The undead: They don't want brains, they want love

As big, pathos-filled, clutch-your-teddy-bear-to-your-chest TV moments go, this one's a doozy: A few minutes into the opening episode of A&E's new drama, The Returned, which premieres Monday at 10 p.m., Claire, a grieving mother (Tandi Wright), stands alone in her kitchen when the front door opens and in strolls her teenage daughter Camille (India Ennenga).

The girl is all apologies: It's already dark out and she's just getting home from school.

Claire is too stunned to care that her baby girl is late.

Camille died four years earlier in a school bus crash.

But she has no inkling that her existence should be an impossibility. She believes it is still the day she died. To her mother's continued shock, the girl is the same age, she's wearing the same clothes as on that fateful day, and she's filled with all the same thoughts, feelings, and needs that occupied her hormone-flushed heart and mind before her death.

The Returned is the latest in a growing body of books, films, and TV shows that challenge our perceived definition of life and death, which has remained remarkably consistent for more than two millennia.

ABC's Resurrection, The Leftovers on HBO, the British horror series The Fades, CBS's alien-procreation fantasy Extant (the Halle Berry starrer returns for season two July 2), and BBC America's breakout hits Intruders and Orphan Black push back, redraw, or even erase the line that separates life and death.

Unlike the undead that populate other examples of horror, these returnees do not feed off people's bodies. They're not looking to dine, they just want to stay.

As fantastical as they are, these stories express a contemporary set of anxieties about the meaning of life in an age when death can be forestalled indefinitely or even cheated entirely through medical advancements including organ transplants, cloning, and cryogenics. They bring home another concrete problem that faces us today: the overcrowding of a planet already low in resources. Finally, these TV fantasies suggest that we may need to rethink some of our most basic philosophical and theological assumptions.

A&E's The Returned, which is based on two French hits, the acclaimed 2012 series Les Revenants (shown last year on SundanceTV under the title The Returned) and the 2004 feature  of the same name (released here as They Came Back), achieves this effect by modifying traditional horror tropes to create a new type of the returning dead. Like Resurrection, which was adapted from a 2013 novel by Jason Mott also called The Returned, the deceased folk who come back to our world represent a strange amalgamation of ghosts, zombies, and vampires.

The Returned and Resurrection have a remarkably similar premise. The ABC show, which also is set in a small rural town, opens with the sudden appearance of an 8-year-old boy in a rice paddy in mainland China.

Returned home to Arcadia, Mo., he's shocked to find that his parents are now in their 60s. The boy, it turns out, drowned in a stream near his house 31 years earlier.

Both series gain tension and momentum when more and more returnees crop up. Not all the living welcome the strange new development. Certainly nothing in the country's more prevalent religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, explains such an event.

Did God send these people back? The devil?

The unique thing about the returnees in both series is that they don't quite fit the traditional horror definition of an undead person.

Like ghosts, Camille and her compadres seek out folks whose lives intersected with theirs. At first, they cling to these living individuals like their shadow.

Yet, ghosts are usually represented as immaterial, spectral beings. These returnees are flesh-and-blood people a la zombies. But unlike the dumb beasts who walk around and around a suburban mall in George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, they retain their full identity and mental faculties.

They look exactly as they once did, unmarred by any gashes or scars.

In fact, the only thing different about them is their hunger. They're famished. Like never before.

What they crave isn't raw brains but our vitality, our acceptance, and most of all our love. They are emotional and spiritual vampires who approach their loved ones with an abysmal desire for human contact.

Instead of grieving for them as deceased loved ones, the living characters in these tales are forced to accommodate the dead, to compete with them for resources.

Like the invading shades in The Fades, ghosts who become material by devouring human flesh, or the angry, envious ghosts in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 2001 horror film Pulse, what the returnees want more than anything is the one thing their husbands and wives, sons and daughters eventually feel they must refuse to give them: life.

We must deny it. We must exclude them with our grief. How else could we possibly continue to love them?

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