MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

George Romero’s “The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar” makes up the first half of the Edgar Allan Poe-inspired anthology film Two Evil Eyes (1990), with Dario Argento’s “The Black Cat” providing the back half. Romero’s contribution adapts Poe’s story “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” in which the narrator’s use of mesmerism as Valdemar is dying arrests the decay of and allows communication with Valdemar for seven months after death, upon which he “wakes” Valdemar, whose body famously dissolves into “a nearly liquid mass.” In Romero’s imagining, Valdemar becomes a fatally ill rich man whose wife’s lover, a doctor, uses hypnotism in a scheme to secure the dying man’s assets for themselves. This Valdemar’s body is not rendered immobile after death, and indeed it, along with the doctor’s own corpse later, resembles one of the zombies for which Romero is most known. These reanimated corpses, however, are not Romeran zombies. While the subjectivity of the deceased, itself under control of the hypnotist, remains in some way tied to yet separate from the body, the body itself can be controlled by “Others,” beings who wish to use these corpses to cross into the living world from the incorporeal limbo which they share with Valdemar. Further, the deceased subject retains consciousness and the ability to communicate (in what seems to be audible speech but not spoken by the body itself), and shooting the reanimated Valdemar in the head has no effect. Arguably then, “M. Valdemar” sees Romero, credited with inventing the modern zombie, instead employing pre-Night of the Living Dead ideas of zombiism, those rooted in Caribbean tradition, which included seeing zombies as a form of ghost. Rather than reduce the individual solely to its embodiment, these walking corpses destabilize the relationship between the subject and its embodiment.