Saachi Khandpur
Death is often seen as synonymous with finality and with the end of life itself. It is a time where one ceases to exist in a tangible form within the known world. However, the (thus far fictional) phenomenon of zombies threatens this binary understanding of life and death to a terrifying extent. As zombies are animated corpses, they look oddly human (and in some cases, recognisable people), and yet are nothing like us. In this sense, these familiar strangers embody the abject, which Julia Kristeva discusses as a breakdown in meaning, and a loss in the distinction of the self and the other (Kristeva, 1982). This non-final death and zombification is terrifying because it threatens the common knowledge about life and death, and thus forces people to their fears, centred around human materiality.
Train to Busan (Yeon, 2016) is one such fictional representation of a fear elicited from the breakdown of this binary. This film follows the story of people trying to survive a zombie apocalypse, trapped inside a train with fast moving zombies. It explores the relationships between characters, and highlights the evolution and devolution of these relationships. One scene in particular is striking in that it really shows that these zombies were once fully human, and that they are recognisable even in their zombified forms. Two elderly sisters, In-gil and Jong-gil are separated when In-gil turns into a zombie and is trapped in a different train carriage, divided by a glass sliding door. However, Jong-gil cannot stand being disunited from her beloved sister, and watches her lifeless eyes blankly stare into the carriage that Jong-gil and a few (un)lucky fellow travellers are safe in. Jong-gil keeps talking to her sister, chiding her for her unwavering selflessness that eventually led to her demise. Because Jong-gil still sees remnants of her sister in who/what has now become a familiar stranger, she opens the door and sacrifices herself and almost everyone else in the carriage to the zombies.
Another fictional portrayal of this fear is #Alive, a zombie film that follows the story of two young people trapped alone in their apartments in a busy apartment complex of Seoul (Cho, 2020). The story follows their perspectives as they see the panopticon of horror unfold from their bird’s eye view apartments (situated directly opposite across an air shaft from each other), and work hard to survive. One scene in particular stands out in this film, where a zombified firefighter finds a cable attached to the apartment of one of the protagonists, Yoo-bin, and climbs it up to her balcony. In this film’s universe, the zombies remember some of the tasks they used to routinely perform as humans, thus allowing this zombie to climb up the cable effortlessly and rapidly through muscle memory. As the zombie gets a grip on the railing of Yoo-bin’s balcony and is about to climb into her house, she grabs an axe and cuts off the zombie’s hand just below the wrist, causing the zombie to fall to his (second) death.
Both films are similar in that they depict a zombie apocalypse overwhelming South Korea, but these two scenes in particular show opposite responses to two zombies who depict similar behavioural characteristics, and pose mortal threats. Here, the question arises: what causes our characters to respond in such drastically different ways to danger that threatens to end life as they (and we) know it? In this paper, I argue that zombies manifest the abject not just due to the biological dehumanisation they personify, but also due to the complete dehumanisation (in terms of human emotions, thinking, and relationality) that they experience. I argue that the erasure of the self goes beyond the biological. In order to explore my thesis, I will refer to the concept of the abject as discussed earlier, and critique authors who consider this abject in a purely biological sense by highlighting the concept of the bare life.
Some scholars, such as Ronald Allan Lopez Cruz, consider zombies to be the perfect manifestation of the abject as they embody the terrifying prospect of the end of human life not just through the spread of a zombie virus, but also through the elimination of any means of reproduction. Lopez Cruz emphasises the fact these “soulless bodies” are “unruly bodies” that are a reproductive (and therefore, evolutionary) dead end (Lopez Cruz, 2012). Here, it is these biologically dehumanised elements that forces humans to face our fear of our own (vulnerable) materiality and oblivion.
A question that arises here is whether the dehumanisation that zombies personify is limited to the biological. This idea of stripping the complexity of humanity to simply its biological components is discussed in detail by Giorgio Agamben, who termed this (at times unconscious) biological reductionism “the bare life.” In his view, this basic biology is considered to be universal, which does not consider the fact that the biological and the environmental are not entirely separate, and that they influence each other in a bidirectional and symbiotic manner (Ticktin, 2006). In Train to Busan, our characters’ fight or flight response is biological to a large extent, but the directionality and intentionality of their responses change as our characters evolve (and devolve) due to the dynamic environmental stressors that they must face and survive (or protect others from). In my opinion, the idea of bare life reduces humans to surviving (not living) creatures who must maintain homeostasis simply to reproduce, and thereby embody evolutionary utility. In Lopez Cruz’s argument, it is exactly the lack of this bare life that causes zombies to personify the abject.
However, I argue that if humans truly functioned on the concept of the bare life, then Yoo-bin and Jong-gil would have reacted in the same way. The difference in their reactions to the same threat comes from the fact that in Jong-gil’s case, the zombie was someone that she recognised as a person she still loves and cannot live without. However, Yoo-bin never knew the humanised version of the zombie that was threatening her life.
I think another moment that illustrates the fact that going beyond the biological manifestations of the abject matters centres around the second protagonist from #Alive, Joon-woo. In the beginning of the film, Sang-chul, Joon-woo’s neighbour, bursts into the apartment in order to escape his infected older brother. It is implied that the pair do not previously know each other despite living as neighbours, as Joon-woo asks Sang-chul to identify himself. Joon-woo is hesitant at first, but then allows Sang-chul to use the bathroom and stay for a few minutes, although he repeatedly asks him to leave, later brandishing a knife. Unbeknownst to Sang-chul, he is infected too, and starts turning into a zombie while still inside Joon-woo’s apartment. Despite Sang-chul’s rapidly unfolding zombification, he tries hard to leave unsuccessfully as his transformation takes over his cognitive abilities and restricts him from opening the door to the apartment. Joon-woo successfully fights off and throws a now zombified and blood thirsty Sang-chul outside the apartment, where he is promptly attacked by another zombie. Later in the film, Joon-woo encounters Sang-chul again as he is fleeing from a group of zombies that are chasing him within the apartment complex. Sang-chul, now almost unrecognisable save for his familiar and yet unfamiliar face, is tucked away in the corner of a corridor and feasting on the corpse of another lifeless (or rather inanimate) zombie. However, even when Sang-chul grabs onto Joon-woo’s ankle with the intention of attacking him, our protagonist is unable to strike out against a now zombified Sang-chul, even though they met only for a few minutes when Sang-chul was still human.
This one relationship between Joon-woo and Sang-chul is so powerful because Joon-woo goes from threatening the human Sang-chul with a knife to not even being able to raise a weapon against a zombified Sang-chul. If the bare life is an accurate and realistically applicable concept, Joon-woo would have been more likely to hurt Sang-chul as a zombie due to the biological abject that he manifests. However, Sang-chul was also someone that Joon-woo tried to (half-heartedly) protect if only for a few minutes. It is a testament to the full and complex humanity that is completed by empathy, and relationality, that even a few minutes were enough to completely reverse the logic of Lopez Cruz’s manifestation of only the biological abject. All the moments from the two films discussed here, as well as the written materials highlighted, clearly show that the erasure of humanity and humanness is not simply in a biological sense. This full erasure is in a way a fully human abject. Zombies manifest the abject because they are something/someone completely unknown that causes the erasure of the self in multiple ways.
In conclusion, zombies manifest the abject beyond just the biological, and in doing so, completely subvert our understanding of life and death in a binary sense, leading to a sense of ambiguous loss. I completely agree with all of the points that Lopez Cruz puts down, but I supplement his argument with the fact that the bare life as Agamben (and Lopez Cruz) discuss it leaves out essential parts of humanity that must be considered for an accurate analysis of the abject as Kristeva discusses. In this sense, the zombie is the ultimate manifestation of the abject as it compels us to face the complete erasure of humanity while maintaining some resemblance to the humanised form of zombies, leading to a difficulty in completely separating the self from the other. In the examples of Jong-gil and Yoo-bin, the difference in their responses to the same biological abject was determined by the past relationship (or lack thereof) that they had with the zombies they faced, and this sole determining factor is clearly powerful enough to completely reverse the logic of only the biological abject manifesting in these zombies in just a few minutes, as in the example of Joon-woo. It is in this purgatory of death and life, and the complete loss of humanity with some semblance to a long-gone humanness, that the ambiguous pain becomes a terrifying reminder of humans’ inescapable materiality.
Works cited
Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers Of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press.
Lopez Cruz, R. A. (2012). Mutations and Metamorphoses: Body Horror is Biological Horror. Journal of Popular Film and Television, 160–168. https://doi.org/10.1080/01956051.2012.654521
Lotte Entertainment. (2020). #Alive. South Korea.
Next Entertainment World. (2016). Train to Busan. South Korea.
Ticktin, M. (2006). Where ethics and politics meet: The violence of humanitarianism in France. American Ethnologist, 33, 33–49.
About the Author
Saachi Khandpur is an international student from India, majoring in politics and psychology with a Five College Certificate in reproductive health, rights, and justice. Her research focuses on violence, healing, and marginalized identities. She can be reached by email here. Saachi was a student in Comp Lit 100: International Horror, taught by Nefeli Forni in Spring 2021.
