Since when did Zombism beomce like Vamprism

[Trekker4747]

I lose track of the popular-culture mythological aspects of fictional beasts but for some reason since the dawn of the internet Zombies have become more and more popular culminating into their own meme. Zombies are everywhere on the internet and highly regarded as unstoppable killing machines that cannot be stopped. (Despite any many forms being depicted as ridiculously slow and even often being depicted as rotting flesh not known for it's viability.)

Now, as I've always understood it Zombies, in the popular form, are created when "something" reanimates a dead body. The dead body, having decayed, doesn't having any human instincts and is just a walking sack of flesh desiring to satisfy a "hunger" which may or may not be satiated by brains. Thus one of the "appeals" of Zombies being that they cannot be reasoned with or stopped they're animals. Animals made of decaying flesh but "animals" none the less.

Vampires, on the other hand, are "un-dead." They're dead people revived to life completely and fully with all human instincts and more. Unfortunately their body is still technically "dead" and needs a constant supply of blood thus vampires go out to take the blood from living people and somehow in this process the vampirism, like a disease, spreads to the victim. Vampirism is like rabies only somehow sexier and/or more dapper.

But in recent depictions of Zombies in popular culture it seems Zombism is also transfered via bite.

What?! That's not what zombies do! They want to eat you! They want FOOD! They don't need your body for any reason other than that! They don't bite you and then say, "Well he's infected, time to move on, eh?" (All Zombies are Canadian in my imagination.) Vampires do that.

So what gives, Popular Culture?! Why are you confusing Zombies and Vampires?! And why are Zombies so damn popular?!

 

[Itisnotlogical]

Zombies don't sparkle or have emotional problems, but unfortunately don't have remarkable superpowers either, other than being alive after previously being dead. So, since guys can't have vampires back, they souped up zombies as a replacement.

 

[Trekker4747]

Zombies don't sparkle or have emotional problems, but unfortunately don't have remarkable superpowers either, other than being alive after previously being dead. So, since guys can't have vampires back, they souped up zombies as a replacement.

Is it bad that that made perfect sense to me?

 

[Temis the Vorta]

To answer your question in a boringly literal manner, I think it was Richard Matheson who is ultimately responsible for the vampirfication of zombies. The critters in I Am Legend weren't technically zombies or even dead, but that's certainly the genesis of modern zombie fiction, even though they were more similar to vampires. Anyway, that just goes to show that zombies and vampires have been conflated from the first, way back in the 50s, when "zombies" just meant brainwashed people in Haiti.

Now watch someone with a PhD in Zombology come along and prove me wrong on all points.

 

[Bonzo the Fifth]

Part of the fascination, too, is that Zombies fill a modern day mythological allegory, addressing several fears and concerns that we have on an individual and societal level of the places that our society is taking us. Take any image of unfocused, seemingly brain damaged or purely instinctual groups of people (say people and iPods, people going the 9 to 5 grind, people going through tedious, quotidian existence), and you see one of those allegories... others include corporate and technological horrors, illustrated quite capably by The Borg in Star Trek or the modern day incarnation of the Cybermen from Doctor Who, who show literal dehumanization via technology.

Dehumanization is the key word here. These are creatures that walk like men, but are very much not men. No super strength, no crazy hypnotism powers, just persistence and numbers.

Vampires, at least in the modern day interpretation, have become a macabre form of fantasy wish fulfillment where the act of being a parasitic, human devouring monster is somehow romantic or desirable. They're people, but much, much better. Zombies, on the other hand, are typically depicted as much, much less, with no inner life, certainly no angst, just an all devouring hunger...

Does that explain anything?

 

[Mr. Adventure]

It's been that way since Night of the Living Dead came out 40+ years ago and before that zombies were basically of the voodoo variety.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

I think it's simple.

Vampires = fear of sex.

Zombies = fear of getting eaten alive (by a wild animal).

Both are primal fears, good for horror. Obviously, vampires have the edge of representing a "fear" that also has a substantial attractive component. Zombies, not so much. So vampires have an internal push-pull dynamic that makes them better fodder for drama than zombies.

There's less you can do with zombies (hard to make them viable characters for instance). The chief problem with vampires is sheer overuse, which maybe explains the little zombie vogue we're going through lately. I don't think it will last.

 

[Bonzo the Fifth]

To answer your question in a boringly literal manner, I think it was Richard Matheson who is ultimately responsible for the vampirfication of zombies. The critters in I Am Legend weren't technically zombies or even dead, but that's certainly the genesis of modern zombie fiction, even though they were more similar to vampires. Anyway, that just goes to show that zombies and vampires have been conflated from the first, way back in the 50s, when "zombies" just meant brainwashed people in Haiti.

Now watch someone with a PhD in Zombology come along and prove me wrong on all points.

I'd say it's just that Vampires once filled the narrative niche that Zombies now fill. Before Dracula was published, vampires weren't romantic or 'complex'. They were ghouls, shambling, rat-like monsters that devoured humans in the dead of night... much like moder zombies... which you can still see in depictions like 'Nosferatu'. 'Dracula', though, changed that, leaving a hole in our collective mythos that needed filling, especially in the post WWII, atomic age era when we had a narrative need for a zombie metaphor.

 

[Reverend]

Though I only minored in Zobology, I think it's safe to say that, as with most fictional monsters, the abilities and even the basic characteristics of zombies varies rather wildly depending on the source. To be fair though, several such creatures have the "if they bite you, you're one of them" gimmick so it's not just vampires. Indeed, in some fiction, vampires have to make the victim drink their blood in order to turn them while for the most part, others like zombies and werewolves only need to chomp for the person the once.

Perhaps the modern idea of zombies making more zombies is tied into a 20th century way to explain how such a thing might be plausible; through a virus, thus biting=infection which leads to death and subsequent undeath.

As to how they've (arguably) come to symbolise the "ultimate" in fictional threats, I think at least part of it has less to do with what an individual zombie can do (shuffle, moan, grab and bite) and more to do with what one person can do when faced with a twenty thousand strong horde. Just as vampires are werewolves played of superstitious fears of "the other" and a more general fear of the dark before street-lights were invented, "modern" zombies (bother the '28 Days Later' runny-jumpy and the old Romero shuffle-shuffle-moan varieties) play more on fears of overpopulation, overcrowding, pandemics, perhaps mixed in with a more general sense of increased personal isolation and a diminishing sense of community.

Plus of course thanks to Ann Rice and the like, Vampires have suddenly become far more "relatable" and almost tragic figures. There's nothing relatable or romantic about a surging mass of rotting corpses dead set on having your brains for lunch.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

I think it's simple.

Vampires = fear of sex.

Zombies = fear of getting eaten alive (by a wild animal).

If you're going to go that route I'd just say zombies=fear of death. A big element of zombie flicks is a sense of inevitablility, you can't outlast death, it always gets you in the end.

 

[Bonzo the Fifth]

I think it's simple.

Vampires = fear of sex.

Zombies = fear of getting eaten alive (by a wild animal).

If you're going to go that route I'd just say zombies=fear of death. A big element of zombie flicks is a sense of inevitablility, you can't outlast death, it always gets you in the end.

Not just death, but the idea of 'living death'. Where you're just going through the motions of a life that you're not feeling or, well, living. I mean, really, who hasn't had that existential angst in their life or at least felt that everyone around them was just some kind of automaton, going through a pre-programmed existence.... and how long can one living man last against such a huge horde... It's a story of hopelessness and nihilism writ large on a modern scale... after all, keep in mind that one of the few things in common with almost all zombie fiction is that the original source (if known) is usually 'scientific'
in nature (a disease, a radioactive whatsit, or some kind of experiment), as opposed to magic or spirits or some kind of supernatural explanation, leading to the metaphor about modern science and technology and consumer culture changing us into something... else...

 

[C.E. Evans]

When were vampires and zombies not popular?


But like most things in pop culture, there are cyclical periods of increased popularity though--especially when they are ultimately "discovered" by a new generation or reintroduced in a new way. Rice and many others made vampires sexy years ago and they've since become the new kings of romance/urban fantasy novels, while the Resident Evil series of video games introduced "kill 'em befer they git you" zombies to a whole new audience...

 

[barnaclelapse]

I think it's simple.

Vampires = fear of sex.

Zombies = fear of getting eaten alive (by a wild animal).

If you're going to go that route I'd just say zombies=fear of death. A big element of zombie flicks is a sense of inevitablility, you can't outlast death, it always gets you in the end.

I would say it's more of a fear of losing control with zombies. I suppose you could say the same with vampires, but I think loss of control of your instincts, desires, emotions and literally everything else around you is more potent in zombie fiction.

 

[Australis]

Since when did zombies become like vampires?

Since lazy authors and scriptwriters decided to sub vampires with zombies, using a little search and replace in th' ol' text editor.

Come up with something original? My dear, are you serious??

 

[saturn5]

I lose track of the popular-culture mythological aspects of fictional beasts but for some reason since the dawn of the internet Zombies have become more and more popular culminating into their own meme. Zombies are everywhere on the internet and highly regarded as unstoppable killing machines that cannot be stopped. (Despite any many forms being depicted as ridiculously slow and even often being depicted as rotting flesh not known for it's viability.)

Now, as I've always understood it Zombies, in the popular form, are created when "something" reanimates a dead body. The dead body, having decayed, doesn't having any human instincts and is just a walking sack of flesh desiring to satisfy a "hunger" which may or may not be satiated by brains. Thus one of the "appeals" of Zombies being that they cannot be reasoned with or stopped they're animals. Animals made of decaying flesh but "animals" none the less.

Vampires, on the other hand, are "un-dead." They're dead people revived to life completely and fully with all human instincts and more. Unfortunately their body is still technically "dead" and needs a constant supply of blood thus vampires go out to take the blood from living people and somehow in this process the vampirism, like a disease, spreads to the victim. Vampirism is like rabies only somehow sexier and/or more dapper.

But in recent depictions of Zombies in popular culture it seems Zombism is also transfered via bite.

What?! That's not what zombies do! They want to eat you! They want FOOD! They don't need your body for any reason other than that! They don't bite you and then say, "Well he's infected, time to move on, eh?" (All Zombies are Canadian in my imagination.) Vampires do that.

So what gives, Popular Culture?! Why are you confusing Zombies and Vampires?! And why are Zombies so damn popular?!

Beacause they're cheap?
How can zombies be Canadian? If they have no body heat surely they'd all freeze come winter/August? And they'd be USELESS at curling.
All horror villains work as metaphors. The shark in JAWS is famously the 'vagina with teeth'. Vampires are our fear of sex and ageing, werewolves our bestial side. Zombies represent our fear of the masses, that we are the minority who will be overwhelmed

 

[Mr. Adventure]

I think it's simple.

Vampires = fear of sex.

Zombies = fear of getting eaten alive (by a wild animal).

If you're going to go that route I'd just say zombies=fear of death. A big element of zombie flicks is a sense of inevitablility, you can't outlast death, it always gets you in the end.

I would say it's more of a fear of losing control with zombies. I suppose you could say the same with vampires, but I think loss of control of your instincts, desires, emotions and literally everything else around you is more potent in zombie fiction.

Or fear of losing individualism to the collective? I suppose you could read a whole bunch of subtexts into the zombie thing, maybe explaining its popularity, maybe it hits different people in different ways.

 

[Gojirob]

To me, zombies also represent the things we thought we were done with not being done with us. The old, the gone, the lost, the past--the zombie mocks all our efforts to move away from it, and vows it will drag us back, most times without ever saying a word.

 

[Jetfire]

Are The Borg more like zombies or vampires?

 

[saturn5]

Are The Borg more like zombies or vampires?

Like zombies, vampires retain their individuality, zombies are an amorphous, brainless mass

 

[Jetfire]

I thought so...I think The Borg would make a great template for a modern zombie story...I am sure some wouldn't think so.