Let me confess, because I've been trained to confess: I
struggle with zombies. As a Christian clergy person, I believe we are called to
love and serve our neighbor. I have trouble recognizing zombies as
"neighbor." Honestly, it's like an existential or ontological or
definitional quandary of some sort. Is a zombie a neighbor in need? If they
have a need, is it for me to shoot them in the head, or offer them some semblance
of loving care, inasmuch as a being out to eat your brain can receive such
care?
I'm reminded of a character early in The Walking Dead who has the opportunity to shoot his own wife (now
a zombie) in the head, but he can't take the shot. This is the zombie struggle in nuce.
This Zombie-kampf, if you will tolerate the neologism, is
all the more difficult because, in addition to the ethical entanglements of
love and zombies, they are also, well... just gross. Contemporary zombie movies
revel in blood and gore. As a cinema-goer, call me squeamish, I can only take
so much. Wading through the entrails of dead but revivified bodies... I'm just
not that into it.
Except that I am. I really am. I can't get zombies off my
brain. Even though zombies make me sick, I also get that their dominance on the
contemporary culture scene gives indication of the sickness of our culture, the
neuroses of our waking sleep, the ghastly deadness of our living.
It is for this reason that I thank Greg Moody for this book.
Moody has seen it all. He is able to take a big picture developmental approach
to zombies on the big screen, and place them in anthropological and theological
perspective.
For a pastor with insufficient time to go back and watch the
whole back catalog of zombie movies (pre- and post-Romero), this brief
introduction to zombies in film is just the ticket. I have read and re-read it,
because I find it actually even more interesting than watching another episode
of The Walking Dead.
I actually did watch a few episodes of The Walking Dead. And I liked Shaun
of the Dead. But there's just something about zombies. Perhaps I'm on the
leading edge of the zombie-survivalist movement. I have seen the horizon, and
the zombie apocalypse begins not with the appearance of zombies in real life--the
zombie apocalypse starts with their appearance, and of our seeing them, in the
cinemas and home theaters where we hunker in seats, stale popcorn and sticky
soda at our feet, and I, an early adopter and survivalist, have decided to flee
the scene before they arrive.
This may be the pacifist option.
Or so I tell myself. But like Lot's wife, I can't not look
back. I read posts from friends on Facebook (don't we all), and register their
amazement at World War Z, their
anticipation of the next season of The
Walking Dead. And I remain curious, fascinated. I am a zombie-stalker at
one remove, the Kierkegaardian "follower at second-hand." I want to
know about zombies without knowing zombies.
I am, I must admit, intrigued by Moody's descriptions of the
early zombie movies when zombies weren't undead but rather enslaved or
soul-less or in a trance or in some other state, zombies with less appetite and
in some form of spiritual slavery. But having caught glimpses of this kind of
zombie in the Borg, or Chronicles of
Riddick, even here I do not honestly know when I will go back and watch
vintage zombie cinema.
For such as me, we have Greg's book. Moody has known the
catharsis. He is a complete set-ist. He's seen it all, or at least quite a lot
of it. He has walked straight into the fear, and out again. He knows the
historical/anthropological origins. But more than anything else, I believe
Moody sees the beauty in the horror, the truth in the gore, the revelation in
the flat eyes. Haiti. Early film. The Romero transition. Theological
interludes. Zombie-r-us. He has plenty of theories, amazing insight, but always
threaded in and through the real history of these zombie films multiplying and
morphing over a century. Moody tells us a story, and for those with ears to
hear, ties the dead heart of zombie undeadness to the beating heart of
sacramental Christian faith. For me, this is an indispensable resource for
helping me look away from something from which I can't look away.
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