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Popular Culture Review
In many zombie films we thus encounter a moment at which someone
comes across a loved one who is now a zombie. In George A. Romero’s Night o f
the Living Dead (1968)—the movie that started it all—Harry and Helen’s
daughter, Karen, eventually becomes a zombie, eats her father’s flesh, and kills
the mother who is unwilling to kill her zombified daughter because she still
loves the dead. And in the first episode of the AMC television series The
Walking Dead, sheriffs deputy Rick Grimes encounters a father and son who
have survived the zombie apocalypse but are now faced with watching the
woman who was once wife and mother to them walk the streets as a zombie.
Toward the end of the episode, Morgan tells his son to stay downstairs while he
takes to the second floor of the home to shoot zombies from a window. He kills
two zombies with a sense of seriousness but no remorse. When he next has his
wife in the sights of his rifle, he cannot bring himself to pull the trigger, setting
the gun down, crying uncontrollably.3
The Freudian warning is, however, put most succinctly in the sequel to
Night o f the Living Dead. Here, in Dawn o f the Dead, a scientist explains to a
television audience:
We must not be lulled by the concept that they are
our family members or our friends. They are not.
They will not respond to such emotion. They must
be destroyed on sight!4
In other words, the dead are still with us, but we must not continue to
treat them in the same way. We must, though they are still a part of lives, move
on to placing our libido—our love—elsewhere. The thought of this is horrific. It
feels like we are killing our loved ones by killing our love for them. It is like
watching them die a second time. And so, the zombie is a literal recreation of
this very philosophical point. The dead must die twice. All of this
phenomenology is what makes zombification possible on film. But of course
there are ways in which the structures and cultural manifestations of what it
means to be a zombie play out in similar ways in real life as well.
From 1978 to 1991, famed serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer murdered
seventeen boys and men, mostly in his Milwaukee apartment. “I carried it too
far, that’s for sure,” Dahmer told police in explaining his frustrated search for a
totally compliant, zombie-type sex-slave who would always be there for him.5
To be sure, Dahmer said that he merely wanted to love his victims and to receive
their love in return. By drilling holes in their heads in an attempt to turn them
into zombies, he meant to “keep them from leaving,” to keep them present and
compliant with his will. It was, in every important way, a desire for the zombie
that operates in the same manner as what we have been investigating on film.
If Freud was incorrect that the problem with loving the dead is that they
are no longer present, we can at least admit that although the dead are still with
us, they are not present in a way that allows any attached libido to manifest itself