[Somehow] How did zombies become 'bondage'?

The German philosopher Nietzsche said:

"The worst thing is that you die soon, and the next worst thing is that you die someday."

If so, how many times would 'dead but not dead' be considered bad?

zombie horse.

Being a zombie is not a very good thing, but there seem to be quite a few people who benefit from being a zombie.

K-Zombie Water is winning streak on the global stage.

The most recent runner is the Netflix original drama <My School Now>.

A zombie virus that started in a high school puts the entire city in a state of disaster.

As of the second week of February, the cumulative playback time exceeded 236,600 hours.

After <Squid Game>, it became the second Korean work to top the charts in the United States.

The drama <Kingdom> series and the movie <Train to Busan> are also considered K-Zombie's box office hits.

American magazine Forbes cited these two works and commented, "No matter how many seasons of The Walking Dead (a zombie series produced by AMC), Korea is the best producer of modern zombie content."

Even zombies seem to have established themselves as major Korean specialties (?) that can be entered into the 'Do you know ○○○' club.

This <Somehow> news is on the side of 'zombies', which are becoming a bonanza in the content market.

How did the zombies, which have been around for a long time since they appeared, have been able to rule as a powerful force in the monster world in recent years?

Now there's the ontological nature of zombies that have become stereotypes.

It eats human flesh, and if you get bitten by a zombie, you turn into a zombie, and finally, you have to completely destroy your brain to stop working.

Although it has gone through various variations over time, these characteristics have not changed.

Before George Romero, who is called the founder of modern zombies, established this principle in The Night of the Living Dead (1968), 'The Origin of Zombies' is actually a Haitian ghost story.

According to records, zombies were created as a result of voodoo witchcraft.

In 1932, director Victor Halperin portrayed the first zombie in the film White Zombie.

The characters take medicine from a Haitian shaman and damage their frontal lobe, turning them into beings who cannot think or feel for themselves.

The zombies in this film are often analyzed as metaphors for women who have lost their freedom and black people living in slavery.

only!

Zombies here weren't at least 'scary monsters'.

Although he was a monstrous creature with no soul that only obeyed the orders of the caster.

It was with George Romero's so-called 'Zombie Trilogy' that he made his full-fledged debut as the protagonist of the horror stage.

In <Night of the Living Dead>, those contaminated with radiation from satellites returning from space exploration turn into zombies.

It is said that he did not even use the word 'zombie' back then.

Many of the images in this film fit the tastes of critics of the time.

A family that eats each other, a swarm of zombies resurrected from a shopping mall as a base.

Along with criticism of the nuclear family system and fetishism, more fundamentally, it is evaluated as embodying the fear of 'something other than me', that is, the 'other' in American society that fought the Vietnam War.

Over the years, zombies have also evolved.

The origins and spread of the zombie phenomenon has changed a bit more 'the way it is said'.

Narratives emerged of the virus being exposed by mad scientists, greed of capital, and mistakes of great power.

What maximizes the tension of the film is the speed of the zombies.

Due to the increasing speed of zombies, the scope of infection has greatly expanded.

Zombie movies such as <Curse of the Dawn> and <World War Z> have evolved into a 'blockbuster' level.

It changed its personality from a horror genre that chills the spine to a thrilling action movie dealing with a 'massive disaster'.

As the most frequently appearing monster character in the East and the West, the charm of zombies, which has established itself as a solid 'genre', seems to be a 'blurred boundary'.

In addition to the characteristics of neither living nor dead, 'my side' quickly turns into a being that harms me.

So, if I am to survive, I must subdue them or contain them.

Usually, the structure of the monster story develops as a confrontation between the 'normal (or my side)' and the monster.

There is a line that cannot be crossed between it and me, and with that line in the middle, all you have to do is defeat the monster.

But what about zombies?

It doesn't discriminate between good people and bad people.

The indiscriminate infection, regardless of anyone's story, becomes a device to maximize fear.

Freud, a psychoanalyst, once described the human fear of monsters with the concept of 'uncanny'.

The reason monsters are scary is that they were part of themselves, that is, they were intimate.

As this intimate part is repressed, it turns into something unpleasant.

Eventually, the familiar turns into the unfamiliar.

Transition becomes a fear.

The appearance of zombies also helps to amplify the sense of heterogeneity.

A damaged body, an awkward gait, a street full of blood…

The 1992 film Dead Alive, directed by Peter Jackson, known for using the largest amount of blood in horror film history, also uses zombie characters.

But that's it.

When it comes to 'dead but moving', 'following the living', and 'corpse', isn't there a familiar image in the East?

It was the Gangsi that chilled the conversation with the sound of thump, thump, thump, approaching.

While zombies became the 'trend monster' that hit the global village, what were the oriental gangsters doing?

According to a research paper comparing Gangshi and zombies (Ahn Chang-hyeon, 2017), the Qing Dynasty writing record <Yeolmichodangpilgi> introduces an anecdote that a lawmaker with outstanding skills met Kangshi.

"His eyes were red, and his fangs and nails were long. His whole body was as hard as a log, so he couldn't be beaten and kicked."

This depiction is the source of the Kangxi figure in many Hong Kong films of the 1970s and 1980s.

The mechanism of appearance of Kangsi is 'wrongly buried corpse'.

It has its origins in a Chinese myth that if you don't bury the dead well, your soul will wander through the Gucheons and do harm to people.

Asa or verb, a stiff body is characteristic (?).

So, the strong men can't even bend their legs and move with their feet together.

However, unlike zombies that run like a machine, as if 'contagion' is the only driving force, Gangsi, which sucks the energy of the living, has many restrictions.

First of all, there are things I fear.

I can't keep up with the amulet, chicken blood, glutinous rice, etc.

The way to rule Kangxi is to put a talisman written on the forehead and put it back into the grave.

According to a folk legend from the Shangxi region of Hunan, China, there is a story that the masters made the bodies walk on their own feet in order to bury the people who died in Gaeji in their homeland.

Overcoming the crisis triggered by strong poetry is close to returning the abnormal state to normal, as mentioned above.

It's not the same as blowing up zombies' heads to survive in the fleshy scene.

There are even analyzes that the color of Kangxi's costume is the official uniform worn by officials in the Qing Dynasty, which symbolizes the order of the mainstream culture.

The goal is to restore order, not to slaughter.

(Is it possible to interpret it even with differences in Eastern and Western cultures?) Perhaps that is why, in movies about strong poetry, they are portrayed as 'the opponents of martial arts battles' rather than 'objects of fear'.

In fact, it is often in the creations of later generations that have been embodied in concrete imaginations that the monsters handed down through folk legends and tales have a plausible presence and story.

The zombie in a Haitian ghost story that was close to a 'puppet' became a 'genre' of a horror movie in a film directed by George Romero, and Kangxi, who found a 'style' with the 1985 Hong Kong movie <Mr.

What is the situation in Korea, a 'zombie producer' that is on the rise?

The American magazine Forbes mentioned at the outset also said, "Korea has created a much more terrifying monster called 'fast zombies' rather than the slow and lazy zombies that have appeared in the West."

Even the same zombie is faster than the K-zombie.

Zombies seem to have a knack for 'fastness'.

The film that is mentioned as the first zombie movie in Korea was <Ghostly> in 1981.

The main story is the situation where the main character, Yongdol, who died three days later comes back to life and attacks the people around him.

Of course, the word 'zombie' was not used at the time, and although it didn't make a big impression at the time of its release, it is considered to be the beginning of a domestic zombie movie.

After most of the period when revenge towards the perpetrators of a spirit of resentment dominated the domestic horror content market, creations using zombie motifs in Korea began in earnest in the late 2000s.

It's through the webtoon.

Two major portals, Naver and Daum Kakao, have requested a list of major webtoons that have been based on zombies or worldviews for the past 20 years or so.

Of course, there are also prominent works on other websites, but first of all, 25 works were listed on the portal from 2009 to 2021.

Among them, <Now at Our School>, which started serialization on Naver and can be considered the 'beginning' of a domestic zombie webtoon, is currently winning the box office.

It was made 13 years ago.

Director Yeon Sang-ho's film adaptation of <Peninsula Prequel 631> also stands out.

There is also <Shotgun Boy>, known as a prequel to Netflix's <Sweet Home>.

In addition to the successful imaging, there is another thing that stands out in the narrative.

It is the emergence of 'self-conscious zombies'.

Many works do not consume zombies only as beings that create a sense of crisis or fear, but rather induce them to empathize with non-human zombies.

Usually, the pleasure in content featuring zombies lies in killing zombies itself. In <All Your Moments>, zombies are portrayed as pitying objects who want to find rest for their family, and even zombies in <Daughter of Zombies>. It is a story about a father raising a daughter who has become a child.

In short, in various Korean works, the zombie can act at her own will, but her body is only mutilated, and she is sometimes introduced as the protagonist of an epic with her own story.

Rather, the brutal appearance of groups or public authorities who appeared to 'protect them' is more emphasized.

Song Ah-reum (2013) suggests that this characteristic is 'rooted in a worldview of causality and retribution' that "if the perpetrator did not do that, I would be alive."

If so, would this Korean transformation prove that 'zombies' are thoroughly imported monsters?

I asked Kwak Jae-sik, a science fiction writer who has been collecting monsters in Korean folktales and tales for 15 years, about the prototype of 'K-zombie'.

As an expert, I divided the prototype of the zombie into two parts.

First of all, it is an 'orthodox (?)' zombie series with its origins in Haitian legends.

“The concept of a zombie in a Haitian ghost story that summons the spirits of the dead and raises the corpses can often be found in Korea. The ritual called ‘first soul’ is similar. An anecdote about Korea is introduced. The phrase 'against (here!)' is mentioned, but in the Goryeo Dynasty, a man named Han Jong-yu pretended to be a corpse with the intention of making fun of the people gathered at a gutpan that summoned the spirits of the dead. It's a record. Closer, you can say that 'Give me my leg' in the legendary hometown is a similar motif. There is also a record that King Munjong of Joseon called in a shaman to revive his father, King Sejong the Great."

Meanwhile, another interesting record introduced by Kwak is very similar to the image of zombies created recently after George Rohmer.

It is a ghost story related to a song of the Joseon Dynasty that is handed down as 'Deungdeunggok (登登曲)'.

There are nuclear power plants in <Yeonryeosil Technology>.

This song, known as a popular song in Hanyang in the mid-Joseon period before the Imjin War, is said to have been sung by dozens or hundreds of children from both families dancing in groups for several days as if they were in contact.

Young people gather in groups, laugh, cry, make bizarre sounds, and dance insanely, which is described as like a shaman leaping and burying a person in the ground.

This decadent journey, which was repeated until he collapsed from exhaustion, spread like a fad.

This is similar to the phenomenon of 'dancing mania' that appeared in continental Europe during the same period (14th-16th centuries), Kwak notes.

German historian Jacob Konishofen records that across Europe, millions of men and women, against their will, in a state of delirium, did nothing but bizarre forms of dancing for days.

This 'nervous dance' attracted an onlooker as well, and "people from all walks of life, peasants and artisans, merchants and housewives alike were engulfed in a wave of madness."

It can be said that it is a record that influenced the <Red Shoes> series of ghost stories in which you have to dance until you die once you are cursed.

Writer Kwak said, "It is speculated that 'ergot disease' fungus, which causes hallucinations on wheat, barley, and oats, etc., was popular around the same time. Unlike the West, where bread is a staple food, in Joseon, the upper classes, who had access to 'sweets' made from wheat, were restrained. I think only those who were affected would have been affected.”

As such, the small fragments that make up the image of modern zombies are found regardless of the borders between East and West in the past.

That may be the reason why zombies can become a 'genre' that is popular with people all over the world today.

Fear becomes our 'content' in various forms.

Sometimes zombies become 'others' to be wiped out, sometimes 'hungry crowd', and sometimes 'loss of free will'.

"I wonder if people feel the least guilty when a 'zombie' appears as an object to be killed in a mobile or web game. They are eerie beings that resemble me and should be thrown away. Because they are such zombies, no matter how many hundreds or thousands of individuals gather, there is a cause for extermination."

When asked what is the secret of zombies, which have occupied the status of an eternal monster for nearly 100 years, Kwak answers:

It is worth thinking about where the horror of 'zombies' comes from.

Blood spurts, flesh is torn off, and the body is damaged, eating human organs and bodies, but without any guilt.

The insensitive 'cruelty' of this being is, after all, created within us and also hidden.

Who will be the next generation of monsters that will surpass zombies?

What kind of monster can reveal more about our hidden nature?

■ References

<A comparative study of living corpse zombies and Kangsi characters>, Changhyeon Ahn,

<Changes in Monsters: The ‘Cultural Generation’ and the Birth of ‘Korean Zombies’>, Song Ah-reum, 2013.

<Korean Monster Encyclopedia>, Kwak Jae-sik, 2021, Workroom Press.

<Zombies in the Digital Age and Non-Volumetric Posthumanism>, Miyoung Park, 2020.

<Zombie Liberalism: Reviving Liberalism through Zombies>, Dongshin Lee, 2014, Journal of American Studies.

<Changes in Narrative Strategies of Zombie Characters in Korean Webtoons>, Hyunhwa Oh, 2020.

<The Origin of Catastrophe and Melancholy: A Study on the Zombie Narrative Appearing in Korean Culture in the 2000s>, Ha-rim Park, 2017.

** A study of difficult-to-understand ‘things these days’ We look forward to hearing from you.

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