Gould 1

Finding the Human in the Zombie: A Synthesis of Film, Neuroscience, and

Disability Studies

Kathryn Gould

Class of 2011

April 25, 2011

Professor Anne Dalke

Department of English

Abstract: Zombie films can act as catalysts for an adrenaline rush, but they can

also represent the human unconscious and have the potential to protect the

human brain from trauma. By using neurobiology and disability studies as lenses,

this thesis will analyze three zombie films, explore portrayals of depersonalization

disorder, and argue that by looking at scenes as Deleuze’s “movement-images,”

the films represent an understanding of the cognitive unconscious and can be

repurposed and recuperated to alter perceptions of how the mind and the self

should interact.

Copyright © Kate Gould 2011All Rights Reserved

Copyright © Kate Gould 2011All Rights Reserved

Gould 2

Scene One:

I most recently became a zombie in the King of Prussia mall.

It was akin to a fever dream, in that far-away foggy way, as numbness

started at my knees and spread up to my hips and belly and my face and oozed

into my brain and my spine and my scalp. I only felt vague senses of unreality

and wrongness and the faint metallic taste of panic lurking at the outward edges

of my experience, which were increasingly expanding away into televisions and

Tempurpedic pillows and massage chairs and As-Seen-On-TV gadgets and the

spinning food court that boasted sound and smell so strong I would have

screamed if only I had found my voice next to the woman who offered samples of

chicken teriyaki.

A magnetic compulsion pulled in my temples and told me to keep walking

so I browsed and walked and winded and lost my breath in the florescent lights

and the swirling crowds of limbs and color and ambient sound that was

immediate and so, so far away. Color leeched out around me like the paint

washing out of an oversaturated watercolor painting and smoothed translucent

Gould 3

into smudges that were Sears and Victoria’s Secret and the store that sold

porcelain clowns and diamond collars for Chihuahuas.

I didn’t pay attention to anything around me because I didn’t have to. My

body knew where to go. Although it was only my second time in the King of

Prussia mall, I found the exit to my car all the way from the other side of that

labyrinthine building. I don’t know long I was there. I didn’t know what I did there.

I only know that I stepped into that acidic, white sunlight and saw the parking lot

grow in front of me and felt the air move into my lungs and I gulped breath after

breath down like water and I slid back into me like a camera coming into focus.

Scene Two:

He wakes every morning, stumbling out of his room in a daze, yawning so

wide and for so long he nearly falls over. He makes the same coffee, the same

toast, wears the same shirt and red tie and nametag, “SHAUN.” He makes the

same trip every morning so he doesn’t have to look where he’s going.

Gould 4

Down to the corner, across the street, over to the shop, and back again.

He buys the same thing every morning, too, a Coke and a Cornetto. Glances at

the daily paper, tosses a handful of coins onto the counter, their silver ringing

muted by the sound of the Indian music on the radio and the overwhelming static

silence of the morning. He keeps his eyes on the sidewalk but his gaze is miles

away as he acts on automatic, looking without seeing, gliding through the

motions without attending to anything around him: the boy and the soccer ball

that hits him in the face, the car that lurches to a stop inches away from his feet,

the curb that he trips over every-single-time he crosses the street.

He stares open-mouthed on the bus, gaze directed at nothing, eyes

slipping over people walking, talking, going to work with the same empty stare

and slack jawed face. Unsettling news reports from televisions and radios roll

over him like rain and he still doesn’t notice. It’s all the same, day after day, and

he’s just an automaton following his schedule.

I. Introduction

Gould 5

These two scenes come from very different sources. The first is my own

narrative of a strong dissociative experience I had as a sufferer of

depersonalization disorder. The second is a representation of Edgar Wright’s

2004 film, Shaun of the Dead, a romantic zombie comedy that follows an

apathetic salesman (Shaun) dealing with a dreary life, an unhappy girlfriend, a

despondent mother, and a slothful flatmate.

Non-fiction and fiction, both scenes articulate a similar story: the zombie-

like waltz of a dissociated individual. When I say I “became” a zombie, I mean

that my conscious self became numb, abruptly and without cause, leaving me to

act as an automaton, wandering through the crowds of shoppers without

consciously intending any of my actions. This essay makes the argument that my

experience was represented in the actions of the character Shaun and others,

like Barbara from Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Francine from Dawn of the

Dead (1978). In each case, crisis, trauma, and tragedy initiate a cascade of panic

and anxiety that culminate in a dissociative, depersonalized experience of the

world.

Gould 6

In this thesis, I will analyze three zombie films (Night of the Living Dead,

Dawn of the Dead, and Shaun of the Dead) as representations of

depersonalization disorder, arguing that the zombie-state as well as the

treatment of the zombie by the gaze prepares and primes our brains to protect us

from the extreme stress and anxiety of devastating violence and tragedy. By

taking a close look at the way the camera treats the main characters of these

films and by theorizing that reading through the lens of disability studies, I will

argue that such films can contribute to a greater understanding of mental illness,

and be recuperated to show the usefulness of dissociation in dealing with

disaster.

II . Disabil i ty and Depersonalization

Disability studies is a relatively new field of study that focuses on the roles

that disabled individuals play in culture, literature, law, history, and other

disciplines. It seeks to both emancipate the disabled body and mind from the

confines of societal conventions, and to reposition disabled individuals into our

culture in such a way that they are neither ignored nor made into a spectacle.

Gould 7

Disability studies questions the concepts of normalcy and “average,” exposing

the fallacy of generalizing people into ideals and standards, and proposes new

ways of positioning and discussing disability as an alternative state.

“Disability studies unpacks and undermines stereotyped representations of

disability in science and popular culture to understand and intervene in how

‘representation attaches meaning to bodies’” (Lewis 340). For that reason, the

theory of disability studies provides a new and distinctive angle for this thesis,

acting as a lens and a means to effect change in a field that has largely ignored

mental illnesses, like depersonalization disorder.

Normalcy is a societal construction. Some disability scholars attribute it to

the contrast between “ideal” and “grotesque,” others to the inception of political

statistics at the beginning of the modern period. However it originated, the

concept of “average” is deeply etched into Western society. Even the progressive

Karl Marx used the ideas of average and normal in order to determine the use of

labor, perpetuating the idea that a population of human individuals is, by majority,

average (Davis 6). Anyone deviating from that average is an outlier and, an

Gould 8

outlier, whether under-average or above-average, is seen as different and even

grotesque. It depends largely on the characteristic that is being measured on

whether or not a trait is desirable less than, equal to, or greater than the average.

For instance, height is typically seen as an admirable trait, so someone taller

than the average for a population is idealized. But this also means that someone

shorter than the average is stigmatized and viewed as freakish. And it’s more

than being derided or ostracized from mainstream or “average” society. Being

disabled means pathologizing what makes someone different or abnormal,

making disability a disease.

Because disability studies focuses on changing the interpretations of

appearance, of abnormal physical states, mental illness and other “invisible”

disabilities have been largely disregarded by the field. By looking at zombie films

and the “movement-image” as representations of depersonalization, disability

studies can refocus to include all types of outliers.

Bradley Lewis writes in his essay, “A Mad Fight,” that psychiatry disability

advocates believe that mainstream psychiatry “over exaggerates psychic

Gould 9

pathology and over enforces psychic conformity” (Lewis 339). The psychological

and societal pressure to “shore up” on the side of sanity is enormous and,

advocates believe, debilitating for those affected. In the case of

depersonalization, those abnormal conceptions of reality can be desirable,

particularly in moments of crisis.

The depersonalized individual acts as a manifestation of the filmic zombie

in real life. Because they appear “out of sync” with reality, and because their

perceptions of the world around them are not quite conscious, unable to feel

emotions and numbed from the world, they are less than human and less alive.

Disability becomes ability and a powerful tool for survival when feeling detached

from the self provides space for the zombie reflexes to take over.

II I. A History of the Clinical

Dissociation was first observed and discussed in the late 18th and early

19th centuries by French and English psychiatrists following the pathologies of

individuals who expressed extreme dissociation and the presence of multiple

Gould 10

personalities. For example, in 1845 a patient wrote in a letter to Esquirol, a

prominent French psychiatrist,

My existence is incomplete. The functions and acts of ordinary life, it is

true, still remain to me; but in every one of them there is something

lacking. That is, the sensation which is proper to them… Each of my

senses, each part of my proper self is as if it were separated from me and

can no longer afford me any sensation. This impossibility seems to

depend upon a void which I feel in the front of my head and to be due to a

diminished sensibility over my whole body, for it seems to me that I never

actually reach the objects that I touch (Sierra 8).

Descriptions of dissociation consisted largely of people who split the self into

many pieces, often accompanied by huge swings in mood and affect, as well as

partial or total losses of memory in the change from one personality to another

(Abugel and Simeon 18). Like Esquirol’s patient, many described a loss of

sensation or numbness of the body in connection to the outside world.

Gould 11

During the mid to late 19th century, investigations of dissociation became

entangled in the occult. Parapsychology, the study of mental phenomena that is

now discredited or disregarded by more orthodox scientific psychology, became

wildly popular in the 1850s. Dissociative events were labeled as possession,

near death experiences, fugue states, somnambulism, and even astral

projection. Explanations, treatments, and tests used to explain or define

dissociation include crystal gazing, hypnosis, induced trances, and examinations

of telepathy and other forms of ESP (extrasensory perception). Well-respected

psychologists and medical professionals of the time delved into the occult in the

hope of attributing dissociative symptoms to past lives, demons, spirits, and

aliens (Carlson 25).

This otherworldly, supernatural approach to dissociation continued until

approximately the start of World War I (1914), when scholars rejected both

parapsychology and Multiple Personality Disorder, which was subjected to harsh

scrutiny and thought not to originate naturally, but rather through the exercises of

a practitioner using hypnosis or other disreputable attempts to detect the

Gould 12

presence of multiple personalities. While prevalent in popular culture all through

the 19th and 20th centuries, Multiple Personality Disorder continued to be

dismissed until 1980, when it was added as “Dissociative Identity Disorder” in the

DSM-III (First, Frances, and Pincus 294). However, depersonalization was still

investigated as a symptom of neuroses well into the mid 20th century. For

instance, in the 1930s Dr Paul Schilder defined depersonalization as “(1) an

experience of feeling cut-off or alienated from surroundings (i.e. derealization);

(2) difficulties remembering or imagining things; (3) inability to feel emotions, and

(4) a feeling of disembodiment, described as a feeling of being dead, or

automaton-like” (Sierra 26). Schilder and other clinicians working in the 1930s

and 1940s concluded that after anxiety and depression, depersonalization was

the most frequent symptom seen in psychiatry.

During the 1960s and 1970s, following a growing interest in altered mental

states of consciousness, there was an increase in publications on

depersonalization in theoretical, philosophical, and clinical contexts. It became

widely understood that individuals experiencing depression and anxiety often felt

Gould 13

dissociated, and that people facing life-threatening situations often became

depersonalized. As attention to dissociation grew, so did empirical studies of

chronic depersonalization that could not be attributed to any other mental

pathology (Sierra 2). Ultimately, depersonalization was labeled as a disorder in

the third revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

(DSM-III) in 1980.

In the present day, investigations of depersonalization disorder are

pursued on an empirical basis, with a focus on the neuropsychological evidence

provided through functional magnetic resonance imaging techniques (fMRIs) and

skin conductivity tests. As it currently stands, there is no officially recognized

treatment for depersonalization disorder and, even when attributed to an anxiety

or panic disorder, it can still persist after other symptoms have been treated

(Sierra 4).

Many hope that researching depersonalization with the aid of neurobiology

and clinical neuropsychology will provide insight into the causes of and possible

treatments for the disorder. Roth and Mayer-Gross, researchers working on

Gould 14

depersonalization since the 1950s, proposed that “’depersonalization comprises

a state of heightened arousal together with dissociation of emotion and thus

serves as an adaptive mechanism which enhances the chances of survival in

acute danger’” (Sierra 19). Roth and Mayer-Gross are referring here to the

function of depersonalization in response to danger or a high state of panic,

passive and active types of trauma (i.e. witnessing a drowning or being in a car

accident). But depersonalization becomes a disorder when someone dissociates

without experiencing anything traumatic; sometimes, it just happens. The

question, then, is why? To better understand depersonalization as a disorder,

researchers are exploring what happens in the brain when someone dissociates.

IV. The Zombie Brain

Dr V.S. Ramachadran, renowned clinical neuropsychologist, calls this

phenomena the zombie in the brain. “When I say zombie I mean a completely

nonconscious being…perfectly alert and capable of making complex, skilled

movements, like creatures in the cult movie Night of the Living Dead”

(Ramachandran 64).

Gould 15

Neurobiologist and cognitive scientist, Christof Koch, describes zombie

agents or zombie behaviors as “an entire menagerie of specialized sensory-

motor processes…that carry out routine missions in the absence of any direct

conscious sensation or control” (206). Like reflexes, these zombie behaviors

include blinking when something looms inside your field of vision, coughing when

your breathing passages are obstructed, sneezing when dust tickles your nose,

or being startled by an unexpected noise or abrupt movement.

You don’t need to think about zombie behaviors in order to perform them

and, more often that not, you don’t. If you’ve ever wandered out of bed in the

morning and into another room and then asked yourself “What was I doing,

again?” then you have been using your zombie agents to your body without

consciously thinking about what you were doing. Other nonconscious agents

control proprioception, which involves balance and body posture, as well as the

feeling of where you are in space. As you move through the world, your body,

limbs, and head continually adjust to keep your balance without your ever having

to think about it. The information needed to keep your balance comes from the

Gould 16

limbic system, part of the “zombie brain,” a largely nonconscious part of the brain

that expresses and controls the “fight or flight” response. A group of researchers

led by Dr Erwin Lemche think that suppression of the limbic system in response

to extreme stress or fear relates to the finding of weakened responses in the

autonomic nervous system (Sierra 138). The fight or flight response accelerates

the pulse and respiratory functions, dilates the pupils and blood vessels in the

muscles, speeds up instantaneous reflexes (zombie behaviors), and stimulates

sweat glands. These responses all prepare for violent muscular action to confront

or avoid a dangerous situation. They are nonconscious zombie behaviors in

which the unconsciously responds to stimuli that it regards as “dangerous,” like

the loud screech of car tires on pavement or the sight of a large dog approaching

you in your peripheral vision (Koch 211).

A series of fMRI tests performed in 2001 by coordinated groups of US and

UK researchers showed decreased activity in limbic structures such as the

amygdala and hippocampus (Phillips et al 156). The amygdala is responsible for

a variety of instinctually driven hormonal processes such as the conditioned fear

Gould 17

response and the formation of explicit emotional memories. The hippocampus is

the seat of all of the memories that make up the story of our lives. It is the

“epicenter of the distributed memory network of the brain” (Abugel and Simeon

108). Whereas the hippocampus will hold the episodic personal memories of a

trauma, the amygdala has the capacity to remember the feelings of that trauma.

The fMRI tests also showed an increase in activity in the prefrontal cortex,

the “executive” part of the brain that controls and modulates emotional responses

as well as complex cognitive behaviors (Sierra 136). This part of the cortex acts

as an inhibitor of the limbic system in order to control anxiety, fear, and panic. It

makes sense to me that when someone dissociates, feeling distant and

emotionally numbed, their prefrontal cortex shows increased activity while their

limbic system activity is dampened. Faced with overwhelming fear and panic, the

higher functions of the brain suppress pieces of the zombie brain, altering

perception of that event. Depersonalization is a disorder of subjective sensory

experience that targets the zombie brain.

Gould 18

I want to turn now to Ramachadran’s gesture toward the creatures of the

Night of the Living Dead as exemplars of the perfectly decent and capable, yet

“completely nonconscious” being that is the zombie in the brain. I will show that

we can learn a lot about the brain and depersonalization from the way that

zombie films treat depersonalized characters.

V. Zombies in Film

The 1930s

Zombie movies, like other films in the horror genre, play off of the tensions

and anxieties of the era in which they are produced. Zombie films first began to

appear in the 1930s and, according to Professor Kyle Bishop, reflected fears of

mainstream Western society being overthrown by a racial Other (65). In films

such as White Zombie (Halperin, US, 1932), for example, witchdoctors create

zombies by enchanting the living—or the dead—and use them as puppets to do

his bidding. Drawing off of Haitian voodoo and folklore, zombie films of this time

Gould 19

are interpreted as expressions of imperialist and colonialist tensions regarding

the domination and subversion of mainstream Americans by those they had

colonized.

The 1940s and 50s

According to author Glenn Kay, zombie films produced in the 1940s

played off of wartime fears of invasion and domination by a foreign power, and

the films of the 1950s reflected the ways in which the Red Scare and the Nuclear

Arms Race ignited the anxieties of the American public (23). Films like Creature

with the Atomic Brain (Cahn, US, 1955) and Quatermass 2 (Guest, US, 1957)

featured zombies originating from nuclear radiation or outer space. These

creatures represented the fear of atomic bombs and of the space race as well as

the fear of Communists hiding in plain sight among the American public. Anyone

could become a zombie and, until they were trying to strangle the life from you,

the zombies appeared to be just like the living.

The 1960s

Gould 20

Zombie movies of the 1960s were not very different from those of the 40s

and 50s. They played off of anxieties about the space race and Frankenstein-

esque fears of the growing powers of science to create life by reanimating the

dead. George Romero’s 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead, both reinforced

those fears and transcended them with a whole new kind of monster. Unlike the

zombies pre-dating 1968, which were created by witchdoctors and used like

puppets, Romero’s zombies (1) were independent and organic in their origin, (2)

far outnumbered the human protagonists, (3) ate human flesh, and (4) had a

contagious condition (Bishop 94). Zombies became undead cannibals, grotesque

and disturbing, and being bitten by them was not only a death sentence: it meant

that you would become a zombie as well. In one fell swoop Romero remade the

zombie sub-genre into one featuring flesh-eating corpses and infection/invasion-

based narratives while simultaneously creating a new standard for horror films.

While many critics reviewing Romero’s film found the amount of violence

immoral and disgusting, the film was one of the top grossers for 1969 and 1970

Gould 21

and demand to see it was so strong that theaters had nightly showings of the

fledgling classic.

Released at a time when disillusionment was running rampant in the

country—spurred by the Vietnam War and the recent assassinations of

Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy—Americans identified with

the film's most shocking suggestion: death is random and without

purpose… A metaphor for societal anxiety, the sight of America literally

devouring itself and the representation of the desecration of the

wholesome American family were ‘reflections of social hysteria’ (J.

Hoberman) and served as a release for the country's repressed trauma”

(He).

The 1970s

Thanks to Romero, the 1970s found zombie films reborn, particularly in

Spain and the UK. Directors took a more serious, socially conscious approach to

the horror genre, playing off of the civil rights movements focused on the

oppression of race, religion, gender, and sexuality. Blaxploitation horror movies

Gould 22

became popular in the US, calling attention to racism and urban crime, while

European films infused terrifyingly gory horror stories with overt sexuality, like La

noche del terror ciego (Ossorio, Spain, 1971), which “exemplifies…the extreme

levels of violence, sex, and kinkiness to which [European horror films] aspired”

(Kay 64).

In 1978 Romero produced his follow-up zombie film, Dawn of the Dead,

also based in Pittsburgh. Often read as a critique of consumer culture, Dawn

follows two SWAT team members, a traffic helicopter pilot, and a news station

staff member who find refuge in an indoor mall as they are beset by hundreds of

zombies roaming through the Pennsylvania countryside. As Glenn Kay

explained, it “establishes the zombies as mindless ‘consumers’ who take their

need so far that they must feed on human flesh” (91).

The 1980s and 90s

In the 1980s, over one hundred zombie films were produced, including

Hard Rock Zombies (Shah, US, 1985), Descanse en piezas (Larraz, Spain,

1987), and Michael Jackson’s Thriller music video. Italy and France started

Gould 23

turning out zombie films at the same pace as US and Spain as horror movies

grew more popular. More directors turned to simpler and more commercial styles

of filmmaking, especially once both large and small studios discovered that “one

could reap a profit with zombie movies and other horror films” (Kay 102).

According to Kay, in the 1990s the striking images coming out of the Gulf

War pushed audiences to gentler thrills and away from gore and horror. Zombie

films became “completely marginalized” as those in search of thrills turned to

action films, which became a staple of the decade. With films like Buttcrack

(Larsen, US, 1988), where anyone who sees zombie frat boy Wade’s butt turns

into one of the living dead, or Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island (Aoyama, US,

1998), a movie based off of the Scooby-Doo cartoon series, zombies fell into the

background as comic relief. A new medium arose at the same time, however,

which continued the supply of gore and ambulatory corpses: video games.

From Japan emerged one of the biggest ideas to hit virtual reality.

Resident Evil (US title) and House of the Dead, both released in 1996, were first-

person-shooters that took players through Romero-esque survival narratives

Gould 24

armed with guns and, hopefully, the wavering courage that accompanied

terrifying in-your-face graphics. The games were phenomenal hits, Resident Evil

selling 2.75 million copies in the US alone (Kay 184). Both games inspired more

games, comic book series and, more recently, movies (Resident Evil I-IV, 2002,

2004, 2007, 2010 and House of the Dead, 2003). A new format for home

viewing, the DVD, made zombie films available at home and pacified fans until

the 2000s brought, as Bishop calls it, the “zombie film renaissance.”

The New Millennium

In 2002, the spin-offs to the Resident Evil video games began appearing,

along with 28 Days Later (Boyle, UK, 2002), which featured a mutated rabies

virus called “Rage.” A Dawn of the Dead re-make came out in 2004 directed by

newcomer Zack Snyder, and while the details of the film differ significantly from

the original, it is one of the few zombie films to gross over $100 million dollars in

international box office. Shaun of the Dead (Wright, UK, 2004) also appeared in

the same year, one of the “Blood and Ice Cream trilogy” which also includes Hot

Fuzz (an action film parody) and the yet to be released The World’s End.

Gould 25

Providing social commentaries about the drudgeries of day-to-day life and the

widespread desensitization of viewers to violence and gore, contemporary

zombie films continue to represent societal anxieties and provide catharses for

movie-goers.

Tracing the progression of zombie films highlights a central theme present

in the genre. Beyond the transformation of the zombie from mindless servant to

cannibalistic corpse lies a shared representation of the cognitive unconscious,

what neurobiologists call the “zombie reflexes” in the “zombie brain.” An

understanding of depersonalization and dissociation can be seen by reading

zombie films, not through the lens of social movements, as was done by Bishop,

Kay, and Linda Badley, who wrote of zombie films as exploiting economies

“based in ‘meat,’ or bio-power” wherein the boundaries between human, animal,

and machine are erased (75), but rather with assistance from Gilles Deleuze’s

theory of the “movement-image.”

I picked the three films, Night of the Living Dead 1968, Dawn of the Dead

1978, and Shaun of the Dead 2004, because they each feature long tracking

Gould 26

shots oddly dissociated from the “reality of the film,” demonstrating Deleuze’s

“movement-image,” and because the films were well-received with audiences at

the time of their release, suggesting that they represented compelling and

familiar states of mind that echoed those of their viewers. The films also came

from significant points in the evolution of the zombie genre: Night of the Living

Dead revolutionized the monster, Dawn of the Dead provided a dark, humorous

social commentary and increased the depth of zombie film, and Shaun of the

Dead breathed new life into a genre that was struggling to survive while

simultaneously playing on the monotony of modern life. All three films are

considered “classics,” epitomizing what makes a good zombie film.

VI. The Movement-Image and the Walking Dead

Drawing on the philosophical work done by great thinker Henri Bergson,

Gilles Deleuze developed a cinematic theory called the “movement-image,” an

assertion that the images projected before us in the cinema are not static images

to which movement is later added but, rather, intertwined and inseparable, a

perceived single entity that gives film its syntax and diction: “Images move within

Gould 27

and between the frame, via the camera’s motion and the rhythm of editing”

(Powell 214).

According to Deleuze’s theory, those moments of movement by camera

and actor not only impress upon viewers a cadence or cinematic grammar, but

also a sympathetic rhythm that we reflect on internally, connecting us to the

stimuli of the “movement-image,” and thereby to the film itself. This process of

sympathetic perception is not conscious, but an involuntary state of attention that

acts on us and in us.

In zombie films, this process mirrors the inattentive nonconscious way

many characters are living, in which the cognitive unconscious takes over. The

rhythmic motion of camera and actor align the viewer with the depersonalized

characters. As Powell explains of Deleuze’s theory, “Physical sympathy connects

our senses to kinetic art forms. In Bergson’s example, if we watch the

movements of a dancer, we participate in them by an internal projection that may

become externalized” (111).

Gould 28

There are several notable kinesthetically pleasing sequences in Night of

the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Shaun of the Dead; each film features

long tracking shots. In Night of the Living Dead a series of long tracking shots

emphasize Barbara’s escape from the cemetery and her panic. In Dawn of the

Dead, a series of scrolling shots from the helicopter accentuate the escape of the

four main characters to a shopping mall. Shaun’s stroll in Shaun of the Dead is

one continuous shot exemplifying the kinetics of the “movement-image.”

Each of these long tracking shots is used to build suspense and tension,

to exacerbate the feelings of dread, and the dream-like quality of a zombie

apocalypse. These kinds of shots mirror experiences and descriptions of

dissociative events felt by individuals with depersonalization disorder, simulating

the automatic, gliding feeling of being led by the zombie brain. Because this

kinesthetic movement creates a physical sympathy between the viewer and the

film, that depersonalized event is experienced internally by the observer. Such

zombie films provide a protective and preparatory function, allowing viewers to

steady their nerves and endure a catharsis of the anxieties that they bring with

Gould 29

them to the movie theater. Bishop relates the story of a law student who lived

through the devastation of 9/11 firsthand:

Although the experience was understandably shocking, this student

claimed he had been emotionally prepared for the tragedy, not by his

family, community, or government, but by the zombie movies of which he

had been a long time appreciator (36).

Thus, zombie films are more than mere representations of depersonalization,

they aid in the dissociation, detachment, and emotional purging of nerves for

viewers.

A. Night of the Living Dead

Thunder crashes and lightning lights up the faces of Barbara and her

attacker, a newly risen zombie, as they stare at each other in the graveyard. The

series of tracking shots in Night of the Living Dead begin with a medium-long

shot of Barbara running through tall grass away from the cemetery, the camera

set at a low angle and tracking her right to left, in and out of the frame. This

position makes the point of view of the observer appear to be that of someone or

Gould 30

something lurking and watching Barbara just out of sight in the field; she is too

panicked to pay attention to anything but the zombie lurching along behind her.

Next, Barbara emerges from the wooded field from the right side of the

frame, onto a road, and she runs towards the camera, which dollies out to keep

her in a medium shot in the center of the frame. Barbara’s running is erratic, hair

disheveled and bouncing on her shoulders, limbs flailing as she tries to elude her

pursuer. By keeping her in the center of the frame and at an even distance while

she runs forward, the shot makes it seem as if Barbara isn’t actually getting

anywhere, and her desperation shows in her face and her form. The scene

creates the effect of being trapped in a bad dream. The editing seems to be

emulating Barbara’s panting breath and her panic, with quicker and quicker cuts

that move closer and closer to her face. As she runs into a field, chest heaving,

the camera shows a series of close-ups of her face and eyeline matches of her

shaky gaze as she searches for refuge. A long shot shows a farmhouse on the

other side of a field, the camera steady and unmoving. As the gaze returns to

Barbara and she runs pell-mell, nearly tumbling over her own feet in her haste,

Gould 31

the camerawork grows more bumpy and erratic, matching the increasingly loud

and feverish extradiegetic music.

Because there is little ambient sound heard over the extradiegetic music,

and because the film is in black and white, with most of these scenes gray and

washed-out, Barbara blends into the sky as she runs, the mood is nightmarish.

The edges of sky and ground, tree and grass, woman and road all meld together

into a single image, the sense of reality leeching away. This is a representation of

depersonalization. The shaky, frenetic “movement-image” of Barbara’s escape

from the cemetery creates a physical sympathy between woman and viewer who

thus shares her dissociation.

And it’s by sharing in Barbara’s dissociation that the viewer can prepare

for horrors of their own, preemptively inducing their prefrontal cortex to suppress

the panic centers of the brain. In the next film, Dawn of the Dead, the characters

have all had opportunities to experience panic and to suppress it. Following two

SWAT team members, who are forced to kill the living dead and their victims,

and two staff members of a news station, who are forced to watch and broadcast

Gould 32

horrifying images and headlines, Romero’s second zombie film represents

another set of dissociative scenes and experiences that move kinesthetically

from the screen to the viewer.

B. Dawn of the Dead

Amid the chaos of the confused and terrified WGON news station, and the

devastating violence and horror of a SWAT raid on an impoverished apartment

building that is ignoring the martial law imposition, four people decide to escape

in a traffic helicopter to the Pennsylvania countryside. The tracking shots that

detail their escape begin once they’re in the air, in a series of bird’s eye aerial

shots that follow the movement of zombies, citizens, and militia on the ground. In

the first tracking shot, the camera flies over a winding road—reminiscent of the

winding roads in Night of the Living Dead—tracking the movement of National

Guard trucks, panning from the lower left corner to the upper right, and then to a

group of men in uniforms and orange hunting gear who are combing through a

large open field for zombies.

Gould 33

The passengers of the helicopter, so high up and disconnected from

what’s going on below them, give a distant narration of what they see going on.

The next few pans get closer to the ground, showing more detail in the activity

below: the citizen and militia Search and Destroy teams march in a line across

the green as the helicopter sweeps over them, left to right, passing them. A

closer bird’s eye shot pans over a house where a series of coach buses,

ambulances, and police cars are parked. A body bag on a gurney, occupied, is

loaded into the back of one of the ambulances as a line of militiamen pass single

file by the house.

The distance between the passengers and the activity unfolding below

them positions them like someone going through a dissociated event. They are

“floating” above the zombie-infested Pennsylvania countryside, narrating what

seems to be happening, but they have no real physical or sensational connection

to what is happening.

These tracking and panning shots, interspersed with wide-eyed close-ups

of the characters, make their view all the more withdrawn from the world and

Gould 34

from their selves. The kinesis of the aerial shots, drifting lazily like a balloon in

the wind, creates the dreamy, safe feeling of dissociation. As disconcerting as

dissociative experience may be in retrospect, that feeling of detachment from

reality is the brain’s way of controlling what would otherwise be a terrifying and

dangerous period of “fight-or-flight.” In Dawn of the Dead, the main characters

choose to “float;” as does Shaun in the next film, Shaun of the Dead, allowing

him to survive until the end.

C. Shaun of the Dead

Shaun’s early morning stroll, carrying him from home to shop and back

again, is one continuous shot. The kinetics of his movement and of the

“movement-image” created therein align the viewer with Shaun, sharing in his

despondent and apathetic perception of the world.

The camera tracks along the street as Shaun crosses it, keeping him in

the center of the frame accompanied by extradiegetic elevator music with a light

beat and in time with Shaun’s sleepy stroll around the corner and to the store. As

Shaun reaches the other side of the street, the camera swivels and rotates to

Gould 35

follow him, from right to left, as a beggar with a large black dog holds out his

hand and asks for change. All around Shaun is the early bustle and sway of the

morning, people emerging from their houses, walking down the street, going to

work. He notices none of this, tripping on the curb in front of a man washing a car

in the street, glaring at the offending strip of pavement as he continues his trip to

the store. The camera movement is smooth, tracking to follow Shaun from the

side and behind, always keeping him in a medium to ¾ shot, far enough back so

that we can see him dazedly strolling along, close enough to catch his sighs and

his yawns. An old man stares at Shaun openly and his vacant stare follows

Shaun—the same way the viewer has been staring at Shaun the whole time.

Shaun glances back at him over his shoulder, noticing the man’s dead gaze,

which foreshadows that of the zombies, who will soon be staring in much the

same way. Shaun’s walk is, in its own way, a kind of walking dead—dead asleep,

dead-end, routine—a sleepwalk that viewers can tell, just by this first sequence,

that he does every morning.

Gould 36

The neuroscientist’s description of the zombie brain is a good explanation

for Shaun’s behavior in his morning trip to the shop—he wanders in front of a

moving car, trips over a curb, and stumbles into the store all without any

conscious acknowledgment of the world around him. And he gets through this

routine alive and unharmed every single day. Such stream of nonconscious

reflexes, of movement without thinking are well-represented by Deleuze’s

“movement-image.” This particular sequence from Shaun of the Dead is

presented through the sluggish and entertaining language of action and editing.

And because the shot is single and continuous, viewers can match the flowing,

easy movements within their minds, sympathizing physically and mentally with

the dissociated character.

In the films, the zombies come out of hiding to find us. Camerawork forces

the viewer to follow the narratives of Barbara, the group from Dawn of the Dead,

and Shaun. Through the kinetics of the “movement-image,” the films evoke the

viewers’ physical sympathy, engaging us in what we probably consider an

“abnormal” state of perception. Today it is considered taboo or uncouth to

Gould 37

discuss psychological disorders or limitations of mental capacities. It is

considered weird to discuss alternate perceptions of reality through the eyes of

someone who is considered “unwell” or “sick.”

These films are able to communicate and emphasize these alternate

perceptions without having to put them into words. The message and the

experience of dissociation goes straight into the brain of the viewer.

VII. Conclusion

Zombies who follow the “normal” living expose not only the lack of average

characteristics of the undead, but also expose the inadequacies and deficiencies

of the living. When we are forced to confront those that are different from us, we

are forced to confront ourselves. While usually a very good scheme for survival,

the “fight-or-flight” response is not appropriate for situations where the perceived

danger is not going to be eliminated by running away or by lashing out physically,

like an earthquake or a pandemic. In those cases, dissociation protects the mind

and the body from undue stress and, ultimately, any kind of harm that would

arise from panicking.

Gould 38

Zombies, like people with depersonalization disorder, are not wholly

composed mentally or neurologically. Automatons of habit, bereft of

consciousness, all they can do is stumble and operate only on the most basic

levels—but that is not unique to the zombies in film, nor individuals with

depersonalization. As shown by Ramachandran, Koch, and other

neuropsychologists, everyone uses the zombie brain and zombie reflexes

everyday. Pathologizing a natural state of the brain and a helpful means of

coping with tragedy is detrimental to understanding how the human mind works

and curbs any attempts to use dissociation in positive ways.

Zombie films are a means for us to confront the shaming and unsettling

reality that our society continues to hide the mentally disabled. By finding the

zombie in the human, by aligning mind and body with the grammar of these films,

and by seeing depersonalization as a desirable state of mind, our culture can

begin the process of accepting that depersonalization disorder is not so much a

disorder as another lens for looking at the world.

Gould 39

Gould 40

Bibliography

Abugel, Jeffrey, and Daphne Simeon. Feeling Unreal: Depersonalization

Disorder and the Loss of the Self. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2006.

Print.

Badley, Linda. Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic. Westport, Conn.:

Greenwood Press, 1995. Print.

Bishop, Kyle William. American Zombie Gothic: the Rise and Fall (and Rise) of

the Walking Dead in Popular Culture. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co.,

2010. Print.

Davis, Lennard J. “Constructing Normalcy.”The Disability Studies Reader. 2nd

ed. Ed. Lennard J. Davis. Hoboken: Routledge, 2006. 3-16. Print.

Dawn of the Dead. Dir. George A. Romero. Perf. David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott

H. Reiniger. 1978. Anchor Bay, 2004. DVD.

Gould 41

First, Michael B., Allen Frances, and Harold Alan Pincus. "Chapter 16:

Dissociative Disorders." DSM-IV-TR guidebook . 1 ed. Washington, DC:

American Psychiatric Pub., 2004. 289-297. Print.

He, Jenny. "MoMA | George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead." MoMA | The

Museum of Modern Art. N.p., 31 Oct. 2007. Web. 24 Apr. 2011.

<http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/films/565>.

Kay, Glenn. Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide. Chicago, Ill.: Chicago Review

Press, 2008. Print.

Koch, Christof. The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach.

Denver, Colo.: Roberts and Co., 2004. Print.

Lewis, Bradlley. “A Mad Fight.” The Disability Studies Reader. 2nd ed. Ed.

Lennard J. Davis. Hoboken: Routledge, 2006. 339-354. Print.

Night of the Living Dead. Dir. George A. Romero. Perf. Duane Jones, Judith

O'Dea, Karl Hardman. Good Times Video, 1968. DVD.

Phillips, Mary L., Nicholas Medford, Carl Senior, Edward T. Bullmore, John

Suckling, Michael J. Brammer, Chris Andrew, Maurico Sierra, Stephen

Gould 42

C.R. Williams, and Anthony S. David. "Depersonalization disorder:

thinking without feeling." Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging

Section 108.3 (2001): 145-160. PsychMed. Web. 24 Apr. 2011.

Powell, Anna. Deleuze and Horror Film . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,

2005. Print.

Quen, Jacques M.. Split Minds/ Split Brains: Historical and Current Perspectives.

New York: New York University Press, 1986. Print.

Ramachandran, V. S.. Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the

Human Mind. New York: William Morrow, 1998. Print.

Shaun of the Dead. Dir. Edgar Wright. Perf. Kate Ashfield, Tim Baggaley, Nicola

Cunningham. Universal Studios, 2004. DVD.

Sierra, Mauricio. Depersonalization: A New Look at a Neglected Syndrome.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Print.