Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies (34 page)

Though Shaun’s best friend, Ed, turns into a zombie, he happily lives in the toolshed out back and still likes to play video games. In fact, released from the pressures of having to keep a job and pay rent, Ed gets to leave all the stress and social logistics to Shaun. Sometimes things don’t change, despite the zombie apocalypse.

Shaun of the Dead
gives us a world in which your friends can still be your friends, even if they’re zombies. Somehow I doubt we will be so lucky.

ILLUSTRATION BY JEFF MCMILLAN

W
hen looking at the explosion of communal, free-for-all zombie activity across the planet, I’m reminded of the late Groucho Marx’s joke about the exclusive club culture of America: “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” Membership organizations by nature are designed to let some people in and keep some people out. Zombies, on the other hand, are the ultimate egalitarians. So when I saw an undead Groucho Marx shuffle by me at a zombie walk one summer afternoon, it hit me that the unique appeal of zombies may be that they are the only club that accepts everyone.

Zombies don’t care what you look like. They don’t care how old you are. They don’t care what you ate last night or if you’re cheating on your partner. They don’t care if you just got fired or just got a promotion. They don’t care about the skeletons in your closet, whether you made the cheerleading squad, or what school you attended. Zombies want you just as much as they want the next guy. They couldn’t want you any more or less than they already do. As George Romero puts it, they are the working-class monster.

Zombies are your friends in low places. Everybody is welcome to join their club. So if you don’t want to become part
of the all-too-welcoming undead horde, you might want to get organized before it’s too late!

Fortunately or unfortunately, creating a zombie organization is as easy as two guys sitting in their basement with a case of beer asking what they should call their new club. A few clicks of the mouse and they’ve got a Web site, a Facebook page, and a Twitter account, and are recruiting new members. It happens all the time.

In the past few years, I’ve watched literally hundreds of zombie organizations come and go. Some look misguided and silly, others seem genuine and worthwhile. Either way, they soon rot back into the earth like the zombies they purport to hunt or protect, research or emulate. If I were to include a complete list of groups in existence as I write this, it would be out of date by the time you read it. Zombie organizations are notorious for launching and dying at lightning pace. But unlike zombies, dead zombie organizations don’t rise again.

Here are three major organizations that have stood the test of time. They’ve proven their worth by developing a dedicated membership and engaging in valuable work.

Zombie Research Society (ZRS) was founded in 2007 by a group of academics, artists, and enthusiasts, including me,
dedicated to raising the level of zombie scholarship in the arts and sciences. From the beginning, an essential characteristic of ZRS is that we don’t make anything up. We don’t claim that there was a zombie outbreak last week at a Walmart in Iowa, because everyone knows that didn’t happen. We don’t treat the coming zombie plague as a fictionalized or implausible threat. We ask the simple, scientific questions: If a zombie were to show up at your front door, what would it look like? What would it smell like? How would it hunt you? How would its brain work? From there we extrapolate concrete survival strategies to help overcome the undead plague we may all someday face.

As the Zombie Research Society motto reminds us: what you don’t know can eat you.

ZRS members are known as One Percenters because they are committed to being among the 1 percent of people likely to survive a global zombie outbreak. Members come from diverse backgrounds, have different interests, and hold varying theories, but they are unified in their support of the Society’s three foundational principles:

1. A zombie is a relentlessly aggressive reanimated human corpse driven by a biological infection.

2. The zombie pandemic is coming. It’s not a matter of if, but when.

3. Enthusiastic debate about zombies is essential to the survival of the human race.

Though ZRS was originally conceived as an electronically connected collection of researchers spread across the globe, in 2010, we launched a network of chapters to enable members in local communities to meet each other, host
zombie-consciousness-raising activities, and enhance their ability to contend with the undead in their own neighborhoods. Ultimately all zombie catastrophe survival is local, so the ZRS chapter system was a logical next step.

Local chapters host official meetings throughout the year and complete chapter-approved research projects in any of the core ZRS focus areas. Past and ongoing projects include organizing zombie walks and other events, producing zombiethemed work in the arts or media, conducting research on the abilities and dangers of a zombie outbreak, and developing alternate evacuation strategies to be used in a zombie outbreak. Membership in ZRS is available to all, local chapter participation is entirely voluntary, and new chapters are welcome to organize.

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.

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
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 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.

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.

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 (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!

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.

T
he 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.
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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.