This new horror prototype became instantly successful, and this little indie flick raked in 30 million worldwide. Thirty million may sound like chump change considering the amounts pulled in by modern summer blockbusters, but when you consider that it made back its production costs 214 times over you can see why even the jaded film moguls started paying attention. Since 1968 there have been hundreds of zombie films, both big budget and total backyard camcorder junk. Even the junk is popular (and some of it is good).
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Brian Keene on the Zombie Effect
“Zombies are the new vampires. You know what I’m talking about. Remember, just a few short years ago, when you could stand in the horror section of your favorite bookstore, close your eyes, and your finger would land on a vampire novel? Well, there are still vampires—but their numbers seem to be dwindling under this new zombie epidemic. Zombies have invaded pop-culture; everywhere from episodes of Aqua Teen Hunger Force to a clothing line at Hot Topic. It has been suggested to me that some of this is my fault. You’re welcome.”
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In his nonfiction book on the horror culture, Danse Macabre,11 Stephen King suggests that zombies have become a new horror paradigm, as complete and valid as vampires, ghosts, demons, and the rest. Fantasy author C. J. Henderson, who has penned a number of zombie short stories, agrees: “In his last film, Romero moved the zombie to the same status of any other monster icon. In Land of the Dead, he completely reverses the audience’s sympathy. Let’s face it—it’s the first zombie film ever where the audience rooted for the zombies to kick everyone’s ass. Look at the story—poor zombies just want to go through the motions of being human. Not good enough for the rich—they have to descend from their ivory towers and steal and disrupt the wretched zombies’ way of life because, as usual, the rich are parasites who always victimize those less financially fortunate rather than put their wealth to good use. Screw ’em, said the audience. Let’s face it, we all wanted Dennis Hopper dead in that film, the same way we want to see these scum-sucking CEOs who feel they’re perfectly justified in stealing the retirement programs of their employees because the billion-freaking dollars they already have salted away for their retirement just doesn’t look big enough.”
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Zombie Films You Never Heard Of (but Need to See)—Part 1
Battlefield Baseball (Jigoku Koshien) Japanese director Yudai Yamiguchi’s 2003 madcap baseball and zombie romp. Over the top and hilarious.
Bio Cops (Sheng Hua Te Jing Zhi Sand Shi Ren Wu). This superior sequel to Bio-Zombie (1998) features slapstick humor that foreshadows some of the stunts in Shaun of the Dead.
Blue Sunshine. A weird little mix of hippies, social consciousness, politics, conspiracy theories, and the living dead. Released in 1976.
Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town. A 1989 Troma Studios mishmash of entertaining weirdness featuring a guest appearance by a then-unknown Billy Bob Thornton.
Come Get Some! Released in 2003, this zombie comedy is better than most and surprisingly entertaining. Worth a look.
Dead & Breakfast. A 2004 zom com so funny it’ll make you pop your autopsy stitches.
Graveyard Alive: A Zombie Nurse in Love (2003). You have to give this points just for being a feminist zombie film. And it’s pretty good, too.
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21ST-CENTURY ZOMBIE MOJO
The popularity of the genre has waxed and waned, and for a while the unquiet dead seemed to have settled back down for their eternal rest. Vampires became trendy again, and the day of the dead seemed to be over, or at least to have peaked in terms of cinematic potential. In fact, a few years ago if someone told me that a zombie novel would hit the hardback best-seller list and that Brad Pitt would make a movie based on it, I’d have either laughed or thought it was a sign of the apocalypse.
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Zombie Clothes
Zombie T-shirts by J. N. Rowan
Zombie T-shirts are enormously popular, thanks to conventions, movie marathons, zombie walks and crawls, and all-night keg parties. Among my favorites are these from J. N. Rowan’s collection.
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Turns out, however, Brad is making a big-budget zombie flick based on the best-selling World War Z by Max Brooks (son of Mel). So, yeah, sign of the apocalypse.
Zombies are back…and zombies are hot; and even though the “z” word may not have been consistently on everyone’s personal radar, a vast pop culture movement has been out there, growing steadily and growing in all sorts of unexpected directions. Not just in feature films, but in fiction, role-playing and video games, TV, direct-to-video movies, comics, toys, music, and art.
Zombie films have made a huge comeback. Shaun of the Dead showed that flesh-eating ghoul movies make good date flicks.12 Dawn of the Dead was remade with quality actors—Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames—and did very well at the box office. The king of the undead himself, George Romero, has returned to making new undead films like Land of the Dead (2005) and Diary of the Dead (2008). The video game Resident Evil13 has been translated successfully into novels and big-budget, highly successful movies. Zombie-esque thrillers like 28 Days Later and its sequel 28 Weeks Later have been international hits, winning critical acclaim as well as audience praise. All three of his original films, Night, Dawn, and Day have been given bigger budget remakes. New zombie flicks are being hustled through development. Zombies have risen from the dead, and this time nothing seems to be knocking them down again.
UNDERSTANDING THE ZOMBIE THREAT
So what makes a good zombie story?
For the most part, the zombie stories in film and fiction follow a basic pattern:
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Raw Footage—Why We Love Zombies
“Zombie movies are horrific on every level—they bring up the fear of the paranoid (having the ones you love turn up against you), they bring up our fears of carnivores (being eaten), and they bring up our fear of disease (becoming a zombie ourselves). There’s no other movie monster that works on so many levels of the mammalian psyche. We’re hardwired evolutionarily to be scared green of zombies.”—James Gunn, Screenwriter for the 2005 remake of Dawn of the Dead14
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Something happens (radiation, plague, etc.) that causes the recently dead to rise.
The risen dead have little or no intelligence and operate on a kind of reduced sub-animal instinct. This instinct drives them to attack living humans.
The dead murder humans and consume their flesh.
In the face of this plague of zombies, civilization quickly crumbles.
A few remaining humans hole up in a (fill in the blank: deserted farmhouse, shopping mall, underground complex, etc.).
The humans bicker, and ultimately one or more of them is responsible for the dead breaking in and chomping on the last survivors.
Often at least one good-looking man and woman escape, but the future of the race as a whole (sex appeal notwithstanding) looks pretty grim.
Welcome to the zombie apocalypse.
But is that how it would actually happen? Let’s revisit what we talked about in the Introduction:
If, for whatever reason, the dead did return to a semblance of life and begin attacking the living, would society immediately and irrevocably come apart at the seams?
Would all the infrastructure fail its citizenry?
Would medical science be unable to find a cure in time?
Would the police and military truly be overwhelmed?
Personally, I don’t think so. And I like apocalyptic fiction.
Having worked at various times in my career with law enforcement, the medical field, and in the sciences, I have a fair amount of faith that the technology, organization, process, and courage of the system would be up to the task.
In World War Z, the author takes the middle view on the issue. He holds that the zombies would overwhelm mankind, largely due to the inefficiencies of the global political system and basic human greed and stupidity. However he further postulates that hum
anity, pushed to the edge of extinction, would find a way to work together and fight its way back from the brink to win the zombie war.
Romero, the godfather of the subculture, takes a far dimmer view. In Night of the Living Dead the ghouls are ultimately (it seems) defeated, even though it’s at a dreadfully high cost in human terms; but in his 1978 sequel, Dawn of the Dead15, he predicts that the plague will continue to spread and more aspects of society will break down. By 1985’s Day of the Dead, Romero predicted a total societal collapse. However, when he picked up the series again in 2005 with Land of the Dead, he seems to have either softened a bit in his dim view of civilization—because in that more whole cities have survived16—or taken a bigger picture view and granted that not everyone on earth would turn out to be a gutless, backstabbing jackass or a failed hero. In that film both the humans and the zombies seem to be evolving to a higher level, though truth be told more of the zombies display admirable qualities (ranging from basic problem solving to genuine remorse for a fallen comrade) than do the humans. A few good guys manage to escape in the end; but few enough to suggest that Romero hasn’t exactly gone all fuzzy-bunny on us. He’s still the ruling monarch of dystopia.
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Art of the Dead—Frank Dietz
The Living Dead
“Night of the Living Dead is iconic, a truly landmark film. There have been better zombie films made, but there will never be a more important or influential one.”
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ZOMBIE CSU
So, now that we know the basic nature of the beast, let’s go deeper into the science to understand the why of zombies, and the how of stopping them. In each of the following chapters we’ll get into the nuts and bolts of how forensics, science, law enforcement, and the law operate. Each chapter is broken into:
Just the Facts: These sections present the hard science from the real world, and here we’ll explore the different aspects of forensics (fingerprinting, blood spatter, gunshot residue, etc.); learn how modern police operate; probe the intricacies of medical science; discuss guns and ammo; report on how the press covers a story; and take a hard look at the law.
Expert Witness: This is where the experts speak out about their fields of study and their insights. I have a great collection of world-class experts in every field related to crime and punishment.
The Zombie Factor: And here we ask my experts to play “what if” and apply their years of experience and insights into how science and the law would react and respond to a zombie uprising.
The Final Verdict: A brief recap of the facts, evidence, and decision based on what they have told us.
Buckle up…it’s about to get a little weird.
The Murder Book
Investigating an Alleged Zombie Attack
Confronting the Undead by Kevin Breaux
In police parlance a “Murder Book” is a three-ring binder in which all the pertinent facts of a case are kept. This book, also called a case file, includes autopsy and forensic reports, crime scene photographs and sketches, transcripts of investigators’ notes, and logs of witness interviews. The Murder Book starts as soon as police begin investigating a homicide and concludes with the arrest of a suspect.
Let’s start building our Zombie Murder Book together…
JUST THE FACTS
The Scene of the Crime
To understand how police handle a crime, we’ll use the following scenario, which will help us set time, place, and other details necessary to create a platform on which the police will build their case. For the most part, and especially in the early stages, the police procedures will be the same for any kind of serious crime (even those that don’t involve the living dead).
Zombie Attack Scenario
Time: Early evening on a weeknight.
Location: A medical research center in the suburbs of a large city. A two-lane blacktop road runs past the truck delivery gate of the research center. The research center has a chain-link fence, an electric gate, and a small guardhouse. The lot is big, with delivery trucks of various sizes parked and locked. The building is locked and dark, closed for the evening. Several light poles cast some light, but large portions of the parking lot are in shadows.
Traffic on the road is infrequent.
Witness: Sheila Wilson, 49, a new accounts manager for a local branch of a regional banking chain. Ms. Wilson drives a 2006 Ford Explorer and receives a cell phone call from a realtor. She pulls to the side of the road opposite the research center fence in order to write down some information. She hears something that sounds like firecrackers and then turns to witness what she believes is a violent attack inside the fence. One man falls, and a second staggers off, apparently injured, crosses the road, and vanishes into the woods across from the research center. Ms. Wilson disconnects her call and dials 911.
JUST THE FACTS
The 911 Call
The transcript that follows is from a 911 call received by Romero Township Emergency Services at 7:16 A.M. on Wednesday in late August.
DISPATCHER: 911, state your emergency.
CALLER: Oh my God, I just saw this man come out of nowhere and attack someone. He looks like he’s hurt. I think he’s dead. God! Please hurry. Okay? This man just came out of nowhere and attacked him!
DISPATCHER: Slow down, ma’am. Tell me your location.
CALLER: I was just driving home—
DISPATCHER: What town are you in?
CALLER: Um…Hinzman, I think.
DISPATCHER: Are you in Romero Township?
CALLER: Yes. In Hinzman. On Argento Road, near Liberty Street. You need to (inaudible).
DISPATCHER: Is this a private residence?
CALLER: No, it’s that big research center on Argento Road. The one by the canal.
DISPATCHER: Can you see a sign?
CALLER: Um…yes, Martin Medical Research.
DISPATCHER: Please remain calm, I have police and an ambulance already on the way.
CALLER: Hurry, please! He had a gun—
DISPATCHER: Tell me what happened. Has anyone harmed you?
CALLER: No, not me—the guard. I think I heard a shot? Maybe a couple of them. And then this man came staggering across the—
DISPATCHER: I need you to try and calm down, ma’am. I need you to tell me what happened.
CALLER: He’s just lying there on the ground. I really think he’s dead. Or (inaudible).
DISPATCHER: I didn’t hear what you said. Your cell phone’s cutting out.
CALLER: The guard’s just lying there. I can see a lot of blood. I can’t tell if he was shot. Oh my god! What should I do?
DISPATCHER: Ma’am, are you hurt?
CALLER: No, I just pulled over to make a cell call and I saw—
DISPATCHER: Are you in any immediate danger?
CALLER: No, I’m still in my car.
DISPATCHER: Did you see a gun? Did you see anyone fire a gun?
CALLER: N-no…but I heard some sounds. Like pops. It didn’t sound like a gun, not like on TV.
DISPATCHER: Do you see the person who attacked him?
CALLER: No…he ran away.
DISPATCHER: He’s not anywhere around your vehicle?
CALLER: No…I don’t think so. He went the other way. Into the woods. Is the ambulance coming?
DISPATCHER: Can you tell me what he looked like? Was he white or black—
CALLER: Um, he was white. Really pale, with dark hair. Short hair.
DISPATCHER: What was he wearing?
CALLER: I don’t know. Maybe a T-shirt and light pants. Like doctor’s pants. Scrubs, like that. He was barefoot, too.
DISPATCHER: Was he alone? Was there anyone else?
CALLER: No, he was alone…just him and the guard. That poor man—
DISPATCHER: Ma’am, is the assailant anywhere in sight?
CALLER: No…he went across the street into the woods. I can’t see him at all. I think he ran away.
DISPATCHER: Ma’am I want you to get out of your car and go over
to the guard. Can you do that for me?