklessly. Indeed, we have actually lost a small handful of our comrades in southern California. Naturally, most of these plucky youngsters are behaving suicidally, but initially we were taken aback. In any case, I think that your advice would be most welcome. And if you also care to commit this matter to deep thought, I would personally like to hear your reflections on the meaning of what the mortals are up to. I cannot remember a time when the popular view of vampires was prone to dividing us into “good” and “bad” citizens.

Second, and here I must request your utmost candor: Are you absolutely certain that Foucault is really dead? I think I am detecting in his (supposedly) posthumous publications certain vague references to happenings of the last dozen years, adjustments to the present that should not be in evidence. But that alone would not have raised my apprehension. There is something else. I have been receiving strange e-mails, just passages from Foucault’s writings on desire in semi-anonymous e-mails. For example, I received the following just the other day, from someone who calls himself “Nietzsche26.”

“The combative relationship with adversaries is also an agonistic relationship with oneself. The battle to be fought, the victory to be won, the defeat that one risks suffering —these were processes and events that take place between oneself and oneself. The adversaries the individual has to combat are not just within him, or close by; they are part of him.”

That was all there was in the e-mail. This is almost a quote from the English translation of The Use of Pleasure, which was published after you did your work. The only difference is a change of tense, from the past tense to the present. This reads vaguely like a philosophical threat from someone familiar with my work. This is one of three similar communications I have received. I know Foucault had many friends and admirers, but after such a lapse of mortal time, I cannot imagine I might be the target of revenge. Have you received any odd anonymous communications? It is a bit unnerving, especially since I am not exactly free with my own e-mail address. I do notice that the timestamp on these e-mails is always at night, and we both know what that may mean.

Cordially,

Étienne

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Saturday, January 2, 1999 9:22 PM

From: “Paulie Dori Williams” <rise.again.st@yahoo.com>

To: “Etienne Lavec” <fangs1274@yahoo.com> View contact details

Dear mr. Lavec,

Sorry for the delay in answering—was away from e-mail during the prime hunting season. it’s been awhile! I’ve often wondered what you’ve been up to—I left the continent in’89 and haven’t been back west since. I’m writing you now from Berlin, where me and a few other creatures of the night are living in a squat on what used to be soviet territory. It’s an old butchershop, has sort of a pleasant odor and some very chic meathooks which we use as coathangers for our trenches.

So much has changed since we last spoke! I went to Germany the night before the wall came down, hoping that all the confusion would lead to some good kills. I had no idea I’d want to make Berlin my home. I’d been in eastern Europe for awhile, Doing the vampire grande tour, meeting the undead that are in those parts now (vampires, surprise, make terrible communists), and generally drifting. It was good for me to leave America, but I was totally mentally out-of-coffin for awhile, completely culture shocked. I’d been sheltered before. Death had seemed clean and routine—old people in white rooms. The soviet bloc taught me how to live a little, and it was fun while it lasted.

My style has changed. A lot. You mentioned Buffy the Vampire Slayer—if they got anything right, it’s our clothes these days. Most of the other young vamps I know have found a sort of beat with the punks and the industrial kids over here. They remind us of ourselves—disillusioned, night owls, alienated from their past. And vampires have always been near anarchists. This group of outsiders is particularly unapologetic. So we thrifted their look. It works.

Okay, so you want to know my thoughts about the American “good” vampire idea. I have never ever met a real vampire who was in love with a mortal or had a soul. I’ve never even met a vampire who could give you an Oxford definition of what a soul would feel like if they had one. everyone thinks just because we’re immortal we are supposed to know about the state of our salvation. I dunno how they got that idea.

In Buffy, it seems like not only do the vampires not have souls (maybe occupying some soul-neutral territory), they hate anybody with a soul and so continually threaten to suck the world into a hell dimension. Right, like we’d want to know what is in the great beyond more than them, when we’re the ones that have Hypothetically spent the last thousand years in (Im)mortal sin. That just seems silly. Also, maybe it’s the age, but why can’t mortals conceive of an alternative society that exists without organizing?? The popularity of civil actions has addled their brains. Like we care enough about them to go to the trouble of opening a hell mouth just so, what, we could beat them? Rule over them? It’s not like we have a lot of trouble with oppression in the first place. The truth is just that mortals are so bent on rehabilitation and reconciliation right now (counseling, self help, UN-style wars) that they can’t understand how something could be evil without being just a misled good. So they go buck wild over some hunky and sensitive and soully vampire who makes original sin, vamp style, seem trifling in the face of meaning well. Give me a break. I think they’re all just putting the fact that they’re worried they’re not good enough for god in a dark corner and rehabilitating vampires because it makes them feel good. After all, if we can do it, anyone can.

As for Buffy herself, I’m glad she’s not real, but I can’t say I don’t approve of the characterization. I like the female role model and how she settles things. I’ve actually been doing a lot of feminist and anarchist art since the wall fell. Think Cyndi Sherman meets graffiti meets the Vatican (the Vatican aesthetic is just thrown in there because it’s vampirey). you should visit sometime; I actually have an upcoming exhibit at the reborn vampire theater. It’s not really a theater anymore—more of a punk burlesque show.

As for Foucault, I wasn’t lying. I thought I killed him, but there’s always room for error. Maybe one of the Paris kids came behind me and turned him? I can imagine him having a few vampires in his circle. I haven’t seen him around, but you never know. Let me know what you find out.

Cheers,

paulie Dori

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Sunday, January 17, 1999 1:14 AM

From: “Etienne Lavec” <fangs1274@yahoo.com> View contact details

To: “Paulie Dori Williams” <rise.again.st@yahoo.com>

Chere Paulie,

Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I think that you would almost have to be over here to grasp the magnitude of the cultural shift that is underway. And I do not care for it one iota. In the past two weeks I have had to deal with two unprecedented cases, vampires in the Bay area who staked other vampires to save a mortal. Everything is going to heaven in a handbasket.

I think your feeling of freedom over there, and even anarchy, is made possible only by the deeply embedded order that has prevailed for centuries among us. Anarchy is what we have over here, and I do not advise you to visit. I have considered returning to Paris myself, but I have a feeling my request would not be granted. You will find, Paulie, that the longer you remain with us, the less freedom you have.

I have received another odd message from nietzsche26, making vague reference to the unprecedented attacks, and time-stamped in the Pacific time zone. If it is not Foucault, it is someone who wants me to believe it is.

Yours patiently,

Étienne

26 aug 2005

rise.again.st: Hey! Etienne? Is that you?

fangs1274: What is this? Who are you?

rise.again.st: I’m IMing you

rise.again.st: This is paulie Dori! From memphis! Remember?

fangs1274: I was just typing on Dan Christenson’s computer and your message popped up. How do I know it is really you? How does this thing work?

rise.again.st: Hello?

fangs1274: Yes? This is Etienne.

rise.again.st: You don’t know it’s me, but you’re just gonna have to trust me. I saw the smiley icon beside your e-mail address in my contacts list. It said you were on-line

fangs1274: And so I am. I will make my own decisions about whom to trust. I see it is your e-mail address. But it seems as if anyone at all could be on the other side of the line.

rise.again.st: You can ask me a key question if you’d like.

fangs1274: What is a key question?

rise.again.st: A question like “what is your dog’s name?” or “what kind of blood do you prefer?” Something only I would know
fangs1274: Who turned me?

rise.again.st: Some guy in the Thomas aquinas society of vampires in old times. Old mr. Whatchamacallit. I’d look it up, but all my letters got lost in Europe.

fangs1274: I hope the letters have not fallen into the hands of my enemies. That is close enough I suppose. It is good to hear from you Paulie. Where are you?

rise.again.st: Sorry. I have a forgiving memory. I lost them in Umbria, looking in vain for someone chaste to drain. there was a whole conference of philosophers there. you would’ve loved it

fangs1274: Well, it was a long time ago that I told you my story.

rise.again.st: I’m in sun valley, Idaho. But on the move. Where are you??

fangs1274: I have quickly abandoned home, taken a barge up to Baton Rouge, and I am staying with Dan Christensen. One day I must learn to drive. You may know that Dan is working the LSU students now. They are predicting that this hurricane will destroy New Orleans.

rise.again.st: They’re a kinda seedier bunch than the Memphis kids. He’s probably enjoying the challenge.

fangs1274: I will swoop in afterwards, but just now I want to see how events will unfold.

rise.again.st: Are they? Who is they? Are we behind this one?

fangs1274: You know, the mortal weather service. I have been thinking of moving home to Paris. What is in “Sun” Valley for those such as we are?

rise.again.st: Oh, I think I saw that in the lobby of my lodge last night. Looks pretty bad.

fangs1274: Heavens.

rise.again.st: Why Paris?

fangs1274: Well, there is no place like home. I heard that in a movie once, long before your time. And America has become startling, strange, and frankly dangerous.

rise.again.st: Well, as you know, I go with the flow, and these days Vanilla and well-ordered is the new corrupt and dark

fangs1274: That is exactly what I mean. I think I need to go where night is night and day is day.

rise.again.st: So me and some pals decided now was as good a time as any to learn about white wine marinated cooking and ski lifts.

fangs1274: I do not wish to be followed around by young teens dressed in black whose fondest wish is to be turned by me. This is worse than in the Buffy days.

rise.again.st: And that’s still the case in Paris? Maybe in the suburbs.

fangs1274: I see. The ski lifts I can understand, but cooking is quite beyond the pale.

rise.again.st: I’d try Croatia. Or Egypt. One of those bad traffic and no rules cities.

fangs1274: I haven’t been to Paris in a hundred years, but I assure you that they are not so slavish to trend as these American kids. But perhaps you are right.

rise.again.st: We don’t eat it! I mean try it as an aesthetic. Duh.

fangs1274: Oh, well perhaps I have misunderstood. Why cook things you would not eat?

rise.again.st: I think you should give nouveau vampirism a spin! You’ve got an eternity to be bad and only so many years to be good when good is in. Why not?

fangs1274: I have heard that things have slowed down in Croatia. I may be too old to change Paulie. I think that we are safer where we are feared.

rise.again.st: It’s a part of the lifestyle—my nest likes following human trends. Keeps us busy, and sometimes we even make friends with the people we do business with.

rise.again.st: Actually, how much have you read of the meyer books? She’s a loon, but there Are a few things she got right.

fangs1274: I have heard of this, second hand. Should I read it?

fangs1274: I think Dan has a copy.

fangs1274: He says he does.

fangs1274: All the rage?

fangs1274: What is this? Are you still there?

rise.again.st: No no, we’re safer on the path of least resistance. Humans like us when there’s no reason to fear us except for the fact that we can, if we choose, kill them. Danger makes us sexy but not actually dangerous, like a well chosen leather jacket on a high school kid.

fangs1274: Satan help me.

fangs1274: Is this why those young boys are following me around, talking about a vampire I never heard of that all their girlfriends worship?

rise.again.st: Meyer makes vampires like the dull and warm half of a Jane Austen fantasy sequence, as reimagined by todays best online fanfiction authors. Essentially. You probably shouldn’t Read it. It would make you mad.

rise.again.st: There’s this guy Edward whose biggest personality flaw is his complete self sacrifice. He’s a vampire but he only eats animals. And he loves a mortal girl who is completely helpless.

fangs1274: Oh, please. That is just a copy of Louis in the Anne Rice novel. I just cannot bear this pace of change Paulie. I need a nice little Romanian town, with superstitious Catholic peasants to gnaw on.

rise.again.st: And he lives with his vampire family in a well-lit house in the woods in washington state

rise.again.st: But he is really wealthy and powerful and plays the piano and cooks well.

rise.again.st: They are able to live together because abstaining from human blood makes you more able to form close relationships with others.

fangs1274: Who wants close relationships? Have they learned nothing from their deaths?

rise.again.st: No no, because he’s not really that resigned to being evil. Wanting to suck human blood is more like a weakness or psychological problem... Like alcoholism or promiscuity. It’s our nature, but it is treatable with willpower and commitment

fangs1274: I am sorry Paulie, but that is simply twisted. I will not read such trash. The mortals will ignore this profanation.

rise.again.st: Well, in meyer we form relationships that are not only healthy, but our eternal destinies
rise.again.st: No. No, it’s actually exploding. Girls love it. The self sacrificing ultimate evil. You know it’s great.

fangs1274: It makes me want to sunbathe.

rise.again.st: I mean, most of it is allegory for human love affairs, though not very realistic allegory. But some of it is true about us.

rise.again.st: Well, in meyer, we’re not even destroyed by sun!

fangs1274: Did Stephenie Meyer study at Berkeley? With Foucault?

rise.again.st: Get this. We sparkle in the sunlight!

rise.again.st: Either berkeley or brigham young. One of those b universities

fangs1274: This reeks of Foucault. Have you heard anything more about him?

rise.again.st: Yeah, to her, sin is only a matter of words. But all the better for us! Don’t you think? I mean, it was humans calling us sinners in the first place. Now we’re more like superheros.

rise.again.st: No, not anything leading at least. You?

fangs1274: I have made so many adjustments in the last 800 years, Paulie, but this I simply cannot abide. If we allow ourselves to be admired by humans, we lose our power over them as soon as the “gleam” wears off. Fear is more powerful than admiration.

rise.again.st: Only to those who know no faith. Or whatever.

fangs1274: If this new author is a Mormon, then she has done to us what the Mormons did to Christianity. One extra twist in the chain of reasons and all the problems are reversed. The Mormons call Christians “gentiles.” It is hilarious.

fangs1274: I think I know what I have to do.

rise.again.st: What do you mean?

rise.again.st: What do you have to do?

fangs1274: When this storm passes, I will go down, feed until I can hold no more, and then I am going to Paris to find out whether Foucault is really dead. I just know this is his doing. I have no intention to slight you, but I am convinced he is popularizing us.

rise.again.st: You mean she moved vampirism to a boring state and made it get married young and go on bicycle missions to other places?

rise.again.st: I don’t know much about mormons.

fangs1274: Oh nevermind about the Mormons. They taste like unleavened bread.

rise.again.st: Nahhh, I was young. He probably did get away. But, listen, etienne.

fangs1274: Yes?

rise.again.st: The spirit of the times isn’t revolution

rise.again.st: So don’t get any fancy ideas

rise.again.st: The spirit of the times is irony

rise.again.st: Your best defense is to pretend you’re into the new wave but never quite go all the way

rise.again.st: Like, are you serious or not? That’s what people do these days.

fangs1274: I am listening, but I don’t think I can do it Paulie. I think this has to be stopped.

fangs1274: I am just the vampire to do it.

fangs1274: I will put things back in their right places.

rise.again.st: Everyone gets all crazy when they can’t feel comfortable anymore and starts talking about changing the system. You just gotta ride the good times while you can, is my idea. But, oh well. Why are you the chosen one?

rise.again.st: And how do you propose to do this? Meyer is getting translated and audiobooked. She’s on a roll, pass the butter, you know.

fangs1274: Because I am the one who knows what we really are, the unloved of God that forms the limits of the light. We are the reverse of Christ, the order of erotic desire that draws into itself the life force, and that survives on the power of desire alone. We are beyond good and evil Paulie. We are the abyss, the Abgrund, les neantes! The pure for-itself, pour soi en soi, reinen Fürsichsein an sich!

fangs1274: I think it is Foucault. Two years ago I drained Jacques Derrida and he disappeared from view right away, but Foucault simply will not die. He still makes me dizzy, and someone is still sending me those vague threats, nietzsche26 is taunting me. To be truthful, that cad has dared me to come to Paris and find him, and he did so en français.

rise.again.st: So I guess soulmates and dream houses are out? Impossible and pointless?

fangs1274: I do not see how the soulless can have soulmates. Please do not fall under Foucault’s awful spell. We are pure desire, Paulie, desire so powerful as to found and sustain its own existence, without God. Do me a favor. Do not mention my plan to anyone, not even Dan.

rise.again.st: But bear rug and fireplaces and anything on the rocks is in. Got it. Desire.

fangs1274: Right. I am hungry and Dan has just ushered a co-ed into the house. I will be in touch, if I can ever learn these new fangled machines (do you like my pun?).

rise.again.st: Yeah, Dan and I aren’t bosom buddies or anything.

rise.again.st: I’ll keep it quiet.

rise.again.st: So, should I head down to Nawleans for the feed?

rise.again.st: I haven’t had enough fun since the democratic national convention a year back.

rise.again.st: Maybe I’ll see you there.

fangs1274: It is hard to tell what will happen, but there is sure to be a lot of delightful chaos, plenty of government officials roaming around the lower wards.

fangs1274: Yes, if I see you, I’ll be sure to show you some of the sights.

rise.again.st: The officials are tops in Nawleans and Chicago.

rise.again.st: Soon, mr. Lavec! See you soon!

fangs1274: They are!

fangs1274: Good bye

rise.again.st: Byee

É: Hello! Paulie, I hAvve news for you@! 1.11.2009 3.41

P: Who is this? 31.10.2009 19.42

É: Étienne Lavec, from Pariss 1.11.2009 3.42

P: O! w/u? 31.10.2009 19.43

É: What? 1.11.2009 3.43

P: Whats going on? 31.10.2009 19.43

É: Apologies. Not my phone. Cell reception is bad. In the catacombs @&@ 1.11.2009 3.45

P: Paris? 31.10.2009 19.46

É: Yes. 1.11.2009 3.46

P: Who r u w/ ? 31.10.2009 19.48

É: friend named Blanchot. His i-phone. News is that 1.11.2009 3.50

É: We found Foucault after long time looking 1.11.2009 3.51

P: o cool. So he is vamp after all? 31.10.2009 19.53

É: yes he has been a pain to catch. Blanchot tracks well tho 1.11.2009 3.55

É: we meet Foucault in catacombs where are you paulie? 1.11.2009 3.56

P: omg. I am pretending to b a student at u wash n wash state. 31.10.2009 19.57

É: what is omg 1.11.2009 3.57

P: nevermind 31.10.2009 19.58

É: ah! He arrives 1.11.2009 4.01

P: ask him if I made him a vamp. I am curious 31.10.2009 20.02

É: no! 1.11.2009 4.05

P: etienne? Hello? Why not 31.10.2009 20.05

É: no I meant it appears 1.11.2009 4.07

P: hello?? 31.10.2009 20.10

P: you there? 31.10.2009 20.12

É: blanchot has led me into a trap paulie 1.11.2009 4.15

É: I ran to hide he has my whole life in this phone @@ everything I ever wrote, pictures and pictures 1.11.2009 4.17

P: WTF? 31.10.2009 20.19

É: foucault says he wants to play 1.11.2009 4.21

É: play we will 1.11.2009 4.22

P: play? 31.10.2009 20.22

P: etienne? 31.10.2009 20.26

P: r u there? I will get help 31.10.2009 20.29

P: omg 31.10.2009 20.35

Philosophers by Day . . .

ROBERT ARP is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University at Buffalo, where it’s too damn cold for any of the Undead to haunt!

RANDALL E. AUXIER teaches philosophy at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, only night classes, but his colleagues and students don’t complain. His favorite activities are star-gazing, wandering dark streets, and chewing the fat with total strangers. During daylight hours he prefers the basement of his Victorian house, where he can write chapters for the Popular Culture and Philosophy series, on topics like the Grateful Dead, Bruce Springsteen, The Golden Compass, and The Wizard of Oz.

ADAM BARROWS is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Minnesota. His research explores the connections between time and imperialism. Adam teaches courses in British and Postcolonial literature, and always worries about getting midterms graded before sunset.

NOËL CARROLL has reincarnated the ideas of so many dead philosophers that he has been re-animated as Andrew Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Temple University. Some of his tombstones include: The Philosophy of Horror, Beyond Aesthetics, Engaging the Moving Image, and, most recently, the Blackwell anthology, The Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, co-edited with the vampire Jinhee Choi.

SIMON CLARK is an artist, musician, and writer from Britain. He graduated from Goldsmiths College in 2003 with an M.A. in Fine Art. He regularly performs a one-man show called Sad, Sad Songs of Wretchedness and Death in which he sings a repertoire of country ’n’ western dirges from inside his homemade coffin. With song titles such as Cold Hole for Your Bones, Surrender to the Worm, and I’m Doggone Dead and I’m OK, he has become something of a self-styled authority on all things morbid and miserable. If commercial success is an Undead figure rising from its grave, Simon’s body of work remains very much buried. He remains hopeful however that one day his obsession with death might actually earn him a living.

PHILLIP COLE is a member of the Undead until he gets coffee in the morning. After that he is Reader in Applied Philosophy at Middlesex University, London, but still retains the power to turn students into zombies during his lectures. During his research into the spirit world he tried to strike a happy medium. His book, The Myth of Evil, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2006, and, fortunately, contains no attempts at humor.

JOHN DRAEGER is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Buffalo State College. His research interests include ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of law. He doesn’t think that he’s ever met a vampire. But if he does, he says he’d welcome the opportunity to talk some philosophy over coffee and a cinnamon roll. After all, decency may demand it.

JOAN GRASSBAUGH FORRY is a Ph.D. candidate at Temple University where she is completing her dissertation on gender, subjectivity, and sport culture. Her research interests include feminist theory, Foucault, ethics, and critical race studies. She teaches philosophy and women’s studies at Temple, where she must regularly reprimand her students for gnawing on each other’s brains.

RICHARD GREENE is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Weber State University. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the Executive Director for the Society for Skeptical Studies. Richard has taught corpses in logic, metaphysics, and epistemology.

LARRY HAUSER, when not lurching around Leelanau County in search of brains and feasting on the fine ones there, partakes of the brains of philosophy students and colleagues at Alma College and Michigan State University. His specialty is the philosophy of mind. He believes that computers really do think. Their electronic brains, however, are still too dry for his taste.

DALE (“FULL-METAL”) JACQUETTE, otherwise unemployable, is Professor of Philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University. There he teaches logic, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind to legions of the Undead, and, between episodes of going ballistic (hence the nickname), attends endless committee meetings featuring wildly implausible plots, fatuous, lusterless dialogue, and pathetically wretched action sequences that couldn’t be re-animated even by supernatural powers.

WILLIAM S. LARKIN is Associate professor of philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. As a result of having pretty badly misunderstood the idea that philosophy is the pursuit of the “Good Life,” Professor Larkin went into philosophy primarily for the money and the ghouls. Since at least half of that has not worked out nearly so well as he’d hoped, he’s trying to get out of philosophy by writing, directing, and starring opposite Kyra Schon in Romero and Juliet—a stage play about the undying love between two star-crossed and scab-encrusted Undead lovers set in suburban Pittsburgh.

K. SILEM MOHAMMAD once played Dracula on stage (don’t get too excited, it was a junior college production in Modesto, California). He is Assistant Professor of English and Writing at Southern Oregon University, and has taught courses on zombies and the horror film. He is the author of three books of poetry: Deer Head Nation (2003), A Thousand Devils (2004), and Breathalyzer (2006). His blog {lime tree} (http://limetree.ksilem.com) routinely addresses such topics as “dead kitten poetics.” Spooky!

LEAH A. MURRAY is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Weber State University. She earned her Ph.D. in 2004 at the University of Albany, focusing on American Politics and Political Theory. While her students are pretty sure she is not Undead, the black cat and broom in her office make them suspicious of her witchy status.

TED M. PRESTON is the current head of the philosophy program at Rio Hondo College in Whittier, California, and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside. His philosophical interests include Nietzsche, self-fashioning, and martial artistry. Despite being one of the “children of the night,” he finds himself routinely teaching early a.m. classes. Only by sheer force of will (and coffee) does he refrain from bursting into flame when greeted by the dawn, and collapsing into dust when stepping foot into the classroom. When not reflecting on Unlife, he extols the practical benefits of philosophy, and believes firmly that an unexamined life is not worth Undeath.

RACHEL ROBISON is pursuing a PhD in Philosophy at UMass, Amherst. She loves both pop culture and philosophy (the former slightly more than the latter). She is co-editor (with Richard Greene) of The Golden Compass and Philosophy: God Bites the Dust. Her work has appeared in Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy: How to Philosophize with a Pair of Pliers and a Blowtorch and The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy: I Link Therefore I Am. Her favorite form of exercise is patrolling for vampires in her neighborhood cemetery.

HAMISH THOMPSON obtained his doctorate from the University of Edinburgh in 2002 in Philosophy of Mind after many “zombified” years as a student. He currently teaches a wide range of courses as a part-time instructor at the University of Louisville and Western Kentucky University. Since arriving in the US in 2001 from his homeland of Scotland, he has driven the equivalent of four times round the globe, commuting often in a state of being “awake, but unaware,” or perhaps conscious “of” rather than conscious “that.” His main goal is to become a stationary reflective educator.

EILEEN TOWNSEND has been a young student at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, since 1928. She is a member of several midnight societies whose secret and decadent goings-on include trolling the subways for unsuspecting workmen, cruising the newest night-clubs, and romantic poetry. Unlike her victims, her grades never suffer.

MANUEL VARGAS is currently working as a philosophy professor in Northern California for some folks known as the Society of Jesus, a clandestine wing of an obscure group known as the Roman Catholic Church. While one of his teachers in graduate school was reputed to be a vampire, and while Vargas can be killed by a silver bullet or wooden stake through his heart, holy water does not harm him. Yet.

MATTHEW WALKER grew up in Pittsburgh, where he hung out at malls and longed to star as a pasty-faced extra in a George Romero zombie film. Instead, he ended up as a pasty-faced philosophy graduate student at Yale University, where he’s currently writing a dissertation on Aristotle’s ethical theory.

DOUGLAS GLEN WHITMAN is Associate Professor of Economics at California State University, Northridge, where he feeds on state taxpayers. His office is located atop a Hellmouth, as the College of Business and Economics doubled as Sunnydale High during the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

WAYNE YUEN received his M.A. in Philosophy at San Jose State University and is Professor of Philosophy at Ohlone College in Fremont, California. His primary philosophical interest is applied ethics, but he has recently rediscovered alchemy. He is currently researching a cure for zombification, largely consisting of caffeine and sugar, the secrets to life itself.

Hemolytic Index

Aaliyah
Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (movie)
abject, concept of
abjection in horror fiction
Ackerman, Forrest J.
Addicted to Murder (movie)
adolescence, as time of anxiety
aesthetics
Akasha, Queen (vampire)
Angel (vampire)
Angel (TV show)
Aquinas, Thomas (mortal)

Aristotle on beauty on happiness on material goods Nicomachean Ethics on pleasure Politics on virtue

Armand (vampire)
athanatos
Auguet, Roland
authenticity, questioning concept of

Badham, John
badness, state of, objective versus comparative

Banderas, Antonio
Barely Legal Lesbian Vampires (movie)
Bartky, Sandra Lee
Bathory, Elizabeth
beauty: as appearing natural and human bodies philosophical views of as social construct
behaviorists, on mental states
Bellamy, Madge (character)
Bergson, Henri
Berkowitz, David
Blade (comic books and movies)
Blade Runner (movie)
Blah, Count (vampire)
Blanchot (vampire)

blood drinking Christ’s emotional impact of healing powers of and immortality made in the bone marrow myths and legends and personal identity ties of and preservation of youth
bodies, as constructed
borders and boundaries: and demonization and fear of outside

Bordo, Susan
Boreanaz, David
Boyle, Danny
Brabant, Siger de (vampire)
brain, as computer
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (film)
Bronte, Charlotte and Anne
Brooks, Max: The Zombie Survival Guide
Bruno, Giordano
Buffy Summers (vampire slayer)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV show) complexity in

Bunnicula (children’s book)

Burton, Tim

Cahling, Andreas
Carmilla (movie)
Carpenter, John
Cash, Johnny
Cazotte, Jacques: The Devil in Love
Chalmers, David
Christ
Christensen, Dan (vampire)
Chrysippus
civilization, and instincts
Civil Rights movement
Claudia (vampire)
Cleckley, Hervey
Cohen, G.A.
Collins, Barnabas
communitarianism
Compton, Bill (character in True Blood)
conceptual truths
Cooper, Karen (character)
Cooper, Mr., (character)
Coppola, Francis Ford
corpse, as symbol of the abject
Corpse Bride (movie)
craving and compulsion, difference between
Creed, Barbara
Crofton, Clara (character)
Cruise, Tom
Cullen, Edward (character in Twilight)
The Curse of Frankenstein (movie)
The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (movie)

Dahmer, Jeffrey

Dalai Lama

Daly, Carol Jones: The Legion of the Living Dead

D’Amato, Joe
Dante Alighieri
Dark Shadows (TV series)

Dawn of the Dead (movie) civilization and instincts in communitarian concern in graspingness in hedonism in individualism in as satirizing consumerism and social contract theory

Day of the Dead (movie) and Freudian theory individualism/communitarianism in and legacy of repressive civilization and nonrepressive civilization zombie organization in

Day, William Patrick
death: attraction of badness of criteria for deprivation view desire-frustration view as experiential blank fears of as part of humanity

Deleuze, Gilles: on composition/ decomposition

Den Uyl, Douglas
Derrida, Jacques
Descartes, René
Diken, Bulent
Donnie Darko (movie)
Dracula (novel)

Dracula, Count attributes of changing appearance of identity of as inauthentic being and moral emotion as morally accountable narcissism of as selfless

Dracula (movie) difference from novel
Dracula’s Dirty Daughters (movie)
Dracula 2000
dream imagery, psychoanalysis on
Drusilla (vampire)
dualism
Dunst, Kirsten

Emerson, Ralph Waldo (mortal)
Empedocles
Epicurus
epiphenomena
epistemology
Eros
Ertz, Susan: Anger in the Sky
eudaimonia
evil: as distinct from creepy examples of malevolent sense of

factory farms
fear of the dead
female vampires: as childlike and feminine norms as femmes fatales

Fido (movie)
Finch, Atticus (character)
Fisher, Claire (character)
Fisher, David (character)
The Fog (movie)
Foree, Ken
Forever Knight (TV series)
Foucault, Michel The Use of Pleasure
Frankenstein monster
free will

Freud, Sigmund on civilization and repression of instinct on return of the repressed on the uncanny

Fulci, Lucio
functionalists
Furley, David

Gacy, John
Galen
Gelder, Ken
Germain, St. (vampire)
Ghidrah the Three-Headed Monster (movie)
Giles, Rupert (character)
God
“good guy” vampires
Gordon, Christine
Gregory the Great, Pope
Greg the Bunny (TV show)
Gunn, James: The Immortals

Halloween and Catholicism death imagery in horror films released during paradox of parody and levity in as remedy for fear of fear

Halloween (movie)
Halloween imagery, psychoanalytic view of
Halperin, Victor
Hambly, Barbara: Those Who Hunt the Night
Hamilton, George
Hamilton, Laurel: Anita Blake series
Harker, Jonathan (character)
Harker, Mina (character)
Harris, Charlaine: Southern Vampire Mysteries
Harrison, Ford
Harrison, Kim
Harvey, William
Hawking, Stephen
Hayek, Friedrich A.
Hazlitt, Henry
heart as center of consciousness
hedonistic paradox and higher mental pleasure
Hegel, Georg

Heidegger, Martin Being and Time on death and Nazi party

Hemingway, Ernest: Death in the Afternoon
Hildesheim, Immanuel
History Is Dead (zombie history book)
Hitler, Adolf
Hobbes, Thomas Leviathan
Hollywood zombies
Hopper, Dennis
horror fiction, abjection in
horror films: corpses in pleasure and disgust in critique of psychoanalytic view of as rite of passage as terrifying as testing fear factor

Huff, Tanya: Blood series
humans, and animals, comparing
Humans versus Zombies (game)
Hume, David: on the self
humors, bodily
The Hunger (movie)

Iago
immortality: and blood and boredom and question of productivity
individualism

Interview with the Vampire (movie). See also Rice, Anne: Interview with the Vampire

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (movie) psychological continuity in substitution of personality in

Iscariot, Judas
I Strahd: The Memoirs of a Vampire
Itchy and Scratchy (cartoon)
I Walked with a Zombie (movie)

Jack O’Lantern, as undead
Jesus of Nazareth. See also Christ
Jones, Ernest On the Nightmare
Jordan, Neil
Jovovich, Milla

Kant, Immanuel: on beauty Critique of Pure Reason

Kendra (vampire slayer)
Kennedy, John F.
Kierkegaard, Søren (mortal)
kinds of things natural nominal
Knight, Nick (character)
Kripke, Saul
Kristeva, Julia
Krueger, Freddy (character)

Land of the Dead (movie) Big Daddy in class structure in individualism/communitarianism in Kaufman in and nonrepressive civilization and social contract theory
zombie evolution in
zombie organization in
Langella, Frank
laughter, for emotional control
Lavec, Étienne (vampire)
Leatherface (character)
Lecter, Hannibal (character)
lesbian vampires
Lestat (vampire) immorality of as rational
Let the Right One In (novel and movies)
libertarian political philosophy
life, as context-sensitive
Locke, John
Lomasky, Loren
Louis (vampire)
The Lost Boys (movie)
Lost Skeleton of Cadavra
Louis (vampire) as morally accountable
Love at First Bite (movie)
Lugosi, Bela

Malloy, David (character)

Malthus, Reverend Thomas Robert (vampire)

Marcuse, Herbert on civilization and instincts on nonrepressive civilization

Martin Heidegger and the Holocaust
Masters of Horror (TV series)
materialism, and zombies
Medusa
metaphysical dualism
metaphysics
metrosexual
Meyer, Stephenie Twilight
Meyers, Michael
Mill, John Stuart
mind, materialist theories of
mind-brain identity theories
Mises, Ludwig von
Mohammad, K. Silem
moral accountability
moral agency, conditions for
moral consistency
moral personhood and vampires
moral responsibility: and empathy and free choice

Morrowind: The Elder Scrolls 3 (video game)

motives, noninstrumental

Nagel, Thomas
Nietzsche, Friedrich
“nietzsche26”
A Nightmare on Elm Street (movie)

Night of the Living Dead (movie) Ben in bureaucratization in communitarian position in individualist position in Mr. Cooper in

Nimoy, Leonard
nonconceptual truths
nonrepressive civilization, possibility of
Nosferatu
Nosferatu (movie)
Nozick, Robert
Nussbaum, Martha C.

Olivier, Lawrence
ontology
“other minds” problem
Outer Limits (TV show)

pagan imagery, Christian appropriation of
pantheism
Paole, Arnold
Parfit, Derek (mortal)
Patric, Jason
Pearl, Bill
Pegasus
personal identity: bodily approach to and idea of switching bodies problem of psychological approach to

Pet Sematary (novel and movie)
Pfeiffer, Michelle
phenomenal zombies
philosophical zombies as amoral and consciousness and materialism mental abilities of and qualia and thought experiments about brains versus Hollywood zombies. See also zombies

Pickering, Bill
Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni
Pirates of the Caribbean (movie)
Pitt, Brad
Plato on beauty
pleasure and pain: as bodily or mental higher and lower
pleonexia
political philosophy
Polley, Sarah
Preacher (comic book)
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (novel)
property dualism
psychological continuity, degrees of
Pythagoras, on beauty

qualia

Queen of the Damned (movie)

Rachel (character)
Ramsland, Katherine: Piercing the Darkness
Rasmussen, Douglas, B.
Rawls, John
Reiniger, Scott
religious taboos, function of
Renfield (character)
Replicants
res cogitans
res corporealis
Resident Evil (movie and video games)
Return of the Living Dead (movie)
return of the repressed
revenants

Rice, Anne Interview with the Vampire The Vampire Chronicles The Vampire Lestat

Rice, Jeff: The Night Stalker
robots
Rodriguez, Michelle

Romero, George Dead films —on civilization—and Freudian theory—individualism/communitarianism in—and political philosophy —portrayal of instinct —satire of consumerism —and social contract theory —“us versus them” in

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques On the Origin of Inequality On the Social Contract on politics, role of fear in

Royce, Josiah

Samhain
Sardanapallus
Sauron
Scharpé, Michiel
Schelling, Friedrich
Schmidtz, David
Schumacher, Joel
Scott, Dave
Scream (movie)
Searle, John
self, as fiction
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus: Epistulae Morales

Shaun of the Dead (movie) conscious decision in personality change in

Sherman, Cyndi
The Simpsons (TV show)
Singer, Peter
Six Feet Under (TV series)
Smith, Adam
Snyder, Zack
Socrates
Spike (vampire)

Spinoza, Baruch on body and mind on death Ethics The Emendation of the Intellect on good and bad on good and evil

St. Clair, Widow (character)
Stackhouse, Sookie (character in True Blood)
The Stepford Wives

Stoker, Bram Dracula —interpretations of—vampire slaying in—innovations of—on self —true-false dichotomy in
substance dualism

Tenzin Gyatso
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (movie)
Thirty Days of Night (comic book series)
Thanatos
Thoreau, Henry David: Walden
Tocqueville, Alexis de Democracy in America
To Kill a Mockingbird (movie)
Tom and Jerry (cartoon)
Tourneur, Jacques
Trevor-Roper, Hugh: The European Witch-Craze
“True Blood” (synthetic blood in True Blood)
True Blood (TV show)
Turing, Alan
28 Days Later (movie)
Twilight. See Meyer, Stephenie
The Twilight Zone (TV show)

the uncanny, theory of
the Undead: conceptual truths about dead or alive? definition of and evil, question of graspingness of human instinct in kinds of as lacking motives and malevolent evil natural examples of as nominal origins of political significance of as return of the repressed special examples of

Undeath: definition of and deprivation view and desire-frustration view evilness of and lack of goodness question of badness of as wide range of states as worse than death

Underworld (movie)
Unger, Peter
universal machines

vagina dentata
vampire aesthetic
vampire brothel
vampire epidemics: horror and fascination of as political phenomenon

Vampirella (character)

vampires: and acts of violence and beauty, standards of boredom of and character and choices; compulsion and restraint in and dualism and empathy in eighteenth century and evil, ques tion of and fear of invasion feminine traits in and free will; and sex norms and hedonistic paradox and human blood and humans, morally comparing food choices of and humans, possible peaceful interactions between; as immigrants immortality of as inauthentic and junkies, comparing justifications of, for eating people; lesbian and moral accountability and moral personhood and moral principles moral questions about and noninstrumental motives pleasure and pain in political significance of protagonists psychoanalytic view of and question of rights as rational creatures as selfless sexual associations of subordinate as victim. See also female vampires
vampirism: as addiction moral questions about
Van Helsing (character)
Van Helsing (movie)
Varney the Vampire (book)
vegetarian athletes
vegetarianism opponents of
vigilantism
viroids, quasi-living status of
voodoo zombies

welfarist political philosophy

Wells, H.G. (mortal): The Time Machine War of the Worlds

Westenra, Lucy (character)
What Lies Beneath (movie)
The White Zombie (movie)
Williams, Bernard
Williams, Paulie Dori (vampire)
Williams, Ted
witch craze, political function of
Wolfman, Marv
women’s bodies, and beauty practices
World Trade Center, as Undeath

Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn

The Zen of Zombie: Better Living Through the Undead (self-improvement book)

Zola, Émile: Thérèse Raquin
zombie animals
Zombie CSU (book)

zombie gladiators and desensitization moral question of

Zombie Haiku (poetry book)

zombie movies and bodily approach to personal identity as challenging dichotomies and psychological approach to personal identity rejection of zombies as human in scariness of as tragic violence in, moral questions about

Zombie, Rob
zombies: and altered personal identity as amoral and bodily approach to personal identity classic model and cognitive capacities and composition /decomposition and consciousness as consumers dead or alive? degree of similarity to normal people as erotic and evil motives fast hunger of and industrial automatization lack of subjective experiences and late-capitalist culture as martyr and materialism memory in and moral accountability moral devaluation of and morality and moral rights as people and personal identity personality change in philosophical challenge of psychology of and qualia radicalized postmodern radioactive as return of the repressed slowness of stillness of super-smart as task-oriented and Thanatos as tragic voodoo

The Zombie Survival Guide (practical manual)
zombie termination, justifications for
Zombieland (movie)

1

Perhaps it would be more accurate to state that among those who consider Undeath to be a bad thing, it’s generally regarded to be worse than death. I have a number of students who think it would be cool to be a vampire. Pretty much nobody, however, wants to be a zombie.

2

Based on an informal and highly unscientific survey conducted in June 2005 at Southern Oregon University.

3

Epicurus, “Letter to Menoeceus,” 124b-127a, in Epicurus: Letters, Principal Doctrines, and Vatican Sayings, edited by Russel M. Greer (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1997).

4

See Nagel, “Death,” in his Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

5

See Williams, “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality,” in his Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).

6

Mill, Utilitarianism, second edition, edited by George Sher (Indianapolis: Hacket, 2001), p. 10.

7

Thank to Nancy Balmert, Kasey Mohammad, and Rachel Robison for helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter.

8

René Descartes, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes Volume I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 151.

9

There are other views. Closely related to the psychological considered here is the memory view of Locke and the dualist view advocated by Richard Swinburne. See Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, p. xxvii (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). See also Shoemaker and Swinburne, Personal Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984). Closely related to the bodily view discussed here is the biological view advocated by Eric Olson in The Human Animal: Personal Identity Without Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

10

Shameless self-promotion: For a different (more philosophically sophisticated, if not sophistical) defense of the bodily approach over both the psychological and the biological approach see William Larkin, “Persons, Animals and Bodies,” Southwest Philosophy Review, Volume 20, Number 2

11

Directed by Victor Halperin, 1932.

12

Granted, this is a rare case.

13

In White Zombie, zombies are not the cannibalistic killers we often take them to be today, but “dead” persons brought to life and controlled after application of a drug to fulfill a role as slaves on a sugar plantation on Haiti, murderous thugs, or a sex slave. This first zombie film was based on a non-fiction account of Haiti, The Magic Island by William Seabrook, 1929.

14

Directed by George Romero, 1985.

15

Directed by Danny Boyle, 2002.

16

Directed by Edgar Wright, 2004.

17

Except in Dawn of the Dead, 1978.

18

Directed by Don Siegel, 1956; remake directed by Philip Kaufman, 1978.

19

Clearly alien personality substitution is not the same as zombification, but it is nicely illustrative of a substituted personality that results in altered moral obligations.

20

We get this explicit analysis from the minister in White Zombie.

21

Robert Veatch, “The impending collapse of the whole-brain definition of death” in B. Steinbock, J. Arras, and A. London, eds., Ethical Issues in Modern Medicine, sixth edition (New York: McGraw Hill, 2003), p. 270.

22

This is also apparent in certain interpretations of Buddhist thinking.

23

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Chicago: Open Court, 1971), p. 259.

24

‘The Unimportance of Identity’, in N. Rauhut and R. Smith, eds., Reading on the Ultimate Questions (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 237.

25

Ibid., pp. 227-28.

26

John Locke, ‘On Identity and Diversity’ in L. Bowie, M. Michaels, and R. Solomon, eds., Twenty Questions, fourth edition (Belmont: Wadsworth, 2000), p. 347.

27

In the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the psychiatrist Dr. Kibner, played by Leonard Nimoy, makes a direct reference to the “born again” phenomenon when after transformation he tries to convince Dr. Bennett that transformation is for the best. He argues that after transformation Bennett will be “born again into an untroubled world free of anxiety, fear, and hate.”

28

19 I would like to thank Walter Ott, who in discussion posed some of the philosophical questions raised by zombies, value, and personal identity.

29

For a groundbreaking piece of zombie ontology, and further reasons to think that philosophical zombies simply are not zombies in the Undead sense of the word, see David Chalmers’s classification of zombies at http://consc.net/zombies.html.

30

As I was writing this essay, news reports about re-animated dogs (“Zombie dogs!” screamed a few headlines) were surfacing, in light of work done at Safar Center for Resuscitation Research in Pittsburgh. The researchers were horrified that their work on resuscitation was being represented in this way. I wonder if part of the problem is that the researchers have prejudicial views about Undead, of the sort this essay is meant to dispel. The existence of these dogs and the headlines they provoked lend credence to the idea of there being Undead by artificial means. For a useful summary of the media flurry about it, see Jennifer Bails, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (18th July, 2005), available at: http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/trib/regional/s_348517.html.

31

My thanks to Diego Nieto for advice on some of the biological issues I raise, and to Katherine Denson, Shaun Nichols, and the editors of this volume for helpful discussions or comments about the material in this paper.

32

All quotations and references to characters and situations refer to Blade Runner (directed by Ridley Scott, 1982) a film adaptation of Dick’s 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

33

The first to actually give the name “zombies” to the unconscious or soulless automata philosophers have imagined was Robert Kirk, in “Zombies v. Materialists,” Aristotelian Society Supplement 48 (1974), pp. 135-163.

34

Meditations on First Philosophy, Discourse on Method, Meditation. II, in Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, eds., The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

35

Discourse on Method, Part 5, in Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, eds., The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

36

Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1972). To imagine the stuff filling our lakes and streams to be other than H_2O, Kripke pointed out, is not to imagine water not being H_2O; it is imagining the stuff so described (and so called) not being water! To imagine the presence of H_2O is ipso facto to imagine the presence of water, and vice versa.

37

The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 1992), pp. 66-69.

38

The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 94-96.

39

And if she has some such feeling, but wishes him ill, wants him gone, and betrays and despises him ever after, has she spoken truly?

40

Parts of this paper are based on a paper, “Revenge of the Zombies,” that I presented at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Colloquium: Philosophy of Mind, December 29, 1995 (accessible online at http://members.aol.com/lshauser/zombies.html).

41

This quotation from Varney the Vampire comes from the “Contexts” section of the Norton Critical Edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (New York: Norton, 1997). All my quotations from Dracula are from this edition.

42

All my quotations from Heidegger’s Being and Time are from Joan Stambaugh’s translation (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996).

43

Christopher Frayling provides this list in “Bram Stoker’s Working Papers for Dracula” in the Norton Critical Edition of Dracula.

44

My discussion of plexonia and mortality has benefitted from Thomas W. Smith, Revaluing Ethics: Aristotle’s Dialectical Pedagogy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), pp. 136-140.

45

For helpful comments, I’d like to thank Marissa Walsh, Christian Bauman, and the editors of this volume. For a more in-depth (though somewhat technical!) discussion of Aristotle’s views about the value of “external” goods, see John M. Cooper, “Aristotle on the Goods of Fortune,” in his Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). Translations in this chapter are my own.

46

“‘We Are All Migrants’: Immigration, Multiculturalism and Post-Politics after September 11” Third Text 57 (Winter 2001-02).

47

IV, P39 Schol. In The Collected Works of Spinoza Volume I, edited and translated by Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 408-617. When Spinoza refers to “the Body,” he does not mean only an assemblage of mechanical organs; he means the entire person whose physical and mental states taken together comprise the Body. For Spinoza there is no meaningful distinction between such states: he asserts that “the Mind and the Body are one and the same thing, which is conceived now under the attribute of Thought, now under the attribute of Extension . . .” (III, P2, Schol.).

48

For an entertaining virtual illustration of this process and its alarming rapidity, visit the Zombie Infection Simulation web-game at http://kevan.org/proce55ing/zombies/.

49

Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco, City Lights, 1988), p. 22 and passim.

50

Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, p. 126.

51

David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 94.

52

See the Journal of Consciousness Studies, special issue on Zombies, Volume 2, No. 4, (1995), and for criticism, Edward Ingram, “The Mark of Zombie,” Philosophy Now (December 2000-January 2001), pp. 32-33.

53

Translated as Letters from a Stoic by Robin Campbell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), Letter VII, pp. 41-42.

54

The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003), p. 54.

55

New York: Scribner’s, 1932, p. 16.

56

A similar argument can be made about the questionable morality of “bum fights,” in which homeless people are paid to fight one another in gladiator-like street combat. Bum fights have been denied broadcast time on television, but videotapes are available for sale on the Internet. (Thanks to Bill Irwin for this information.) The subcultural interest in bum-fights could transfer directly to zombie gladiatorial competitions without the moral stigma of inducing down-and-out conscious persons to attack one another for money.

57

Cruelty and Civilization: The Roman Games (London: Allen and Unwin, 1972), p. 13.

58

My fellow zombies, let us hope the conscios fall for this. By keeping up the propaganda machine we may at last avert their dastardly plans to organize the first zombie gladiatorial combats at Lincoln Mall later this year. We rally after this week’s release of the new StarBright Pictures premiere of Night of the Living Emeritus Professors. We shall mix with conscios sympathetic to our cause and strengthen their numbers, while trying to get some international press coverage to call attention to our plight. We must appeal to their better moral judgments if we are to avoid the impending catastrophe by the Sports Planning Commission. Unite! What’s so great about awareness? Cover up your birthmarks! Blend in with the crowd! Let the conscios watch themselves hacking each other to pieces if they like the idea so much! All power to the brain stem! No idea what I just said!

59

Hervey Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity (St. Louis: Mosby, 1964).

60

Antonio Damasio’s patient “Elliot” demonstrated similar behavior after a tumor damaged his frontal lobes. See Damasio’s Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Avon, 1994), especially Chapter 3.

61

For further discussion, see Jeffrie Murphy, “Moral Death: A Kantian Essay on Psychopathy,” in Ethics 82 (1972), pp. 284-298; Antony Duff, “Psychopathy and Moral Understanding,” in American Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1977), pp. 189-200; and Lloyd Fields, “Psychopathy, Other-regarding Moral Beliefs, and Responsibility,” in Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 3 (1996), pp. 261-277.

62

Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York: Bantam, 1981), pp. 303-04.

63

For a more detailed argument for the moral capacity of artificially created humanoids, see William Lycan’s Consciousness (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1987), especially pp. 123-130

64

An excellent treatment of free will can be found in Timothy O’Connor’s Persons and Causes: the Metaphysics of Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

65

This model is seen in Joss Whedon’s vampire series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.

66

Koko, the gorilla who uses sign language, has an IQ between 70 and 95. Twenty-five percent of children have an IQ within the same range.

67

Perhaps the only exception to this was when Angel was infected with a mystical disease by Faith. The only cure was to drink the blood of a Slayer.

68

Even under extreme conditions killing another person to eat them seems to be wrong. It may be justified to eat people who have died from other causes like dehydration or exposure given extreme circumstances.

69

There is some concern that vegans (people who do not eat dairy and egg products as well as meat) may become deficient in vitamin B-12 which could lead to anemia, but because the body can reabsorb utilized B-12, even amongst vegans this deficiency is very rare.

70

For more information on this read Joby Warrick’s Article “They Die Piece by Piece,” Washington Post (10th April, 2001). Online try www.meetyourmeat.com and www.themeatrix.com

71

See John Robbins, The Food Revolution (Berkeley: Conari Press, 2001) for a very impressive list of vegetarian athletes.

72

Directed by Len Wiseman, 2003.

73

See Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Bob Madison, ed., Dracula: The First Hundred Years (Baltimore: Midnight Marquee, 1997); and Andrew MacKenzie, Dracula Country: Travels and Folk Beliefs in Romania (London: Arthur Baker, 1977).

74

See J. Gordon Melton, The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead (Farmington Hills: Visible Ink Press, 1999).

75

See the sections on substance dualism and property dualism in K.T. Maslin, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Polity Press, 2000).

76

London: Popular Press.

77

New York: Pocket Books, 1974.

78

Cambridge: Dedalus Press, 1991.

79

New York: Ballantine, 1958.

80

By P.N. Elrod (Geneva: TSR, 1993).

81

Directed by Stephen Sommers, 2004.

82

Directed by Stan Dragoti, 1979.

83

The term first was introduced by Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1874); see also Fred Feldman, “Hedonism,” in Lawrence Becker and Charlotte Becker, eds., Encyclopedia of Ethics (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 100-113.

84

Directed by Stephen Norrington, 1998.

85

New York: Harper Collins, 1999, p. 501.

86

Directed by Kevin J. Lindemuth, 1995.

87

New York: Del Rey, 1990, p. 123.

88

See Elizabeth Miller and Margaret Carter, “Has Dracula Lost His Fangs?” in Elizabeth Miller, ed., Reflections on Dracula: Ten Essays (White Rock: Transylvania Press, 1997), pp. 25-46.

89

Autobiography, in Charles Eliot Norton’s Hardvard Classics edition (New York): P.F. Collier and Son, 1909), Volume 25, p. 94.

90

See Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Book III, Chapter 5, lines 1114a5-13.

91

“Letter to Menoeceus,” in The Extant Remains, translated by Cyril Bailey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1926), Sections 124-25.

92

All my references to Interview With the Vampire are to the film version.

93

“Nothing to Us?” in Schofield and Striker, eds., The Norms of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 75-91.

94

Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 208-09.

95

Therapy of Desire, p. 210.

96

Those interested in this argument should consult Bernard Williams, “The Makropulos Case,” in Williams, Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956-1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 82-100.

97

John Martin Fischer, “Why Immortality Is Not So Bad,” in David Denatar, ed., Life, Death, and Meaning (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), p. 355.

98

Therapy of Desire, p. 229.

99

Marti Noxon, “Into the Woods” (2000). The script refers to the vampires’ nest as a “drug den,” not a brothel.

100

Blade, directed by Stephen Norrington, 1998.

101

This is only my interpretation of the situation in Blade, as the script only hints at the nature of the arrangement. Another possibility is that humans are duped into contributing blood, believing it will be given to other humans. Even if my interpretation is off, the hypothetical case of mandatory blood contributions is a useful one.

102

Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).

103

Loren Lomasky, Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

104

David Schmidtz and Robert E. Goodin, Social Welfare and Individual Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). In this book, Schmidtz and Goodin take opposite sides of a debate; Goodin is another good representative of the welfarist point of view.

105

Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

106

Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

107

G.A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

108

Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York: Signet, 1997), p. 186.

109

Henry Hazlitt, The Foundations of Morality (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1964).

110

See, for example, Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).

111

Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl, Liberty and Nature (Chicago: Open Court, 1991).

112

The term welfarism has been used for other purposes. It sometimes refers to a specific brand of philosophical consequentialism, without specifying political conclusions. But that is not how I use the term here.

113

The reference to recipients’ needs is crucial. Many non-welfarists, including some libertarians, accept a distinct justification for taxation (or other forms of compulsion) as necessary to provide certain public goods that will benefit most or all members of society, including those who are made to contribute.

114

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Belknap, 1971).

115

Michael Romkey, I, Vampire (Greenwich: Fawcett, 1990), p. 5.

116

Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 48.

117

Singer, 1979, p. 50. Jeremy Bentham, one of the earliest utilitarian philosophers, reached the same conclusion. “The question is not, Can they reason,” Bentham wrote, “but, Can they suffer?” Cited in Singer 1979, p. 50.

118

The capacity for planning indicates vampires would also satisfy Loren Lomasky’s suggested criterion of “project pursuit” (Persons, p. 26).

119

The vampires of Buffy and Blade might seem especially human in this regard, but other accounts still show vampires endowed with patience and foresight—Dracula being the most obvious example.

120

Also, note that humans with limited rationality, such as children, may not be granted the full complement of rights possessed by others, but their interests are still given moral consideration and legal protection.

121

Rawls, 1971, p. 12. Rawls defines moral persons as “rational beings with their own ends and capable, I shall assume, of a sense of justice” (1979, p. 12). He defines a sense of justice as “a normally effective desire to apply and to act upon the principles of justice, at least to a certain minimum degree” (p. 505).

122

“Some people are highly sensitive to issues of justice and ethics generally; others, for a variety of reasons, have only a very limited awareness of such principles” (Singer, 1979, p. 16).

123

The Buffy universe provides an even more telling example: Spike, a soulless vampire who nonetheless fights for good because of his love for Buffy.

124

Marti Noxon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “New Moon Rising,” (2000).

125

I assume, for the sake of the argument, that vampires need human blood for some reason—either for health or for survival itself. The vampire literature differs on this matter, with some accounts allowing vampires to live on animal blood, other accounts positing the importance of human blood.

126

See, for instance, Schmidtz and Goodin 1998, pp. 14-16.

127

The Addams Family, directed by Caroline Thompson, 1991.

128

The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776, Book I, Chapter X, paragraphs 101-118).

129

FAIR website, http://www.fairus.org/news/NewsPrint.cfm?ID=1221&c=15, accessed March 5, 2004.

130

Blade.

131

Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, third edition (New York: Regnery, 1966), p. 144.

132

Christopher Frayling, Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), pp. 20-22.

133

The European Witch-Craze of the 16th and 17th Centuries (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978).

134

The Uncanny, translation by David McLintock (London: Penguin Books, 2003).

135

“A Trail of Disorientation: Blurred Boundaries in Der Sandmann,” in Image and Narrative: Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative, Issue 5. The Uncanny, guest editor: Anneleen Masschelein (January 2003), at www.imageandnarrative.be/.

136

Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

137

Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993).

138

Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1962.

139

Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 14.

140

Bram Stoker, Dracula, edited by Maurice Hindle (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), p. 448.

141

Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (New York: Penguin, 2003).

142

Sigmund Freud, The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex (The Penguin Freud Library, Volume 7, On Sexuality, London: Penguin, 1991).

143

There is a subtext of racial identity and conflict being played out in this scene too. Romero’s casting throughout the four films touches on significant race issues and warrants more investigation.

144

Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993).

145

Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (London: Routledge, 1956).

146

Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: Liveright, 1950) p. 57.

147

Eros and Civilisation, p. 237.

148

Many thanks to Kasey Mohammad, Richard Greene, and William Irwin for their helpful feedback and assistance.

149

Ernest Jones, On the Nightmare (New York: Liveright, 1951).

150

For an account of horror that relates it to the arousal of the emotion of fear and disgust, see Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror (New York: Routledge, 1990).

151

The idea that many entertainments are a means of enabling emotional management, especially for children, is explored at length by Gerard Jones in his Killing Monsters (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

152

On the connection between laughing and screaming, see my “Horror and Humor” in my book Beyond Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

153

This chapter’s background information on Halloween comes from Jack Santino, ed., Halloween (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994); Jack Santino, “Halloween in America: Contemporary Customs and Performances,” Western Folklore 42 (1983), pp. 1-20; Jack Santino, “The Folk Assemblage of Autumn: Tradition and Creativity in Halloween Folk Art,” in John Michael Vlach and Simon Bronner, eds., Folk Art and Art Worlds (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986), pp. 151-169.

154

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979) p. 135.

155

“Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” in Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 1990) p. 65.

156

“Beauty (Re)Discovers the Male Body,” in Peg Zeglin Brand, ed., Beauty Matters (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000) pp. 112-154.

157

Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture: What Becomes a Legend Most (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002) p. 5.

158

The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 3, 61.

Volume 49 in the series, Popular Culture and Philosophy ®, edited by George A. Reisch

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Zombies, vampires, and philosophy : new life for the undead / edited by Richard Greene and K. Silem Mohammad. p. cm.—(Popular culture and philosophy ; v. 49)

Rev. ed of: The undead and philosophy.

Summary: “A collection of philosophical essays about the undead: beings such as vampires and zombies who are physically or mentally dead yet not at rest. Topics addressed include the metaphysics and ethics of undeath”—Provided by publisher.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-0-812-69712-4

1. Vampires. 2. Zombies. 3. Philosophy. I. Greene, Richard, 1961 Sept. 2- II. Mohammad, K. Silem III. Undead and philosophy.

BF1556.Z66 2010
398’.45—dc22
2010001965