Zombies.

Yeah. Zombies.


Anyone who’s known me for more than an hour probably understands that I have a little peculiarity of personality that causes me to have a deep and abiding affection for the darker, more shadowy aspects of life. I love Halloween, and horror novels and movies. I love sideshows and freak shows and creaky run-down old carnivals, the kind you don’t ever see unless you live out in rural areas (and awfully rarely even then). To me, old cemeteries are fascinating, beautiful places. For the love of hell, I’m fascinated by thanatology.

You get the picture, I’m sure.

So it may come as a surprise that despite all this affection for these morbid preoccupations that I’m not really a zombie fan. Okay. I’m just not a fan. This is irksome because zombies are everywhere these days. There are more zombie films than I can name given a half an hour dedicated to doing nothing but, there are zombie flash mob events held all over the world, numerous video games (‘Left for Dead’ anyone?) and zombie toy sets.

I can’t watch zombie movies without getting an inner twitch, even if the movie is actually pretty good. The best way to sum it up is by recounting a conversation I had with my friend Delia several years ago. While I can’t recall the film we were actually discussing (‘Shaun of the Dead’ perhaps?) I admitted that zombies bugged me.

“You’re not scared of them or something stupid like that are you?” she asked me, a snigger in her voice.

“Nope,” I told her. “I just don’t buy it.”

“What?!” she asked. After a few beats of silence she burst out laughing; the opportunity to give me hell about something is always just too appealing, a favorite pastime even. “Now, you do know they are just movies, right?” The cheerful mockery dripped through the phone and stuck to my ear. Peals of laughter pelted me through the receiver.

Of course I know they’re just movies. The movies don’t scare me. (Precious little does, actually.) I’m not even terribly bothered by the traditional idea of zombies (folkloric Caribbean, et al). The movie or book or what have you may be interesting or even quite entertaining, but I’m never able to suspend my disbelief enough to really get into it. That’s what stops me.

Now, I am quite a skeptical person by nature – the list of things I don’t “believe” is a damn sight longer than the list of things I do. But even so, I can rationalize my way around most things.

Ghosts? Well, energy itself cannot specifically be destroyed, so the human energy that makes us us, has to go somewhere, to shift into some other form, so I can stretch around that corner a bit. Vampires? Well, they’re just a representative Freudian archetype for the human tendency to victimize one another through various forms of subjugation. Werewolves? The beast within, our feral selves. Freaks or the deformed? Our fear of the "other," the perverse, the thing we’re horrified that we may actually be but are as yet unaware of. Haunted houses…? Again – I think you get my meaning, so I won’t belabor the point.

But zombies? Give me a f**king break. Having spent way too much time studying death and the dead in one form or another, my mind refuses to relax when it comes to the notion of zombies. (Honestly – short of sticking my hands into a cadaver I’ve studied an amount of putridity that most consider quite disturbing, considering the fact it’s not even my vocation.)

I mean – think about it. When you consider what happens to the human body upon the cessation of life, and when you have even a rudimentary understanding of that series of biological processes, it becomes impossible to even imagine that such an astonishing phenomena as the walking, moaning, hungry dead is remotely feasible.

The muscle tissue is deteriorating and lots of little bacteriological shimmies are forcing decay, rendering muscle tissue inert – no working muscle, no movement kids. And, by definition, one of the things that determines the end of life is the cessation of all electrical activity to the brain and therefore through the nervous system. No neurological impulses, no compulsion to munch a brain, right?

But let me get all obnoxious and keep going – remember our old friend rigor mortis? You know, the last stiffie? From a quick Wiki: “Immediately following death the body is flaccid. It becomes increasingly rigid over time due to lack of ATP [Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP)-energy source produced in respiration in mitochondria of cells] and buildup of lactic acid. This process happens in stages over the first thirty six hours post mortem.” Long story short, this is the process that ensures that muscular tissue will shortly be absolutely useless, and in the process the ligaments and tendons attached thereto will lose their functionality as well.

It just won’t work. Dead flesh is dead flesh, the end. Seriously. So how the hell can old Uncle Ebenezer, buried some decades or what have you earlier, come jangling toward you with a yen for fresh grey matter, huh? Okay. Maybe he’s been under for too long. What about the freshly dead, say a la George Romero’s masterpiece “Night of the Living Dead”? (I admit to its mastery for it atmospheric quality and its unusual cinematic construction, thanks.) Maybe there’s still some sort of latent charge, like the batteries in that old flashlight under the sink that no one has touched for years?

Nah. That series of processes involved post-mortem are too biologically overwhelming for there to be any physical activity. So forget it. Zombies are horseshit, and as much as I want to drop the internal dissection (pun very much intended) and just enjoy a good gut jumper, I just can’t do it.

So. I actually take the time to explain all this to Delia. By the time I’m finished I’m not altogether certain she’s heard a word, she’s laughing so hard. I’ll be damned but the woman is actually gasping for breath.

I wait it out. This is something I’m used to. Once Delia gets started laughing at something, you just have to let it go, man, because, trying to stem its flow will only make it worse. And she is my best friend, after all, so I don’t want to kill her just to test my anti-zombie hypothesis.

“Heeee… heeee… heeeeeeeeeeaaaaahhhh!” My eardrum is bleeding, but I think she’s winding down. “Who in the f**k actually thinks like that?” she wails between gasps. “It’s a movie! Dork!”

I have to laugh myself and agree with her. It is pretty damned weird that I actually spend the mental energy on such a thing when I should be enjoying the absurd beauty of watching some pasty white limeys whack skulls to the tune of Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” (because honestly – that was tremendous). She’s right. Who the f**k does think like that?

Evidently I do. And I just don’t get why other people don’t.

But then I consider my brother in law, Chris. Chris has a rather odd preoccupation with the idea of zombies. When I say preoccupation, I mean latent obsession. Every window and every door to every enclosed space that he could potentially occupy is locked tight, even when the mundane threat of a regular old break in is at its smallest. This includes holiday gathering of ten to fifteen people in broad daylight. You’re screwed if you walk outside for a smoke and Chris happens to pass the door after you’ve gone out. You’d better hope it’s not cold!

This behavior makes him seem kind of twitchy and paranoid. I can sort of see it, but… come on man, relax. I don’t think it’s personal or home security that motivates this unease either. I’ve actually heard tell from other family members hat he’s made multiple references to the inevitable “zombie invasion.” The dude is serious.

While I haven’t personally had this conversation with him I really get the idea that he has a genuine concern, nay – terror - of a sudden swarming of mindless hordes, all coming his direction with gaping maws and stupid opaque gazes. It’s the sort of thing that kind of makes me want to cover myself in oatmeal and strawberry syrup and wander underneath his window at night just to see what sort of response I get. I’d do it if I wasn’t half-convinced I’d end up summarily decapitated. I’m funny that way.

But anyway, Chris and his “zombie thing” and Delia and her mocking laughter and all the movies and books and this and that made me think. There’s something to this.

I don’t know if you recall how, in the Seventies, there was a spate of interest in demonic possession after the release of “The Exorcist” that was almost frenzied. The release of “The Omen” compounded the issue; even if you managed to exorcise one batch of demons the Devil Himself was off procreating and preparing to wreak havoc on humanity. Cases of “actual” demonic possession sprang up all over the country.

It kept going into the Eighties. I remember Coach Dallas actually warning we poor mushy and impressionable minds about the threat of backward masking in rock music and subliminal images - in class. I remember Detective Lee Reed of the Abilene Police Department coming to Eastland to give an informative lecture for parents, so that they would be aware of the warning signs of Satanic activity and protect your children. Watch out for Ozzy Osborne! Beware of Judas Priest! And never forget – your neighbor may be a cult member!

[I actually interviewed Det. Reed a number of times years later on another loosely related but similarly absurd topic, and his fervor on the subject of occult influences had not waned one iota. I have never met a man so serious about the need to protect the unassuming and soft-minded from the ever-increasing powers of evil. This guy made Fox Mulder look like a skeptic of Dawkinsian proportion. This is a great story, but one for another time.]

Then, in the Nineties, there (to my personal observances) emerged a sort of tug-of-war between the sacred and profane that was suddenly, well, rather clinical. The religious right was emerging with a not unimpressive force in the wake of the Reagan Era, but there was suddenly very vocal opposition in the form of the New Secularists. There was a lot of back and forth in the media about who was right and who was wrong, who was damned and who was a gullible fool that has yet to wane this day. And this is where I get back to the zombies.

I think the thing that troubles Chris, and the thing that has crept into the popular, cultural subconscious has little to do with the lumbering crackers-open of craniums. If you ask me it’s everything to do with a nebulous concept of overall societal safety. Make a note – most of the cultures that are currently enjoying the zombie genre the most are the Western cultures. I’m talking about North America, the U. K, and much of Europe. The cultures of affluence that are suddenly faced with the reality of class and racial disparities that they’ve really, really tried to ignore for generations.

The same cultures whose educational expectations have dropped but whose media consumption has increased in almost perfectly proportional levels. The cultures in which we’ve managed to kill off the old gods and replace them with much larger, shinier, perfectly packaged varieties – versions much more in harmony with what we crave or are comfortable with. Brand new, brand name, easily assimilable and ready for consumption.

Basically, we’re either thinking less or someone else is doing the thinking for us. And for those with a little more finely tuned radar, the problem with this is obvious. Those who don’t think for themselves, or are easily led and manipulated, particularly in large groups, are bloody dangerous. Yet there’s something that’s even more dangerous, if you ask me, and that’s when one of those large and easily led/misled/manipulated groups gets its teeth into a little truth or fact.

Not a lot. A little. Just enough to start moving the herd in a potentially beneficial arc… but not enough to keep the trajectory on the right path. The perverse genesis of a great big, homogenous mind, set on one cause, belief, or crusade, all but dead to reason and dialogue, lumbering steadily toward the smaller, still living (thinking) organism. That’s when all hell will break loose. Perhaps it will manifest like an infection of the group mind or an immunization against an evil - perhaps literally, perhaps figuratively. No one will know until the outbreak begins. Either way, the disease will spread like the Black Death, creating a new Dark Age, or the “cure” will be mandated at once to protect us from ourselves, initiating a forced “enlightenment.” Either way, it’s not like we’ll have any choice in the matter.

Oh hell.

I’ve gone and done it again. I sat here and got to thinking and ruined another perfectly good movie with way too much analysis. I guess that what it comes down to for me is that, while I enjoy a good diversion as much as the next guy, I do have to keep wondering: are they serious with this shit? And, while I keep my eye on the mental midgets behind the curtain, I should also realize that they shouldn’t worry me too damned much. Delia has a point and Chris has a point and I’m stuck right in the middle.

I’m the dork that actually thinks like that. Still, don’t think that there’s not a small but growing stockpile of provisions down in the garage…


Recommended reading:
Stiff by Mary Roach
Danse Macabre by Stephen King




Copyright L. E. C., 2009, All Rights Reserved.