“Another film her husband had been writing about for his book was a French movie about people who simply came back. These returned people had died, funerals has been held in their names, and now they were appearing in the city center, clothed and in fine health. At first, they were divided by age and gender and temporarily housed in airplane hangars. Families had to provide papers and passports and photos to claim their undead. In this movie, there was no blood, no biting and lurching. The undead had the vestiges of their former memories; their body temperatures were five degrees lower; they pretended to sleep at night but they were faking; none of them actually slept. They all looked serene and terrified. A doctor theorized they were stuck in a latent period, still in the process of awakening into a new life, though in the end the doctor concluded this latent period would be unending. Meanwhile, the undead experienced an unspoken and collective realization of their own: suddenly they were driven to leave their families, to roam out into the countryside. They were drawn to underground places, down into the sewers and tunnels. In one scene, a man’s undead wife tried to climb a garden wall, in order to escape their home. The man ran out into the yard in his pajamas, his bare feet a luminescent white in the green grass. He shouted her name. She climbed faster. He grabbed hold of her ankle. When she turned to look at him, her expression suggested it was not her undead state that was so strange; rather, it was the state of the living—a state so starved and selfish it was willing to make her a prisoner, if that’s what it took to keep her close—that was the most deranged one of all.”
—Laura Van Den Berg, The Third Hotel