Halloween – now duly extended to include the entire month of October – is, after New Years, the most introspective time of year. At the dawning of each new year we take a moment to take stock of our future and past, where we came from and where we’re going, using the convenient demarcation of the tolling bell to measure our present position and trajectory – but during this, the spooky month, we dismantle ourselves into component entities, stare at ourselves in successively revealing caricature, and wonder what it is about these shadow-selves that scares us.
First, we have the noble skeleton, definitely the most kitschy of these specters. We each have a skeleton inside of us and we know it, but I think a lot of us don’t quite believe it. Yeah, it makes sense, and is a mechanical requirement for our continued functioning, but it’s just hard to to make a mental connection between that dry white bone and our mushy and muddled existence. I think originally the skeleton, and particularly the magically animated form of it, was targeted as a stark memento mori – but as a monster it is difficult to take seriously, often seeming more playful than dangerous or grotesque. Still, there is an uncanny feeling seeing the frame animated without the muscular apparatus that should allow it to move, a sense that maybe it never actually needed us to get around, that our fleshy existence was allowed to continue out of mere convenience – or that we might be easily replaced by an otherworldly power, allowing our skeletons to be emancipated and slip free of us, leaving us behind and leading a new life unfettered by our degrading weight.
Conversely, zombies embrace that weight, are defined by it, and represent a new order of flesh above thought. All too often these come to stand in for savage invaders in fiction, giving us a target for unfettered xenophobia, cruelty, and violence – even as many of these fictions pretend to be critical of these same attitudes. At its core, though, the zombie is the betrayal of the body, the age and disease and rot that catches up to us all, slowly, inexorably, regardless of fitness or merit, relentless. There is a melancholy that cannot be escaped, knowing that time is slowly catching up to us at the rate of one second per second, and the zombie is this existential despair brought to life – or undeath, anyway.
Though we classify them as “the undead,” each creature represents a wholly different form of undeath than the one before – the skeleton is the mechanical self abandoning the flesh, the zombie is the flesh conquering the life that supposedly controlled it, and the vampire – the vampire is the life conquering the flesh through sheer systematic cruelty. The vampire is the tyrant, the king who rules by theft, the spirit of the system of feudalistic and capitalistic cruelty and extraction and vested into a single form. He is high ranking, the pinnacle of desire for wealth, sophistication, strength, cleverness, and he does nothing but take from those under him to maintain that, becoming great through extracting the distilled greatness of those within his grasp, eventually leaving them husks and himself more powerful than ever. Nevertheless, he observes certain rules, certain niceties, which make him seem even-handed and reasonable to those who find it easy to overlook the monstrosity of his actions – and he will never find any shortage of these, because in the end all too many are willing to betray their fellows just to get a small taste of the power he represents.
Are ghosts undead, or just dead? I guess they’re less dead than expected, at any rate. Ghosts are a wish and a fear tied together. The wish to never have to let go of our past; the fear that the past will never let go of us. The wish that something animates us beyond our bones and meat; the fear that that which animates us does not love us. The wish that we might never be left behind by the dead; the fear that death and circumstance will warp them beyond recognition. The ghost is the refuge of the past and all of our fears and anxieties about the future shelter within it – including the fear that the past will catch up to the future and kill it.
The final popular form of undeath comes in Frankenstein’s monster – who, for conveniences sake, we call the Frankenstein. One might hesitate to include him in the ranks at all, for his story is not one of the body and its conquest of death, but one of the mind – and its inability to escape the circumstances of its birth. Yes, the tale of Frankenstein is generally regarded as a parable of the cruelty of careless and immoral technology, and so it is – but the monster himself, his story is one of abandonment and a search for meaning. He is the inversion of the vampire, only given form through the unthinking power of another and discarded, disdained, rejected. He is without purpose and wants nothing for himself except to have a self, an identity – and in the end the only way he can define himself is through that hole, that void. We can all see ourselves in that mirror, knowing that at any moment the system that created us could decide we no longer have a use, could discard us, abandon us. If not undead, perhaps still unliving – for what manner of unlife could this sort of undefined, immeasurable and unwritten creature lead?
Beyond undeath lies the double-life. The Werewolf is the fear of the self, that we might have desires even we don’t know about and that, before we know it, we might be compelled to do terrible things. Everyone knows their own beast well and keeps it hidden, tame, a dog instead of a wolf – but we’ve all seen enough of the world to know that other people have done cruel and terrible things, and the fear remains: What if there’s a catalyst that turns me into one of them? What if all it takes is a code, a secret ritual or phrase, a glimpse of the eye of the moon, and that cage snaps apart, and I become the monster? Sometimes, looking at those who chose blood and violence, it seems that precious little might stand in the way of such a metamorphosis, so we stare at our feet instead of the night sky so we know where we stand.