Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies
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Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974)
DOCTOR:
Are you hurt?
GEORGE:
No, but it tried its hardest. What the hell’s wrong with it?
DOCTOR:
We don’t know. It’s the third one born since yesterday with an incredible aggressiveness, almost homicidal in its intensity.
(3) BIOLOGICAL INFECTION
The modern zombie is biological in nature, not supernatural or magical. This unique characteristic allows it to be studied from a scientific perspective and is also an essential element in our understanding of how the condition of being a zombie occurs. The prevailing theory is that the zombie state is transmitted by an infectious contagion that readily spreads to new hosts. We call it the coming zombie pandemic.
KNOW YOUR ZOMBIES: BILL HINZMAN
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Known as the Cemetery Zombie, actor Bill Hinzman played the first-ever modern zombie to appear anywhere when he lurched on the screen in the opening moments of Night of the Living Dead. As part of George Romero’s core production team on that film, his name will forever be linked to the iconic monster he helped bring to life.
Hinzman worked behind the camera with Romero on future projects before writing, directing, and starring in a lackluster rip-off of Night called FleshEater in 1988.
ILLUSTRATION BY JOSH TAYLOR
2: VOODOO ZOMBIES
Romero didn’t think the flesh eaters he created were zombies because prior to Night of the Living Dead the world only knew zombies to be soulless slaves of the Haitian voodoo tradition, magically brought back from the dead to do the bidding of their masters, usually as menial labor. In fact, other than their shared name, there is no connection between the voodoo zombie and the modern zombie.
Unlike actual corpses rising from the grave, voodoo zombies are induced through a mixture of drugs, religious ritual, cultural belief, and spiritual possession. After being put into a trancelike state that approximates a coma, victims awaken and are told that their souls have been taken from their bodies. Then, to keep them under control, they are regularly fed the hallucinogenic drug datura, also known as the “zombie cucumber.”
Wade Davis is a world-renowned anthropologist best known for his 1985 book The Serpent and the Rainbow, which explores the zombie traditions of Haitian voodoo. The book was made into a movie of the same name in 1988 that took great liberties with the original text. Saying that Davis hated the adaptation is an understatement. He’s gone as far as to declare it to be the worst movie ever made in the history of Hollywood. Davis isn’t right about that. Serpent isn’t even the worst movie of 1988. If you have any doubts, pick up a copy of Mac and Me, a shameless knockoff of E.T. featuring an extended dance montage in a McDonald’s parking lot.
I can’t help but feel a little sorry for Wade Davis, because he, like George Romero, understands that the flesh eaters of Night of the Living Dead should never have been called zombies in the first place:
The zombies in movies like Night of the Living Dead have no connection at all to the zombie of Haiti. It is not a correct or fair use of that word.3
Davis knows what he’s talking about. He earned a PhD from Harvard, was the 2009 recipient of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s Gold Medal, and has been a featured speaker at the TED Conference, where geniuses and world leaders go to shape the future of our planet. At the same time, he’s spent the last thirty years explaining that voodoo zombies don’t want to eat your brains. It’s got to be a little frustrating.
But Davis has an unassailable point. From a dramatic standpoint, there is no connection between the voodoo zombie and the modern zombie. From a factual, anthropological, religious, or historic standpoint, there is no connection between the voodoo zombie and the modern zombie. It’s as misguided as asserting that the protective cup that athletes stuff in their jocks when playing contact sports is closely related to a coffee cup because they share the same name. And then using that as justification to include the athletic cup in an academic study of the history of the Peruvian coffee bean.
AT THE MOVIES
In the 1960s, zombies were not on the popular-culture radar. Two notable books were published about Hollywood film monsters that decade, and neither even mentioned zombies. A Pictorial History of Hollywood Film Monsters and Master Movie Monsters feature mummies, vampires, aliens, werewolves, and even mad scientists, but zombies don’t get a single word of coverage. Zombies were omitted not because they weren’t getting the respect they deserved but, rather, because Night of the Living Dead hadn’t yet been made.
Haitian zombies were known in anthropological circles, but they certainly weren’t considered a bankable film subgenre. The few voodoo zombies on-screen in the 1930s and 1940s were not inherently dangerous and took aggressive action only when instructed to do so by their masters. In fact, they were so docile and fundamentally good that they often turned on those same masters when ordered to do something particularly nefarious. They could even, as Wade Davis explores in The Serpent and the Rainbow, talk about their memories and experiences with pathos and recognize themselves as individuals participating in their community’s culture.
Even in Hollywood versions of Haitian voodoo zombie stories, zombies weren’t scary. In the 1932 film White Zombie, they’re described as “corpses taken from their graves and made to work in sugar mills and the fields at night.” That is what they were in the movies before Night of the Living Dead, and that is how they are still perceived in Haiti today.
The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988)
DR. ALAN:
I need you to remember what happened before you died.
ZOMBIE:
I remember it all. The coffin, the burial, I saw it all.
DR. ALAN:
Were you sick? What was it that you felt?
ZOMBIE:
I heard the dirt falling on me. The darkness pressed me down, down.
IN THE FLESH
Of all the differences between voodoo zombies of the Afro-Haitian tradition and the modern zombie as first realized by George Romero, none is more striking or more overlooked than the fact that voodoo zombies are not dead. Let me repeat: voodoo zombies are not dead. They are as alive as you or I but operate under the strong religious or substance-induced belief that they have been brought back from the dead to serve a living master.
Webster University professor emeritus Bob Corbett has studied Haitian culture for decades and personally traveled to Haiti more than fifty times over the past fifteen years to investigate its people and traditions. He writes:
Eating the zombie cucumber keeps them in their zonkedout state, but otherwise they are just like animals in a pen and will do what they are told to do. Mainly they’re used as slave labor.
In our correspondence, Corbett went on to emphasize that voodoo zombies have beating hearts and normal blood flow and body temperature. They need to sleep, eat regular foods, and eliminate waste like the rest of us, and they are not contagious or aggressive.
There are people in Haiti today who believe that they have been transformed into zombies, but they still retain the same rights as any other citizen. If a zombie is killed or its death is caused through the neglect of another, the offender is put on trial for murder. As I said, voodoo zombies aren’t dead. They are also not aggressive, nor created by a biological infection. The lack of connection between the voodoo zombie and the modern zombie cannot be overstated.
3: ZOMBIE EVOLUTION
The modern zombie first appeared in Night of the Living Dead in 1968. Made on a shoestring budget with borrowed cars and part-time actors, Night tells the story of a group of strangers trapped in an isolated farmhouse while roaming zombies try to break through their hasty defenses and eat them.
As the film opens, two siblings, Johnny and Barbra, arrive at a remote cemetery to visit their long-dead father’s grave. Johnny realizes that Barbra is as spooked to be there as she was when they were kids. He teases her, pointing to an o
ld man wandering across the grass and playing into her fright by suggesting that the guy is an attacker. The joke is on Johnny, though. The wanderer is actually a risen flesh eater bearing down on them. Johnny will be dead just seconds after his naively prophetic words.
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
JOHNNY:
They’re coming to get you, Barbra.
BARBRA:
Stop it. You’re ignorant.
JOHNNY:
They’re coming for you, Barbra.
BARBRA:
Stop it. You’re acting like a child.
JOHNNY:
They’re coming for you. Look! There comes one now!
Night brought in an estimated $42 million worldwide. When adjusted for inflation, George Romero’s tiny independent film grossed the equivalent of nearly $265 million in today’s dollars. That’s more than double the box-office numbers of 2009’s smash hit zombie comedy Zombieland, prompting one critic to exclaim that the film had been given a license to print money.4
Despite its mass appeal, critics were slow to come around, but eventually the groundbreaking nature of Romero’s horror masterpiece couldn’t be ignored. New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby snidely referred to the film as junk in 1970,5 but by 2004 the Times did an about-face, including Night of the Living Dead on a list of top pictures in the history of cinema. Now regarded as one of the most influential films in modern horror, Night is among a highly selective collection of pictures archived in the National Film Registry at the United States Library of Congress for its profound cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance.
When one speaks of zombie movies today, one is really speaking of movies that are either made by or directly influenced by one man: director George A. Romero.
—Gospel of the Living Dead (2006), Kim Paffenroth, PhD
And just how important is the man behind the film? According to award-winning writer-director Quentin Tarantino, George Romero is single-handedly responsible for all the action, gore, and intensity that make modern genre films great.6 Max Brooks, bestselling author of Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z, says that when it comes to the modern zombie, it’s Romero’s world, and we’re all just living in it. And John Carpenter, director of such horror classics as Halloween (1978) and The Thing (1982), simply states that Romero profoundly influenced an entire culture.7
The same year as Night’s release, legendary actor Boris Karloff, who played the title character in dozens of monster classics such as Frankenstein and The Mummy, prophetically observed, “My kind of horror isn’t horror anymore.”8 He was right. Night of the Living Dead had changed things forever.
BORN FROM VAMPIRES
So where did Romero get his idea for the modern zombie? Jump back to 1953 and Richard Matheson, a young paperback writer with two twenty-five-cent novels to his name. The prestigious Nelson Doubleday Company had just agreed to publish his first hardcover, a work of vampire fiction called I Am Legend. Set in contemporary Los Angeles, Legend didn’t rehash Old World interpretations of the iconic monsters but instead turned them from elegant loners who lived on the fringes of society into a horde of bloodthirsty ghouls violently driven to suck the last drops of life from every living person on earth.
Romero was so inspired by the book that when he decided to make his first film some fourteen years later, he set out to create a loose adaptation of I Am Legend. In fact, Romero’s and Matheson’s stories are so similar that Matheson initially mistook Night of the Living Dead for his own work:
I caught that on television, and I said to myself, “Wait a minute—did they make another version of I Am Legend they didn’t tell me about?” Later they told me Romero did it as an homage, which means he gets it for nothing!9
Though Legend has been directly adapted to the big screen three times, most recently as a Will Smith blockbuster,10 many argue that Night of the Living Dead is a truer interpretation of Matheson’s vision than any of the official versions. But what sets Romero’s film apart from I Am Legend, what makes it truly great, is Romero’s deliberate rejection of all aspects of the vampire myth in favor of a much scarier, much more realistic threat.
Although Romero decided against having the undead transform into vampires after their death, the stumbling, staggering corpses in his film do bite people and eat their flesh; and, vampire-like, their bloody victims become undead cannibals as a result of becoming involuntary meals.
—Real Zombies (2010), Brad Steiger
Matheson’s goal was to bring the vampire into the modern age by creating a biological explanation for its existence. He invented a bacterial infection that created vampires, Bacilli vampiri, which could then be scientifically researched and understood. Matheson’s vampires could no longer fly or trans-figure themselves. They didn’t have superhuman strength, and they didn’t turn into bats. But Matheson carried over several elements of the traditional vampire myth. His vampires still hated crosses and Christian symbols. They couldn’t tolerate exposure to garlic. They died in direct sunlight and could be killed using a wooden stake through the heart. Romero rejected this cultural baggage.
By creating the flesh eater, a creature that literally arose in the modern age with no limiting Carpathian Mountain mythology, Romero was able to remove all of the Old World superstition and give birth to a completely scientific monster. No myth, just pure biology. No special powers, just the limited humanlike abilities of a rotting corpse. No supernatural force, just the logical result of modern man’s polluting impact on the natural world. Still, the relationship between Romero’s flesh eaters and Matheson’s vampires remains the closest that the modern zombie has to any other creature.
FLESH EATERS LURCH FORTH
As you might expect, given the history of Romero’s connection to I Am Legend, he didn’t consider the creatures he created to be zombies at all. He called them flesh eaters.
In fact, Romero was so dedicated to the brand-new concept of his flesh-eating monster that he originally named his film Night of the Flesh Eaters. It was only in the eleventh hour that the distribution company swapped in Living Dead for Flesh Eaters in hopes of appealing to a wider audience.11 At the time, living dead was a term used broadly to refer to various undead monsters, including vampires, mummies, and even Frankenstein. By way of example, Cave of the Living Dead (1965), Fangs of the Living Dead (1968), and Crypt of the Living Dead (1972) were all released around the same time as Romero’s Night, and all are vampire movies. The title was changed so late and in such a rush that on Wednesday, November 1, 1968, one month after its official premiere, a Pittsburgh Gazette review still referred to the film as Night of the Flesh Eaters.
So how did we get from flesh eaters to living dead to the entire planet calling Romero’s monsters zombies? It was a slow ten-year process, culminating in yet another distribution company changing the name of yet another Romero film.
In 1978, Romero was approached by famed horror director Dario Argento, who offered to bankroll his next film, giving Romero $750,000 cash as long as Argento could have the European rights.12 Argento then changed the name of Romero’s second flesh-eater movie from Dawn of the Dead to Zombi. Presto, the label stuck. The film raked in $55 million worldwide, becoming arguably even more iconic than Night, and that’s how we all came to mistakenly believe that Romero’s flesh eaters were zombies.
THE SICKNESS EVOLVES
The modern zombie has remained remarkably consistent since it first lurched into popular consciousness in 1968. Most films follow a basic plot structure that is very close, if not identical, to that of Night of the Living Dead. But there are certain qualities or aspects of zombies that have changed over the decades. Most notable is the process by which a human is turned into a flesh eater.
Romero’s original vision was that zombies were not contagious. They were created by an infection present in the environment, not spread from zombie to human. Anyone who dies for any reason will acquire it. According to Romero, a bite is not necessary to transmit the infection, and
he remains true to this original conception and uses this approach in all of his zombie films. It was Romero himself, though, who unintentionally opened the door to a new interpretation of how zombies are created. In Night of the Living Dead, the first person to turn from human to zombie on-screen is a little girl. She has been bitten on the arm and is suffering some strange illness. The bite doesn’t appear to be substantial enough to cause any real damage, but the girl is barely conscious, and she soon dies and comes back as a zombie.
This terrifying turn of events sends a clear message: bites matter. They’re toxic at the very least and at worst may be directly related to becoming a zombie and spreading the plague. In Romero’s second zombie film, Dawn of the Dead, the two main characters who expire and return as zombies both die as a result of bite wounds. Though Romero has made his perspective clear over the years, the genie was out of the bottle.
Popular understanding accepted Romero’s idea that the zombie condition is caused by an infectious plague, but the spread of the plague was narrowed to include only those who have been directly infected by a zombie bite or exposure to zombie blood or body fluid. Not only does the current zombie-contagion model align more closely with its vampire roots, but it also conforms to our knowledge of infectious diseases, allowing zombie outbreaks to dramatically mirror more common outbreaks such as swine flu, mad cow, and rabies. The zombie sickness doesn’t automatically afflict everyone, but we all have the potential to be infected if exposed.