Bowie Ibarra
–Down the Road: A Zombie Horror Story (Permuted Press, 2006)
–Down the Road: On the Last Day (2006)
David Moody
–Autumn (Infected Books, 2005)
–Autumn: The City (2005)
–Autumn: Purification (2005)
–Autumn: The Human Condition (2005)
–Autumn: Echoes (2005)
–Autumn: Disintegration (2007)
The Living Dead
–Night of the Living Dead by John Russo (Pocket, 1980)
–Return of the Living Dead by John Russo and George A. Romero (Dale, 1978)
–Dawn of the Dead by George A. Romero and Susanna Sparrow (St. Martins, 1989)
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For more on the psychology of zombies see Chapter 4.
THE FINAL VERDICT: DOCTOR, DOCTOR, TELL ME THE NEWS…
Are zombies likely? No. And we can all be thankful for that.
Are they totally impossible? Also no. And we can all lose some sleep over that.
Granted there would have to be some pretty radical shifts in human physiology and disease pathology for anything even close to this to happen, so there is additional comfort in the thought that Mother Nature probably isn’t actually out to get us and so wouldn’t craft mutations of this kind just to mess with our heads. On the other hand, Mother Nature did invent prions, so she certainly has her mood swings.
In light of the medical evidence and theories discussed in this chapter, we have to turn around and take another look at the issue of whether zombies are dead or alive. Let me rephrase that: Are they truly dead or only partly dead?
If they are actually corpses, then the process of rigor mortis could offer storytellers a reasonable explanation for why zombies are sometimes fast and sometimes slow, because with rigor mortis first the body is loose, then stiff, then loose again. Loose could equal quick and spry. Also, a dead zombie will eventually decay and fall apart. If they are somehow kept alive-ish by feeding on living flesh, there will be a point where that source will either run out or be denied to them. With no nutrients, proteins, or liquids being ingested, the bodies will decompose. It should take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months before zombies are no longer even a marginal threat (though the infection will likely persist).
On the other hand, if zombies are at least marginally alive, as my experts all seem to think, then a zombie’s speed will depend on how much brain damage is present. Brain damage can certainly interfere with motor function, resulting in stiff, jerky, and uncoordinated movement.
Romero called his film Night of the Living Dead. Everyone has focused all their attention on the word dead; but for me the operative word is living but only as it impacts the definition of dead. Living death, then, would be a brand new term, a concept that fits into what we now see as a gap between truly alive and definitely dead. Given all that we’ve learned so far from our experts, that’s what living dead is going to have to mean: a third designation of existence.
The Predator Compulsion
Zombie Forensic Psychology
Know Your Zombies by Robert Sacchetto
“I did this instructional poster for fun, around last Halloween. It was just after I finished a commission piece for a client who wanted a regular portrait of his two small kids. I think that there was some time overlap…I guess my brain was in a weird place at that point and I thought, ‘Why not make this fun and combine the two?’ and there it was!”
JUST THE FACTS
Zombies and the Human Psyche
One thing you have to admire about zombies is their dedication to purpose. They want to eat you and they will continue to try and do so without distraction or any alteration of intent until they either get their victim, are irrevocably prevented (by, say, a bullet to the head), or until they decompose to the point where they are no longer capable of accomplishing their goal. They don’t require rest, they don’t succumb to frustration, they never lose interest. Theirs is a task assigned on the deepest primal level, and they will set about it indefinitely.
In the genre stories this compulsion is the source of frequent speculation, but no clear answer is ever uncovered. Having risen, why do they attack humans?
And, do they attack only humans?
In Night of the Living Dead one of the ghouls is seen eating an insect, suggesting that they feed on any living thing. In the Dawn of the Dead remake, however, the zombies clearly have no appetite for anything except human flesh, eschewing to chew on a dog, which then runs unharmed through a crowd of hundreds of them.
This is one of the elements that is never fully resolved, probably because as a plot point it brings up more issues than it would solve. Here are some of the points to consider:
Are zombies omnivorous or just carnivorous?
If merely carnivorous, will they eat any living thing?
–Romero establishes that they eat (at least) humans and insects.
–It has been speculated that it is warm living flesh that attracts the zombies’ appetites, but then how do you explain the zombie who eats the insect? Insects, though certainly possessing body heat, do not possess very much of it.
–Heat alone can’t be the lure or else they would continue to feed on the recently dead, and all the movies suggest that the zombies eventually stop feasting on a corpse after it begins to cool (else there would be no new zombies left intact to rise). It takes hours for a body to cool to room temperature.
–If zombies are attracted to warm flesh, then they should logically be compelled to feast longer on victims in warmer climates and less so on victims in cooler climates.
If these arguments successfully deflate the belief that it is warm human flesh that the zombies crave, then what is their true desire? Is it, perhaps, some kind of energy? Perhaps ch’i, the intrinsic vital energy believed by many to flow through the body along pathways called meridians? If so, how does the zombie feed on the ch’i?
–Does feeding on ch’i mean that they are actually some kind of psychic vampire or perhaps essential vampires? (See “Fearsome Folklore: Essential Vampires.”)
If they are not essential vampires, then what is it about humans that causes the zombies to fixate? In nature all things have an explanation, even if we do not currently understand it.
If, on the other hand, zombies will attack any living thing (human or otherwise) can their infection be passed on?
There are endless ways to spin the zombie’s predator compulsion. But there are other psychological issues at hand, such as how humans would bear the knowledge that the dead were rising, that death had been more or less repealed in the ugliest possible way; that our buried loved ones may be rising from the dead (if you go with that version of the mythology rather than the virus); that we might have to confront a zombie who was formerly a loved one, a neighbor, or a friend and shoot them; and so on.
But is there a way to crawl inside the zombie’s head and understand what makes it tick?
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Fearsome Folklore: Essential Vampires
Essential vampires feed on one or more of the following:
Life Force, often called ch’i (Chinese), gi (Korean), or ki (Japanese). This life force is believed to be either electro-chemical, or made from pure energy and flows throughout the body along pathways called meridians that are laid out much like the circulatory system. This energy flow is the basis for healing arts such as acupuncture and acupressure, and it cultivated through various meditative practices, such as yoga.
Breath. Many of the world’s shape-shifting vampires, particularly those that transform into cats, will-o’-the-wisps, or flying insects, land on sleeping humans (usually children) and then drain away the breath leaving a child gasping or dead.
Sexual Essence. Some vampires seduce their victims in order to drain away a man’s potency or a woman’s fertility.
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Expert Witness
A lot of writers have speculated the concept that humans, facing an unbea
rable situation such as their own friends and family coming back from the dead, would not be able to cope with it on a spiritual or psychological level. People would break, their emotions would race out of control and then explode like overworked turbines, their sanity would rupture, and long before the zombies won the war the humans and their fragile minds would lose it.
This is a disturbing concept, and I put it, and some related questions, to my experts on psychology, religion, and philosophy. Their answers may disturb you.
“One of the requirements for sanity,” says therapist Jerry Waxler,1 M.S., “is to develop a set of rules about life that let you predict with some sort of certainty what is normal and what is not. When the rules are broken too severely it can lead to a breakdown. For example, soldiers in Vietnam went in assuming they were protecting their orderly, civilized way of life. Then when they found that to survive, they had to shoot women and children, it created a conflict that drove many of them to the brink. The same is true for zombies. If you discover a loved one, a family member or even spouse wants to eat you—the shock goes far beyond any ethical consideration. Your very definition of what is sane in the world becomes disturbed to the breaking point. At that point, you are casting off from the realm of psychology, and into the realm of prayer. May God have mercy on our souls.”
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Art of the Dead—Doug Schooner
After the Apocalypse
“I would like to see more artists and filmmakers explore the actual mental activity of the ‘zombies.’ What if the person a zombie used to be was actually still alive and conscious within the body, unable to control their actions through the loss of their free will? Trapped within a body they couldn’t control, watching and feeling every aspect of the horror as they continued without rest or chance of redemption. This is the overall concept I tried to convey when painting “After the Apocalypse: Contemplating My Day in Hell.” To be trapped within yourself without free will or control over your own actions. As human beings, we are trapped within our own bodies. We have conscious thought wrapped in a shell that will never “touch” another person or living creature in any aspect other than through the use of our bodies—through verbal and physical actions. Loneliness within yourself. Compound that with the loss of control over your own body (similar to complete paralysis) but while still continuing to have it function without your consent, controlled by something else. This is my concept of true hell. Loss of free will but still having consciousness to experience all the feelings associated with the ‘death.’”
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“There is a point where what happens in the mind and what happens in the soul are part of the same process,” says Kanchana Patel, Ph.D., a consultant with the University of Mumbai. “When we experience a global event such as the Indonesian tsunami we are, as a people, struck to the heart. An event of this kind is too large to allow a purely personal reaction. Our reactions are not only social, but they interact and collide in a panic as everyone else tries to both understand the why of the event and at the same time grasp the simple science of it. It is difficult, in the moment, to step back and say with dispassion that plate tectonics are a fact of life and there is nothing personal in it, just as there is no personal malice, no intent to harm in a volcano or a typhoon, and yet while the winds are blowing or the ash is falling we cling together and scream out ‘Why?’ as if the storm itself will speak an answer. When no answer comes we pray and when prayers do not appear to be answered—at least in any way we can perceive—we despair. Hot lava from a volcano may kill many people by destroying their bodies, but it is despair—that sudden, terrible thought that the universe is out to get them and that no other celestial force is willing or able to intervene. How strange it is that faith of such intensity exists at the moment of death, or in those moments leading up to a sure and certain belief in death; and how sad that this faith is the total certainty that the universe wants to murder them.”
Waxler adds, “While I have never lived through a zombie attack, I have witnessed in my lifetime two national traumas, the assassination of John Kennedy, and the crashing of the World Trade Center on 9/11. In both cases, the national psyche was severely wounded. The collective pain and disruption was far-reaching, and because such severe trauma takes place outside the reach of logic, you can only understand its effects by observing its aftermath. After 9/11 we responded by collectively moving into a defensive stance. Airport security lines, and the two wars we are fighting simultaneously are direct results of 9/11. It’s not quite so easy to understand how JFK’s assassination affected the national psyche. One thing is that, decades later, it still feels like a knife through my heart. And I wonder if some of the craziness of the late sixties was a sort of reaction against the disturbance of the assassination. The loss of an orderly world leads to some strange behavior.”
Nick Ladany, professor of counseling psychology at Lehigh University, takes a slightly different view. “People would adjust more quickly to death and go back to seeing it as more natural, rather than the sterile and removed way death is dealt with currently. In the past, the primary place for children to play was in cemeteries and it was not uncommon for bones to pop up every now and then after a storm. But because death was seen as a natural process, it was not seen as so unusual. Imagine today if a parent was with a child when a bone of a dead person popped up out of the ground.”
Dr. Patel of Mumbai recalls, “My grandmother was in New Delhi the evening that Mahatma Gandhi was murdered by Nathuram Godse. Like many women my grandmother was so convinced that Gandhi would be the one to permanently change things for the better. He was for the liberation of women, for the end to untouchability, for unification of religious and social groups, and for an end to poverty. Could a man have higher aspirations or be more selfless, and yet the Akhil Bhāratīya Hindū Mahāsabhā2 sent assassins to kill him, and they did kill him, using a gun to shoot down a man who would not have raised an arm to block a slap to the face. Grandmother told me that on that night, as news reports came over the radio that Gandhi was dead, that she felt some of herself die, too. She said that Gandhi, as political as he was, had brought a hopeful innocence to the world and now it was dead. I thought about that and then about what you asked me about how we would react if the dead rose to attack the living. Truly, I believe that if the dead rose, if we were at war with our own beloved dead, all innocence would die long before the battle was won by either side. I do not know that, as a people, as a race, we would psychically survive such an event; and if we physically survived it we would be a different people.”
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Art of the Dead—Seth Rose
Strange Immortality
“Immortality is no gift. I can’t think of anything sadder than to just continue to exist.”
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Joyce Kearney, Ph.D., an interfaith pastor and counselor at the Burlington House in New Jersey, says, “I don’t think the issue of killing one’s neighbors—should they become zombies—will do as much psychological or spiritual harm as killing one’s family. Particularly the children. Not only would this cause rips in the fabric of the mind and soul, if the zombie menace were to continue for any length of time then no one would dare to get pregnant. There might be some desperation ‘save me’ kind of sex, but who would want to bring new life into a world where death ruled?”
This view, however, would come about if humanity was believed to be losing the war against the zombies. If the situation was desperate but under some kind of visible control, the deepest levels of panic might not kick in, an opinion to which my experts agreed.
“But if we were seen to be losing that fight things would go terribly wrong, terribly fast. It would destroy our ability to think about the world,” insists Dr. Patel. “Not only would conception fall off, but there would be a rise of what you could call ‘compassionate murder.’ This would not be euthanasia of someone infected by the zombie bite; but murders of healthy children and probably of the elderly, and husbands killing wives and wiv
es killing husbands. Why? Because people would know that to die of a zombie bite would be the practical equivalent of being damned to eternal hell and torment. Mercy killings would seem reasonable to guarantee that their loved ones would never become the living dead. This would, of course, be a catastrophe of incalculable proportions, but worse still would be what would happen if the plague was ended. Imagine surviving such a calamity knowing that you killed your family and that the zombies may never have been able to because the government was getting on top of the situation. You would see yet another round of suicides…so long after the last zombie was destroyed you would still be seeing new deaths.”
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