Zombies are the latest trend now, something I have trouble understanding as I'm not a fan and have a powerful fear of those creatures. With the popular show 'The Walking Dead' and the movie 'World War Z' I thought it would be interesting to have a 'battle' between these two genres and to see which one would win.
The title doesn't refer to the question 'In a battle between a vampire and a zombie, who would win?' The answer is easy, obviously a vampire because he is smarter, stronger and faster. Let's look more on the battle aspect of the popularity contest, in such a contest, who would win?
To start off the vampire is a creature of mostly Eastern European and other countries superstitions. It has since evolved from a terrifying creature to a creature that is admired and even worshipped.
'In Haitian folklore, a zombie is a mindless, animated corpse, or a living person dehumanized and enslaved by black magic. In actuality zombies have less to do with magic than with neurotoxic folk poisons (and their corresponding antidote) used by Voodoo priests to stimulate death and resurrection, thus effectively establishing social fear and social control. The misdiagnosis of cataleptic trance as death is an important feature in the evolution of both the Caribbean zombie and the European vampire.' David J. Skal (2006)
Stories of zombies in Voodoo communities were popular and are still talked about today.
This is an actual event: a young woman dies mysteriously and is buried, she is spotted and returns several days later to the horror of neighbors and her family. They all say that she has returned from the grave as a 'zombie'. She shuffles, walks slowly, unable to speak words, grunts and gazes, the typical characteristics of a zombie. After much investigation, it was discovered that the young woman was not 'technically dead', she had been drugged by a Voodoo priest put into a coma-like sleep, she woke up still under the effects of the drugs. A Voodoo priest had abducted her, drugged her making her and everyone in the community believe that she had died and come back as a zombie. The priest's intention was only to use her as his servant. The main objective of the zombie in that culture is to serve the necromancer or Voodoo priest who has resurrected him. He is a slave, and does not need to eat flesh, it only obeys its master, walks slowly and gazes a lot.
The Ghoul of Arabic folklore is almost the equivalent of the zombie as it is a demon or djinn that feeds on human flesh, it sometimes eat dead people and takes the form of the person it ate. It eats human flesh and sometimes drink blood. It often takes the form of an animal or a beautiful woman living in the desert and luring unwary travelers. The movies of the 20th century decided to reject the Voodoo zombie characteristics and went with the flesh eating part. The ghoul became popular in the twentieth century in monster movies. These new versions of ghouls were similar to vampires as they were reanimated dead people in humanoid form. The ghoul preferred eating human flesh, and it acted with neither will nor intellect.
The zombie evolved and became more vampiric, thanks to George A Romero's films, the zombie became a flesh-eater. 'The characteristics of the cannibal zombie overlap considerably with those of the traditional vampire: both rise from the grave to bite the flesh of the living, who subsequently become infected with the curse of living death themselves.' David J Skal (2006)
The zombie compared to the vampire can go out in the sunlight and spread its plague, the vampire doesn't intend to spread it's plague all the time. The novel 'The Strain' by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan does represent the vampires as plague spreaders like zombies.
The big difference between vampires and zombies is sentience. Zombies are not sentient beings, some movies portray them as being able to see, hear, smell and get a little bit smarter but the ways zombies are 'learning' seems almost Pavlovian. In the remake of 'Dawn of the Dead' the zombies are drawn to the shopping mall because that's where they used to go when they were humans, (interesting how they were 'zombies of consumerism' before they became undead), or because they can 'smell' the humans inside.
In that movie the zombies run fast which does not sit well with fans as zombies are often seen as shuffling around.
The zombie genre stands for fear, the fear of the horde; an unstoppable mass of mindless, dangerous creatures that you can fight but cannot defeat. It also stands for the speeding rate of diseases spreading.
It can be seen as easy to destroy zombies, the way to do that is 'removing the head and destroying the brain' as the news anchorman clearly states in 'Shaun of the Dead'. That seems not too complicated but what if there are too many of them? What if they overpower you? What if you run out of ammunition?
Vampires might be easier to kill as they possess so manny weaknesses: sunlight (sometimes) holy symbols (sometimes), garlic (sometimes), stakes through the heart and plain and simple decapitation. Many of those 'weaknesses' don't work today in modern fiction. Zombies don't care for holy symbols, stakes and bullets won't work, only through the head.
The vampire is more intelligent, fantastical, individualistic and self aware. They have amazing powers, depending on the film, book or TV show. They can turn into mist, hypnotize and turn into animals. The vampire can be a unique individual, a Romanian count or a sparkly high school boy, the list is endless. Zombies have none of that, while the vampire has a fashion sense, the zombie wears what he 'died' in, a postman uniform for example. They can do impossible things, so many things that are unreal and that is why we don't fear them. The zombie however represents the fear of things that could almost be possible: an epidemic of global proportions and the annihilation of the human race.
We understand vampires, they are smart, beautiful, they were once human and now they are 'super-humans'. We are fascinated by them and want to become them.
Many movies introduce zombies in order to convey a message, such as the dangers of consumerism, globalization and evil corporations. The vampire represents the outsider, the rejected, the mourner, the persecuted or like in 'True Blood' a seeker for citizenship. The zombie has an insatiable hunger, the vampire is hungry but a controllable one, he can allude to addiction, drug use and blood diseases even venereal ones. The vampires can represent the fear of a future evolution of mankind through genetic manipulations.
The vampire has so many motivations and emotions, lust, remorse, love, hatred, vengeance, it can be a hero as well as a villain. The vampire is immortal, it will never be ravaged by diseases and show signs of aging. It will not rot or have limbs falling off. Zombies always look disgusting and decayed, why do people today like them?
The vampire, like Louis in 'Interview with the Vampire' has seen so much, witnessed changes in history and is a good storyteller. The zombie cannot speak, the novel and film 'Warm Bodies' is an exception as the zombie boy character of 'R' narrates the story, but there is a happy ending as he turns back into human, an element that zombie purists definitely hated.
The vampire feeds on blood, human or animal, anyone will do. The zombie eats human flesh, is it satisfying a hunger or simply spreading its disease through biting? Now zombies eat brains, what's that about? Why would they eat the brain? Is it inspired by the custom of Papua New guinea people who seek to gain the knowledge of their elders? Aren't zombies satisfied with soft human flesh? They must be strong enough then to be able to crack the skull open and reach the organ.
Let's not get into the whole moral aspects and questions such as: 'if my loved ones are zombified, do I have the courage to shoot them in the head or chop their heads off?' From what we've learned from "The Walking Dead' is that during a zombie apocalypse, the zombies are not the danger, the still living survivors are. I don't watch this show, but I've seen enough TV previews to know basically what happens.
The vampire movies seem to win in terms of quality, there are awesome movies such as 'Near Dark', 'The Lost Boys' and 'Interview with the vampire', 'Nosferatu', 'Salem's Lot', 'Dracula'. When looking at good zombie movies, I can only think of Snyder's 'Dawn of the Dead', the Romero films and Peter Jackson's 'Braindead'. Danny Boyle's '28 Days Later' is good but it is debatable whether it is an actual zombie movie as the zombies aren't 'undead' but just spreading a plague.
Some good movies that I'm able to watch without having nightmares are: 'Shaun of the Dead', 'Zombieland' and 'Warm Bodies'. I agree those are comedies and according to zombie fans, not actual good zombie films, but I managed to enjoy every minute of those without screaming, crying, hiding my eyes and throwing up.
The vampire genre seems to attract good filmmakers such as Coppola, Whedon and Guillermo Del Toro. The TV shows such as 'The Vampire Diaries', 'Buffy' and 'True Blood' contain vampires and other supernatural creatures but never zombies. The show 'Supernatural' does feature zombies sometimes but the show looks for more varieties and originality when portraying monsters.
I will probably never understand the big fascination for zombies today. Perhaps it's like the love for disaster movies, the fear of an impending doom and human annihilation seems exciting to some but not for me.
Vampires will always rule OK?
And the winner is: the vampire
And the loser is: the zombie
References:
. Melton G. J. (1999) The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead, Visible Ink Press
. Skal D. J. (2006) Vampires: Encounters with the Undead, Black Dog & Leventhal publishers, New York.
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