The Capitalist Zombie Apocalypse Has No National Borders

Over the past several decades South Korean cinema has been brought to a zenith of skill and acumen and gained international acclaim. While these technological and storytelling feats have evolved at a rapid rate, they have also been accompanied by societal fears and concerns that they similarly adopted from the west. Their use of the image and theme of the zombie holds particular importance within the realm of cultural psychology and marks their attainment of a fully formed capitalist society. 

Peninsula

Victor Halperin’s White Zombie of 1932 is considered the first zombie movie ever made. It is laden with capitalist and post-colonial fears. Paradoxically, the more broadly recognized zombie lineage that we acknowledge today derives from George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, which ironically showcased middle class concerns of droves of unwashed hippies overtaking the middle class and consuming them. Within both remains the common thread which capitalizes on capitalist societies being overwhelmed by ‘the other.’

The Italian Post-Marxist theorist and philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berrardi refers to the phenomenon of those living in a capitalist society and viewing any perceivable ‘other’ as “the swarm.” Within The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, Berrardi explains that a swarm is a mass that operates as a single organism, where behaviors are reduced to conformed activities. To go against this conformity can lead to being treated as an enemy to the continued survival of the swarm.

Franco "Bifo" Berrardi

Berrardi’s conception of “the swarm”

Reminiscent of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Man of the Crowd, Berrardi’s observation is that the rest of human behavior is observed as almost automated, and to step out of that and pursue your own goals is a defining feature of humanity. Berrardi’s theory can easily be applied to zombie movies as the masses on screen are solely interested in the death of the main characters. For these protagonists, their desire to survive can be seen as divergent behavior from the desires of the hoard, a reading that becomes even more fitting since the zombies wish to envelope the characters, to force them to join the swarm. Berrardi explains that to live in “the swarm” is to exist in a capitalist society today; to experience conflict for going against the trend, even if that trend’s goal is to destroy you. 

While the west emerged into a finely tuned capitalist society through generations of inherited ideology, South Korea came through a considerably more abrupt method. Following the Korean Conflict, South Korea was posed as a free democracy but was actually a dictatorship in which the people lived under harsh restrictions. It wasn’t until the late 1980s and into the early ‘90s that student rebellions and social revolt led to the creation of a free democratic state with a burgeoning capitalist economy. The film Chilsu and Mansu from 1988 by Park Kwang-Su provides an excellent example of the role that film played in the liberation of the South Korean people.

Chilsu and Mansu

South Korea was forced to rapidly adapt in order to compete with foreign markets while emboldening its recently liberated population. While cinema was certainly a part of this adaptation, as can be seen with the hallyu movements, industry and commerce would be needed to influence the daily life of the population. This was not solely to make the transition from forms of government a worthwhile investment, but additionally because in their newfound freedom, South Koreans were able to watch western and international cinema, and were able to see how their quality of life differed from those around the world. This importing of international qualities of life combined with technological advancements allowed South Korea to flourish into a competitive financial power within three decades.

Accompanying all the advancements and enrichments that accompanied this mass conversion, problems arose as well. A population that had previously been homogeneous by decree of a dictatorship suddenly found themselves free in a manner that little in their history had prepared them for. People that were not used to the ideas of debt or neighborly competition soon found themselves dealing with issues of the swarm.

Film and cinema had been a method of rebellion, culminating in a free democracy and open market. Much of the cinema of the first wave of hallyu would deal with guilt and doubt surrounding the political and social upheaval surrounding the liberation of the South Korean people. Notably, Lee Chang-Dong's Peppermint Candy of 1999 is often considered the first film of the hallyu movement and deals directly with internal and external conflicts arising from the movement towards freedom. But as this democratic and capitalist country continued to develop, so too did their filmic methods of representation of societal fears and anxieties evolve to the point that new visual methods were necessary to portray the angst and despair of daily life. 

Peppermint Candy

One method of dealing with societal fears was to turn towards horror, which had been a method of penetration into the psyche of a people for a long time. Horror had been a grand point of introspection to better appreciate and communicate societal fears in the west since the very beginning of moviemaking at the turn of the century. Moreover, horror stories have been a fantastic exploration into the psyche of different people for centuries beforehand. 

Movies like Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan and Peninsula, as well as series like Kingdom, were successes both within South Korea as well as abroad arguably because they embodied capitalist fears of the swarm. Moreso, they actually tap into something the horror film theorist Carol J. Clover refers to as “White Science and Black Magic.” “White Science” is employed within the zombie trope as a reification of contemporary fears; atomic bombs, nuclear spills, inexplicable viruses and syndromes. To quote Clover from her book Men, Women, And Chainsaws: Gender In The Modern Horror Film:

“White Science refers to Western rational tradition. Its representatives are nearly always white males, its tools are surgery, drugs, psychotherapy, and other forms of hegemonic science.”

An example of this White Science can be seen in Train to Busan and Peninsula in which the cause for the zombie outbreak is some unknown chemical accidentally released upon the public.

Train to Busan

Conversely, within Kingdom we can see an example of Clover’s Black Magic. To quote Clover again;

“Black Magic,...refers to satanism, voodoo, spiritualism, and folk variants of Roman Catholicism. A world of crosses, holy water, séances, candles, prayer, exorcism, strings of garlic, beheaded chickens, and the like.”

While Clover is speaking directly to the Western experience of Black Magic, we can see within Kingdom that there remains an adherence to the basic principles of Black Magic in a manner that makes the film directly relatable to the South Korean people. This specificity can also be seen in Na Hong-jin’s movie The Wailing where the director showcases the distance of the contemporary South Korean citizen from older, indigenous religions that were largely suppressed or ignored by previous regimes. Within both films we can see that there is a South Korean-centric vantage point to Cloven’s Black Magic. 

The Wailing

These points are relevant because they show the relative interchangeability of motifs and themes within South Korean and international cinema. This is in large part because much of contemporary South Korean cinema borrowed, adopted, and adapted from the international cinema that the people were allowed to explore once the country developed into a democratic state. However, the shared cultural fear of the swarm and the other as personified by zombies shows us that South Korea has finally truly become a capitalist state. Their fear of losing themselves with the automated swarm mentality is a fear shared by people living in capitalist countries all over the world.