All Hail the Zombocalypse

By Steve Locke

Photo by Poblin King

A sad, lethargic moan lingers in the darkness as someone, or something, scratches against a pane of glass. The film’s hero tells his leading lady to be calm; he’ll go see what the noise is. He gets to a light switch and flicks it on to reveal…

Zombies.

A group of decayed corpses smash through the window, snarling ravenously. They swarm and lurch upon the man and woman. The last two survivors are done for, twisting and screaming as flesh is torn from their bones and they are utterly rendered to piles of bloody entrails.

The hallway leading up to the room where these two make their last stand is chock full of swaying zombies, all salivating at the sounds of screams and vying for a chunk of fresh human meat. Walking dead traipse around the foyer of the building, as if caught in a daze. They wander the streets, bump into abandoned cars and trip over uneaten corpses at their feet. It’s all over. There aren’t any more survivors. The film credits roll to the slow pulse of a drum and the eerie scratch of violin strings; a hymn to the extinction of the human race.

The zombie apocalypse has arrived.

* * *

Zombie culture has seen a significant resurgence in the past decade, with movies like the Dawn of the Dead remake and 28 Days Later, and their permeation into video games such as Resident Evil and genre revitalizing books like Max Brook’s The Zombie Survival Guide. My heart still skips a beat when I watch zombie flicks, and I feel this emptiness in my gut. It’s an unsettling sensation like after watching news reports from a war zone, when I see images of impoverished people running from tanks, or the charred remains of a helicopter crash victim, or kids with missing limbs.

But I don’t get that feeling when I watch classic monsters like the werewolf of the mummy. The closest it gets is when Dracula spews out those cheesy and oh-so-subtle lines to his buxom victims right before he chomps on her neck: “I’m so glad you came over for… dinner.” It seems like people are forgetting about those original monsters; they’ve been immersed in popular culture for the better part of film’s history, where zombies have only been gaining momentum since the 1960’s. Dracula has appeared in more films than any other fictional character, ever. The desire for stories about misunderstood freaks of nature, suave bloodsuckers and fish-men has long been satisfied. It’s a new century, calling for a new kind of monster. So why do zombies stick out?

* * *

There have been many incarnations of our flesh-loving friends. Before the George A. Romero-inspired zombies in Night of the Living Dead became everyone’s favourite, there had been a history of the zombie mythology in our culture. Romero’s zombies say much about the human condition in our modern world, but what about those that date back to prehistoric folklore?

Take the Sumerian poem Epic of Gilgamesh, where the concept of the undead preying on the living first showed its gruesome face in the words of the goddess Ishtar:

“I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld,
I will smash the door posts, and leave the doors flat down,
And will let the dead go up to eat the living!
And the dead will outnumber the living!”
(Tablet 6, translation from Symbiosis Magazine, March 2004)

Superior numbers almost always will guarantee a win battles. Consider the number of dead souls wandering around in the underworld, accumulating exponentially over the ages. It’s safe to say that if the dead were all brought back to the land of the living, they would certainly overpower the armies of the greatest empires without a hitch, and come out of it with even more undead soldiers to add to their ranks. It’s one thing for a human to take a spear in the chest and stay down, but it’s another when that soldier gets right back up to continue the slaughter. In the event of a zombie-horde attack, the confidence in one’s army could diminish in a matter of moments. Just imagine what a soul crushing thing it would be to witness the fall of a whole city that is unable to offer any resistance. It would be utter chaos; there’d be nowhere to hide.

There are religious connotations to these early zombie stories as well. Take “The History of Gherib and His Brother Agib” for example, a story from the medieval Arabic collection One Thousand and One Nights. Here, Prince Gherib fights off a family of zombies, enslaves them and converts them to Islam. The story shows us that zombies are something wholly unnatural and that no matter what age one lives in, when something dies, it better damn well stay dead.

Reanimated corpses don’t exist in the realm of storytelling without the influence of a higher power, where someone has stumbled upon the secret to “eternal life” to bring the dead back to life. The Creole word “Zombi” first appears in the 1797 publication of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Description topographique et politique de la partie de l’isle Saint-Dominigue, a formidable guide to the culture and beliefs of the people of the island known today as Haiti. Translated to the French word revenant, “Zombi” describes a person who returns from the dead. This common Haitian notion may have originated from shoreline communities where slaves buried their deceased and floods caused the bodies to return to the surface. Aside from this particularly gruesome fact, they believed in sorcerers called bokors – the voodoo precursor to the mad scientist – who claimed to have influence over the dead, to the extent that they could control and capture spirits to increase the sorcerer’s power.

The next most influential account in literature is the story of our pal Frankenstein, written by the young (and morbid) Mary Shelley in 1818. Frankenstein is not considered a zombie because of his capacity to think and feel, though it’s from this source that many 20th century notions of zombies were developed, particularly the idea that zombies are created through a scientific process. What’s more, the fire-fearing lug influenced the zombie evolution in how modern conceptions of returning dead are depicted as vengeful.

Frankenstein, as well as modern zombies, might be figure heads for Mother Nature, who is trying to tell us not to mess with her lest we feel her wrath. This concept is echoed in the 1902 short story, The Monkey’s Paw, by English author W. W. Jacobs. Here, a man who is taking the death of his son rather hard comes across a mystified monkey’s paw, which has the ability to grant him wishes. When he wishes for his son to return to him and his bereaved wife, he does so in a decayed form. The final wish is for the son to return to his resting place, and that’s where the story ends. Nothing like seeing your son as a zombie to give you some closure, eh?

Both Frankenstein and The Monkey’s Paw are heartbreaking stories on their own, but they both echo a person’s desire to overcome death. It’s a terrible thing to have to deal with the passing of a friend or loved one, to know that you’ll never see them again, and to be reminded that one day you’ll see your body fail you and finally give out too. It’s long been said that death is what makes life worth living; we’ve got to balance rushing through our days while we try to make something out of ourselves, and also, taking the time to appreciate all that we have. It’s a tough gig, being alive.

* * *

It wasn’t until the 20th century where we received some of the strongest influences on our modern North American conceptions, beginning with the master of the macabre: H.P. Lovecraft. He wrote several stories that featured the undead theme, including In the Vault, where we were given the first instance of someone being bitten by a zombie. Though these stories are of note, it was Lovecraft’s Frankenstein-inspired story in 1921, Herbert West – Reanimator, that helped define zombies as we know them in today’s popular culture. George A. Romero borrowed Lovecraft’s ideas of the dead rising due to a science project gone wrong, and of the undead being animalistic and uncompromisingly violent. I guess you can’t come back from the dead with all of your marbles; there has to be a catch.

Almost forty years before Night of the Living Dead hit the silver screen, White Zombie made its theatrical debut in 1932. It’s considered to be the first zombie movie, which has long since spawned a cult following and has even become the name for a 90’s era alt-metal band. The voodoo-inspired zombies of this film influenced black and white horror flicks throughout the course of the next few decades. But it wasn’t until 1936, when the adaptation of H.G. Wells’ Things to Come was released, that we first witnessed the zombie apocalypse as a result of a plague. I can imagine another light bulb in Romero’s head flicking on.

We’ve got just about all the components to the Romero archetype, but there’s one ingredient missing to this zombie soup, and that’s Richard Matheson’s book, I Am Legend, published in 1954. Romero, in a retrospective interview with Cinegothique Online about Night of the Living Dead, credited Matheson by saying:

“[My script] grew out of a short story I had written, which was basically a rip-off of the Richard Matheson novel… I used zombies instead of vampires; I always thought that zombies were a sort of blue collar, working class monsters that might show up in anybody’s backyard. I also felt that, rather than opening with a fait accompli, it might be more interesting to observe the world during its collapse…I ripped off the siege and the central idea, which I thought was so powerful—that this particular plague involved the entire planet.”

H.G. Wells’ Things to Come, Matheson’s I Am Legend and Romero’s movies all share the threat that is familiar to those who grew up during the Cold War, when either Russia or the United States could have wiped out humanity in one swift and painfully simple action. This is the era when Romero saw his rise to fame, where he used the zombie apocalypse as a way to criticize society’s decay in the face of Vietnam-era politics, bioengineering, slavery and exploitation.

What these stories become, then, are tales of loss and survival. The many facets of common life — public transportation, communication, medical facilities and armed defence — are washed away in a mass panic. We would be reduced to scavengers and as a result, all of our proud civility would go out the window. I’d bet anyone would punch a man in the face to steal his last can of peas if they were hungry enough in such a scenario. What’s more, we’d become the bottom of the food chain. We’d live each day with the scraps we’d find, running from monsters until one day they catch us and we’d go to a gruesome death, kicking and screaming into the dark.

Max Brooks, cult hero and author of The Zombie Survival Guide would agree with me: “Other monsters may threaten individual humans, but the living dead threaten the entire human race… Zombies are slate wipers.”

How’s that for a scary scenario? It was enough to provide Romero fodder for his sequels, from Dawn of the Dead to Diary of the Dead, which revisits the early days of a zombie apocalypse. All his films have been successes thanks to what James B. Twitchell, author of Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror, calls the “hybrid vigour of a ghoulish plague monster.”

* * *

This plague monster is, to me, the most frightening out of all the Hollywood regulars at the late night drive in. It embodies sickness, which is a common fear in modern times, what with the rise of HIV and AIDS to pandemic levels, and the ever familiar fight against cancer. With each of these illnesses, a minute number of cells are all it takes to ruin the human body. People seem to be more wary of germs these days, with the proliferation of hand sanitizers and the tendency of individuals in some cultures to wear surgeon’s masks when out in public. 2003’s 28 Days Later, as well as its sequel, were perhaps the two films which preyed on our fear of sickness the most, where one drop of infected blood was able to transform a loving father into a ravenous beast set on devouring his daughter.

Zombies bear a close resemblance to vampires in how vampirism and the zombie plague are both afflictions that transform human physiology. In the case of the vampire, the person is essentially the same psychologically, with some physical enhancements like strength and reflexes, and some setbacks like a deathly aversion to sunlight. The blood lust might reflect the capacity for a person to be addicted to a particular substance, but the Romero zombie goes far beyond these depths of human depravity. To me, zombies are those who have been completely stripped of their humanity. They are less than animals; they have no sense of will besides their primal urge to cannibalize their fellow man, or sense of self. They are essentially mindless slaves without the sense to ask themselves if eating people is wrong.

Zombies are us. I could become one, and so could you or any of your friends or family members. Someone you loved your whole life, who looked upon you with adoration could suddenly turn on you and see you as dinner. And there would be no compromise, no rationalizing with them. You’d have to kill them or be killed, never mind that they were once thinking, feeling individuals. It’s easy to feel pity for plague victims when you imagine who they might have been before they were bitten: someone with a job and a dog and maybe a boyfriend or girlfriend, but are now slowly rotting, with a truly inhuman affliction.

No wonder I get an empty feeling in my gut after watching zombie movies, because the scenarios they present could actually happen. There are some bacterial strains that have mutated and are now resistant to medicine, which could one day become a plague that outwits the best medical minds and leaves society and the human race in shambles. We’ve seen the leaders of the free world act irresponsibly, particularly in terms of the Iraq war, at great cost of people’s lives. Scientists continue to mess with the laws of nature, and it’s no secret that there are nukes all over the place, just waiting for someone to push the big red button.

Who knows? Someday it might be all over for the human race: our cities in ruin, our land laid to waste. And as the last struggling person is dragged into a moaning darkness, there’ll be no one left alive to hear their screams of terror, no one to hear Mother Nature whisper: “Don’t say you didn’t deserve it.”