Episode 164: Ghosts and Zombies

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This week, we’re continuing our series on monster and spooky stories by digging into ghost and zombie tales.

We talk a little about how last week we covered vampires and werewolves - characters who tend to be immortal or to live longer than typical humans. Those stories tend to be about alluding or running away from death. But ghost stories and zombie stories tend to be about facing our mortality and confronting our fears, exploring the darker and more unknown aspects of life and death.

In this episode, we explore some of the differences between zombie and ghost stories and what they tend to explore.

  • Zombie Stories - Explore human crisis and fear of contagion and infection, human disconnection, avoidance of responsibilities and sleepwalking through life, and situations where you feel surrounded, stuck in place, or paralyzed. Zombies often have lost all of their humanity and empathy, so sometimes these stories explore how the people also lose theirs while trying to survive.

  • Ghost Stories - Explore dealing with loss and death, sins and horrors from the past that can’t be directly accepted and acknowledged, the things in our lives that are scary to look directly at, baggage and toxic family legacies that are passed down, and helping the dead settle their unfinished business so that they can cross over and the living person can learn lessons along the way. Ghosts often have regrets that hold them in place or can be monsters that want to do harm to the living, but they can also be truth tellers that rise up and force characters to open their eyes and see.

We also talk about the 2001 ghost story film The Others and how it used the audience’s assumptions to create a wonderful twist towards the end that reframes the story. In this way, twists that hinge on assumptions can almost be hidden in plain sight, since we think we already know the answer and have no reason to second guess it.

As we end this episode, we talk about the psychological side of these stories and how they often are bulit around mysteries and secrets. They may make us ask questions like:

  • What caused this zombie infection? Can that be fixed?

  • What does it mean to be turned? What if it happens to someone you love?

  • What happened in the past that led to this haunting? What do they want?

  • Is there a ghost or is there another explanation?

We hope you enjoy this conversation. Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there!

Into the woods,

Fable & The Verbivore

Notes:

The Verbivore mentions a TED Talk on Ghost stories that explored why we tell them. That presentation was made by Coya Paz under the title “Hauntings, Histories, & Campfire Tales: What Ghost Stories Tell Us”.

Also, we want to acknowledge that the creatures from I Am Legend the novel are more like vampires and the Darkseekers from I am Legend the film are like a vampire and zombie hybrid. We’re talking about them here in relation to the infection that’s the catalyst that causes them to change.

Here are a few articles and videos we referenced for this conversation:

We touch on several of our previous podcast episodes. They are as follows:

Books and Films Mentioned:

Music from: https://filmmusic.io
‘Friendly day’ by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Bethany Stedman