Indigenous Religious Constraints on Horror Narratives: Why Zombies Fail to Naturalize in Japanese Folklore

This paper examines why zombie narratives failed to naturally emerge and stabilize within traditional Japanese folklore, despite their prominence in Western horror traditions. Rather than attributing this absence to cultural preference or historical contingency, the paper argues that it is a structural consequence of indigenous religious frameworks governing the status of the dead. By analyzing Japanese syncretic conceptions of death—shaped primarily by Buddhism and Shinto—the study shows that the deceased are ritually integrated as venerated or relational beings rather than positioned as legitimate enemies of the living. Within such an ontological framework, the reanimated, decaying corpse central to zombie horror becomes not terrifying but conceptually incoherent. The paper further demonstrates that Japanese horror deploys functional equivalents to zombies, such as ghosts, possession, and curses, which preserve the ethical status of the dead while relocating fear to relational imbalance, unresolved obligation, and boundary violations. Through comparative analysis, horror is reframed not as free-form imagination, but as a cultural mechanism that enforces ontological boundary conditions. This work contributes to horror studies, religious studies, and cultural theory by showing that the monsters a culture fails to produce can be as revealing as those it embraces.