On Fear and the Familial Undead in Homer’s Odyssey and the Films of George A. Romero

Did Homeric epic ever frighten its audiences? If so, what passages might have evoked fear, and why? And might those same passages evoke fear in us as 21st century audiences? To help answer those questions, I put Homer’s Odyssey in dialogue with a set of 20th century horror film texts. This paper examines a common source of fear (deos 11.43, 633) in Odysseus’ narration of his visit to the underworld in Odyssey 11 and the swarming “ghouls” who populate Romero’s apocalyptic visions in Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978); I’ll also briefly address the fear elicited in the remaining films of Romero’s zombie series as a coda to my reflections on fear and familial dynamics. The particular brand of “art horror” (Carroll 1990) elicited in both Homer and Romero is born from a basic transgression, where those who should be confined to the realm of the dead invade the realm of the living. Moreover, while many among the dead remain anonymous, a distinct form of narrative tension is effected by the introduction of recognizable faces, family members, among the masses. By looking at the landscape of Homer’s dead in conjunction with that of Romero’s first two entries to his undead series, we can not only better understand one mechanism for eliciting fear in art horror, but also speculate on some of the basic social tensions from which such fears emerge.