If popularity on television and movie screens is any indication, a good number of the costumed ghouls knocking on our doors this October 31 will be the modern West’s two preferred trespassers from the afterlife — vampires and zombies. At first blush, these nightmarish cousins couldn’t be further apart. Vampires — which have been with us in their current form at least since the Industrial Revolution — are fast, sexy, cunning and imperishable. They are sleek nocturnal hunters, and even in the violence of the kill they can be depicted as elegant, like great cats. Zombies — not the Afro-Caribbean variety, controlled by a shaman, but the mindless, flesh-eating dead injected into American popular culture by the filmmaker George Romero with his 1968 film, “Night of the Living Dead” — are most often the opposite: slow, mindless, shambling, putrid excrescences in a state of perpetual decay. Vampires represent a kind of higher place on the food chain — one could at least imagine wanting to become a vampire; the current vogue of carnival-like zombie walks notwithstanding, we can safely assume that no one would want to become a zombie.
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Nevertheless, beyond their obvious differences lies a common core, one that stems from a universal ambivalence that humans, condemned to know they will die, share toward what Shakespeare called “the dark backward and abysm of time.” On the one hand, the dead, while dear to us, lose their human aspect and in their physical existence take on the repulsive quality of decay; on the other, we yearn for and project something eternal, unchanging, an animate presence that we refuse to surrender to the degeneration of time.
That humans live simultaneously real, physical lives and symbolic, meaningful existences means that they must die not once, but twice. As the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan wrote, it is possible in the human imagination for these two deaths, one symbolic and one real, to not entirely coincide. In such cases we enter a peculiar state, one he called “entre deux morts” — or between two deaths.
Those whose symbolic selves die while their bodies still live attain a kind of extra-worldly beauty. Lacan identified Sophocles’ great character Antigone with this state — condemned to death by Creon for having defied the state’s law by burying her treasonous brother, she burns with a righteous splendor that puts to shame Creon’s pathetic attachment to the state’s laws.
Those whose bodies die while their symbolic selves linger constitute an entirely different breed. Chained by a law or obligation to an animate state their bodies can no longer support, such beings become monstrous specters, condemned to walk the earth as embodiments of some insatiable hunger.
It is not too difficult to see in these two archetypes our modern vampires and zombies, the former “radiating a sublime beauty,” in Lacan’s words, the latter monstrous excrescences driven on by a fundamental imbalance in the world of men.
The image of the uncannily beautiful vampire has become familiar enough to cross over into teenage fantasies, starting with the popular TV show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and continuing with the hit series “The Vampire Diaries” and the “Twilight” book and movie phenomenon. In these, as well as in adult-oriented novels, movies and TV series — such as Anne Rice’s “The Vampire Chronicles” and their film adaptations, and the series “True Blood” and “Dracula” — vampires and humans are sometimes difficult to distinguish from one another. Vampires are often “humanized” in these pop culture blockbusters. In the case of “True Blood,” it’s more the case that humanity is “vampirized”; that is, humans are represented as vampire-like monsters just as likely to prey on the vampires as the vampires are to prey on them.
“True Blood” goes furthest in projecting a fantasy world in which vampires and humans may coexist, thanks in part to the mass-production of a synthetic blood substitute for vampire consumption. The availability of this nutritional product allows some vampires to “come out of the casket.” Indeed, the show makes no attempt to hide that it is in part an allegory of conservative entrenchment in the face of the liberalization of sexual morality and the mainstreaming of gay life. As the billboard featured prominently in the credit sequence screams, “God hates fangs.”
It is hardly surprising that vampires continue to evolve in ways that mirror psychosexual anxieties. As children of the romantic age of horror, they are bound to the compulsive cycle of sin and punishment that is characteristic of the tradition of gothic horror. Yet there is another dimension of the repressed that has marked the figure of the modern vampire since its Victorian incarnation in Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”: namely the economic repressed that Karl Marx remarked upon when he spoke of the monstrous face of capitalism as a vampire-like machine, “a circulating thing which gains its energy only by preying upon ‘living labor.’”
In fact, the Marxist identification of the vampire with the predatory practices of capital has proved to be as enduring as the undead monster himself. Among recent literary offerings, Seth Grahame-Smith takes the association of the vampire with blood-draining sociopolitical practices in the direction of traditional slavery in “Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter” (2010), while Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan refocus the lens to reveal the vampire monster in the figure of the cunning capitalist in the “Strain” trilogy and its TV spinoff. Remarkably, “The Strain” features “blood factories” dedicated to the “efficient extraction and packaging of human blood.”
While the vampire continues to haunt our modern imagination, it may fall to its less attractive brethren to claim the title of the perfect monster for the age of globalization, sometimes called the age of the post-human. In effect, the anonymous zombie crowds pack into one moving bundle everything monstrous and terrifying about a global economic machine that leaves nothing but lifeless bodies and undead remnants in its wake. In late capitalism, the German philosopher Niklas Luhmann once wrote, the scandal is not class exploitation but the uncountable masses of people who are born not even to be exploited, but just to die:
If we look at the huge masses of starving people, deprived of all necessities for a decent human life, without access to any of the function systems, or if we consider all the human bodies, struggling to survive the next day, neither “exploitation” nor “suppression” — terms that refer… to stratification — are adequate descriptions. It is only by habit and by ideological distortion that we use these terms. But there is nothing to exploit in the favelas.
“Human debris,” Rush Limbaugh sneered at the Occupy Wall Street protesters, by which he meant to imply that they were simply unemployed; like zombies, they were bodies without a purpose.
If the modern vampire may have functioned as an apt metaphor for the predatory practices of capital in colonial and post-colonial societies, today’s zombie hordes may best express our anxieties about capitalism’s apparently inevitable byproducts: the legions of mindless, soulless consumers who sustain its endless production, and the masses of “human debris” who are left to survive the ravages of its poisoned waste.
Perhaps our fixation with images of the zombie apocalypse is ultimately tied to the conviction that there is no possible alternative to capitalism as a worldwide economic system, paired with the realization that the logical evolution of global capitalism leads to nothing but destruction. As the philosopher Slavoj Zizek has said of our love of films depicting cataclysms of Earth-threatening proportions, we have come to a time when “it’s much easier to imagine the end of all life on Earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.”
So as the vampires and zombies creep out of our screens and up to our doorsteps on Halloween night, we should recall what one survivor says to the others in Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead,” as they stare out in terror at the advancing zombie hordes approaching the shopping mall where they have taken refuge: “They are us!”
David Castillo is a professor and chairman of romance languages and literatures at the State University of New York at Buffalo. William Egginton is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. They are currently writing a book on the media and the crisis of reality.