by Mogk, Matt
ZRS has an advisory board that includes a number of leaders in zombie arts and scholarship, posts regular research updates online, and hosts the Zombie Safehouse, a members-only social network that includes member profile pages, discussion forums, and local chapter pages.
ZOMBIE RESEARCH SOCIETY AWARDS
Launched in 2008 to celebrate the forty-year anniversary of the first lurch of the modern zombie into public consciousness, the ZRS Awards consist of three annual prizes given to individuals, groups, or institutions that have done the most to raise the level of zombie scholarship in the popular culture, sciences, and preparedness, respectively.
In addition, ZRS established the Romero Prize in 2009 to acknowledge one group or individual who has shown great originality, vision, and innovation in their work on zombies in any field. Named in honor of the godfather of the modern zombie and Zombie Research Society board member, George A. Romero, this prize represents the highest honor that ZRS can bestow.
Some past prize winners include the following:
The Walking Dead
The Walking Dead is a dramatic TV series based on Robert Kirkman’s graphic novel of the same name. The show takes a serious look at the real-world problems of living through a catastrophic zombie pandemic and has been widely praised by critics and audiences alike. Winner of the 2010 Romero Prize.
“The Living Dead Brain”
The work of neuroscience team Bradley Voytek and Timothy Verstynen represents a major advance in zombie research, resulting in their paper on zombie brain function, “The Living Dead Brain.” The pair also developed a three-dimensional theoretical model of a zombie brain. Winner of the 2010 ZRS Award in Science.
Mathematical Zombie Outbreak Modeling
In 2009, a team of researchers from the University of Ottawa published “Mathematical Modeling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection.” It found that a large-scale zombie outbreak would lead to certain doom unless attacked quickly and aggressively. The paper received widespread attention and was named a top idea of the year by the New York Times. Winner of the 2009 ZRS Award in Science.
Zombie Haiku
Ryan Mekum’s Zombie Haiku is the story of one zombie’s gradual decay told through poetry. Upon the release of the book, Robert Kirkman said that Mecum had “quite possibly found the only corner of entertainment not yet infected by the zombie plague.” Though zombies continue to penetrate further into the pop culture landscape, Zombie Haiku stands out for its original take on the classic zombie outbreak scenario. Winner of the 2008 ZRS Award in the Arts.
LOST ZOMBIES
Lost Zombies (LZ) is a zombie-themed social network whose goal is to create the world’s first community-generated zombie movie. Intended to be a documentary-style film that chronicles a catastrophic zombie outbreak in the days following complete societal collapse, LZ members create their own online profile pages and are encouraged to submit photos, videos, and audio recordings as well as take part in chat discussions to be used in the eventual feature film.
In 2009, Lost Zombies won the Zombie Research Society Romero Prize for achievement in zombie popular culture. That same year the site earned top honors in both the Social Network and People’s Choice categories at the South by SouthWest Web Awards presented as part of the celebrated South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas. LZ cofounder Skot Leach says that zombies are the perfect platform to allow an audience to make its own film:
Zombie outbreaks in movies always start local but inevitably they turn global, so in the long run they impact everyone. We all become part of the same human community fighting to stay alive, and that shared experience gives us a common creative language to make a movie.
Lost Zombies is in good company. Two years before it launched, Twitter was a little-known online application that won its own South by Southwest Web Award in 2007. The resulting attention it received sparked its meteoric transformation into the microblogging behemoth it is today.
Driven by user submissions, Lost Zombies has produced several mobile applications and books, a short film, and other Web and print products. They are committed to completing their feature film, and I for one can’t wait to see it!
ZOMBIE SQUAD (ZS)
Created in 2003 in St. Louis, Missouri, Zombie Squad (ZS) is a nonprofit organization that uses the model of a zombie pandemic to encourage the public to seek education and training necessary to survive a wide range of natural and man-made disasters. ZS works with a number of charities on fund-raisers, food drives, blood drives, and other activities, and was the winner of the 2008 ZRS Award in Preparedness.
Their stated goal is to instruct the public in disaster preparedness in an entertaining way that accounts for multiple worst-case scenarios. Zombie Squad has a strong membership base primarily in North America, as well as an online forum that houses the bulk of their disaster preparedness and survival information.
Zombie Squad is best known for their annual camping weekend called Zombie Con, which kicked off in 2005. Set in rural Irondale, Missouri, Zombie Con is a members-only event that consists of educational survival seminars, trips to a local shooting range, zombie movie screenings, and general outdoor activities such as hiking and canoeing.
37: THE WRONG AND RIDICULOUS
The Aghori is a cannibalistic Hindu sect believed by some to derive mystical powers from their strange and macabre rituals. They live in cemeteries across India, robbing the graves of the newly deceased and then eating the stolen corpses, both raw and cooked on open flames. Their activities are highly illegal, but police are often afraid to intervene.
One Aghori practitioner described eating the dead and bloated body of a pregnant woman, saying that it tasted like mango as chunks of flesh pulled away from her bones. Another recounted eating the brains of the recently dead with his young son:
I used to wait at the funeral pyre until the skull would burst—it bursts with a fine pop—and then I would rapidly, to avoid burning my fingers, pull out parts of the brain, which would be a gooey mess, partially roasted by then, and would eat it.74
By their own account, the Aghori can make skeletons rise and fight each other, and it is said that they use ghosts and demons to take control of the minds of innocent victims.
Their behavior is disturbing and creepy, to be sure, but the Aghori have no connection to the living zombie of contemporary popular culture, much less the undead modern zombie. And they’re not even remotely connected to the Haitian voodoo zombie. However, some scholars incorrectly assign the term zombie to this sect and its followers.
Varying interpretations and beliefs about the modern zombie are to be expected and can often advance the level of respect and understanding that zombies receive. But there is another category of zombie scholarship that is not driven by honest and intelligent differences of opinion but rather by pure laziness. The authors of such works don’t bother to learn much about zombies, familiarize themselves with existing zombie research, or even confirm their facts. Indeed, some don’t even bother to watch the films or read the books they discuss and reference. Misinformation of this kind only increases widespread confusion about the origins and defining characteristics of the modern zombie and shows a complete lack of respect for the subgenre as a whole and for its creator, George A. Romero.
I feel compelled to include some of the most egregious factual errors I’ve spotted in the published works of zombie critics and scholars. Ultimately, it was the sloppy scholarship seen in the examples below that drove me to write this book and still make me want to stick a fork in my eye every time I come across them. This chapter isn’t an extensive catalog of errors, as there are dozens more that I chose not to include because they might be explained away as oversights, typos, or simply honest mistakes.
To be clear, my intention isn’t to make anyone look like an idiot, even if they’re making grossly idiotic claims. So I’ve removed the authors’ names and publication titles to protect the guilty.
Here is a selected tour of the wrong a
nd ridiculous in recent zombie works of nonfiction:
Quote #1:
The Romero zombie has a fiendish desire for fresh human flesh, in particular warm blood and brains, and will stop at nothing in pursuit of them.
Correction:
Zombies have never eaten brains, said “brains,” or shown any interest in brains in any of George Romero’s movies. The only zombies in film that eat brains appear in the Return of the Living Dead series, which is not part of the Romero franchise. And warm blood? Where did that come from? There are no zombies in any of Romero’s films that demonstrate a particular interest in blood, warm or cold. Sadly, this statement was written by a widely published zombie expert who is apparently unfamiliar with Romero’s work.
Quote #2:
One of the most entertaining ways of doing this [depicting zombies eating brains] is to show the zombie slicing the top off the victim’s head, putting its hands inside it, and eating the still-warm brains.
Correction:
I’ve never seen, read, or heard of this scenario in any zombie movie, book, or game ever produced. When has a zombie sliced off the top of a person’s head and reached in with its hands? What would the zombie use to slice a human skull? And this quote is from a zombie book that bills itself as a “complete guide.”
Quote #3:
Moreover, the Romero zombie feels no pain, and therefore will not suffer in the least when set alight. Thus it is unclear how to kill the Romero zombie.
Correction:
Romero made it very clear in his first film, 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, and in every movie he has made since, that zombies are killed by destroying the brain. Furthermore, the zombies in Night are clearly afraid of being set on fire. They back away from flames as survivors set furniture alight to keep them at bay. It makes me wonder if the “zombie expert” who authored these lines has ever seen a zombie movie.
Quote #4:
Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, published in 1818, told the tale of a monster who was created from a reanimated corpse, much like a zombie.
Correction:
The monster in Mary Shelley’s novel is created by a misguided scientist, Dr. Victor Frankenstein, who gets the bright idea to sew together body parts taken from many different dead people, not a single corpse. Ever wonder why the monster has stitches all over its body? By contrast, zombies are the remains of a single person reanimated by a biological infection. There’s a fundamental difference. You’d think this wouldn’t have escaped the notice of a published university scholar with several advanced degrees.
Quote #5:
When Johnny senses Barbara’s growing anxiety, he reverts to the same puerile behavior, mischievously invoking Boris Karloff, lisp intact, and uttering Night’s signature line, “They’re coming to get you, Barbara.”
Correction:
It’s Barbra, not Barbara. You might chalk this up to a simple typo, but in a book entirely focused on one movie, Night of the Living Dead, is it asking too much that they spell the female lead’s name correctly? It is misspelled not once or twice but throughout the entire text. The author also credits John Russo as the sole screenwriter of Night, when the film was actually cowritten by Russo and George Romero, based on a Romero short story.
Quote #6:
In 2007, Damon Lemay’s Zombie Town achieved some acclaim when he portrayed a town of dead people, resurrected and motivated by a mysterious parasite.
Correction:
Some acclaim? Really? I can’t find a single film critic who has ever mentioned this movie, let alone given it acclaim. The one review I did hunt down is from an obscure Australian blog stating that Zombie Town doesn’t have a single shred of originality in it. What’s worse, given the dozens of popular, influential, or acclaimed zombie movies in existence, Zombie Town is one of only three movies not made by George Romero listed in this book entirely about zombies!
Quote #7:
This [a virus] has killed almost 90 percent of the world’s population, only to resurrect them as flesh-eating zombies who can only travel at night or in the shadows.
Correction:
Where do I start with this one? A professional film critic is talking about the Will Smith blockbuster I Am Legend, correctly noting that the creatures can’t stand sunlight. But she doesn’t connect the painfully obvious dots that this is a defining characteristic of vampires, not zombies. I can only assume she hasn’t read Richard Matheson’s original vampire novel, also titled I Am Legend, on which the film is based.
Quote #8:
Although the remake [of Dawn of the Dead] had mixed critical reviews, it was a commercial success and remains one of the top-grossing American horror films.
Correction:
Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead is not one of the top-grossing American horror films. It wasn’t even one of the top-three-grossing horror movies the year it was released (2004). It claimed fourth place at best, behind The Grudge, Saw, and another zombie movie, Resident Evil: Apocalypse. What’s more, it wasn’t even the top-grossing horror remake to hit theaters within six months of its release. That honor went to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Quote #9:
[In Night of the Living Dead] a number of teenagers are trapped in a remote and abandoned farmhouse by a group of these mobile corpses who are hungry for their flesh.
Correction:
There are no teenagers in Night of the Living Dead. The two leads, Ben and Barbra, are thirty-two and twenty-three, respectively. The next two most prominent characters trapped in the farmhouse are a married couple in their forties. Even their daughter, the young girl who famously turns into a zombie in the film, is just eleven. This hogwash comes from a two-hundred-plus-page book with Zombies in the title that has just three pages devoted to anything related to the modern zombie. And still its facts are all wrong.
Now that I’ve had my say on the wrong and ridiculous, I ask that you keep a skeptical eye open and check out the validity of what you read on zombies. Junk gets published every day. Just because something is in print doesn’t mean it’s accurate, remotely factual, or even worth the paper it’s printed on.
And if you’re going to write about zombies, please take the time to confirm your claims. Resist the urge to make sloppy comparisons or sweeping generalizations. And at the very least, watch the films and read the books you’re writing about. Seriously, people.
38: FINAL THOUGHTS
If you take just one thing from this book, I hope it’s a belief that the modern zombie has earned the right to be recognized and clearly defined.
Filled with pure aggression, limited in its biological makeup, and driven by an infection that threatens to swallow the whole of the human race, Romero’s flesh eater is fundamentally the same creature today as it was when it first appeared in Night of the Living Dead in 1968. It also continues to prove remarkably relevant through the changing decades.
The modern zombie evolved from vampires, not from the soulless voodoo slaves that share their name. But unlike vampires, the walking dead don’t carry with them the baggage of Old World superstitions and myths. They aren’t supernatural, superhuman, superstrong, or particularly super at anything. Just the opposite. Zombies are grossly natural in their rotting flesh, imperfect brains, and limited physical abilities. They don’t pretend to be anything more or less than what they are.
But what they are is the end of the world.
MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS
All zombie research is theoretical. We can never know exactly what the coming pandemic will look like until the teeming un-dead horde is finally at our doorsteps.
You may think that day will never come, and you could be right. But as Daniel Drezner, professor of international politics at Tufts University, argues, even if the chance of a zombie pandemic is a fraction of 1 percent, it represents such a profound and devastating threat to modern civilization that the only responsible course of action is intense research and preparation.75 Because once the dead rise, th
e days of study and conjecture are over.
Gone will be reasoned debate and hard scientific study. Gone will be global lines of communication and easy access to information. Gone will be the support structures that allow us to engage easily in serious scientific, social, and historic investigation. When the dead rise, it’s run-and-scream time.
Therefore, mankind’s research goal must be to develop solid working theories that foster as complete an understanding as possible of the dangers we face before it’s too late.
ALL SURVIVAL IS LOCAL
The steps it takes to survive the aftermath of a large-scale zombie outbreak are much the same as those needed to survive any prolonged catastrophic natural or man-made disaster.
Our basic human requirements remain constant, and attention to those requirements means the difference between life and death. In survivalist circles, this simple and well-established principle is known as the Rule of Three, which holds that in a worst-case scenario, a person can live only so long without certain essentials.
In three minutes, you’re dead without air.
In three hours, you’re dead without shelter.
In three days, you’re dead without water.
In three weeks, you’re dead without food.
If you live in a mild climate, you may think you don’t need immediate protection from the elements, but you will always need protection from roaming zombies and the other deadly threats outlined in the previous chapters.