Resident Evil 5: Further Readings

"I Walked With a Zombie" and other politically charged undead moments in pop culture.
3/23/2009 9:25 PM | 1 Comments | Page 1 of 2

Here's a dirty little secret. People like me who write about games from a cultural perspective love when a game like Resident Evil 5 comes along. Sure, the game is fun, and there's tons to talk about in that regard. But it's infrequent that games start as a launching point for issues of race. Thing is, ever since storytellers got their hands on the zombie myth they've discovered ways to embed political messages.

"The Magic Island" by William Seabrook is largely considered the first book to bring the Haitian zombie myth to light. Written in 1929, the book is both troublesome and enlightening -- it's a literal field guide into the heart of the zombie myth. The chapter "Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields" describes the use of the zombies as plantation labor. Seabrook argued for the "freedom of the negro people to govern or misgovern themselves." But at the same time he often took a disconcerting view of the people of Haiti. He wrote:

The Haitian peasants are thus double natured in reality -- sometimes moved by savage, atavistic forces whose dark depths no white psychology can ever plumb -- but often, even in their weirdest customs, naïve, simple harmless children.

The first edition of his book contains striking and evocative illustrations by Alexander King that dwell heavily in stereotype. Comic book artist Steve Bissette has posted some examples of the lurid, powerful work.

By a recent stroke of luck I was able to see Val Lewton's 1943 horror picture "I Walked With a Zombie" (trailer) when it screened at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago. The movie is a textbook tale of Gothic horror. The director himself referred to it as "'Jane Eyre' with zombies." What struck me about the movie was the way it deftly exploited issues of race. The story follows a young nurse Betsy who travels to Saint Sebastian to work for white plantation owners. She's hardly set foot on the island before a local sets the tone for the entire film. He tells her that an "enormous boat brought the long-ago Fathers and the long-ago Mothers of us all -- chained down to the deep-side floor." Betsy's blithe reply: "But they came to a beautiful place, didn't they?"

In "I Walked With a Zombie" the tortured white plantation owners and Betsy herself pay a kind of debt, both for the misdeeds of others, but also for their continuing insensitivity to the people who work for them. This speech from Paul Holland, one of the plantation owners, contains a line that may sound familiar. "There's no beauty here," he says. "It's death and decay. Everything good dies here -- even the stars."

Resident Evil 5 isn't the first piece of pop culture to use science to explain the walking dead. "The Serpent and the Rainbow" by horror director Wes Craven transformed the work of ethnobiologist Wade Davis into fantasy -- but it was grounded in Davis' discovery that the Haitian zombies were not literally the walking dead, but prisoners in their own bodies kept that way by a drug-induced trance. The movie is currently available to stream on Netflix. It starts off positively frightening -- Craven has always had a talent for updating and exploiting myth. But watch the movie devolve into silliness at the end.