The Id And The Ego's Response: A Brief Summary

Creatures of the Id and the Ego’s Response: A Psychological Imperative

The vampyre, a creature eternal; the idea behind them is so old, its origins cannot be definitively traced. What it is about the creatures that these stories of eternal, undead bloodsuckers stay with us through the ages? “Vampires Never Die”, written by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan, attempts to explore this question. It relates tales of the vampyre to the unfulfilled desires and lusts, fear and superstitions in our lives. It explores this idea that our culture hungers for tales of these creature as a way to fill a sort of void within us, one that exists in man in a form relevant to its time; to put it simply, there is popularity in the adaptability of the vampyre.

The Haitian zombies are a representation of the loss of one’s spiritual sense of self, or free will. Similar to werewolves, they embody the separation from that which defines our humanity. A Zombi is a person who has lost their soul to a Bokor (a Haitian Shaman), becoming a mindless, shambling creature; unquestioning in its drive to serve its master, and to this point the ideal of the creature was a very powerful tool for slave masters to utilize. Slavery in Haiti was so brutal, death was an escape; a way to return to return to the heaven that was the spirit of their homeland. However, a Zombi is a creature incapable of crossing into this paradise, and so the threat of being turned into one was a tool to keep slaves from killing themselves and inflicting “the worst kind of thievery” on their masters. To those men and women, there would be no worse fate than to be an eternal slave, even in death. The zombie was, essentially, born from the yearning of an enslaved people to be free and the fear of a death void of

It is one of very few creatures that, with perhaps the exception of the film “Warm Bodies”, has not been romanticized in either literature or the media. In fact, it seems it is the killing of them that has become romanticized. With each step forward our society advances, so too does the zombie in its ability to feed on modern nightmares. As the vampyre does, the zombie adapts to the time in which it finds itself. Director George A. Romero’s Zombi creation infects others via the exchange of bodily fluids; being that they rose to prominence in the 1980’s, when AIDs was becoming a growing fear in the populace, one must wonder what viewers may have thought upon seeing these monsters on the big screen. Genetic manipulation, disease, nuclear fallout; humanity has more fears than can be counted, and as reanimating the dead is a science likely still far in the future, there are a multitude of fictional methods that feed on these fears while giving birth to the animated, soulless dead. In a world that is constantly advancing, producing weapons and discovering disease, zombies put a face to the fear of what these discoveries may make of the human race. Perhaps we shall become soulless in our pursuit of knowledge; destroy the world so terribly humanity becomes nothing more than a cannibalistic