Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies (2 page)

Matt Mogk once walked away from success, and that’s why I offered to write this foreword. Yes, he’s way into zombies, and he’s carved out an impressive niche as one of the foremost experts of the age. But for me, the path that led him to this new career is easily as interesting as the career itself. A long time ago, probably when he still had hair, Matt worked for a Hollywood literary management company. To say that it was a frustrating, depressing, utterly confounding profession
would be an understatement. So many writers, so little talent. Even more mind-boggling than the limitless excrement he forced on the marketplace was the insatiable appetite the marketplace had for it. Like the lone Wall Street trader who wrestles with the logic of credit default swaps or the Washington intern who loses sleep over campaign finance loopholes, Matt found himself being pulled through a machine that was slowly, steadily grinding his spirit into dust.

One day he was charged with hawking a particularly noxious turd to a studio executive who was looking for something completely different. “I want a family script,” this “creative executive” demanded, “like
101 Dalmatians
but without the dogs”! The script in Matt’s charge, an adult thriller set in South America, could not have been less suited to the parameters placed before him. Frustrated, demoralized, and teetering at the edge of his moral abyss, Matt responded with a confident “That’s EXACTLY what this script is about! I’ll send it right over first thing tomorrow, and trust me, you’ll LOVE it!” And he did. And
they
did! Score one—one BIG one—for the new super-manager Matt Mogk, the man who could sell anything… except his soul.
If this is what it means to succeed
, Matt told himself,
then I don’t want any part of it.

So he walked away from a newly white-hot career as a Hollywood dung salesman and several years later was standing on the set of the Spike TV series
Deadliest Warrior
. This new Matt Mogk was now the founder and president of the Zombie Research Society, an organization devoted to the study and promotion of all things living dead. That’s where we became friends: planning our strategy for the show’s “Zombie vs. Vampire” episode. We’d met a few months earlier at the nation’s first dedicated zombie convention (yes, there is one now), and at the time, I wasn’t sure what to make of him. Given
the growing popularity of zombies, and the growing ranks of those seeking to make a quick buck off them, I was deeply suspicious. However, I was wrong (as is usually the case in my life).

Matt not only turned out to be a stand-up guy, but he is legitimately, deeply, inspiringly passionate about the subculture of the living dead. As we sat in the green room of
Deadliest Warrior
, building our case for a zombie victory over vampirism, I could only marvel at the inner workings of the mind of Mogk. I’ve often said that I think about zombies way too much, and compared to most people, I do. I’ve considered their physiology, their behavioral patterns, the threat they pose to us as a species, and the steps we might take to protect ourselves from them.
Publishers Weekly
once dubbed my first book,
The Zombie Survival Guide
, as “unnecessarily exhaustive.” They had yet to learn what those words really meant!

Unlike me, Matt has also considered the cultural impact of zombie fiction on the human psyche, deconstructing it like an NYU film school professor might deconstruct the works of postmodern French cinema. Somehow he’s managed to keep a toe in both universes. Matt can easily jump into the zombie sandbox for a heated argument about what sword works best against undead necks, then jump right back out for an intellectual analysis of the later works of George Romero.

If zombieism were a religion, I would be a monk, sequestered behind walls of books and ruminations, while Matt would be a pilgrim, out among the people, preaching, educating, and converting from dawn till dusk. When he told me he was writing a book “for people who don’t know anything about zombies but would like to learn,” my only thought was: “We couldn’t have a better ambassador.”

So if you are someone who’s never given the living dead
much thought but are curious as to why the living living can’t get enough of them, then this is your book. You may be captivated, or repelled, or just plain weirded out by its pages, but by its end, the one thing you won’t be any longer is ignorant. Prepare to become a zombie expert.

Oh yeah, and don’t read it before going to bed.

A
fter a typically harsh Chicago winter, the city by the lake was sunny and bright in the early summer months of 1969. Escaping the rising afternoon heat, a young film critic named Roger Ebert ducked into a local neighborhood theater to catch the matinee. He found an empty seat among the packed audience of mostly children and families and settled in for what he expected to be just another low-budget monster movie called
Night of the Living Dead.

Though the film had already generated some negative buzz, with
Variety
going so far as to call it an orgy of violence,
1
Ebert was consciously withholding judgment until he watched
it for himself. He took his new job seriously, and having grown up a huge science fiction and horror fan, he was sure to be more open to the charms of this black-and-white screamer than some stuffy reviewer from the East Coast. After all, how different could it be from the hundreds of other formulaic B-movies he’d seen in the last decade?

The room went dark, the movie projector sputtered to life, and Ebert’s question was answered in the first few minutes of grainy footage that splashed across the screen. This film was not only different; it was unlike anything he’d ever seen before:

There was almost complete silence. The movie had long ago stopped being delightfully scary, and had become unexpectedly terrifying. A little girl across the aisle from me, maybe nine years old, was sitting very still in her seat and crying.

I don’t think the younger kids really knew what hit them. They’d seen horror movies before, but this was something else. This was ghouls eating people—you could actually see what they were eating. This was little girls killing their mothers. This was being set on fire. Worst of all, nobody got out alive—even the hero got killed.
2

The gruesome new monsters in writer/director George A. Romero’s terrifying vision gave audiences such a shock that many were literally afraid to leave their seats after the closing credits ran and the lights went up. People freaked out. They covered their eyes, clung to the arms of complete strangers, and screamed at the top of their lungs for the nightmare to end. Then when it finally did, they turned around, bought another ticket, and went back in for more.

The modern zombie was born.

T
he
Oxford English Dictionary
is widely regarded as the premier dictionary of the English language and is rated the most comprehensive dictionary on the planet by Guinness World Records. It includes specific definitions for countless obscure and unusual monsters, including the infamous chupacabra of Latin America and Bigfoot’s Himalayan cousin, the albino yeti. But it does not include an accurate definition of the modern zombie. It instead focuses solely on the slavelike zombie of Afro-Haitian tradition that is completely unrelated to the modern zombie of contemporary pop culture.

Unfortunately, the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
is no better. A search for
zombie
only turns up results for the Haitian zombie
and the zombie computer. Not exactly what you might call encyclopedic results.

Does this mean that every movie, video game, event, and organization that this book focuses on simply doesn’t exist? Are the tens of millions of people who participate in zombie walks, zombie proms, zombie pub crawls, zombie conventions, and zombie film festivals across the planet gathered to express their interest in a nonthing? Or, instead, is the modern zombie being overlooked? It seems that billions of dollars in annual revenue across multiple platforms still can’t put the modern zombie officially on the map.

Based on an extensive study of the modern zombie’s evolution over the past half century and on countless interviews with zombie fans and scholars across the globe, here is the first and most authoritative definition:

The modern zombie is a relentlessly aggressive, reanimated human corpse driven by a biological infection.

This definition is intended to be narrow enough to clearly identify the modern zombie’s unique characteristics and broad enough to apply equally to the original
Night of the Living Dead
as to the zombie films being conceived and produced today. Furthermore, by breaking down the definition into its component parts, three key elements emerge against which all manner of creature can be quickly and easily judged.

These three definitional elements of the modern zombie are (1) it is a reanimated human corpse, (2) it is relentlessly aggressive, and (3) it is biologically infected and infectious.

Zombies occupy the decaying shell of what was once human. They inhabit corpses of flesh, blood, and bone, which makes
their systems imperfect. So while they may be relentlessly determined, they are far from invincible. Zombies have a limited life span, given that their bodies are rotting as human corpses do, and they operate under the same laws of science and reason that all worldly beings must operate under.

Whether the undead scourge is created and spread by bite, by blood, by radiation, or on the wind, zombies are first and foremost defined by their relentless aggression. You can’t negotiate with a zombie. You can’t tell a zombie what to do. A zombie has single-minded focus. It will never stop. It will never surrender. A zombie will continue to move toward its goal at any cost.

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.