Lessons from the Zombie Genre

Imagine a zombie. What does your zombie look like? How does it move? What does it eat? How does it spend its day? What if any hobbies does it have? More likely than not, you probably pictured a zombie of the George A. Romero variety: a slow-moving reanimated corpse that feasts on the flesh of the living and that can only be killed by damaging the brain. (Perhaps it also has a taste for brains – although this culinary preference did not come from Romero.)

Although the popularity of zombies comes in waves, this genus of zombie has enjoyed a place in American culture for more than fifty years starting with Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead. The most recent wave of zombie-mania came probably in the early 2010s, largely coinciding with the rise in popularity of The Walking Dead TV series. For several seasons the show was a thought-provoking meditation on how societies would organize and evolve following the collapse of civilization coupled with the suspense of early seasons of Game of Thrones. One never quite knew which beloved character would die a brutal but narratively meaningful death. 

During this period, you may have attended TWD watch parties. You may have donned some makeup and hipster garb while participating in a “Zombie Walk.” You may have collected trinkets and bits of zombie paraphernalia. Personally, I amassed several t-shirts and accessories alluding to the zombie’s taste for brains (e.g. a bracelet that reads “Zombies Only Want Me for My Brains”). However, I was also working in a psychopharmacology lab for part of that period, meaning at any given time I had several rat brains in a freezer – so maybe I would have collected those items anyway. 

As time went on though, TWD became a slow-moving, repetitive slog that didn’t know when to die. Its insights into human nature became less frequent. One of the most important characters on the show died a narratively meaningless death that threw off what seemed like the ultimate arc of the series. The cast was constantly diluted with increasingly generic new additions. Actors playing key characters jumped ship. Many characters started to seem protected for potential returns or unwanted spin-offs. Ultimately people lost interest in the show. The zombie subgenre’s new life slowly faded – although it would be unfair to say the subgenre completely died.

A little more than a year ago, I remember sitting on a Zoom meeting with several writers when the topic of zombies came up in conversation. Apparently there are people who actually fear that zombies may one day become a thing, someone noted. Not just culturally but an actual thing like squirrels or E. coli or business-casual sports bras. At the time I was somewhat dumbfounded (although in retrospect I think I may have met some of these people). My response was that this is absurd. Zombies can’t be a thing – at least not biologically.

On the call I think I gave some quick explanation pertaining to circulation and movement, as giving a more detailed explanation would have taken too long. Likewise, I will refrain from giving a full explanation here, as enumerating all the reasons zombies can’t exist could fill a book – a medical physiology textbook to be exact. However, in short, I believe it is sufficient to say that when a person dies, there is typically a reason. If your heart stops pumping blood, you die. If blood can no longer reach your brain, you die. If you lose a large quantity of blood, you die. If there was a way for you to walk around with your arm cut off and your entrails hanging out, to paraphrase the great mathematician and chaos theorist Dr. Ian Malcolm, life probably would have found a way.

Now, those who want to nitpick could say I am too fixated on Romero zombies when there are so many other varieties in the family Zombiaceae. For the traditionalists, there is the now-extinct genus of zombie that existed prior to and wiped out by Romero zombies. For those unfamiliar with zombie history, prior to 1968, the term zombie generally referred to living people trapped in a trance-like state and subsequently enslaved through a combination of drugs and possibly hypnotism, as implemented by someone familiar with the ancient voodoo knowledge of Haitian witch doctors. These were the zombies of Victor Halperin’s 1932 White Zombie, which was probably the first full-length zombie movie and which featured Bela Lugosi as a voodoo master living in a spooky Haitian castle with a small staff of individuals he zombified over various disagreements and rivalries. (You’re welcome for the extra help at Halloween trivia night.)

However, given that no one still living has seen White Zombie (other than those of us writing essays on the zombie) and that in modern times those concerned with the control of populations through mind-altering drugs tend to inhabit a different corner of the internet, I think it is safe to leave this extinct genus alone. Hence, that leaves virus zombies and Cordyceps zombies.

Virus zombies (best depicted in Danny Boyle’s 2002 28 Days Later), as the name implies, are people who became zombies due to a virus. That virus probably came about due to a lab leak situation. The zombies it produces generally are fast-moving and highly aggressive – sort of resembling what some would imagine rabies would look like if it affected people the way it does dogs. Given the viral origins of these zombies, they seem more scientifically plausible than those reborn from extreme radiation brought to earth by a probe we sent to Venus (as was the case in Night of the Living Dead) or Bart Simpson reading from a book of magic spells he found in the occult section of his school library (as was the case in The Simpsons’ “Treehouse of Horror III”). This viral origin also allows them to bypass the major problem with Romero zombies. Virus zombies are not the reanimated dead. They are living human beings whose behavior has been altered by a virus. 

Similarly, Cordyceps zombies, largely exclusive to The Last of Us IP, possess a scientifically plausible origin with some version of this already seen in nature. Cordyceps is an actual genus of fungus that often acts as an endoparasitoid of invertebrates. It alters their behavior. It turns them into mindless slaves recruited to assist in the Cordyceps life cycle. It ultimately renders its host a Lilliputian tableau of body-horror.

But the major problem with both virus zombies and Cordyceps zombies is that, leaving aside discussions of the effects of certain fungi with hallucinogenic properties and the possibility that one’s gut microbiota can influence one’s mood or food preferences, we don’t really have any known microbes that produce long-term alterations in human behavior to the degree necessary to turn us into mindless biters or spore-transmitters. Sure it might be fun to speculate in an upper-level micro or neuro course about how a pathogen of some sort could transform us into such a thing. Damaging the frontal lobes could make a human host more impulsive and weaken their ability to engage in moral reasoning. Increasing activity in certain regions of the amygdala and hypothalamus could increase aggression and create an insatiable hunger. But in reality, if this were possible, life probably would have found a way.

Yet, despite the many flaws with the basic concept of zombies, one shouldn’t throw the undead baby out with the bathwater in which it drowned. Even though their primary attraction can’t exist, zombie films and TV shows actually can have a lot to say. As I noted earlier, at its best, TWD was a thought-provoking meditation on how societies organize and evolve. 

The show starts with an individual who wakes up in a hospital after the world has ended. He joins a small group of survivors. That group becomes a nomadic tribe. That tribe forcibly merges with another group that has a small farm. They lose the farm when a herd of zombies flows through. They reestablish their community in an abandoned prison. Go to war with a larger community. Merge with another. Discover and establish trade with others. Then catch the eye of a former gym-teacher-turned-warlord. 

Throughout these story arcs, our heroes constantly have to make morally difficult decisions to ensure their survival. It’s not always clear whether their actions are justified. As bleak as it sounds, minus the zombies, this is probably a pretty decent depiction of what life would be like if civilization fell and no one was able to put it back together.

At the other end of the spectrum is Edgar Wright’s 2004 Shaun of the Dead. When the film opens, life for the middle-class inhabitants of then-modern London is depicted as dull, meaningless, and routine. People sleepwalk through their lives in a trance-like daze, disconnected from those around them as they commute to menial jobs they can’t stand. Most have nothing to look forward to other than nightly trips with their mates to the local pub. Zombified by city life, when the zombie apocalypse hits, Shaun (played by Simon Pegg) and some of the film’s secondary characters can barely even tell if something is wrong. 

Are the constant sirens of emergency vehicles really any reason for concern? Is the man-eating pigeons in the park just homeless? Is the woman standing largely motionless in Shaun’s garden just drunk? Was the man who broke into his parents’ home and who bit his stepdad just a crackhead? Granted, in a very clever nod to Night of the Living Dead, Shaun is more of a channel-flipper than a news-watcher, but given the state of the world today, if zombies overran San Francisco, would anyone even notice?

In any case, unlike TWD in which it would appear no more than a handful of large fascist city-states and loosely connected territories were able to establish themselves after more than a decade in the show’s timeline, in Shaun of the Dead order is restored rather quickly. Furthermore, society adapts to the existence of zombies in a completely believable manner. Zombies are not wiped out. Nor are they treated as dangerous predators. Instead, they are incorporated into modern life in a way that commodifies them while also taking into account the emotions of the living who still see them as loved ones. 

Grocery stores use zombies as cheap labor. Zombies race each other for chunks of meat on game shows. People maintaining possibly sexual relationships with zombies go on daytime TV to explain themselves. Shaun keeps his now-literally-zombified best mate in a shed in his garden where he can play video games all day just as he did in life.

Yet, without going to either extreme, Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, back when Romero was still referring to his newly-invented creatures simply as ghouls, managed to provide its own highly insightful take on what would happen if society were to dissolve – a take that seems to eerily ring true today more than ever. 

Released in a time of civil unrest, the potential collapse of society was prominent in the minds of many viewers. Shot for next to no money in black and white, the film had something of an unintended newsreel quality that would have been more noticeable to audiences back in 1968 than those watching it today. Twilight Zone-style expositions along with mock radio broadcasts and television news footage provide information regarding the world beyond the claustrophobic farmhouse in which our small group of survivors barricade themselves. Early on it becomes apparent that emotional distress, rash decisions, and discord among the survivors are just as dangerous as the recently dead slowly surrounding their shelter. 

Should they retreat to the basement which is better protected but has no secondary exit if the ghouls break in? Or should they stay above ground where they are less protected but can escape if necessary? Should they flee to one of the shelters they heard about on the news? Or should they remain at the farmhouse and wait for the authorities to arrive? 

After all but one of the survivors die following a botched attempt to escape and a self-destructive power struggle, none of it matters. The basement is the only option left. There, the hero of the film waits it out till morning when he hears help has arrived. The only problem is help is a little too brash, a little too self-confident, and a little too quick to act first and ask questions later. Hence, they end up shooting the hero in the head before congratulating themselves for saving the day.