But the worst thing about the army of the dead and each of its individual members isn’t what they do, or who they do it to, or what they do with them afterwards — it’s that they’re able to do anything at all. They exist, and by existing they issue one huge collective FUCK YOU to all that the living characters’ hope for the future and all they hold sacred from their pasts. Whoever you used to be before the White Walkers get to you and kill you is gone when they bring you back. Your existence is cruelly prolonged, but you’re as mindless and dangerous as a sword in their hands.
This is easily the most ineffable aspect of GOT horror, and it requires a certain Potter Stewart “I know it when I see it” mind-set to grasp. But again, think of Ned Umber, this adorable kid who started the episode by awkwardly attempting to be as polite as possible to the very intimidating ladies and lords in charge of Winterfell. That he deserved better than to be murdered and nailed to the wall is obvious. Yet when he opens his eyes and starts flailing and screaming, and when he keeps screeching as he’s slowly burned back to death, you get the sense that something really awful is happening here, something worse than just a standard crypto-fascist Walking Dead zombie kill.
When I watched this scene, I didn’t reach for zombie movies or shows for a point of comparison at all. Instead I thought of the passage from The Lord of the Rings that explains that orcs and trolls were created as a “mockery” of Elves and Ents, races that were generally wise, kind, thoughtful, and caring of the world around them. Morgoth, the original Dark Lord of Middle-earth, saw them and decided to show his enemies exactly what he thought their innate freedom and nobility was worth: a bunch of hideous ravenous sadistic idiots who thrive in darkness and eat people alive.
I thought too of how Bram Stoker and Stephen King describe vampires in Dracula and Salem’s Lot respectively. It’s not just that they’re mean-spirited, bloodthirsty, and possessed of dangerous powers. It’s that they’re wrong, somehow, in a way the humans who encounter them feel in their guts. They’re not just scared of the vampires; they’re disgusted by them. They find them somehow lascivious and obscene in their persistence after death. In both books, the protagonists seem to want to destroy their undead enemies not just to be safe from them, but to be rid of them — to avoid ever having to look at their fanged faces or hear their sepulchral and somehow bogus voices again.
I wrote about Game of Thrones and horror on the occasion of the Season Eight premiere for Vulture.
Tags: A Song of Ice and Fire, asoiaf, fantasy, Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin, horror, reviews, TV, TV reviews, vulture