The Evil Dead Hand and the evolution of the Undead.

... Since the first time humanity saw the ravages of death ,speculation regarding the undead have flourished. 

The image of a skeletal cadaverous hand, poking, almost in defilement, from freshly stirred earth has forever been seared in our darkest dreams. That very profound and phantasmal visual has haunted us, as a species, since our cave man days. To this very day the prominence of that icon is still quite alive in modern media. 

 That archetypical effigy has infected every artistic movement to date: from unforgettable movie posters, to quintessential novels, and/or epochal illustrations. The so called: ‘Evil Dead hand’, is a dormant representation that flings us back to the irrational worries of our more primitive ancestors. 

Following the same vein of Carl Jung’s archetypes, this archaic pattern has slowly been digested, regurgitated and, once again, processed into our collective unconscious. It has become one of the most autonomous, and hidden forms, that has emigrated from our dreams into physical manifestations.

Like the analytical psychotherapist’s popular figure of ‘The Shadow’, as a representation that embodies those dark desires we do not wish to identify ourself with, but nonetheless exist within us, this horrible motif speaks of our deep seeded fear of death; ‘The Shadow’ of nature. 

‘The Evil Dead hand’ epitomizes, not how we see ourselves, but, ultimately, how we see the world around us. And it all began, most likely, with one naive and ancient farmer raking the land over a mount of loose burial dirt. A cadaver, in mid rigor mortis, twitching up; his paralyzed hands searching for live. 

A construct that could easily remake and re-hatch itself, in a variety of ways, across the globe.

As such conjunction, superstition, folk tales and lack of scientific inquiry, mixed together in an orgy of constructive hunches, and gave birth to the undead fiction. 

Vampires, zombies, revenants, ghouls, Frankensteins, and wraiths, owe their parentage to this emblematic model. To this clear icon of one of our most staggering fears. 

We tremble before the dead, because, in the most fundamental way, they mirror a reality we can never escape; the overwhelming fact that we will die, rot and, whatever remains of us, fall into a vast well of assured uncertainty.

This, in a way, was what that long forgotten fore-bearer truly disturbed and dug-up; the truth of our very mortality.

Excerpt: The Wraith of The Obelisk- L.J. Gomez.