TOP 5: Reasons Zombies Reign As Horrordom's #1 Monsters

With Hallowmas upon us, I thought I would go over the reasons why I consider zombies to be the greatest monsters yet invented, a sort of grand synthesis of all of the best elements of previous fright-mongers. See if you agree, and offer your own opinions and counterarguments in the comments section below.

1. They’re anthropomorphic.

There’s all sorts of beasties under the sun (and moon), but in general I’ve always found that the creepier specimens are the ones which assail you while housed in a human body. Bruce the shark in Jaws, the Blob chasing a young Steve McQueen, or the wide assortment of killer piranhas, rats, and dinosaurs out there don’t hold a candle to things like vampires, werewolves, and zombies — monsters that retain aspects of their humanity even as they terrorize us with their doom-laden, inhuman fates.

2. They’re the living dead.

An adjunct to #1 above. Some monsters are nothing more than exotic animals, others demons associated with the netherworld of some ancient religion or mythology, and still others ordinary humans with a black nullity where their soul and conscience is supposed to be. All provide us with legions of good scares, and may they continue to do so!

But there remains a special type of unease associated with that which was once alive, normal, and often loved as friend or family returning in a degraded state as recognizable as it is hideous. At their best vampires fit this bill, but zombies manage to routinely do so even at their worst, which makes them to my mind more consistently effective on screen or in print.

3. They’ve got contagious cooties.

With many monsters, your primary fear is getting ripped limb from limb. But the truly frightening ones up the ante by the ease with which they can flip you to the dark side. Along with werewolves, zombies have always been the ones offering our intrepid heroes/victims the least margin for error: one bite and you’re out, baby. In the case of werewolves, at least there is a great amount of humanity left, along with the time and wherewithal to control or mitigate your fate. Get nicked by a zombie, however, and it’s game over — an irreversible downhill slide into permanent monsteria.

4. They possess strength in numbers.

Most bloodthirsty fiends are of the single or limited variety, while others assault us by the dozens, hundreds, or even thousands. Only zombies, however, typically manage to completely overwhelm our entire world and way of life in short order, threatening to throw civilization itself into a permanent nightmare.

An added benefit to this is the frequent spectacle of massive, ultra-cool firepower which we get the pleasure of seeing levied against the limitless zombie hordes.

5. Their resistance to the Twilight effect.

Vampires have been defanged via Twilight, True Blood, and any number of other romantic variations on the Dracula theme. Werewolves are often tragic Byronic brooders who ooze a feral sex appeal in between their bouts of lycanthropic mayhem and murder. Horrordom’s vast assortment of serial killers — Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Norman Bates, Freddy Krueger, et al. — ply their crimson trade on sexy damsels in the throes of passion and/or provocative undress that grants the murders a quasi-erotic quality. Even Frankenstein’s monster had his bride (It always strikes me when I watch Bride of Frankenstein how it’s so campy as-is that Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein is almost as much a remake as a send-up).

But zombies steadfastly resist all efforts to sissify, romanticize, or eroticize their essential awfulness. About the closest anyone has come is the late horror author Brian McNaughton, who in his well-regarded collection of short stories The Throne of Bones (1997) did his perverse best to establish believable intimate relations between the living and the dead — although technically his writing centered not on zombies but ghouls (since both George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead [1968] and Max Brooks’ [son of Young Frankenstein director Mel!] novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War [2006] use the term ghoul when talking about zombies, it’s an easy distinction to blur).

But even McNaughton’s try resulted in a gilded yet still-disgusting necrophilia inspiring only revulsion in the average reader, rather than the tempting fantasy of hot-blooded Freudian boogeyman sex the revisionists seem to crave. Amidst the plethora of attempts to demythologize and hyper-sexualize our creature features and books, zombies remain wonderfully unredeemable, continuing to serve the purpose for which they were originally created: personify evil and scare the hell out of us.

Happy Halloween!

Author’s Note: I still intend to get back to For Conservative Movie Lovers, but several weeks of intense jury duty plus a lot of overtime at work has left me unable to get the requisite reading, viewing, and writing done to my satisfaction. Hopefully soon.