Journalism / The moral question of the undead

        Ash Williams turns the corner and pushes his chainsaw through the chest of a zombie. Tomato sauce blood sprays like a fountain, and the dismembered zombie sinks to the ground… Even more dead than it was before. Ash steps over the body, and moves on, undoubtedly to ‘kill’ more. So… Is Ash right in doing this? Is it moral to kill a zombie? Is it the same thing as killing another human, an animal, or nothing like any of these at all? That’s what I endeavour to find out.
         Zombies have always been an integral part of popular culture. There are several possible etymologies of the word zombie. One possible origin is jumbie, the West Indian term for “ghost”. Another is nzambi, the Kongo word meaning “spirit of a dead person.” Zombies were, in one of their earliest forms, the ‘brain-washed’ victims of Haitian voodoo spells. These zombies were not technically dead (or undead), but merely those whose consciousness has been reduced to an instinctual level – eat, sleep, moan… These zombies were said to be made slaves to the witch doctors that created them. But zombies could go even further back than that. They are even included in the Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Sumerian text:
        “Father give me the Bull of Heaven,
So he can kill Gilgamesh in his dwelling.
If you do not give me the Bull of Heaven,
I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld,
I will smash the doorposts, and leave the doors flat down,
and will let the dead go up to eat the living!
And the dead will outnumber the living!”
        But in the twentieth century, zombies became a popular theme in horror movies. One of the earliest of these was 1932’s White Zombie; quickly followed by such films as 1943’s I walked with a zombie, and the influential Night of the Living Dead, released in 1968. “Night of the Living Dead” was the first of director George Romero’s series of films involving the corporeal undead. His legacy included such classics as Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead. His films brought popularity to the genre, and other cult films like Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead series and Danny Boyle’s 28 (insert period of time) Later series.
        Many of these films deal with the concept of zombie uprising on a global, apocalyptic scale. Such situations provoke violence between the survivors and the zombies themselves. And so we come to the question – Is the murder of a zombie just as immoral as the murder of a regular person?
        To answer this question, we must first answer the question of definition. What is a zombie? This differs between mediums, but the majority of zombies in pop culture are slow, rotting, shambling corpses that hunger for human flesh and can only communicate in mono-syllables, if they can communicate at all. This is the description that we will go with – other films contain more intelligent zombies (e.g. – The somewhat comical zombies in the Return of the Living Dead movies. “Come to the hospital” says a reanimate, looking forward to the brains that would arrive…) while other films provide a glimpse of sprinting zombies. These zombies are more physically able – Examples are in the 2004 remake of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, by Zach Snyder, and in Boyle’s 28 Days Later. (Note that Boyle’s 28 series are technically not zombie films. They are actually infected with the Rage virus, and Boyle has stressed that they aren’t zombies. However, their behavior is stereotypical of zombies, and for the purpose of the subject will be regarded as zombies.)
         And so we have the stereotype in our mind – a Romero zombie is a good example. Now let’s compare a Romero zombie to the zombie’s origins and descendants. The voodoo zombie and the Romero zombie, or Hollywood zombie, are very similar, in their animal-like instinctive mind. The main difference is the fact that the Romero zombie is dead, whilst the voodoo zombie is has merely been ‘brainwashed’. The descendant of the Hollywood zombie, and the most relevant to the question, is the philosophical zombie. The philosophical zombie is an analogical being that is a person who only does things, never thinks and feels. The philosophical zombie could be regarded as the hypothetical opposite of a person who is in a vegetative state. The philosophical zombie is used by philosophers as an analogy to answer questions to do with what makes a human a human. The core of this subject is directly linked to this. The Romero zombie can be regarded as a philosophical zombie –albeit the fact that a philosophical zombie does not need a hunger for human flesh to be classified as such. But this is the definition that we will go with – the Romero zombie, as the voodoo zombie, as a philosophical zombie.
        And so we have our definition. But if you were, to take our example from the beginning of this essay, Ash Williams deploying a zombie in the first Evil Dead, by mashing into its chest with his chainsaw. Though – we should possibly use a more appropriate zombie – a Romero one. In Dawn of the Dead (the original version), Peter shoots a zombie in the head. It falls to the ground, doubly dead, as its brain functions have been eliminated. This presents us with one of the most important points to the question – the way to kill a zombie is to destroy its brain. This means that they rely on their brains to survive.  This would be physical functions, such as ambulation, are controlled by impulses in the zombie’s brain. This is the same as in a person. But are human thoughts and such performance different? For the sake of the argument we will say yes. This means that zombies may move and feed, as commanded by instinct, or their primeval id, it does not mean that they have the functions of comprehensive thought, learning, etc. Killing them in such instances would mean that you are not killing a human, on a moral scale – rather you are killing what could be thought of the logic of a human, but not the art. The part that differs us from animals – art, science, human culture – is all through communication and comprehensive thought. If the zombie lacks these, it could be thought of as an animal.
While this does not mean that the practice of shooting a zombie in the head is moral, it does mean that it is not the same as shooting a human. We could think of it as the same as killing a cow. Killing a cow is not seen as moral to all, but it is widely accepted in the majority of people’s heads that if the said cow is trying to eat your brain, you will be forgiven for acting in self-defense.
But there is another factor. In Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, when Fran asks Stephen why the zombies have come to the mall, he replies thus: “They come back to the place that they remember. This was an important place for them.” Social commentary aside, this is a meaningful phrase. Romero is implying that the zombies retain some form of memory, be it even a mere sub-conscious whim. Their lives are not completely wiped upon resurrection. So is killing one moral? This is harder to answer. If the zombie’s memories are sub-conscious, one could regard that they are in a state akin to sleep. So if you are murdered in your sleep, do you feel pain? Nobody can answer this, but it has been shown that zombies fail to register pain. This means that the only immorality in killing a zombie would be the theft of its opportunities. But does a zombie have opportunities? The fact that the rest of their lives will be spent in a state of sleep that they will not remember means that one could argue that the theft of a zombie’s life is not a theft at all.
And so I conclude with opinion. I do not believe that the act of killing a zombie is immoral. This is largely due to the fact that killing one is in most cases an act of urgent self-defense, but also due to the fact that they do not register pain, and lack opportunity in the rest of their lives. But I am not infallible – who knows? Maybe zombies are just trying to tell us something, with all of their lurching and moaning – “that hurts, cut it out!”