No Such Thing as an Amish Zombie

A recent Huffington Post article said this:

"The horror genre in general has always been a reflection of our social anxieties. … In the wake of 9/11, zombie narratives have increased dramatically, which isn't surprising considering the concerns in our culture since then -- SARS, bird flu, chemical weapons and the radicals and extremists with whom you can't reason and you can't negotiate."

I’m afraid I cannot disagree. I DO agree that horror narratives address popular fears. If nothing else, horror stories are akin to urban legends, tapping into anxieties and giving them fangs. The end result is a catharsis, based ironically in survival (yes, I am claiming that surviving is the real horror. More on that another time).

What I don’t agree with is this idea that the particular fears that Zombies embody are influenza, biological warfare, and terrorism. None of these, in my mind, align with the horror that a slow shuffling field of teeth-chomping brain eaters evoke. However, those three things do, sort of, have something in common that I think DOES resonate with zombies: government hubris.

I’ve talked about it here before (or at least I’ve meant to) this idea that when the zombie apocalypse comes, it will be the devastation to infrastructure that spells mankind’s doom. Communication breakdowns, service and product distribution failures, and worst of all, patriotism begetting factionalism. Us versus them will lump anyone who isn’t in your immediate pack or clan a “them.”

In other words, zombies represent our fear of internet dependence. Yes, it’s as simple as that. If the lights go out, if we can’t Facebook and Amazon and Fantasy Football and Fox News, then we’ll have to look at ourselves. Looking at ourselves means everyone else is, basically, not us, and paranoia means they’re all jealous of our brains and want to eat us, whole. 

You think I’m silly, but mark my words. The only people in the world who are unafraid of zombies are the Amish.

The Zombies are Coming… Tomorrow

With no apologies or explanation I am announcing that Zombie for Life will now be updated only weekly. 

Weakly?

Oh shut up. I’m turning into a zombie myself with all this writing. That’s me, shuffling after sentences, gurgling “blogs.” The whole point was to “promote” my book of short stories. But writing these posts has gotten to be more fun than that. Yeah, I wind up waxing pseudo-philosophical, but then I like to hear myself talk. No zombie can say that! Or say anything! Cause they don’t talk!

Anyhow, I got other blogs going weekly now too, so I have arbitrarily decided Thursday will be Zombie day. Until it isn’t. Or until I get some more energy and write up a whole mess of stuff too good to hold onto.

In the meantime (or until tomorrow I guess) here’s some zombie quotes. I Googled “best quotes” and it gave me a bunch of quotes with the word “best” in them, so exchanged the word “best” with “zombie” and these turned out to be all true.

• In the practice of tolerance, one's enemy is the zombie teacher. --Dalai Lama 
• The only real failure in life is not to be true to the zombie one knows. --Buddha 
• The zombie road to progress is freedom's road. --John F. Kennedy 
• Learn to say 'no' to the good so you can say 'yes' to the zombie. --John C. Maxwell 
• I am easily satisfied with the zombie. --Winston Churchill 
• I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the zombie. --Oscar Wilde 
• He who knows zombie knows how little he knows. --Thomas Jefferson 
• But men are men; the zombie sometimes forget. --William Shakespeare 
• Why don't you start believing that no matter what you have or haven't done, that your zombie days are still out in front of you. --Joel Osteen 
• Expect the zombie. Prepare for the worst. Capitalize on what comes. --Zig Ziglar

Grr, arrgh.

What is Zombie-Ness

Imagine you’re at Zombie Con. All around you, people are enjoying themselves. They’re buying and selling merchandise, discussing movies and TV shows, playing games and fantasizing about the ultimate zombie stronghold. Here and there, you see individuals shuffling in tattered clothes, skin a sickly green, oozing wounds dripping, faces half-torn off.

You feel a touch on your shoulder. Just a simple tap. And now you have the uncontrollable urge to tap someone else on the shoulder. So you do, and for a moment, the urge goes away… only to bubble up inside you again. You must tap someone else on the shoulder. So you find someone else, and it’s the same thing… the urge goes way, but then comes on again. But the next person you see, well, you don’t feel like tapping that person. You barely notice that this person, too, is about to tap someone on the shoulder. You ignore that person, move towards the one he’s going to tap, and tap that person too. There’s no sense of competition—it’s just fresh meat to tap.

In the above, who are the “zombies”? Is it the people dressed up to look like the lurching undead, with their facsimiles of blood and gore and decay? Or is it the ones who can’t help but do what they do, and in doing so, make other people do it too?

I was thinking about this idea of what “zombie-ness” is. Since zombies aren’t actually real, there are two kinds of “zombieness.” There’s all the trapping and tropes, the things that make Zombie walks and Zombie cons so much fun. It’s that veneer if zombieness we’ve talked about ad-nauseum on this blog before.

Its like Angry Birds Star Wars. What is “Star-Wars-Ness?” Ostensibly, it’s a shiny black helmet, cinnamon-buns on the side of the head, a glowing stick, and big orb half-constructed. Those things can be used to dress up the Angry Birds.

But they don’t tell the story—they only work if you already know the story. Whereas the shoulder-tapping scenario is very zombie-like, but without all those tropes and trappings.

But are the two even separable? Yes, if we can have people dress up like zombies without requiring them to be dead and actually feed on people. On the other hand, the shoulder-tappers. Are they really zombies?

I’ll let you know at Shoulder-Tapper Con, where people trade elongated foam fingers, wear shoulder pads, and discussing movies like Night of The Living Interrupters.

Here Come the Gut Gobblers

With requisite apologies to Tennyson.

Half a step, half a step, half a step shuffling,
All on the highway of death lurched the gut gobblers.
"Here come the flesh eaters! Shoot for the brains!" was said:
Onto the highway of Death lurched the gut gobblers.
"Here come the flesh eaters!" Was there a brain there saved?
No, tho' the living knew someone had fuck’d up:
Zombs to make no reply, zombs not to reason why,
Zombs but to lurch and dine: onto the highway of Death
Lurched the gut gobblers.
Shotgun to right of them, crossbow to left of them,
Hand axe in front of them splurching brains sunder'd;
Storm'd up from a gritty smell, moldy they lurched and well,
Snapping their jaws of death, tongue stuck in mouths of Hell
Lurched the gut gobblers.
Flash'd all those blasts where flash'd as they blasted heads,
Sabring the gobblers there, beheading armies, while
All the world wonder'd: Plunged in the ‘pocalypse
Right thro' the line they broke; survivors falling
Reel'd from the shotgun blasts shatter'd and sunder'd.
Then they fell down, but not the gut gobblers.
Shotgun to right of them, crossbow to left of them,
Hand axe in front of them splurching brains sunder'd;
Storm'd at with bow and shell, while each survivor fell,
Though they had fought so well came thro' the jaws of zombs
Up with those mouths of Hell, all that was left of them,
Left of gut gobblers.
Where next the gory blade? O the wild feasts they made!
All the world wondered. Fear the gore they made,
Flee from those awful zombs, hungry gut gobblers.

Tires vs. Zombies

Inexorable, it seeks prey and when it finds prey it is unrelenting. I’m talking about a virus. It invades a cell, uses what’s inside the cell to reproduce itself, and the cell is destroyed when all of those copies burst out, each seeking more prey.

The analogy to zombies is not precise. One zombie grabs at a helpless victim, tears into her flesh and begins consuming, but this does not lead to several zombies bursting out. For the analogy to work, we would need on zombie invading a “cell” containing several humans, and the result is several zombies bursting out of the mall or the safehouse or whatever.

(This, by the way, is why I always scoff when people post picture on the internet of their “zombie strongholds.” Hard to get in means hard to get out, and all it takes is one zombie to make that stronghold a gut-gobbler factory).

What’s more, it’s not that a virus goes into a cell and then uses the material inside to make copies—the virus uses the cell’s actual mechanisms to facilitate the reproduction process. The zombie-in-your-safehouse analogy then would suggest that its not just that the zombie turns people into zombies, but that the social dynamics of the group lend themselves to zombie making. Bickering distracts folks from maintaining the stronghold, falling in love makes it hard to put a shotgun to the head of a newly turned zombie, etc.

So the analogy is not a bad one, it just needs adjustment to work. And the consequence of a working analogy is, how does it inform a solution to a zombie problem? Well, your body will elevate its own temperature to kill of a virus. In other words, it makes the host inhospitable. How would we do that in the real world?

I have no idea. In World War Z, people with fatal diseases were unappetizing to zombies. But that breaks out analogy- we need the host, the cell, the mall, to be in hospitable.

I’ve got it—tires. Like those tires you step into and out of quickly an obstacle course. Line the roads with tires! The living have agility—the dead don’t. They’ll fall all over themselves. It would take weeks for them to move a few city blocks.

This is brilliant. I’m applying for the MacArthur Genius Grant. I may have eradicated the need for zombie fiction forever.

Oh no.

The Nine Kinds of Zombies

Note: someone brought a copy of “The Wisdom of the Enneagram” to my house this last weekend. This has nothing to do with that, I swear.
There are lots of different zombies types out there, and when you’re fighting for scarce resources against evil representatives of the still-living, a zombie-by-zombie analysis is probably a waste of time. So here’s a handy guide I just made up based on nothing but a few tropes. Usefulness = 2/10

The Horde Former: HF zombies believe the essences of zombiedom lies in the horde, a tight group of shuffling gut-gobblers in slow inexorable pursuit of their prey. HF zombies know there’s safety in numbers, and will refuse to pursue a straggler on their own, even if it’s in their best interest. HF zombies can be thwarted by hiding in spaces where only individual zombies can go—tight alleyways, partially blockaded doorways, etc.

The Yelper: the Yelper is the first zombie to notice a new victim, and to make some kind of sound to alert other zombies in the area. This alert, however, will alert the new victim that she’s been seen. In this way, The Yelper is an early-warning system when the living are on stealth missions. If you see a Yelper, take it out first, and quietly, and you might avoid detection

The Massive Bleeder: The MB Zombie typifies all of the visual cues associated with an obvious undead presence: half-bashed-in face, open sores, intestines spilling from the gut. What the MB zombie lacks in mobility and longevity, it makes up for in shock value—living who come into contact with an MB zombie can become stunned into immobility, making them easy pickings for other zombies.

The Silent Surprise: this zombie is the one who seems to come out of nowhere, when victims least expect it. SS zombies take advantage if bickering-to-distraction amongst the living, in the best-case-scenarios, wind up taking a big bite out of the asshole with the loudest mouth. Avoid SS zombies by always being vigilant and taking no safety measure for granted.

The Curious: the Curious zombie can often be found alone, wandering, seemingly aimlessly, more given to distraction than the other zombies. This is the zombie who will first respond to diversions when you need to move the zombies out of a sensitive area or towards some kind of trap. Don’t be fooled, however; just because a Curious zombie is looking at the bucket of guts your waving and not your throat, he’ll still go for your flesh if you get too close.

The Slowest: the slowest zombie always lags behind the horde, is always last to the kill, and is always last to get up. In this way they can be the easiest to get away from, but at the same time, they can be too easily forgotten about. Keep your heads counts and kill shot counts as accurate as possible, or the late-arriving Slowest zombie will surprise you just as you let your guard down.

The Unrelenting: the Unrelenting zombie just never quits. This is the one you see shuffling along on one very broken ankle, or pulling herself along by just her arms, body ripped in half. Whereas with other zombies a kill-shot seems obvious, with Unrelenting zombies you can never be sure: spike the brain, cut off the head, and burn the whole thing. Even then, don’t breathe the fumes. Just don’t.

The Gallagher: this zombie is crazy and unpredictable. You’ll find yourself watching this zombie instead of killing as it shuffles about, bouncing off of walls, trying to eat tires, and other crazy hijinx. But don’t be fooled—when this zombie finally decides to go in for the kill, the results will splatter everyone with blood and gore. When facing the Gallagher zombie, just put it out of its misery as soon as possible.

The Quintessential: this is the prototypical, platonic, perfect zombie. It has exactly the right color fo grayish greenish skin. It has the right number of small but obvious open, oozing wounds. The right amount of blood dripping from its mouth. It doesn’t walk or run, but moves at a pace somewhere in between. The beauty of the quintessential zombie extends from its unlife to its undeath- they are always killed with a perfect shot-gun blast to the head, usually by the least experienced survivor in the group, and there’s always a satisfying splash of brain matter as they gracefully fall down in slow motion. But beware: there’s never not any quintessential zombies. So long as we keep the zombie thing alive, these zombies will always exist.

Zombies Love Tryptophan.

Zombies used to say “brains” and that was what they were after. Just brains. But then modern-zombies started eating the whole person. There’s a huge difference there. My theory is that while older zombies went after our “moral” cores, the new zombies go after our “identity’ cores.

At the end of Night of the Living Dead, a bunch of rednecks have some zombies strung up from a tree, and are shooting at them. Barbra is visibly disgusted. These barbarians are no better than the mindless brain eaters that had earlier terrorized a house full of survivors. The barbarians are just as brainless, or a-moral, as the zombies.

But you’re modern zombie film or TV show is about guts. Do the characters have the guts to do what needs to be done to survive? Or will they give in to a false sense of themselves, the person they “used” to be, and in the process, be taken down by a hungry horde of intestine-gobblers?

Here’s the key, and the cheap thanksgiving tie-in: Tryptophan. The tryptophan in turkey, and most meats, most protein-possessing foods, gets converted in your body into serotonin. Ninety percent of that stays in your gut. So when the zombies eat your guts, they’re getting a nice fat dose of serotonin. And since they’re brains don’t work so good, that serotonin stays in their gut, too.

They eat it so that their guts will keep working, allowing them to eat more. This circle is the core of they’re identity. Not eat to live, or live to eat, but eat to eat. Juxtaposed to that is the survivors. They eat to live, of course, but their vicious circle is about survival. They survive to survive.

And what’s survival but evading death? And what’s death but the big sleep? And what’s serotonin but the sleep transmitter? And what’s serotonin but what is made out of tryptophan? And what’s tryptophan but the amino acid that comes from Turkey? And what’s turkey but the result of “living to eat?”

Thanksgiving is a day to be thankful that we can choose who we want to be: Gluttons. Even zombies don’t get to choose that.