What are the undead? There are many ways we have envisioned the undead, corporeal and incorporeal, malignant or benign, the undead even run the gamut of good and evil. Yet the overarching feature of that which is not alive and is not dead, that uncanny fear we have of death, permeates their existence.
So, what use does a narrative have for the undead? First, my mind flutters towards Odysseus, and all those other Greek boys, who in legends consulted ghosts with necromancy. Yet, these ghosts don’t appear to me to be “undead.” They are most assuredly dead.
What are the undead? They are not dead, but often were; they are not alive, but had to have been. Sometimes the undead will have a purpose, or sometimes one is merely staving off that grim fellow with the scythe.
Reality’s refusal to have anything so dramatic as a literal undead monster doesn’t help, for then the matter would be one of observation and experimentation. No, this is subjective work, classifying the undead.
And I think, the undead is literally that which should be dead and is not. It is something we instinctively know has stayed on this earth overlong. It becomes something metaphorical, then, and I search for a real world counterpart: I see it in certain ideologies.
Have you ever spoken with someone, but simultaneously not spoken to the person? Some long dead spirit takes over the person’s lips, plays the part of a thinking individual. You can tell what that person will say before he says it, because the undead aren’t alive, and they can’t grow and change. Have you ever spoken to someone possessed by his dead father, by an ideology he can neither know nor critique?
Tale Told 