Stranger Danger: Danger Word and the Faceless enemy

      While both Danger Word and the materials shown in class focus mostly on the Horror of the Zombie arising from distorting and corrupting something or someone that is intimate or familiar, another reason the Zombie has remained such a prominent trope in Horror is due to its faceless nature and the paranoid fear that invokes.  Both Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Adams' Danger Word mostly focus on the intimate horror of the Zombie, its nature to endanger the character, and by extension the reader, with people or other characters that were once familiar or that the reader was attached to.  When Kendrick is hunted down by Grandpa Joe, the horror of the scene comes not from Kendrick being hunted, but from the fact that he is endanger by a character who, only moments before, the reader empathized with and connected to.  This agony of fighting the Familiar is one of the reasons that Zombies are used so heavily, it is a very powerful concept charged with emotion.  However, on the other hand, Zombies and their other horror counterparts are also able to inspire a paranoid fear through their faceless nature, that is, that the zombie looks almost exactly like another ordinary human being.  In Danger Word, there is a small scene where Joe and Kendrick drive past a man on the road looking for a ride, and when asked if the man was a freak, Joe responds "Don't know, It's hard to tell.  That's why you never stop."  Here we see the nameless fear of the Zombie; unlike vampires or werewolves or other supernatural creatures with distinctive traits and shapes, the Zombie is nothing more than a human corpse, and sometimes not even that.  Because of its lack of distinction  and due to the fact that it is so close to us that it is hard to tell apart, this gives it an almost faceless quality, where the Zombie is able to be anyone at any time, an indistinct stranger among a faceless crowd of people.  This inspires a sort of paranoia, where any person could be a Zombie, and thus it becomes unsafe to trust anyone.      This paranoid distrust of strangers, along with the faceless nature of the Zombie, plays to and exploits a common fear in the real world, the fear of the "stranger," who we are told might be a serial killer, or a kidnapper, and whom we should take precautions against and avoid at all costs.  Thus, the Zombie becomes this "stranger," who might kill us, and by exploiting this fear along with the paranoia it causes, the idea of the Zombie transcends the page and begins to affect the reader.  It inspires paranoia and fear in the reader himself, as he begins to associate the fear of the faceless Zombies in the story with that of the faceless "Stranger" in his own life, and it is this ability to tie into, and subsequently affect, the readers own lives that has allowed Zombies to remain such a prevalent theme in both Horror and Society.