Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies (5 page)

At this point, thanks to Boyle’s blockbuster innovation, living zombies are firmly ensconced in the zombie film subgenre. The 2009 film
Zombieland
, for example, introduced a raving horde that appears ambiguously living, or perhaps ambiguously dead. The movie seems to intentionally gloss over the monsters’ life status, making it less relevant.
Zombieland
’s creatures
are identified by name as zombies, are ravenously hungry for human flesh, and have a pale, corpselike appearance. Many film scholars and fans alike believe them to be undead, but the only character to turn from human to flesh eater does so off-camera, making it unclear whether she died and came back to life or just went violently insane.

To get the final word, I spoke with the film’s writing team of Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who confirmed that their zombies are indeed alive. They need to eat and drink water and can be killed like any other living person. Gone is the requisite focus on destroying the zombie brain to kill it, and gone is the concept of the dead rising. But almost anyone will tell you that
Zombieland
is a zombie movie. With a name like that, how could it not be?

The most striking difference between Romero’s flesh eaters and Boyle’s rage-filled maniacs is not their status as living or dead but their speed. Before
28 Days Later
, zombies had always been shambling and stiff. Sure, they’d speed up a bit when they were within striking distance of a meal, but for the most part, they walked at a snail’s pace. Because Boyle kept his zombies alive, he was able to logically make them sprint,
adding the advantage of speed to their traditional attributes of being relentlessly aggressive and highly contagious.

Some argue that speeding up the ghouls takes away from the classic gnawing anticipation of a shambling horde that can’t win any footraces but always gets you in the end. True or not, the concept of fast zombies was such a hit that when it came time for a big-budget remake of Romero’s classic
Dawn of the Dead
in 2004, the zombies were virtual track stars. But this time, they were also undead, so their speed couldn’t be explained away by arguing that they were in some way still human. Zombie traditionalists who reluctantly accepted Boyle’s contribution to the subgenre were up in arms when the actual dead ran, including Romero himself.

Simon Pegg is the writer and star of 2003’s hit British zombie comedy
Shaun of the Dead
and a vocal advocate for the slow, shambling zombie over its faster counterpart seen in many recent movies. In a 2008 opinion piece published in the UK national newspaper
The Guardian
, Pegg strongly argues against sprinting zombies:

A biological agent, I’ll buy. Some sort of super-virus? Sure, why not. But death? Death is a disability, not a superpower.
It’s hard to run with a cold, let alone the most debilitating malady of them all.

Ironically, Pegg himself may have played a pivotal role in the rise of the fast zombie in cinema by poking fun at how easy their slower cousins are to avoid and annihilate in
Shaun of the Dead.
Director Zack Snyder said that he chose to make his ghouls run in the
Dawn of the Dead
remake, released one year after
Shaun
, not because of the infected in
28 Days Later
but because it’s not so easy to make fun of a faster ghoul.

Whatever your preference, it’s clear that both the slow and the fast zombie, both living and undead, are here to stay. As a traditionalist, I find it a challenge to accept. But diversity is usually a very good thing—or in this case, a very deadly thing. They walk, they run. They’re alive, they’re dead.

They’re all after you just the same.

Jim wakes up in an abandoned hospital, walks outside, and finds London mysteriously empty. He wanders the streets, searching for answers. In the graffiti-marked halls of a local church Jim finds a seemingly helpful priest who turns out to be a raving maniac. He quickly learns that in a zombie plague nowhere is safe.

With the Priest,
28 Days Later
ushered in the new era of living zombies, the biggest innovation in the zombie subgenre since Romero’s
Night of the Living Dead
.

ILLUSTRATION BY JORELL RIVERA

A
s we’ve seen, vampires are so closely related to the modern zombie that they deserve their own chapter. After all, the modern zombie evolved from the vampire, and both share several defining characteristics: they are undead, they bite, and they consume humans in one way or another.

The obvious reason vampires aren’t zombies is that, well, they’re vampires. Principally, this means that they are not generally understood to be scientific or biological in nature. They have supernatural strength and speed, and according to various traditions, they can shape-shift into any number of other creatures. They can live forever, never decaying or growing old, and are nearly invincible as long as they avoid sunlight and never skip naptime. Scientifically speaking, vampires don’t make a whole lot of sense.

Contemporary vampire writers have tried to pull the vampire into the modern age with various updates, including making them cool high school kids who sparkle or making them more like zombies, meaning more scientifically based. In
I Am Legend
, Richard Matheson provided biological explanations for his vampires. Remnants of Matheson’s efforts to give vampires a scientific rationale can be seen in Will Smith’s 2007 blockbuster adaptation of the book. In fact,
Legend
’s filmmakers intentionally tried to cash in on the popularity of zombies
by giving vampires some of their qualities. But make no mistake, it’s not a zombie movie.

Like vampires of old, the creatures that infect Smith’s
I Am Legend
can leap over cars in a single bound. They magically climb on ceilings, they can scheme and strategize, and they sleep the days away in creepy clusters like bats. The plot pretends to hinge on a biological plague that can be cured someday, but repeated lapses in logic show a certain lack of respect for that premise.

This tendency to blur the lines between vampire and zombie—to associate the two in confused ways or borrow from zombies to enhance vampires—is actually widespread. Ultimately, the connection between ancient vampire traditions and the modern zombie is tenuous at best. But several well-known examples are worth mentioning, if for no other reason than to show the distinct differences between the modern zombie and the vampire. Here is a brief tour of the most prominent vampire traditions that pop up in zombie books.

According to Germanic lore, the Nachzehrer occupies the corpse of a person who died in extreme circumstances,
such as suicide, murder, or violent accident. In the case of a deadly infectious disease passing through the region, the first person to die of the illness was thought likely to turn into a Nachzehrer.

Similar to the modern zombie, Nachzehrers do eat human flesh, but they don’t restrict their diet to the living. They were thought to chew their own hands, legs, and clothing while still inside the grave. After crawling out, they would eat the bodies of the other dead in the cemetery, giving them a superior ick factor but little cultural cachet.