Beastly Transformations

Sometime around 2023, internet travel content creators discovered that Kensington, a neighborhood in North Philadelphia, is in the middle of a severe and publicly visible drug addiction crisis. In their quest to create sensational, viral content, these creators titillate their audiences by describing the intoxicated people on the streets of Kensington as zombies and the drug addiction crisis as a zombie apocalypse. The pursuit of internet clout through “tranq tourism” evokes the sordid history of Victorian and Gilded Age slum tourism in cities such as London and New York while dehumanizing the victims of poverty, homelessness, mental illness, and addiction as dangerous monsters.¹

A playground in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington, 2006. ChrisErb, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Beyond the cruelties of modern slum tourism, the bigger problem with content creators describing poor, urban, often unhoused, “drug addicts” as zombies is that the zombie, America’s favorite twenty-first-century monster, is unsavable. The zombie represents the transformation of a human being capable of reason and self-control into a soulless monster capable of nothing more than unconscious locomotion and ravenous consumption with an insatiable appetite for human flesh. The zombie apocalypse itself, predicated on the zombie’s pathological and unnatural ability to self-replicate through its bite, signifies an existential threat to humanity, an extinction-level event. Most importantly, the transformation from human to monster is permanent. Zombies cannot be treated or cured, only exterminated.²

A line of undead ‘zombies’ walk through a field in the night in a still from the film Night Of The Living Dead. George Romero, 1968. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

At first glance, using the zombie as the monster metaphor for drug addicts seems like a thoroughly modern production. But as a historian who studies the “drunkard” as an antecedent of the contemporary “addict,” I cannot help but notice how the zombie metaphor recapitulates discourses about human nature, free will, and the causes of addiction that are at least five centuries old.

Long before “tranq tourism” discovered Kensington’s “zombies,” early modern English writers discovered the monstrous drunkard, a man who, through his intoxication, had transformed into a beast. Across half a millennium, metaphors of monstrosity that dehumanize the drunkard (beast) and addict (zombie) allow people to blame the individual in question as wholly and irrevocably different and inherently monstrous.³ Just like the zombie drug addicts of Kensington, the monstrous drunkard was irredeemable in the eyes of Protestant clergymen, educated medical professionals, and later, temperance reformers, until modern efforts to medicalize alcoholism.⁴

The word drunkard was a sixteenth-century neologism, a new linguistic construction that entered vernacular English around the beginning of the early-modern period. Like other neologisms, such as bastard and coward, drunkard was a pejorative term used to describe a person who was defined wholly by a single negative trait, in this case, drinking too much and too often.⁵

The drunkard emerged at the intersection of religious strife and the commodification of alcohol. As Protestants blamed Catholics for promoting drunkenness through seasonal feasting, the proliferation of alehouses commercialized ale production, enabling continuous masculine drinking outside the home. The early-modern drunkard was quickly associated with violence, profligacy, dishonesty, and a lack of self-control, generating anxieties about a growing urban underclass, political dissent, and social disorder.⁶

In this context, the drunkard quickly became a target for writers who depicted him as a monster. One of the most compelling early-modern expressions of the monstrous drunkard was the metaphor of the beastly metamorphosis. Premodern natural philosophers believed that all existence was organized according to the Great Chain of Being. God and his angels were at the top, while Satan and his demons were at the bottom. In between the two sat human beings, with animals, plants, and minerals below them. Like modern zombies, animals were understood as beastly, that is, incapable of controlling their appetites, violence, and other behaviors because they lacked the capacity for reason and free will associated with human beings.

The great chain of being. This version is taken from Retorica Christiana, published by Diego Valdes (signed as F. Didacus in the bottom left) in 1579. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Writing long before the development of modern medical concepts of habituation, compulsion, and addiction, early modern English literature seems to suggest that the beastly metamorphosis takes place as the drinker becomes intoxicated. Different animals represented attributes of the drunkard’s disruptive behavior. Intoxicated men were as gluttonous as a pig, angry as a lion, quarrelsome as a dog, stupid as a donkey, or lecherous as a goat. The use of animals to describe the various aspects of the drunkard’s debauched character also reminded writers of Greek myths about witches who used potions to transform men into animals.⁷

Man with a dog head, Nuremberg Chronicle/Schedelsche Weltchronik, Hartmann Schedel, 1493. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

One of the first popular writers to describe the drunkard’s beastly metamorphosis as a transformation from man to monster was sixteenth-century playwright and poet George Gascoigne. In A Delicate Diet, for Daintiemouthde Droonkardes (1576), Gascoigne compared intoxicating drinks to the potions prepared by “Circe, or Medea,” which possessed the power to “Metamorphose, & transforme men into ougly mishapen monsters” who ended up as “brute Beastes.”⁸ Early modern discourses also conveyed a sense that the drunkard’s transformation could become permanent. By the mid-seventeenth century, Thomas Heywood, a poet and playwright like Gascgoine, depicted the drunkard as a monstrous human-animal hybrid on the frontispiece of Philocothonista, or The Drunkard, Opened, Dissected, and Anatomized (1635).⁹

The frontispiece of Heywood’s Philocothonista reproduced in Phillip Stubbes’s Anatomy of the Abuses in England in Shakspere’s Youth, A.D. 1583, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, (London, 1877-79). Via Internet Archive.

Portraying the monstrous drunkard as a human-animal hybrid suggested that the drunkard’s characteristics had become unchangeable by injecting nascent conceptualizations of race into the metaphor. As Europeans encountered new people during the Crusades and early exploration of Asia and Africa, travelers brought back stories of monstrous races in exotic, faraway lands. Many writers wondered if the beings they encountered were even fully human. As a result, the human-animal hybrid became an early signifier of immutable differences, of the inhuman Other. Casting drunkards as similar creatures suggested that they degenerated from a civilized Christian to someone resembling the monsters at the edge of the map.¹⁰ Once transformed, the drunkard could no more reform himself than the monsters on the map could change themselves.

The idea that the drunkard was a monster endured in temperance rhetoric on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean during the nineteenth century. For example, Benjamin Rush, a physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, still listed a familiar menagerie of animals to describe the drunkard.¹¹ Temperance reformers and physicians alike continued to believe that the drunkard was unsavable. Consequently, most reformers invested all their efforts into preventing men from becoming drunkards in the first place through moral suasion, education, and outright prohibition.

The discovery of alcohol as a discrete chemical substance in 1811 and the growing awareness that drunkenness was a sort of problem internal to White male citizenry helped temperance reformers shift some of the blame from the drunkard to the drink. Even though he ought to be responsible for drinking in the first place, the drunkard’s degeneration into his final beastly form was ultimately the fault of King Alcohol, who ruled drinkers’ appetites as a chemical tyrant, and, perhaps, the drink seller who made it available.¹²

King Alcohol, and his Prime Minister, designed & engraved by J.W. Barber, 1872. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

As the twentieth-century medicalization of addiction transformed the monstrous drunkard into an alcoholic patient, new drug-using monsters filled the American imagination—the psychopathic addict, the cocaine fiend, the heroin junkie, the crack mother, and the meth head.¹³ The zombification of Kensington’s denizens depicts them as dangerous monsters, a threat to all around them, for whom extermination is the only antidote.

At the same time, MAHA voices in the federal government are calling for a revival of involuntary civil commitment, medical incarceration, and institutionalization, even as they cut federal funding for mental health programs.¹⁴ The poor, urban, racialized addict, often unhoused and experiencing other mental disabilities, remains dehumanized as a voracious monster necessitating coercive control—or perhaps even extermination—in the popular imagination.

1. Liam Foley, “The Kensington Nightmare: Open Your Eyes,” Opinion, The Villanovan, November 1, 2025, https://villanovan.com/29058/opinion/the-kensington-nightmare-open-your-eyes/; Charles Fain Lehman, “How Do You Solve A Problem Like Kensington?,” The Philadelphia Citizen, February 20, 2025, https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-kensington/; Emma Copley Eisenberg, “When Suffering Goes Viral,” Orion Magazine, October 3, 2023, https://orionmagazine.org/article/philadelphia-kensington-zombies-tranq-addiction/; Olivia Empson, “‘Tranq Tourism’: Alarm in Philadelphia as TikTokers Travel to Film Drug Users,” Society, The Guardian, December 17, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/dec/17/tranq-tourism-tiktok-philadelphia-drug-use-xylazine; Marlie Ford and Kevin Revier, “Social Media Depicts Kensington as ‘Zombieland’—and It’s Deadly,” Filter, July 27, 2023, https://filtermag.org/social-media-kensington-drugs-zombie/.
2. Jon Stratton, “Zombie Trouble: Zombie Texts, Bare Life, and Displaced People,” in The Monster Theory Reader, ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (University of Minnesota Press, 2020); Kyle William Bishop, American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture (McFarland, 2010).
3. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, ed., The Monster Theory Reader (University of Minnesota Press, 2020); Asa Simon Mittman and Peter Dendle, eds., The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2012); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory: Reading Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
4. Sarah W. Tracy, Alcoholism in America: From Reconstruction to Prohibition (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Jack S. Blocker, American Temperance Movements: Cycles of Reform (Twayne Publishers, 1989).
5. Oxford English Dictionary, “-ard (suffix), Etymology.” See also, Laura Sievert King, “The Invention of the Drunkard,” The Sober Heretic, May 29, 2019, https://thesoberheretic.com/2019/05/29/the-invention-of-the-alcoholic-part-1/.
6. James Nicholls, The Politics of Alcohol: A History of the Drink Question in England (Manchester University Press, 2011), 8–12; Mark Hailwood, Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England (Boydell & Brewer, 2014); Jessica Warner, “Shifting Categories of the Social Harms Associated with Alcohol: Examples from Late Medieval and Early Modern England,” American Journal of Public Health 87, no. 11 (1997): 1788–97.
7. Cathy Shrank, “Beastly Metamorphoses: Losing Control in Early Modern Literary Culture,” in Intoxication and Society: Problematic Pleasures of Drugs and Alcohol, ed. Jonathan Herring et al. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
8. George Gascoigne, A Delicate Diet, for Daintiemouthde Droonkardes (London, 1576), Image 14, Early English Books Online (EEBO).
9. Thomas Heywood, Philocothonista, or, The Drunkard, Opened, Dissected, and Anatomized (London, 1635).
10. Surekha Davies, Humans: A Monstrous History (University of California Press, 2025), 29–54; Davies, “The Unlucky, the Bad, and the Ugly: Categories of Monstrosity from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment” and Debra Higgs Strickland, “Monstrosity and Race in the Late Middle Ages,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous.
11. Benjamin Rush, An Inquiry Into the Effects of Ardent Spirits Upon the Human Body and Mind (Boston, 1823), 7–8.
12. David Korostyshevsky, “An Artificial Appetite: The Nineteenth-Century Struggle to Define Habitual Drunkenness,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 98, no. 2 (2024): 175–204.
13. David Herzberg, White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America (University of Chicago Press, 2020); David Farber, Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed (Cambridge University Press, 2019); Nicolas Rasmussen, On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine (New York University Press, 2009); Timothy A. Hickman, The Secret Leprosy of Modern Days: Narcotic Addiction and Cultural Crisis in the United States, 1870-1920 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007); Caroline Jean Acker, Creating the American Junkie: Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Joseph Spillane, Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States, 1884-1920 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Sarah W. Tracy, Alcoholism in America: From Reconstruction to Prohibition (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Nancy Campbell, Using Women: Gender, Drug Policy, and Social Justice (Routledge, 2000).
14. Josephine Wonsun Hahn and Rosemary Nidiry, Federal Cuts to Behavioral Health Will Harm Public Safety (Brennan Center for Justice, 2025), https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/federal-cuts-behavioral-health-will-harm-public-safety; Kathryn Waring, “RFK Wants to Send People to ‘Wellness Farms.’ The US Already Tried That.,” Teen Vogue, April 17, 2025, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/rfk-wellness-farms-us-disabilities.