In the original script for 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, the director George A. Romero refers to his flesh-eating antagonists as 「ghouls.」 Although the film is widely credited with launching zombies into the cultural zeitgeist, it wasn’t until its follow-up 10 years later, the consumerist nightmare Dawn of the Dead, that Romero would actually use the term. While making the first film, Romero understood zombies instead to be the undead Haitian slaves depicted in the 1932 Bela Lugosi horror film White Zombie.
在1968年電影《活死人之夜》的原創劇本中，導演喬治·A·羅梅羅將喜食人肉的角色稱為「食屍鬼」。儘管這部電影獲得廣泛認可，使殭屍迅速成為一種文化的符號，但直到十年後，羅梅羅在消費者權益保護主義稱之為噩夢的《活死人黎明》——《活死人之夜》的翻拍版本中才真正使用「食屍鬼」這一名字。在《活死人之夜》製作當中，羅梅羅明白殭屍不同於傳說中的海地活死人奴隸，1932年貝拉·盧戈西（Bela Lugosi）主演的《白魔鬼》就有對後者的描述。
By the time Dawn of the Dead was released in 1978 the cultural tide had shifted completely, and Romero had essentially reinvented the zombie for American audiences. The last 15 years have seen films and TV shows including Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later, World War Z, Zombieland, Life After Beth, iZombie, and even the upcoming Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
到1978年《活死人黎明》上映之時，文化潮流完全轉向，羅梅羅必須重新創作殭屍題材電影以迎合美國觀眾的口味。隨後15年中《殭屍肖恩》、《驚變28天》、《殭屍世界大戰》、《殭屍之地》、《我的殭屍女友》、《我是殭屍》等電影和電視劇相繼問世，甚至《傲慢與偏見與殭屍》也即將上映。
But the zombie myth is far older and more rooted in history than the blinkered arc of American pop culture suggests. It first appeared in Haiti in the 17th and 18th centuries, when the country was known as Saint-Domingue and ruled by France, which hauled in African slaves to work on sugar plantations. Slavery in Saint-Domingue under the French was extremely brutal: Half of the slaves brought in from Africa were worked to death within a few years, which only led to the capture and import of more. In the hundreds of years since, the zombie myth has been widely appropriated by American pop culture in a way that whitewashes its origins—and turns the undead into a platform for escapist fantasy.
但是,相比於美國流行文化的隻言片語，殭屍傳說卻歷史久遠，而且有其更加深刻的歷史根源。殭屍首先出現在17、18世紀的海地，那時海地叫聖多明戈，是法屬殖民地，殖民者從非洲販賣許多黑奴強迫他們在甘蔗種植園裡勞作。法國統治下的聖多明戈奴隸制極端嚴酷：僅在幾年內，一半的非洲黑奴因過度勞累死亡。自那之後幾百年時間裡，殭屍傳說就受到美國流行文化的廣泛歡迎，其本質已被抹掉，成為美國逃避現實幻想的發揮平臺。
The original brains-eating fiend was a slave not to the flesh of others but to his own. The zombie archetype, as it appeared in Haiti and mirrored the inhumanity that existed there from 1625 to around 1800, was a projection of the African slaves』 relentless misery and subjugation. Haitian slaves believed that dying would release them back to lan guinée, literally Guinea, or Africa in general, a kind of afterlife where they could be free. Though suicide was common among slaves, those who took their own lives wouldn’t be allowed to return to lan guinée. Instead, they』d be condemned to skulk the Hispaniola plantations for eternity, an undead slave at once denied their own bodies and yet trapped inside them—a soulless zombie.
殭屍並不啃食別人，而是啃食它們自己。殭屍的原型出現在海地，見證了1625年到1800年前後，奴隸遭受的非人待遇，是非洲黑奴極度悲慘生活和飽受奴役命運的反映。海地奴隸相信，死亡能解放他們，讓其重返原生地——大抵位於幾內亞或非洲地區——就可以獲得自由，這多少有些來世的意味。自殺的奴隸到處可見，但是以這種方式結束生命的奴隸沒有重返故地的資格，他們會被詛咒，永世都在伊斯尼帕奧拉島種植園不得翻身，變成一個活死人，即否定自我卻又不得解脫，變成一具行屍走肉。
After the Haitian Revolution in 1804 and the end of French colonialism, the zombie became a part of Haiti’s folklore. The myth evolved slightly and was folded into the Voodoo religion, with Haitians believing zombies were corpses reanimated by shamans and voodoo priests. Sorcerers, known as bokor, used their bewitched undead as free labor or to carry out nefarious tasks. This was the post-colonialism zombie, the emblem of a nation haunted by the legacy of slavery and ever wary of its reinstitution. As the UC Irvine professor Amy Wilentz has pointed out in her writing on zombies, on several occasions after the revolution Haiti teetered on the brink of reinstating slavery. The zombies of the Haitian Voodoo religion were a more fractured representation of the anxieties of slavery, mixed as they were with occult trappings of sorcerers and necromancy. Even then, the zombie’s roots in the horrors of slavery were already facing dilution.
1804年海地革命，法國殖民統治宣告結束，殭屍成為海地民間文化的一部分。殭屍的傳說發生些許變化，並融入巫毒教（又稱伏都教）中，海地人相信殭屍是薩滿巫師或巫毒巫師復活的屍體。（巫師，人稱bokor，用巫術操縱活死人，讓它們免費為他們從事不法活動。）這就是後殖民主義的殭屍。海地受奴隸制影響很深，一直小心謹慎防範奴隸制捲土重來。加州大學歐文分校教授艾米·威倫茨（Amy Wilentz）在她關於殭屍的文章中指出，海地革命後，海地幾次徘徊在重建奴隸制的邊緣，巫毒教中的殭屍更是斷斷續續地表明對奴隸制的重重憂慮，還有對神秘巫術的恐懼。即便如此，殭屍產生的根源——即對奴隸制度的恐懼，正在淡化。
It was in this form—Voodoo bokor and black magic—that the Haitian myth first crossed paths with American culture, in the aforementioned White Zombie.Although the film doesn’t begin to transform the undead in the way that Romero’s films and the subsequent zombie industrial complex would, it’s notable for its introduction of white people as interlopers in the zombie legend. It would take another few decades or so, but eventually the memory of Haiti’s colonialist history and the suffering it wrought—millions of Africans worked into the grave—would be excised from the zombie myth for good.
在上文提到的《白魔鬼》中，海地殭屍傳說正是通過巫毒教巫師和黑魔法首次引起美國文化的關注。該影片雖然並未開始把活死人塑造成羅梅羅電影裡和日後電影行業中的活死人形象，但值得關注的是，在該影片中，白人是作為入侵者形象引入的。在之後幾十年甚至更長的時間，海地的殖民地歷史及其所受的痛苦——幾百萬名非洲黑奴死亡，終將會完全被遺忘，永遠的從殭屍傳說中抹掉。
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In 2011, The Atlantic’s James Parker exhaustively listed all the ways zombies have infiltrated pop-culture consciousness, but he singled out AMC’s hit The Walking Dead for its 「triumphant return to zombie orthodoxy」 amid a sea of reimaginings. The show’s sixth-season premiere had around 20 million viewers, and its spinoff, Fear the Walking Dead, debuted in August to record ratings. The Walking Dead is more or less the zenith of the heretofore inexhaustible zombie craze, a cultural supernova that’s infiltrated everything from comics and video games to literary history and the CDC itself, which has dedicated part of itswebsite to 「zombie preparedness.」 The zombie is no longer a commentary on consumerist culture, as it was in the comparatively halcyon days of Dawn of the Dead; it has consumed consumerist culture.
2011年，《大西洋月刊》編輯詹姆斯·帕克（James Parker）詳細地列出殭屍影響流行文化的各種方式，但他把美國經典電影有線電視臺的熱播劇——《行屍走肉》單列出來，因為該作品在再創造作品橫行的時代中，成功回歸到殭屍的本質。該劇第六集首播就俘獲了2000萬觀眾，其衍生劇《行屍之懼》於八月首播，創下收視率的新紀錄。迄今為止，殭屍熱依舊盛行，它是一種突如其來的新文化熱潮，從漫畫到遊戲再到文學史，都能找到它的痕跡，甚至連疾控中心網站也做好了「對抗殭屍準備」，而《行屍走肉》多少可以說是這股熱潮的頂峰之作。如今殭屍不再同《活死人黎明》相對盛行時一樣，是關於消費文化的評論；反之開始消費消費主義文化。
For a brief period, the living dead served as a handy Rorschach test for America’s social ills. At various times, they represented capitalism, the Vietnam War, nuclear fear, even the tension surrounding the civil-rights movement. Today zombies are almost always linked with the end of the world via the 「zombie apocalypse,」 a global pandemic that turns most of the human population into beasts ravenous for the flesh of their own kind. But there’s no longer any clear metaphor. While America may still suffer major social ills—economic inequality, policy brutality, systemic racism, mass murder—zombies have been absorbed as entertainment that’s completely independent from these dilemmas.
曾經很短的一段時期內，活死人能夠隨時作為發現美國社會問題的羅夏墨跡測驗（Rorschach test ）。在不同時期，殭屍分別代表資本主義、越南戰爭、核恐懼，甚至民權主義運動引發的緊張局勢。如今殭屍通過「殭屍啟示錄」幾乎總是和世界末日聯繫起來，人們擔心幾乎所有人類都變成食人怪獸，以啃食同類為生，引發全球恐慌。再沒有其他比這更清楚的比喻了。儘管美國依舊遭受各種重大社會弊病，經濟不平等、政治暴力、種族歧視、集體屠殺，但是殭屍已經成為娛樂元素，完全與這些困境毫無關聯。
Which is a shame, because the zombie is such a potent symbol. For example, there’s a clear connection between the zombie of slave-driven Saint-Domingue and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent exploration of black disembodiment—the body under constant threat of capture, imprisonment, and murder. For Haitian slaves, the invention of the zombie was proof that the abuse they suffered was in a way more powerful than life itself—they had imagined a scenario in which they continued to be slaves even after death. In Between the World and Me, observing a young boy in front of a 7-Eleven, Coates writes, 「This was a war for the possession of his body and that would be the war of his whole life.」 The same declaration could be transported 1400 miles and 300 years and still hold true.
這實在令人羞愧，因為殭屍是這樣一種強大的文化符號。例如，殭屍和作家塔-奈西斯·科茨（Ta-Nehisi Coates）最近研究對象有著明確的聯繫，前者是在奴隸發展的聖多明戈，後者精神被惡意地操控，面臨時常被抓、被囚禁甚至殺死的威脅。對海地奴隸來說，殭屍的創造有力證明了他們遭受的虐待，其程度已超過生命自身的承受力，他們曾經想像這樣的場景即使死後也要繼續為奴。在《世界和我之間》（Between the World and Me）一書中，科茨一邊觀察在7-Eleven便利店前一個小男孩，一邊寫道，「這是一場身體爭奪戰，也是一場畢生戰爭」。時隔300年，跨越1400英裡，這仍然適用。
Instead American pop culture has used the zombie, fraught as it is with history, as a form of escapism, rather than a vehicle to explore its own past or current fears. Writing for GreenCine, Liz Cole is onto something when she says that, whatever their allegorical shadow, zombies are perhaps 「indulging our post-apocalyptic fantasies」 above all. Elmo Keep notes in The Awl how pop culture tends to romanticize depictions of the end of the world: In these situations, 「Petty frustrations and mundane realities of real life all disappear, as do the complexities.」 And so the zombie apocalypse isn’t an outlet for fears but for fantasies, functioning as an escape hatch into a world with higher dramatic stakes, fewer people, and the chance to reinvent oneself, for better or worse.
儘管殭屍是歷史的產物，但是，美國流行文化不是發掘其自身歷史或者探討最近的社會隱患，而是利用殭屍作為逃避主義的表現形式。莉茲·科爾（Liz Cole），是英國一家旅遊網站撰稿人，她說無論殭屍有什麼不好的寓意，最重要的是它們也許「遷就了我們後啟示錄式的幻想」。埃爾莫·基普（Elmo Keep）在新聞網站（the Awl）上說明流行文化如何將末日世界描寫浪漫化：在這些情況下，「現實生活中個人悲觀和種種現實全部消失，社會各種複雜也不見了」。因此，殭屍啟示錄不是用來排解恐懼，而是用來揮發幻想，使人類逃入另一個世界，那裡充滿各種刺激冒險，人類比當前世界少，而且不論好壞有機會重新改造自己。
Zombies, in their American incarnation, strip earth back down to its essential parts: mankind, nature, survival. Think of The Walking Dead’s Georgia, a desolate but oddly idyllic expanse of camps, fields, abandoned motels, and forest clearings. In this way, post-apocalyptic zombie scenarios are as much utopian as they are dystopian. The landscape is cleared of industrial plants, oil derricks, real estate developments, traffic jams, construction sites, and urban blight.
在美國，殭屍化身毀滅者，讓地球回到原點，只剩下幾個必要部分，即人類、自然與生存。想想《行屍走肉》裡喬治亞州，一片荒涼但空地上卻有帳篷，農田、遺棄的汽車旅館、林間空地，一片田園景象。如此一來，在後啟示錄中，殭屍場景的反烏託邦意味不亞於它的烏託邦意味。這些場景中，工廠、油田鐵架臺、樓房、交通擁堵，建築工地和所有城市弊病，都消失得乾乾淨淨。
With just a handful of survivors set against a stark landscape of browns and greens, every person’s decisions take on an outsize importance, often a life-or-death meaning. As the former Stanford doctoral student Angela Vidergar toldLive Science in 2013, 「The ethical decisions that the survivors have to make under duress and the actions that follow those choices are very unlike anything they would have done in their normal life.」 The importance of the lives of characters on The Walking Dead is implicit, because theirs is the only story left to tell. And that, of course, is the key to their fantasist power: Who wouldn’t want to escape into characters leading lives of infallible significance, with their survival and the endurance of the human race perpetually at stake?
倖存的一小群人類同了無生機的環境展開對決，每個人決定的重要性就被放大，關乎生死存亡。安吉拉·韋德嘉（Angela Vidergar）曾在史丹福大學攻讀博士學位，2013年她告訴美國生命科學網站說，「倖存者們被現實所迫，不得不做出一些有關道德倫理的決定，根據這些選擇而採取的行動在他們正常生活中也根本不可能實現。」毫無疑問，劇中人物的生命非常重要，他們的故事是唯一流傳下來並講給世人聽的。當然，他們幻想力量的關鍵就在於：在危急關頭，誰不想逃出生天，成為絕對重要的領導者，延續人類種族？
Hence a bitter irony between the Haitian zombie and its American counterpart. The monster once represented the real-life horrors of dehumanization; now it’s used as a way to fantasize about human beings whose every decision is exalted. While it’s difficult to begrudge the storytelling logic of wiping out the many to restore meaning and importance to the few, it’s still worth acknowledging the bleak asymmetry of the zombie then and the zombie now. The original emerged in a context where humans were denied control of their own bodies and sought death as an escape. And now in pop culture, the zombie has come to serve as the primary symbol of escapism itself—where the fictional enslavement of some provides a perverse kind of freedom for everyone else.
因此，海地殭屍和美國殭屍，這一比較充滿諷刺意味。殭屍曾經代表著對現實中殘酷待遇的恐懼，而如今則成為幻想危機出現時有人能做出偉大決定的表現手段。這種講故事的邏輯就是抹掉大量的人，將意義和重要作用全都重新集中到少數人身上。要羨慕這種邏輯，十分困難，不過了解彼時和此時的殭屍之間的對立，還是值得的。最初殭屍產生時：人類無法主宰自己的身體，以死亡來尋求解脫。而現在在流行文化中，其虛構的奴役情境為每個人提供一種錯誤的自由，成為逃避主義的首要標誌。
譯/柳文平 審校&編輯/劉秀紅