Curing Zombies in "The Bone Temple"

We like to think that monsters are timeless. Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy—we know what they look like, how they behave, and what motivates them. But the historian knows better. Monsters are chameleons that reflect their times. They reveal much about the worries and dreams of the societies that produce them.

For instance, take Dracula. This monster came to fame with Bram Stoker’s famous 1897 novel. In the book, the Count is an Eastern European ghoul, whose ambition is to storm England, enslave its women, and "pollute" its blood with vampirism. As historians recognize, the context of Stoker’s book is of a time of anxious imperialism.

The British Empire was extending deeply into distant lands, and “race” theory was telling the English that their “blood,” while superior to other races, was in danger of being overwhelmed by “foreigners.” In such a climate, a non-English monster, making his way into the homeland and going after its women, was especially frightening. Notably, Dracula was also trying to get his clammy claws on London’s real estate, in a dark parody of British conquest abroad.

A new zombie movie, The Bone Temple, similarly reflects our present-day worries, particularly our concern with mental health and the idea of a chemical cure. To understand this, a brief sketch of the zombie is in order.

The zombie first came to the mass attention of Americans with the publication of William Seabrook’s book about Haiti, The Magic Island (1929). Seabrook was a tortured soul, an alcoholic writer deeply traumatized by his experiences in the blood-soaked fields of World War I.

For Seabrook, the zombie was a creature tailor-made to his experiences. He described them as “soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life.” They perhaps reminded him of the ghastly walking wounded of the Great War. Here is another description: “The eyes were the worst…They were in truth like the eyes of a dead man, not blind, but staring, unfocused, unseeing. The whole face, for that matter, was bad enough. It was vacant, as if there was nothing behind it.” This seems to resemble the soldiers so broken by combat that they just stared off, unable to continue their bloody frontline jobs. Seabrook had seen a lot of this.

The Bone Temple gives us zombies reflective of our own troubled historical moment. A recent study by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found a stunning one in 10 Americans claiming to have suffered a “mental health crisis” in the past year. Such calamities are highest among those aged 18-29 (15.1%). Americans are talking about mental wellness much more lately—and confessing in significant numbers to be suffering personally. Mental health crises are in the air.

Though Bone Temple is the fourth film in the 28 Days zombie franchise, this is the first one to situate the “rage virus” as a mental health issue. Earlier films have shown that the virus was a man-made illness that escaped a lab. Now we learn that the infected “see” the uninfected as monstrous, and so they kill them due to a derangement of their personal realities.

In the movie, Ralph Fiennes plays a doctor who learns that the infected have a chance for a cure. He reasons that, since the zombies settle down under the influence of morphine, their illness might be described as a curable state of psychosis. From here, he develops an anti-psychotic medical cure that appears to work.

The idea of anti-psychotic medication making a deranged person fit to return to society is an old one, dating back to the discovery of chlorpromazine (marketed as Thorazine), first synthesized in the mid-twentieth century. Thorazine was touted as a “chemical straitjacket” that would empty out the horrific “back wards” of the crowded state hospitals, returning patients to society, placid and cured. Optimism was high. Unfortunately, Thorazine was no panacea, and many of the medicated did not face happy lives back in their often-intolerant communities.

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The Bone Temple speaks to this history, as well as to our present. Its zombies, unlike those of most such films, are not beyond hope. Its optimistic message is wrapped in the old dream of the miracle drug, one that haunts the history of psychiatry. Interestingly, the non-infected villain of the film also seems to suffer from mental illness. He complains of hearing voices. He is not cured by drugs, and thus meets a horrible fate.

The Bone Temple is a work of entertainment. It should be judged accordingly. But it can also be seen through the lens of our culture. We can nod to its historical pedigree without chastising the efforts of the filmmakers, who have succeeded in making a rousing movie. Like other films, it both evokes its time and reflects the dreams and nightmares of the broader society that produced it.