Zombies, the life of the undead party -- #2 in the series "Of Myth 'n Monsters"

Zombies make me feel fairly intelligent, and that’s a good thing. I’m glad they’re around. Sure, any zombie worth its weight in rotten flesh will try to turn my brainpan into its personal salad bowl (I use the word ‘salad’ loosely) if I don’t keep a sharp eye on the shambling abomination, but a lifetime of vigilance is a small price to pay for the ego stroke provided, free of charge, by the relative cluelessness of zombiekind.

But let’s hold our undead horses here. Are zombies genuinely clueless? Zombies are becoming somewhat harder to identify as the years pass. The zombies of writer-director George A. Romero, nicknamed the Grandfather of the Zombie, are a piece of cake to peg. In 1968’s seminal classic, Night of the Living Dead, they’re the legion of pasty graveyard hooligans shuffling like soiled robots from their disturbed resting place straight to the farmhouse buffet. A recent trend in storytelling (Daniel Waters’ 2008 novel Generation Dead, for example) has been to endow the zombie with greater awareness and less stench, more individual personality and less mindless mob mentality, more nuance and a longer shelf life, a creature that won’t fall apart at the seams two weeks after going from your beloved dead buddy Bob to the horror of “holy crap, Maude, is that Bob in the yard eating the dog?!”

As something of a zombie purist, I’m wondering if the recent trend of upping zombie IQ and shelf life is nothing more than a shameless commercial effort to ape the eternal life expectancy and infinite charm of vampirism, which remains seated firmly upon the throne atop Monster Mountain. Although ratcheting up zombie brainpower and sustainability seems suspiciously like a “vampirification” technique to me, I still stand in favor of experimentation in storytelling, particularly when it remembers to have a sense of humor. Even so, the last thing a voodoo bokor (sorcerer) would want is to conjure a zombie with a will of its own. That would be like giving a Pharaoh’s mummy the Staff of Ra and telling it to play nice. In voodoo tradition, zombies are meant to be controlled by the bokor, designed to do the sorcerer’s bidding, not to be running around New Orleans challenging the vampire Lestat for the title of Most Angst-Ridden Monster in the Antebellum South. Lestat has a lock on that title, and there’s no damned point in trying to beat the old boy at his own game.

Ride any of the world’s subway systems and you’ll encounter evidently mindless individuals staring blankly into the middle distance, individuals you might believe to be modern urbanized zombies. Odds are a suspected zombie is a first edition human who has yet to be resurrected by sorcery or apocalyptic shenanigans. If you can’t make up your mind one way or the other, give the suspect a hardy kick on the shin and see if he screams. Humans are expert screamers; zombies, not so much. The zombie specialty leans more toward moaning and groaning and other guttural delights.

Any scholarly discussion of zombies, which this most certainly is not, must acknowledge the bizarre being’s African-Caribbean roots, where the word ‘zombie’ (sometimes spelled ‘zombi’) has its origin. I’m no scholar, but I’ll acknowledge the roots nevertheless, and I recommend investigating the voodoo connection, if you have the time. It’s fascinating and worth a look. Be that as it may, the zombie we all know and love is primarily the product of American pop culture; namely Hollywood (numerous films, most recently Zombieland, to date the highest grossing, no pun intended, zombie flick in history), horror magazines, comic books, novels (at least a dozen in the past decade) and computer role-playing games such as All Flesh Must Be Eaten. There’s even an old-fashioned board game, Oh No…Zombies, for public consumption. Truly, there’s nothing quite like a zombie apocalypse to get the creative juices flowing, and I expect the Zombie Hype Index (ZHI) to continue its meteoric rise.

One of humanity’s greatest recent creations is the zombie walk, where zombie lovers let their freak flag fly. For those of you who don't know, a zombie walk is a civic event usually held in an urban setting around the time of Halloween, when reputedly sane humans get all gussied up as undead horrors and strut their stuff as a mob, often to the shock and dismay of people easily shocked and dismayed. The popularity of zombie walks is growing exponentially. The number of organized walks around the world has been increasing annually, with zombie walks in general becoming larger and more sophisticated (if I may be forgiven for using the words ‘zombie’ and ‘sophisticated’ in the same sentence). Participants are encouraged to go all-out on their makeup and dress, as well as urged to ‘stay in character’ for the duration of the event. Any search engine worth a damn will lead you to information about the location of the zombie walk nearest you. For costume and makeup ideas as well as some good giggles, go to the images application of Google, Bing, etc. and type in ‘zombie walk.’

The first zombie walk on record was held in Sacramento, California on August 19^th, 2001, and was used as an extremely appropriate promo tool for a midnight film festival named The Trash Film Orgy. At the moment the unofficial record attendance, estimated at 8,000 walkers, occurred at the October 2009 walk in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It’s only a matter of time – likely a very short time – before 10,000+ zombies shamble through an urban center. The majority of the world’s zombie walks take place in North America, with one of the original classics taking place in Toronto, Ontario, the stomping grounds of writer-director George A. Romero, but the UK and Australia have been doing a bang up job of participating in the globalization of zombie awareness (which sounds like an oxymoron, I know).

I’m not implying that zombie walks are one of the Seven Wonders of the World, but I am suggesting they’re flirting with the Top Ten. Communal shambling can be a terrific bonding experience, something that gives the mentally infirm a sense of community, a sense of fellowship, a sense of – heaven help us! – humor, however deranged and unconventional it may appear to be. In addition, quite a few zombie walks are now tied in to charities or used to raise public awareness of issues such as, ummm, world hunger. Hey, whatever works, right?

In regard to hunger, I take exception to any link between zombies and cannibalism. How can a zombie be classified as a cannibal? When a zombie consumes human flesh it isn’t being cannibalistic because a zombie isn’t a human being, it’s a zombie. A frog, for instance, used to be a tadpole, but that doesn’t make it a tadpole anymore. Do we call frogs “tadpoles that became the amphibians known as frogs?” No, we call them frogs. Caterpillars don’t fly, but their successors, butterflies, most assuredly do. Butterflies have their roots in the world of caterpillars, but no one would ever suggest that butterflies and caterpillars are one and the same. Now imagine if you will the pale, bloodied face of a post-vomit, post-bar fight drunkard staggering down the street at 2 AM. The similarities between the ill, battered drunk and a zombie do not make the drunk a zombie. Nor do the similarities between a zombie and a human being make the zombie human.

Hopefully we can put the absurd zombie-cannibalism connection to rest once and for all, the kind of rest denied to zombies, those ravenous creatures cursed to lurch through a world of broken hearts and shattered tombstones, whether reanimated by sorcery, inexplicable anomaly or paper-thin plot device.

I’m sure the un-life of a zombie is an often difficult and misunderstood one, so to all you undead dudes and dudettes out there, I offer these words of encouragement: Shamble on