The Case of Zombies and Cave-People

My husband and I enjoy watching movies that shock the system; movies that take the human body and turn it into a thing to be twisted and broken and slashed and demonized. We come from generations that have been desensitized to the media's grotesque dismemberment of the human body. In life, I can only remember having seen one real human corpse - that of my Nana during her open-casket wake, when I was a young teenager (and Nana's corpse looked more fake than anything I'd seen on a screen). Yet I'm insatiably drawn to the Hostels and the Saw series, not to mention the Resident Evils and Dawn of the Dead films.

Last night, John and I took advantage of a free Blockbuster rental and treated ourselves to a film called The Descent. The film followed a group of young women who, in search of adventure, found themselves trapped in a cave occupied by strange bat-people. I never really counted how many girls there were. I knew better than to develop any kind of relationship with them and instead turned to anticipating how these beauties would be mutilated and destroyed. Do you shudder at me for saying so? The success of movies like this leads me to believe that you would have felt the same, as indeed millions of us do every year.

As I watched the bat-people devour the movie's cast model by model, I found myself reflecting upon the relative strangeness of the situation. Could there be a race of humanoid carnivorous creatures living in an undiscovered cavern somewhere, who have adapted to the conditions of the cavern after having been trapped down there hundreds of years ago? Sure. I'm from New Jersey, and I believe in the Jersey Devil, so why shouldn't I consider anything possible? What seemed bizarre, however, was the ravenous appetites of the bat-people. They wouldn't stop feeding. And they were wasteful! They devoured one girl's intestines and left the rest of her pristine meat on top of a pile of bones, blood, and other unfinished meals. It was behavior so bizarre that it transcended animalistic... it was distinctly human.

Watch a show on Animal Planet or the Discovery Channel, and you see terrifying creatures with enormous fangs and unmanicured claws taking down frightened creatures who cry out for lack of defense and acknowledgment that their lives are at an end. You see great herds of beasts running for their lives, evading the predator and fighting to protect their young. But once that creature goes down, once the predator has made the kill, the herd ceases to run. It accepts the loss of the one who has become food, and continues to live side-by-side with creatures who view the herd as the original fast-food chain.

Yet our most sensational films do not follow the sensibility of the animal kingdom. Human-ish creatures like those of The Descent, Jeepers Creepers and The Hills Have Eyes, not to mention any and all zombies ever scripted, are not as logical as the big cats of Africa or the Grizzlies of North America. If you encounter a hungry lioness and your friend goes down, your chances of walking away casually with few scrapes and bruises are pretty good. In order to out run a grizzly, you must only be faster than your slowest friend (as long as that friend is not Timothy Tredwell). But zombies and cave-people will kill until we're all dead. It is the human stain, not the animal instinct or the disease of the undead, that subverts the sustainability of harvesting human meat.

And that's why these movies are so terrifying, and that is why zombies are scarier than tigers. Every day we see humans cutting into flesh, picking it apart, devouring only as much as we can to keep ourselves energized, but throwing away anything we fear might "make us fat." Or, on the flip side, we will throw wasteline to the wind and eat ribeye after ribeye, without considering how many lives were lost in order to harvest that one section of meat. Gone are the days when our prey could live comfortably beside us and accept that every so often we would have to pick off a pheasant to feed our family. It is no wonder, therefore, that we empathize with our food, recognizing the raw meat's similarities to the flesh and blood we've seen when we've accidentally cut open our own bodies. If another species were to treat us the way we treat our food, the nightmare would surely begin.

As species after species disappears from our planet, it is no wonder that somewhere in us is a fear of our own disappearance. Mankind is so burdened with eco-guilt - the belief that our original sin and neglect of Paradise has made us incapable of stewarding the earth as we promised God we would - that our fears of retaliation are manifested in zombies and cave-people. Why wouldn't somebody do to us what we've done to others? Yet we are so urbanized and sub-urbanized, that to move away from plastic-wrapped grocery store meat and toward eating something "with a face" would take a massive shift in a community psyche.

But it is possible. Curse me for saying so, but the dreaded economic recession has given us a nudge in the direction of sustainability, of returning to our roots. More and more families are raising "backyard chickens," who provide eggs and meat to sustain one family. No casualties, no waste. Hobby farms are becoming more popular, as people are acquiring their own dairy cows for milk and beef. Certainly, we must get over the hump of being the executioner of Bambi's mother, but even hunting is providing low-income families with free food for weeks on end. The fact that we are interacting with our meals before that meal's death means that we are less wasteful, more grateful, and more reverent for the sacrifice. As we move away from factory farming and grocery store shopping, we begin to see ourselves reflected in the beauty of wolves and bears and big cats (oh my!), and we will see less of ourselves in the horrifying images of zombies and cave-people. There will always be a need for zombies and cave-people, of course. If only to remember what we could have become; if only so that I can hold my husband close while I squeal in horror and fascination