Primal Fear: Haunted by Ghosts of Predators Past

Office Space's copier notwithstanding, machines aren't as satisfying to fight; flesh and blood is better. It seemed self-evident when I said it during a discussion about game A.I.s in general. Now, after some serendipitous reading, the assertion makes even more sense. Forget about Cylon skinjobs and the sentient supercomputer HAL 9000. For the time being, it's machines that neither look nor behave like they're alive that I have in mind.

“Have you ever wondered why normal adults living in urban environments like Manhattan are liable to be terrified of snakes and spiders, while being quite blasé about dangers like cars and cigarettes?” David Livingstone Smith asks in The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War.

His answer agrees with Barbara Erenreich's: “[H]uman beings are haunted by the ghosts of predators past” -- which is to argue that we evolved in environments where it paid to be aware of animal predators, but not the technology that we would invent millennia later. And so, as Smith writes, high-grossing movies like Jaws, Alien, Predator, and Jurassic Park “arouse primal emotions within us. We respond to these films because they resonate with ancient fears of being hunted and eaten.”

While we are, without doubt, able to imagine nightmares such as a demented car that intends to drive donuts over our corpses, these scenarios lack a snarling dog's ability to automatically elicit hair-raising reactions. The Resident Evil games get this and use it to frightening effect. Crocodiles, snakes, and spiders are among the menagerie of clawing, biting, or stinging animals that menace us in the series' current incarnation. RE 5, of course, capitalizes on the psychology of fear in other ways as well.

More than any other species, ourselves included, parasites and viral organisms have historically made mankind miserable (the Spanish flu eliminated 50 million of us in only a year and a half). It is correct to object that, while we can see macroparasites such as tapeworms and leeches, the microscopic monsters that create measles, leprosy, and Lhasa fever have until very recently remained invisible to humankind. Remember, though, that their transmission vectors – rats, lice, blood, feces, rotten flesh – are both obvious and elicit instinctive revulsion across cultures.

There's more to zombie imagery than this peculiar power to induce disgust. Smith writes that “it is typically thought that the contaminated object transmits its filthy essence to anything that it comes into contact with.” Bear with me, as this becomes fairly complicated. Essence (Aristotle called it substance) distinguishes what a thing is from the qualities that it has. Dogs have four legs, for instance, but can lose any number of these and retain their “doggy-ness.” In other words, a hairless, toothless, three-limbed dog remains in our minds' conceptual “dog” category despite his setbacks. This essentialist thinking finds its home in the notion that humans have souls independent of the bodies that they inhabit (and, perversely, in the tradition that held that a person was black or Jewish on the basis of one-eighth of his or her “blood”).

Zombies -- the converse of our hypothetical canine -- are superficial humans who've lost their human essence. The ubiquity of made-up monsters that appear to be people but in actuality aren't – consider werewolves, vampires, witches, changelings, Cylon skinjobs, pod people, T-800 terminators, and demon-controlled children to name but a few -- proves the concept's immense power over the human imagination.

If you agree with Smith; copious evidence canvasing all of recorded history; and the research of psychologists who study post-combat stress disorders, it is essential for soldiers and communities to dehumanize the enemies who they destroy or whose destruction they condone. We compare our foes to the same dangerous and disease carrying animals that trigger the instinctive fight-or-flight and disgust responses detailed above. Zombies literalize the picture that political propagandists paint when attempting to activate our anti-parasite modules in preparation for war -- which brings us to the disquieting nature of another note that Resident Evil 5 strikes. The title not only features fearful animals and contagious pathogens that create monsters in people's clothing; it blatantly turns people who in relatively recent history have been relegated to a sub-human status and held as vectors of barbarity and disease into barbaric disease spreaders.