Mindless Machines and Zombies

I’ve just finished listening to the great series Supernova in the East by Dan Carlin. I highly recommend it if you want more than an overview of the Asia-Pacific conflict in World War II — not a dry list of events and places, but a sense of what it actually felt like to be there. Carlin has a great way of presenting history from the inside, always trying to portray what someone might have felt or thought.

This post, however, is not a review of the series.

At the beginning of the first episode, Carlin describes the Allied wartime image of both the German and the Japanese soldier. The German: a cold, precise, mathematical robot. The Japanese: something wilder — a “foaming at the mouth, crazy robot” who doesn’t stop. His exact words: “their little finger will come after you if you leave that alone.”¹1.Dan Carlin, “Supernova in the East I,” Hardcore History, episode 62, released July 14, 2018. Available at dancarlin.com. The quote appears approximately 18 minutes into the episode. Transcript via HappyScribe.

It is a fascinating thing to hear, because in 2026 that description maps almost perfectly onto one image: a zombie apocalypse. The mindless, unstoppable attacker who keeps coming even when dismembered. And that match is not a coincidence.

Zombies and Horror

There is a lot of research regarding this very question.

The zombie as we know it — mindless hordes of cannibalistic undead — is a surprisingly recent invention, and from a different horror angle. George Romero essentially built the modern template in Night of the Living Dead (1968), basing it on Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend (1954). Before that, the zombie was something entirely different: a Haitian figure of slavery and colonial horror, a will-less body controlled by a master, working endlessly, threatening no one. Scholars trace this origin to the trauma of the transatlantic slave trade and the U.S. occupation of Haiti — the zombie as a figure of enslavement, not of attack.²2.The zombie’s Haitian origins and connection to slavery and colonialism are the dominant thread in zombie scholarship. For a readable overview, see Jeffrey H. Cohen, “Zombies: The Undead Shuffle”, Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective (Ohio State University). The key academic monographs are Roger Luckhurst, Zombies: A Cultural History (Reaktion Books, 2015) and Sarah Juliet Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion, and Living Death (Rutgers University Press, 2015).

What happened between that figure and Romero’s flesh-eating horde is contested. One thread, developed by historian W. Scott Poole, runs through the World Wars.³3.W. Scott Poole, Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror (Counterpoint, 2018). Poole’s own essay adaptation of the book’s thesis is freely readable: “How Horror Changed After WWI”, Literary Hub (2018). Note that the thesis is contested: reviewers point out that horror long predates WWI and that the 1918 influenza pandemic — which killed far more people than the war — has an equally plausible claim on early horror imagery. In 1919, the French director Abel Gance ended his anti-war film J’accuse with a sequence of the war dead rising from their graves to march on the living. He filmed it using 2,000 actual soldiers on leave from Verdun — men with visible wounds, missing limbs, bandaged heads — and by his own account most of them were dead within weeks of returning to the front. That sequence is striking because it needed no special effects: the war had already done the work.

World War II added its own layer. Wartime Hollywood made literal “Nazi zombie” films — Revenge of the Zombies (1943) featured a scientist building an army of the dead specifically because they “cannot be stopped by bullets,” using the zombie as a metaphor for fascist mind-control.⁴4.Megan Lynn Faragher, “‘Nazi Zombies!’: The Undead in Wartime and the Iconography of Mass Persuasion,” Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural 7 (2021). Open-access PDF: revenantjournal.com. See also Angela Smith, “Angels, Monsters, and Zombies: Defining Us and Them in First World War Poetry and Art,” in the same issue: revenantjournal.com. On the other side of the Pacific, Japan processed its own trauma through monster imagery: Godzilla (1954), whose scarred, burning skin drew directly on the keloid scars of Hiroshima survivors.

Poole’s thesis is contested, though. Horror long predates the World Wars — think Frankenstein, Dracula. Romero’s own stated influence was Matheson’s novel, not battlefield imagery. And the dominant strand of zombie scholarship roots the creature not in war, but in race and colonialism. War was probably one inflection of a figure that was already there, with the “mindless unstoppable horde” drawing from several anxieties at once.

The image, whatever its exact origins, did not stay in zombie films. Tolkien’s orcs, written during and after his service at the Somme, have been analyzed as a “perfected example of a dehumanised enemy” — a creature you can dispatch by the thousand without moral weight, because it is coded as something less than human.⁵5.Robert T. Tally Jr., “Demonizing the Enemy, Literally: Tolkien, Orcs, and the Sense of the World Wars,” Humanities 8, no. 1 (2019): 54. Open access: mdpi.com. Tally explicitly hedges that Tolkien “did not mean to suggest” any direct allegory; Tolkien himself wrote that he “cordially disliked allegory in all its manifestations.” Tolkien himself rejected any allegorical reading, and the scholar who makes this argument is careful to frame it as influence, not allegory. But the function is the same: killable in unlimited numbers, faceless, driven by a master’s will. Military shooters do the same thing — the exotic, faceless enemy, the strategically obscured bodies, the streets emptied of civilians.

War propaganda requires stripping the enemy of recognizable humanity so that killing them feels permissible. What the scholarship documents is how widely that same toolkit has spread through fiction, long after the wars that produced it.

Christian Kamikazes

In his series, Carlin is at pains to point out that the “mindless machine” view of soldiers was far from reality. And nothing makes this clearer than the personal histories he traces in the final episodes.

The word kamikaze conjures an image of almost fanatical self-destruction — someone so brainwashed or so alien that they choose to fly a plane into a ship. The zombie image, again.

But Carlin draws heavily on Ivan Morris’s The Nobility of Failure, whose final chapter — titled “If Only We Might Fall” — collects letters written by kamikaze pilots to their families in the hours before their missions, to show something quite different.⁶6.Ivan Morris, The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975). The final chapter, “If Only We Might Fall,” collects kamikaze pilots’ letters to their families. Note that Morris’s framing has been contested by later historians who argue the “noble sacrifice” aesthetic was largely state-manufactured rather than authentic tradition — and that the pilots’ own letters show grief and private doubt more than ideological conviction. For a freely readable account making that case, see Yuki Tanaka, “Japan’s Kamikaze Pilots and Contemporary Suicide Bombers”, Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus (2005). Many of these pilots were educated young men — students, some of them Christians — who did not choose their missions. The mission chose them. In a military culture built on hierarchy and collective obligation, refusing was not a real option. What their letters reveal is not fanaticism but grief, irony, private doubt, and an almost unbearable awareness of what was being asked of them.

One recurring detail Carlin returns to is how many of these men framed their deaths not as a glorious sacrifice they had chosen, but as something the war demanded and the system delivered. They were not mindless machines. They were people caught inside a machine — which is a very different thing, and a very different horror.

The propaganda image — the zombie soldier who cannot be reasoned with, who has no interiority — exists precisely to make you stop asking that question. Carlin’s contribution is to keep asking it.

What Horror Remembers

There is something uncomfortable in the observation that zombie movies, orc armies, and alien invasion films are all doing the same psychological work as wartime propaganda — stripping a human being of their humanity so that killing them requires no grief.

But horror has another tradition alongside that one: the tradition of forcing the question back open.

Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s 28 Days Later (2002) is a useful example. On the surface it is exactly the kind of story we’ve been describing: a rage virus turns people into fast, mindless, utterly unstoppable attackers. But the film’s real horror turns out to be the uninfected soldiers the survivors find at the end — men who, given power over others in an apocalypse, immediately revert to domination and violence. The infected are terrifying. The humans are worse. The sequel 28 Weeks Later (2007) doubles down on this, with the American military’s attempt to restore order collapsing into exactly the atrocity it was meant to prevent. And 28 Years Later (2025) asks a darker question still: what kind of society rebuilds itself after a catastrophe, and does it choose to remember the people it lost, or just move on? Kingdom, the Korean series set in the Joseon Dynasty, works the same way — its zombie plague is a consequence of famine and class violence, the monsters rising because the ruling class failed to feed the peasants.

These stories use the horror frame not to confirm the dehumanizing image but to question it — to ask what we become when we treat other people as threats to be exterminated rather than as people.

What is interesting to me is how much of this questioning happens in horror and genre fiction rather than in direct historical accounts. The kamikaze pilot as a grieving, doubting Christian man barely exists in public memory. But the zombie who turns out to have been someone’s father, someone’s child, someone who did not choose what they became — that image is everywhere.

Maybe horror is how we tell the stories we haven’t figured out how to tell directly yet.

Notes

This post is part of my #100DaysToOffload challenge.

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