A Look Into the Things That Go Bump in the Night
Zombies and vampires have two things in common: they’re undead and their bites spread contagion. But beneath the gore and fangs lies something deeper: a legacy of colonial fear, invasion, and control.
Let’s start with zombies. While pop culture often paints them as brainless hordes from apocalyptic wastelands, their origins trace back to Haiti and the transatlantic slave trade. In Haitian Voodou, the zombie was a symbol of spiritual enslavement, a body robbed of its soul and autonomy. When American filmmakers got hold of the concept, they stripped it of its cultural roots and repackaged it as a metaphor for mass panic, disease, and the collapse of civilization. Think White Zombie (1932), which exoticized Haitian culture while feeding Western fears of the “other.”
Vampires, on the other hand, are often aristocratic, seductive, and foreign. Bram Stoker’s Dracula wasn’t just a bloodsucker, he was a metaphor for reverse colonization. As a mysterious outsider from Eastern Europe, Dracula invades London, threatening to corrupt its women and drain its lifeblood. The vampire myth plays on anxieties about racial mixing, immigration, and the loss of national purity. In other words, it’s not just horror, it’s xenophobia in a cape.
Both monsters reflect colonial anxieties. Zombies represent the fear of uprising enslaved bodies returning to claim vengeance. Vampires embody the dread of infiltration and the idea that the colonized might one day colonize the colonizer. Their bites don’t just kill, they transform. They blur boundaries between self and other, civilized and savage, human and monster.
Zombie Movies’ Realistic Reflections
Modern horror hasn’t abandoned these themes. Films like 28 Days Later (2002) and Train to Busan (2016) use zombie outbreaks to explore government failure, class divides, and global pandemics. Vampire stories like Let the Right One In and Blade reframe the myth through race, gender, and trauma. Even Twilight, for all its glitter, plays with the idea of assimilating the vampire who learns to pass as human.
So why does this matter? Because horror isn’t just entertainment, it’s a mirror. It reflects the fears we’re too afraid to name fears about power, identity, and history. Zombies and vampires may be fictional, but the systems that created them are very real.