Hamlet talked of ‘shuffling off this mortal coil’ as a metaphor for death. To judge by the average zombie movie, that shuffling doesn’t end with death. The media have been full this week of hysterical coverage of Brad Pitt’s visit to Glasgow to star in the latest zombie epic (as a Glaswegian born and bred I won’t repeat any of the scurrilous comments this prompted about my native city).

It got me to puzzling over the appeal of zombies, in films, on TV, and now in outrageous rewritings of literary classics  After all, this version of the undead, that we’re all so familiar with, is a pretty new phenomenon. I’ve not been able to trace any earlier reference than the 1954 publication of Richard Matheson’s novel ‘I am Legend’, subsequently filmed with Charlton Heston, and more recently with Will Smith. Prior to that, as in the classic Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur movie ‘I walked with a Zombie’ the concept had stayed fairly close to its Voodoo roots.

Of course, it was George Romero’s stomach-churning 1968 movie masterpiece ‘Night of the Living Dead’ which defined the current model of the Zombie as a crazed, flesh-eating monster which attacks in hordes. In the mid-70s I saw this at our Student Film Society and was scared and disgusted in equal measure, though evidently not as much as the female students sitting on either side of me, both of whom left lasting weals where they had gripped my wrists in terror at key moments.

Romero was—is—a very canny film-maker who knew exactly what he was about. I’ve a fondness for his much less well known 1973 movie ‘The Crazies’ which is a devastating metaphor for the behaviour of the US army in Vietnam. Perhaps part of the appeal of zombies is that they are so blank, they can accept almost any layer of interpretation. The second movie in Romero’s original trilogy, for example, set in a shopping mall, has always been seen as a critique of American consumerism.

But now zombies are everywhere, to the extent of eclipsing vampires, whom I’ve personally always found more interesting. Vampires, of course, unlike zombies, have a long and rich folk heritage which Bram Stoker drew on (with a canniness equal to Romero’s) for his defining novel. I think Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ is an under-rated masterpiece even if, perhaps, an accidental one—Stoker may have wrought more effectively than he knew. At a time of mass immigration from the East, of new discoveries about germs and infection, of nervousness about the rise of the ‘new woman’ (exemplified in Stoker’s Minna Harker, with her stenography, the strength with which she supports her shattered husband, and her courage in confronting the Count, and yet at the same time she too has been ‘infected’), ‘Dracula’ pulled all these together into an incredibly potent, and still powerful mix. No screen adaptation has really captured that power, though the 1977 BBC adaptation, with its surprise casting of Louis Jourdan as the Count, for me comes closest, and it’s available on DVD.

A completely different set of metaphors is unpacked in Elizabeth Kostova’s intriguing 2005 novel ‘The Historian’ where the survival of the vampire through all the vicissitudes of the 20th century in the Balkans becomes a telling image of how the ideologies that have tortured that region—Fascism, Communism, Nationalism, Islamism—can’t be killed off by conventional means.

So, apart from indulging myself, what is the relevance of all this to culture in the Highlands and Islands? First, that we perhaps don’t make enough of some of the darker folklore and traditions of the area, and here I’m going to offer a totally unashamed puff for my colleague Peter Urpeth’s strange novel about shamanism in present day Lewis, ‘Far Inland’ And of course in 1990 NVA’s life-changing Glen Lyon epic ‘The Path’ blended Highland and Eastern mythologies to unforgettable effect. As Peter’s novel hints at, and as the School of Scottish Studies recordings used in ‘The Path’ revealed, some very dark and primitive ideas and concepts remained current in parts of the Highlands and Islands until well into the last century.

Secondly, Open Book’s recent tour of ‘Macbeth’, which I caught in Eden Court a couple of weeks ago, reminded me forcefully that great art never loses its relevance. Without in any way making an overt point, Marcus Roche’s taut and energetic production, using just six actors, had huge resonance for the current situation in Libya and Iraq, where hated dictators cling on with increasing violence to the last remnants of their power. ‘Macbeth’ might at first have seemed an odd choice for the first round of the new North of Scotland Touring Fund, supported by Creative Scotland, LEADER, and HIE, but this production proved that playwriting doesn’t have to be new to be topical.

In stark contrast, just ten days later I decided to leave Illyria’s open air production of ‘Twelfth Night’, at Brahan Estate, at the interval. This was the sad case of a director who couldn’t trust Shakespeare to be relevant, and so rather than bringing out the play’s innate humour—and its poetry and romance—he had to get his laughs largely at the play’s expense, with pratfalls, crude sexual jokes, and laboured rewritings of Shakespeare’s words (‘and in sad cypress let me get laid’—I ask you!). In fact, I wouldn’t have been surprised if a zombie had wandered on to the stage—an undead Benny Hill. Now there’s a scary thought.