Zombies vs Vampires

Zombies are disgusting, zoned out monsters with skin that is generally pale and falling off and they are often missing limbs. They stumble around with no sense of direction and one intention, to eat the flesh of any creature with a heartbeat. Vampires on the other hand are attractive, sexual, and graceful monsters who suck the blood of humans with the intention of creating new vampires. The origin of zombies comes from Haitian voodoo, where “zombie” translates to “spirit of the dead”. It was believed that a voodoo priest could give a person a powder known as coup padre that would make a person appear to be dead. The public would burn this person, believing they were dead, and the voodoo priest would exhume the body which would be physically intact but have no memory and become a mindless drone of the voodoo priest. The origin of vampires comes from Europe in 1347 at the start of the Black Plague. Vampires were created to explain the Black Plague and how the disease spread. It was believed that if a person died and had a second soul, the second soul would walk the earth, killing the person’s family and friends and eventually everyone in the town. Although zombies and vampires are completely different in almost every way possible, they both express society’s conscious and unconscious fears and anxieties and transcend social norms and taboos.
Zombies’ most obvious function is to the social taboo of cannibalism. Zombies violate the basic rule of what it means to be human: not eating people. This taboo is depicted best in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968). The scene, an hour and 15 minutes into the movie, shows several quick cuts and close ups of zombies ripping apart and eating “human” organs and limbs. The scene, a...

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... Dracula were used to show that Mina and Dracula are aware of each other’s presence. In the scene, Lucy, who is a pure and virtuous woman, is willingly having sex with a werewolf and enjoying it. A taboo of bestiality is openly and provocatively shown here. Lucy having sex outside of marriage is a transcension of the social norms of 1897, when Bram Stoker’s Dracula was written. Lucy’s destruction in Bram Stoker’s novel and any Dracula movie shows a “deliberate attempt […] made to make sexuality seem unthinkable in ‘normal relations’ between the sexes” (Senf, 39). During and after Lucy’s transformation, she becomes very sexual and makes several sexual advances. By killing Lucy in the novel, Stoker shows society’s fear of female sexual assertiveness and the belief that sexually assertive women are evil and un-Christian and unable to be in a ‘normal’ relationship.